Just Curious

Brown-bag lunch with ACLU fellow

Just had a brown-bag lunch today with a group of young law school activists and Ray Ybarra, an ACLU Racial Justice Fellow who is himself a rising 3L. It was about a very sobering topic: the treatment of undocumented immigrant workers in the hands of vigilante groups along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Mr. Ybarra's tactic was very innovative. With ACLU's support, he organized teams of reporters who would contact leaders of these hate groups and ask for their permission to interview these people and follow them in their pursuit of illegal immigrants. The end result would be a very provocative documentary film, and the work was exciting. Just think about it. Camping along the U.S.-Mexican border with a Neo-Nazi 2:00 in the morning...

I recently signed up for the Harvard Immigration Project, a project co-directed by my friend Andy. Part of what the Project does is to provide legal and other counsel to new immigrants (mostly from Brazil) in the greater Boston area, who had been facing increasing anti-immigrant harassment in neighborhoods such as Framingham, Mass. The situation there is clearly out of bound. Vigilante are airing anti-immigration TV shows via the local station!

I think it is here that we must draw a line. Regardless of whether we should grant these people civil rights (which has bene debated since time immemorial by people like Gerald Neuman, Owen Fiss and Rogers Smith), the compelling interest of a nation-state to ensure its border integrity should never trump basic human rights which is universal.

It has important implication for my personal growth as a student of philosophy as well, especially since I'm currently doing classical German philosophy, a tradition that focuses a lot on the consummation of human history which takes the form of the creation of a perfectly rational kingdom of ends (a final triumph of humankind over the natural world?) or a universal homogenous utopia (the abolition of ideology, notions, and other contradicting categories such as creeds, race, ethnicity, gender, etc., envisioned first by the Prophet Isaiah and then by men like Hegel, Marx and Kojeve, and to a lesser extent Francis Fukuyama.)

posted by James Chang @ 2:52 PM