The United States is home to a vast majority of people who are direct decedents of immigrants or who are immigrants themselves. Our politicians devote plenty of political rhetoric to equal opportunity and the idea that this is a country of immigrants. In reality, there exists in this country a humanitarian crisis; an estimated 11 million people that are locked in a permanent underclass.
This is a humanitarian crisis years in the making, largely because of the political disregard of the problems facing immigrants. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice aims to shed light not just on immigrant rights, but on the apathetic nihilism and political opportunism of our representatives. To help combat the social stigmas facing undocumented people, the SCSJ is hosting a watch party for DOCUMENTED, a film that explores the life of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, who recently came out as undocumented. Join us this Sunday, June 29th, at 9:00 PM EDT, and take part in a conversation on immigrant rights.
According to the New York Times, the United States is currently “faced with an unprecedented surge of child migrants from Central America that is overwhelming shelters and jails in Texas and Arizona.” 52,000 children have been caught crossing the border into the U.S. since October of last year, twice as many as the year before.
The Obama Administration has said that this amounts to an “urgent humanitarian crisis,” and has responded by planning to house undocumented children in detention centers and expediting deportation strategies to send the children back to the countries they initially fled. While many immigrants’ rights groups denounced the Administration’s decision as an inhumane response to an already bleak predicament facing the children in their home countries, critics of the decision said the proposal didn’t go far enough.
This is indeed a humanitarian crisis, but not for the reasons given by mainstream media. Neither forced deportation of child migrants nor an increase in border militarization will solve problems for the countries children flee from, or the 11 million undocumented people who are stuck in a new caste system here in the U.S.
Join with us on June 29 to watch Documented, and share your thoughts on what comes next to end the human rights crisis that is U.S. immigration policy.
Post by SCSJ Intern Aaron Bryant
