New Haven Independent

Dozens of students and some “townies” filled the chapel to hear Matos, executive director of Junta for Progressive Action, a Fair Haven social service organization for Latinos, and Lugo, an activist with Unidad Latina en Acción, describe the lives of the several thousand estimated undocumented immigrants who live in New Haven.

“I think the most important challenge of being an immigrant is — being an immigrant,” Lugo said, “being in a country that doesn’t belong to us. Then you start suffering discrimination, you start working in places in horrible conditions, and also living in horrible houses.” Lugo fled Colombia 20 years ago when his student activism got him in trouble with the government. He was granted political asylum and is now a U.S. citizen.

Matos said a few years ago Junta added services to try to meet the needs of the community’s undocumented population, because no one else was doing anything to address their problems.

Those problems include exploitation at work, threats of deportation, and victimization by those who treat them as “walking ATM machines,” in a reference to the fact that they are known to carry a lot of cash, since it’s almost impossible for them to open bank accounts without proper identification. Over the past year or two, Junta has worked with Unidad Latina to promote rights for the undocumented, encouraging Mayor John DeStefano to issue a municipal identity card, among other ideas.

That proposal slipped out “prematurely” last year, said Rob Smuts, DeStefano’s deputy chief of staff and another member of last night’s panel. He promised that the mayor is still planning to issue the cards, once the administration works out some of the bureaucratic kinks involved, because DeStefano believes it’s not good to have a shadow population. “It’s not good from a government perspective as well as a human decency perspective,” Smuts said. “There are all kinds of problems that arise when people are unable to exercise rights that the rest of the population can.” He mentioned substandard housing that immigrants are afraid to complain about and the fact that the undocumented can’t get drivers’ licenses.

The fourth speaker, Alicia Schmidt-Camacho, is an assistant professor of American Studies at Yale and an expert on U.S.-Mexico border issues. She said that conceptualizing immigration as a “problem” and criminalizing immigrants is a fairly recent development in American history, since before 1924 there were no generalized restrictions on immigration (not counting such specific anti-immigrant laws as the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s).

She said as the battle over immigration heats up, citizens are being pushed by elected officials as well as by xenophobic grassroots activists to see the undocumented as “the other” — separate and different from themselves.
“So we’re looking at a moment,” she said, “in which we’re being told that the defense of our citizenship demands us to deny the basic civil and human rights of others in our midst. That is the logic of the vigilante and not the logic of a democracy.”

All the speakers agreed that the New Haven Police Department is exemplary in its treatment of undocumented residents, i.e., that the policy is to not enforce immigration laws and to not engage in racial profiling.

In the Q&A session following the presentations, one audience member asked what individuals or groups specifically are opposed to the presence of the undocumented in New Haven or in the state. Matos mentioned there are a relatively few individuals who are virulently anti-immigrant, and Smuts added that the much larger group are those comfortable having a population in the shadows, for a number of reasons, but economic exploitation is a big one.

One of the goals of the forum was to encourage Yale students to get out into the community and work on these issues. One Yale junior who now volunteers at Junta said she never knew such a “wonderful place” as Fair Haven existed during her first two years on campus.