YAYA held Part 2 of their event, Bridging Communities: LGBTQ
and Immigrants, its purpose to show the intersections between the issues faced
by both communities. Part 2 consisted of a discussion panel of undocumented
persons, people who have undocumented family members, and queer individuals. After
the panel, I still feel that these intersections could be dismantled further,
so I’m glad that YAYA has decided to continue with the series.
Panel members talked about personal experiences with
immigration, detainment, and the Secure Communities Program. I hear many
nightmarish stories about immigration and detainment nightmares, but they’ve
been just that—nightmares, stories that scare you, but from which you wake,
into a world where the terrible isn’t real, it doesn’t exist. I have always had
the privilege of closing the paper, turning off the tv or radio, and having to
face no other reminders of issues of immigration and detainment.
People hear stories like this: a man, who had valid, legal
visa to live and work in this country, was detained after failing to switch
lanes with a blinker, confused for another man with the same name, held in a
detainment center for eight months, during which time he could not see his wife
or two young children, causing him to lose his business.
But now I hear this story, and its told to me by my friend,
about his uncle, who lives where I live, and I feel the bad thing from that
dream, the sad ending, creeping closer to me. As if I were ever apart from it.
I keep having to remind myself that terrible thing, always allowed to seem so
far away, has been here the whole time, I was just not looking at it.
On one level I know that I am implicated within the system
that allows for such failures such as our current immigration system. It’s a
challenge, however, to precisely identify my place within this operation. I
don’t just want to be sympathetic to a cause; I need to know my
implications—what’s at stake for everyone?
The structure of this event—analyzing immigration through
the lens of the LGBTQ movement—benefits me by using concepts that I am familiar
with within LGBTQ issues and applies them to immigration, with which I am less
familiar with at a macro level.
Detainment and deportation doesn’t happen exclusively to
those who are undocumented. While this rhetorical path doesn’t begin to address the flaws in the
immigration system as a whole, the current system has obvious hypocritical
failures.
A system with so many inherent flaws that allows for such
error, and is built to sustain the loss of human life and well being that it
causes, is inevitably unjust.
I can see parallels between immigration and detainment
failures and the recent rise in LGBTQ teen suicides. The schools resist a
change in the dialogue about bullying, preaching tolerance rather than
acceptance, at best leading to an outcome of benign ostracization or
tokenization based on media-enforced stereotypes. But when kids end their lives
after no action is taken to stop daily harassment, let alone cycles of
othering, fetishizing, and criminalization, deaths are labeled isolated
incidents, happening because of the failure of an individual and their family.
If any external blame is placed, it’s on one teacher or one peer, who is just
another child existing in the same system of abuse and oppression.
School bullying seems very similar to immigration in that
both involve systems that rely on discrimination and fear within the most
vulnerable. The dominant party feels safer with ‘the others’ out of the
community, either physically removed or socially outcast.
I think I’m going to suggest this for Part 3 of Bridging
Communities, as something to investigate further...
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