Congratulations to the Student Immigrant Movement
A word of congratulations is due this week to the brave young organizers with the Student Immigrant Movement for maintaining a 24/7 presence in front of the Mass. State House for 19 days until they managed to help stop the legislature from pulling off one the more pathetic displays of poll-driven politics in recent memory and convince them to reject the worst provisions of a package of anti-immigrant proposals that the Senate added to their budget proposal with very little debate last month. Not to say that this publication is overexcited about what has been achieved. Some of the proposals still stand - and whether they merely codify existing practice into law or not, they are still anti-immigrant and therefore execrable. And one could also argue that SIM played a dangerous game by risking polarizing the public before immigrant activists have really built a solid coalition that includes large numbers of citizens in Massachusetts.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the proposal that would have made it virtually impossible for students who were brought here as children by undocumented immigrant parents to ever win the right to go to Mass. public colleges is gone from this year's state budget - as is the proposal that would have created a snitch line worthy of dictatorships everywhere and allowed random people to rat out their immigrant neighbors.
To any who would say that the reason the House-Senate Conference Committee struck out such language from their budget proposal has nothing to do with the work of the SIM ... I think you're being rather disingenuous. No sane state wants to be compared with Arizona right now - least of all Massachusetts - and a bunch of immigrant students pushing exactly that message in front of the State House for everyone (including the New York Times) to see cannot help but affect the debate on these issues. As indeed it clearly did.
Now this does not mean that I think everything is hunky and dory here in the Commonwealth on the immigration reform front. It is not. The very idea that thousands of documented immigrants stand to lose health care benefit under the Commonwealth Care Bridge Program that the Conference Committee budget struck out is bad news in and of itself. And there is still a long long road ahead to winning the fair and rational federal immigration system that this nation - and immigrants to these shores - deserve on a variety of grounds. Plus a similarly long road to building a better climate for immigrants on the state level.
But advocates like the SIM organizers and the many labor, religious and community organizations that helped them out know that implicitly. Most every person in immigrant organizations like SIM has suffered through many tough times on their road to political activism. Up to and including the horrors of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border - dodging the Border Patrol, right-wing militias and criminal organizations as they go.
This after suffering very very difficult economic and political situations in their countries of origin. Many of which are directly connected to the actions of numerous U.S.-based multinational corporations and their friends in successive Presidential administrations. Then having to learn English fast and get a K-12 education that plenty of uncharitable people would be more than happy to deny them. Then a very tough struggle to get a college education. And then a hard fight to stay in the country in some legal fashion under an immigration regime that simply doesn't provide most immigrants with any kind of path to legal immigration.
So for this week, I just want to congratulate the SIM folks for a job well done. And say that I look forward to seeing what they do next.
