Politics aside, immigration gets a new angle

The issues surrounding immigration, lawful and undocumented, are complicated – and I certainly don’t claim to be an expert in them. Issues of undocumented immigration, border control, amnesty, and rights for immigrants seem to divide people in startling ways, and not along the political lines we are so accustomed to.

However, one thing seems clear, at least to me – we shouldn’t allow people to die along our borders, people who are simply seeking out opportunities they might not have in their native countries.

That’s the issue Ray Ybarra, a 26-year-old law student, is working on right now. I met Ybarra while on a JustJourney in Chiapas, Mexico. And, while the issues surrounding immigration and immigration laws are complex, he made this one point very simple – the right to live, documented immigrant or not, should be fundamental.

Ybarra works in Douglas, Ariz., a tiny town along the Mexican border. In a time that is post-“Operation Gatekeeper” and “Operation Hold-the-Line,” two major anti-undocumented immigration movements that blocked up borders in both California and Texas, Arizona is the new hotspot for undocumented immigration.

But, that’s a major problem. Crossing into border towns in parts of California and Texas was difficult, but not necessarily life-threatening. Crossing into the Arizona desert, and being forced to walk for days on end, is a completely different story. It’s a story that is leading to the deaths of hundreds of undocumented immigrants a year. This is compounded by the fact that picking up an undocumented immigrant in the desert, or harboring one in any way, is a federal offense, one that can come with hefty jail time.

Ybarra is standing up against this fact. In a grand act of civil disobedience, he is attempting to bring thousands of people to the Arizona border next year, and, working with them, simply pick up those crossing the desert – or, for those who choose not to pick people up, to simply be there in numbers and solidarity with the concept. And, in a time of difficult questions around immigration policy, I admire Ybarra’s efforts to put peoples’ lives and safety first, and political motivations second.

Now, let me explain – Ybarra is not encouraging Americans to bring in undocumented immigrants, or to carry them across the border. He is encouraging people to scan the desert and pick up those who are making the difficult journey. In other words, he is encouraging people to render humanitarian aid. Essentially, Ybarra is trying to make a moral argument, backed with real people, that by having a federal law AGAINST picking people up in the desert, we are allowing them to die – that, being forced to pass by someone, because of the law, is morally wrong.

And, given the state of things, Ybarra's project is impressive. We are living in a time when the U.S government is actually building a fence, a big, hulking, hundreds-of-miles-long fence along the border. We are also living in a time when heavily armed individual citizens, with no legal authority and no training, are taking it upon themselves to act as border police, catching immigrants proudly and sending them back home. And, given these facts, and the difficult questions facing us around immigration policy, I believe that the movement Ybarra is leading is brave. It’s the kind of movement that, wherever we fall on the political spectrum, has a unifying message – we should not allow people to die along our borders, and we shouldn’t have laws that are complicit in those deaths. And, I for one, agree with him.