What liberals, conservatives, & progressives are all getting wrong about immigrant activism
Recent confrontations with Senator Sinema by immigrant activists remind us that our power lies in our ability to bother the powerful
Multiple Arizona residents and immigration activists have recently pestered one of their Senators, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema regarding her lack of support for a reconciliation bill that might provide a path to citizenship for people brought to the U.S. as children without documentation who now don’t enjoy rights and protections in the only nation many of them have ever known as home. One woman, identifying herself as Karina, politely approached the Senator on an airplane recently. “Senator, hello. How are you?” she asked the seated Sinema.
“I just want to know if, as my Senator, you can commit to passing a reconciliation that can provide a pathway to citizenship.”
After being ignored by Sinema, Karina nonetheless thanked the Senator and left. “Alright Senator, I see that you don’t want to respond. Thanks for your time.”
Other young people recently also approached Sinema at one of her workplaces, Arizona State University to demand an accounting from the Senator as to why she has turned away from fulfilling the types of promises she pointed towards when she originally ran for the U.S. Senate. A woman who introduced herself to Sinema as Blanca calmly told her story to the professor and politician as Sinema attempted to get away from the students by going into a bathroom.
“I was brought here to the United States when I was three years old,” Blanca said.
“In 2010, both my grandparents got deported because of SB 1070. I'm here because I definitely believe that we need a pathway to citizenship. My grandfather passed away two weeks ago, and I was not able to go to Mexico to visit him because there is no pathway to citizenship."
Blanca continued, saying that she and others like her once campaigned on behalf of Sinema, but now are willing to campaign against her should she not support the human rights of immigrant families like hers. "We need to hold you accountable for what you promised us that you were going to pass when we knocked on doors for you," she said.
“Just like how we got you elected we can get you out of office if you don’t support what you promised us.”
Since those interactions, right-wing liberals and conservatives alike have criticized the young activists as everything from rude to criminal.
Even many so-called progressives have piled on, not attacking the immigrant activists as morally or essentially repugnant like their liberal and conservative colleagues, but instead as impractical. The logic they’ve used goes something like this, If you want to convince someone to take your side, following them into a bathroom isn’t likely going to be an effective way of doing that.
The pearl-clutching liberals and conservatives who are aghast at denizens daring to approach their elected officials with anything other than adoration at sanctioned times and in allowed places is easily dismissible. Simply put, we are not concerned with what those who don’t view us as fully human think of our approaches.
Their esteem means nothing to us. Beyond that, the privileged don’t get to decide the means and manner with which the marginalized resist.
The pernicious nature of the criticism from supposedly well-intentioned progressives who claim sympathy for immigrant families’ plights is much more subversive and subtle. These pundits, who themselves certainly cannot point to successful campaigns of any sort that they’ve played a role in, only want to offer their opinions which they assume expert to us lowly, emotional, simple plebeians.
They want to help us convince politicians to support the right policies and confronting them in public just isn’t the right way to do that, progressives argue. Leaving aside their own complete lack of qualification to offer advice on matters of issue advocacy, campaigning, or organizing, their position is fundamentally situated on a complete misapprehension of what politics itself is.
They claim to worry that such direct-action tactics are not rhetorically convincing to politicians, but politics is not about convincing leaders of the rightness of one’s ideas. Politics is about power.
For normal people politics is not about convincing the powerful with rhetoric it is about demonstrating, protesting, and becoming an inconvenience to the powerful. Politics is about letting the powerful know that you and yours can become an even larger inconvenience to them should they not bow to your collective will.
Successful politics for people who don’t employ lobbyists or have cash to throw fundraising events is then often about harassing, threatening with electoral consequences and making life all-around unlivable for the powerful who daily attack the powerless, en masse, with cruel policies and neglect.
This approach – making oneself not only heard by one’s elected officials, but also feared by them– is not merely a permissible tact in a republic such as ours. It is actually our duty.
Young immigrants like Blanca, supposedly not “American,” have a far superior practical understanding of what it is supposed to mean to be an American. Her simple, calmly delivered threat needs to be the bare minimum motto that we should all take up when engaging our elected officials.
“Just like how we got you elected we can get you out of office if you don’t support what you promised us.”
Who offered her a job when she leaves the Senate. A former Green Party member catering to Corporate Lobbyists.