What we're about...

We plan to convene a roundtable forum on the topic of immigrant justice. Because “we conceive of immigrant justice in the broadest of senses, with a critical attention to the divergent racializing processes that affect diverse immigrant and non-immigrant communities of color as well as intersecting questions of gender, sexuality, ability, class, citizenship status, religion, and national origin, which complicate conventional approaches to immigrant rights,” invited participants will include practitioners and activists who are actively engaged in and committed to que(e)rying various models of immigrant justice organizing.

The issues to be discussed under this broad rubric include, but are not limited to, detention, deportation, profiling, borders, torture, and surveillance. Surveillance, in particular, offers many communities and diverse sets of organizers a site to articulate and act against the seemingly endless ways of surveilling bodies in our neoliberal context. For instance, organizers from multiple movements including dis/ability rights, immigrant rights, queer rights, etc. have mobilized against the REAL-ID Act and other contemporary forms of bodily surveillance. It is just this sort of cross-section of local people laboring to comprehend, articulate, and build solidarity around coalition-building immigrant justice issues that we plan to invite.

We will facilitate a dialogue in which the intersectional, interstitial, and intervening issues within immigrant justice organizing are highlighted, rather than subsumed under the sometimes reductive banner “immigrant rights” offered by the larger, less progressive immigrant rights organizations. For instance, what are the connections between HIV/AIDS activism, youth organizing, detention and deportation, economic justice, police brutality, the drugs wars and the Rockefeller drug laws, gentrification, gay asylum court cases, domestic partnership legislation, queer/labor alliances, the security-industrial complex, and welfare legislation; and—extending the conversation beyond the roundtable itself into a material impact for those attending—how can we collectively brainstorm and enact shared practices and strategies in response to obstacles specifically raised by neoliberalism, the simultaneous diminishing of the state and the state’s encroaching power on individuals’ and communities’ rights, and the collusion between public-private/corporate-government, etc?

Because issues of profiling, surveillance, and borders are very often framed solely as legal concepts and we are more interested in the innovative community organizing being done on the ground in New York City.

This event will coincide nicely with the Immigrant Justice Project’s new period of ferment and activity. We plan to work with activists and scholars both inside and outside our institutional location in order to simultaneously help us think through our positions and future work as scholars/activists and create a space in which new ideas and practices can be shared and applied, where appropriate, to this crucial, intersectional work already being done around immigrant justice.