Black Immigrants are Deported in Higher Numbers than Asian and Middle Eastern Immigrants: Reconsidering Immigrant Rights’ Challenge to ‘Racial Justice’ Work”

By Tamara Kil Ja Kim Nopper
August 18, 2003

In the aftermath of 9-11, an agenda calling for immigrant rights organizing and racial justice work to come together has become popular in social justice circles. Calls for coalition between the two camps were promoted before 9-11, but began to gain more momentum (and funding) after 9-11. These gestures of “solidarity” were mostly heard from immigrant rights advocates, who used liberal political magazines, conferences, their newsletters, and other public forums to argue that racial justice politics could no longer ignore immigrants now that immigrants were becoming, according to some, the main victims of racial profiling and the prison system.

Some immigrant rights advocates pointed out that immigrant rights work needed to have an analysis of state violence and therefore make coalition with racial justice movements, which had already been focusing on policing and prisons. And some racial justice folks publicly spoke to the need for their camps to reach out to immigrants. Indeed, it was only these sound bites—of racial justice folks publicly chastising themselves and their kin—that seemed to get any press in liberal political publications.

Yet this distinction between racial justice and immigrant rights was grounded in assumptions of which immigrants were being targeted by the state. Racial justice has long been coded as Black, meaning that we assume racial justice is justice for Blacks only. Immigrant rights, therefore, is often juxtaposed in opposition to racial justice issues, or issues that are connected with Blacks. Immigrants are racialized as Brown (Mexican, Central American and South American) or as Asian or Middle Eastern (in most INS data, the two regions are actually considered under a broad “Asian” category that includes 39 nationalities). In other words, immigrant rights is seen as speaking to the needs of non-Black immigrant groups of color, whereas racial justice is viewed as taking care of the needs of Blacks only.

Reconsidering 2 - Misguided