A Common Humanity: Ritual, Religion, and Immigrant Advocacy in Tucson, Arizona

4. Immigrant Advocacy in Tucson Responds to the Gatekeeper Complex

56 chapter four Immigrant Advocacy in Tucson Responds to the Gatekeeper Complex Assisting Central American refugees evade torturers and assassins in their homelands, the diverse strains of immigrant advocacy in Tucson built one of the most impactful campaigns for social change of the 1980s. What were originally fledgling and improvised responses to a crisis cohered and grew into a movement characterized by inspiring leadership, a committed rank and file, and a set of beliefs, terms, and actions flexible enough to accommodate both religious and secular constituents. Moreover, the movement was effective, for it transformed the lives of refugees and government policy. The movement also transformed the worldviews of the participants, not so much by grand design as by the need to understand the logic and practice of border enforcement. As activists applied their values to this somewhat arcane realm, they developed and sharpened a robust contrarian critique of two assumptions at the foundation of US immigration policy. First and foremost, the inability of Central Americans to win asylum through official channels undid the principle that illegal entry and illegal entrants were inherently bad. Less obviously, but just as importantly, recognizing that poverty was at the root of the wars in Central America challenged the easy distinction between “political” and “economic” refugees. By proposing that human rights and biblical mandates of hospitality trumped state decrees, they were reimagining community in postnational terms. This critique primed advocates for Central American refugees to lift their work outside a paradigm of political asylum and attempt a more comprehensive reckoning with immigration policy that would address Immigrant Advocacy in Tucson • 57 undocumented workers. Such a reconfiguration did in fact occur, though not immediately. Rather, the metamorphosis came in reaction to a series of precipitous changes during the interim, in which border enforcement became better funded, more militarized, and reoriented to a deterrencebased strategy. By the late 1990s, these measures were squeezing migrant traffic into southern Arizona, bringing dozens and then hundreds of deaths to a swath of land between Tucson and Mexico. Tucson immigrant advocates have responded to these developments by creating organizations whose practices are at once new and deeply rooted in local and national precedents. These organizations differ in their approaches , which include documentation of human rights abuses, legislative lobbying, public education, and the provision of direct material aid to migrants in the course of their journey. But they share the conviction that migrant casualties in the desert condemn US border policy as a catastrophic failure and that there must be an extensive campaign to promote the dignity and legal standing of migrants in public consciousness as a step toward ending the death toll. In the ongoing dynamic of Tucson immigrant advocacy at the turn of the twenty-first century, participants put values into action, changing and being changed by the greater world as they reimagine and practice the community that Jim Corbett called a transnational religio. Responding to IRCA In the spring of 1986, as the convicted Tucson Sanctuary defendants awaited sentencing, Congress was debating the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). IRCA was the biggest federal immigration reform package in a generation, and the first to specifically target illegal immigration from Mexico. Among IRCA’s noteworthy components was an amnesty under which undocumented people in the United States could obtain citizenship,1 but the political price of the amnesty provision was a budget hike for the INS and Border Patrol to please ardent restrictionists (Massey, Durand, and Malone 49). The infusion of monies enabled the agencies to amplify trends in place since the Carter administration by militarizing their operations with high-tech equipment and collaborative ties with the armed forces (Dunn, Militarization). As funding for border enforcement crept upward at the decade’s end, persistent references by many media outlets and public figures to “illegals” carrying out an “invasion” were joined by the rhetoric of an international “War on Drugs.” Amid 58 • Chapter 4 such martial metaphors, restrictionists began to describe border enforcement as a test of collective will in which illegal immigration from Mexico was not just a matter of job loss, declining wages, or undesirable cultural elements but of national survival. Prescient observers quickly recognized that the demonization of illegal entrants could lead to abuses of power by government agencies,2 and the need for checks on state power in the borderlands resulted in a new network of immigrant advocacy that included Tucson. Around the time of...