Encuentro: Defending Migrant Rights Across the Americas
How do we move beyond the type of punitive immigration enforcement policies that have put children in cages, separated families through mass deportation, and wasted billions of public dollars on ineffective border policing? On April 13, 2021, a group of policymakers, scholars, and community advocates from across the Americas will hold a transnational convening to discuss more humane migration policies that focus on integration rather than on criminalization.
This conference – Defending Migrant Rights Across the Americas – marks a partnership between the Center for Latinx and Latin American Studies (CLLAS) and the Equity Research Institute (ERI) at the University of Southern California (USC). I’ve had the privilege of serving as an affiliated faculty with the Equity Research Institute since I began my tenure at USC. Now, I am proud to serve as the founding director for the Center for Latinx and Latin American Studies.
Our collaboration on this encuentro embodies what our new center stands for: a hemispheric approach to some of the most important and challenging issues that shape everyday life for Latinx and Latin American people. For example, we know that for many families in Southern California immigration is an intimate experience that binds households across the hemisphere. This is certainly true in Los Angeles County, where approximately sixty percent of all children have at least one parent who is foreign-born. For these families, immigration policy is only a beginning. As our colleagues at ERI have shown through their research, immigrant integration cannot be separated from the struggle for racial and economic justice.
We also take a hemispheric approach because we think it is important to bring Latin American Studies and Latina/o studies into conversation with one another–something that is often lacking in academia and policy–in order to address issues that cross as many borders – cultural, political, and disciplinary – as do the people of the Americas. We have invited policy makers, academics, and activists from South America to have a dialogue with us because we think that a hemispheric issue requires a hemispheric approach.
These participants will include: Adriana Alfonso (Ministry of Justice and Human Rights in Argentina), João Guilherme Granja (Brazilian representative to the Organization of American States), Nora Pérez Vichich (Government Migration Consultant in Argentina) and Pilar Uriarte Bálsamo (Professor of Anthropology at the Universidad de la República, Uruguay).
As my colleague Deisy Del Real will explain in a future blog post, it’s important for us to learn from South American countries who signed onto the Mercosur Residency Agreement. This agreement was the beginning of a set of policies that eventually granted legal residency to nearly 3 million formerly undocumented migrants in South America. As the political winds turn to new conversations about comprehensive and humane immigration reform in the United States, what can we learn from our neighbors? To facilitate this conversation, we have invited important advocates from the United States, including María Elena Durazo (California State Senator), Doug Massey (Professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs), Nana Gyamfi (Black Alliance for Just Immigration), Odilia Romero (Comunidades Indigenas en Liderazgo), and Angelica Salas (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights), to discuss innovative approaches to long-stalled immigration reform. Together, participants from North and South America will brainstorm ways strengthen immigrant rights across the Americas.
For too long the United States has focused on border enforcement and criminalization as a solution to much deeper social, political, and economic dynamics that drive people to leave their homeland. We must look beyond the border if we hope to address the hemispheric inequities that are responsible for so much of the dislocation and trauma that is often only addressed through the lens of unauthorized border crossings or the criminalization of immigrants in the U.S. By focusing our attention on the border, we ignore our own complicity in setting up the conditions of exploitation and extraction that have triggered so many of the migrations that have occurred across the Americas. Can we, for example, address the current migration crisis without rectifying the violence and social instability that the United States has helped to create across the hemisphere? Now it’s time to recognize that comprehensive immigration reform not only means creating pathways to citizenship for all, it also requires us to address the underlying inequities that set the stage for mass human migrations.
About the author:
Juan De Lara is an Associate Professor in the department of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and Director of the Center for Latinx and Latin American Studies. His interdisciplinary research focuses on three broad themes. The first centers on urban political economy, racialization, and the politics of space. A second set of research interests focuses on the use of data science and technology to reorganize how various state agencies are restructuring the social relations of race, immigration, and labor. A third set of projects focus on public-facing research that support community-based organizations in their efforts to resolve social disparities.
His first book, Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Inland Southern California is now available from UC Press. The book uses logistics and commodity chains to unpack the black box of globalization by showing how the scientific management of bodies, space, and time produced new racialized labor regimes that facilitated a more complex and extended system of global production, distribution, and consumption. More information here: UC PRESS.
