GLOBAL, LOCAL CONNECTIONS: Lurking With Intent to Seek Justice

Lurking, with Intent to Seek Justice

March 2007 This past week a discussion has ensued over whether to make amends to immigrants fleeing Hitler who were denied U.S. visas, by giving Anne Frank citizenship. Well, as a historian and one who seeks justice I’m all for reparations. But first, let’s stop manufacturing crimes for the next generation to repair! If we want to right the injustices of our immigration system, let’s first provide citizenship and, while we are at it, livable wages and collective bargaining rights for all farm, service, construction, and other underpaid workers. What does immigration have to do with workplace justice? Everything. According to a March 4 New York Times article, farmers in Colorado are bringing in prisoners to replace undocumented workers who aren’t showing up there due to recent immigration crackdowns. Iowa is following suit. The prisoners make 60 cents a day. Yes, you read that correctly. Those farmers pay a fee to the state. So prisoners are subsidizing both farmers and the state of Colorado. Colorado Corrections officers tout it as a way to provide job skills for inmates. The desire of employers for an exploitable workforce knows no bounds. The government needs to intervene with subsidies for certain sectors if necessary, to make sure that all workers make a decent living for their labor. Otherwise employers will continue to search for more vulnerable workers, communities who are criminalized and can’t fight for their rights, be they undocumented immigrants or prisoners. Speaking of criminalization, Minneapolis city councilperson Cam Gordon is introducing a motion to repeal a 47-year-old law that, in effect. criminalizes African American men. In 2006, 133 of 167 of those arrested for “lurking with the intent to commit a crime” were people of color, the vast majority of them African American men. The law allows the police (and those people calling in with complaints) to decide what someone is intending to do. At a March 7 Urban League Forum on the subject, the moderator asked, “Where are African American men in Minneapolis safe to just be?” Duane Reed, president of the Minneapolis NAACP, replied, “In my home.” While we fight lurking legislation in Minneapolis, George Bush has been lurking in Latin America with the intent to retain supremacy over the region. He is stealing the rhetoric of resistance. He is countering moves by Latin Americans to use their high-profit resources to fund human needs and build sustainable diverse economies based on fair trade and regional economic interdependence. Bush wants to make sure those natural resource profits stay in the hands of multinational corporations. So he has exhibited a sudden awareness of Latin American poverty and offered aid, such as a naval ship hospital, as if that could address continental health-care needs. Guatemalans greeted Bush’s recent visit with a demonstration of 2,000 demanding: No to the war in Iraq, U.S. military out of Guatemala, yes to immigrant rights, social justice, and fair trade between all peoples! Bush’s assertion to Latin America that the United States is “about health care and education” is especially galling as we continue to struggle in Minneapolis with a yawning race/education gap kindergarten through grade school. Everyone (including me) has their theories. But it is action we need. One thing we can do immediately is to pass the Dream Act now so that this year’s senior high students who came to Minnesota without documents have the possibility of college. And we need to stop the war. Money for schools, not war. Money for health care, jobs, immigrant resettlement, not war. Let’s do that first. And yes, we must take care of our wounded soldiers. Properly. But first: Stop the state-sponsored spread of a mass epidemic of PTSD; stop the war. Then we will need to talk about reparations. In Iraq, Latin America, at our borders, for our veterans, for those conquered and enslaved, and those abused by our military-industrial complex, here and around the world. It will be a long conversation. And when we begin to sort out reparations priorities, I vote that we do as Mother Jones said: Pray for the dead (including my childhood heroine, the beloved Anne Frank) and work like hell for the living.