Immigrant Stories: How did you come to US?

stfuxenophobes:

PHOENIX — A judge on Tuesday sentenced more than a dozen immigrant rights advocates to one day in jail stemming from a protest last year over Arizona’s controversial immigration law, but they got credit for the day they spent behind bars at the time of their arrest.

Justice of the Peace David Seyer handed down the sentence about three weeks after finding the group of protesters guilty of a misdemeanor charge of disobeying police orders. They had faced up to four months in jail and a maximum $700 fine.

The group was arrested July 29, 2010, when dozens of protesters took to Phoenix streets on the day Arizona’s new immigration law was set to take effect. They also were speaking out against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who organized an immigration patrol the day the law took effect.

The protesters massed outside one of Arpaio’s jails, beating on a metal door and forcing sheriff’s deputies to call for backup. Officers in riot gear opened the doors, waded into the crowd and hauled off those who didn’t move.

A judge ended up putting the most contentious parts of the law on hold. The dispute over the law will likely end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Among the protesters was the Rev. Peter Morales, president of the Boston-based Unitarian Universalist Association. Morales lives in Arvada, Colo., and Salem, Mass., and was elected as the first Latino president of the association in 2009.

“The sentence was as lenient as it could be without dismissing the charges,” Morales told The Associated Press from Arvada after attending the hearing by phone. “So I believe that the judge was clearly moved and affected by the character and the idealism and the comportment of the defendants.”

Arpaio said regardless of the length of the sentence, he’s happy the judge found the demonstrators guilty.

“I’m not going to criticize the judge,” he said. “Let’s just say it’s a conviction and it sends a message out that anybody that violates a law is going to be arrested and go to jail.”

The sheriff said Morales and the other protesters are welcome to sit down with him in his office anytime to discuss illegal immigration.

But, Arpaio said, “If he violates the law, he will be arrested. Period.”

Morales said he had no immediate plans to return to Phoenix for a protest, but he said the Unitarian Universalist Association was holding its general assembly in Phoenix next June and will hold an immigration protest at that time.

“Joe Arpaio hasn’t seen anything yet,” Morales said. “We will make our disagreement and displeasure known.”

He said the protest likely wouldn’t involve the kind of civil disobedience that led to his arrest last year.

weexist-weresist:

and since many of us consider biology to be an essential requirement,

i’d like to know what other requirements there are for non-native cultural groups.

• for example. i spent 2 years of my life in pakistan before moving to the US. i am pretty ‘americanized.’ does that mean i am not pakistani? i speak the language and i vaguely know the politics and i like the food. i am told i act white instead of pakistani. but can we define what it means to act white? to act pakistani? the desi girls in HS called me an ABCD because i dont watch bollywood movies or care about shopping at abercrombie. but i knew the politics and the language better then them. so. there is that.
• there was a white girl in my class who  grew up in bangladesh. maybe she doesnt find herself fitting in with white americans. but under this logic, she can never be bangladeshi or consider herself such because she is white and has (probably) white american parents.
• the british crown brought indian slaves to african colonies. they were called coolies. well a lot of these coolies had children and blahblahblah in african colonies. thats why there is such a large indian/south asian diaspora in parts of africa. so anyway, sometime in the 1970s i think, this guy named idi amin took power in uganda and expelled all the south asians (who considered themselves to be indian african, ugandan, african, etc) because now his uganda was reserved for ‘real africans only’. but for the little indian diaspora kids who were now forced to move halfway across the world, they were african.
• two years ago israel deported hundreds of migrant worker families because israel is for the jews. some of these families had children who were born in israel and lived there all their life. i think they were mostly filipinos. so these filipino israeli kids were not jewish ergo not proper subjects of the israeli state. and in the interviews i read, they were really fucking confused about going back the phillipines because they were not born there, they had never been there, they spoke hebrew instead of tagalog.
• in a seminar i went to with some world famous african studies scholars, one scholar suggested that africa would only become powerful and regain what has been lost to colonialism by articulating a distinctly black pan-african identity. a white woman in the audience who had spent her entire life somewhere in africa was very upset by this statement. my white friend who has devoted half his life to working in the congo and zambia would be upset by the prospect that he could never be a real african because he isnt black. he and the woman both realize their privileges positions as white folks in a colonized land, but does this mean they cannot form relationships with the soil, the sky, the people?

this is what i mean when i say that you cannot vet or establish tangible measures for cultural membership.

because the world is full of crisscrossing lines that cannot be untangled, and instead of suggesting that liberation is only possible if they were all untangled and the linear injustices faced by one thread were corrected, we have to work with the reality,which is that things are nuanced and Everything Is Complicated.

i dont want to suggest an answer for/against any of these scenarios but i want to suggest that things are not as clear as they seem as this is the reality many of us refuse to grapple with.