Skilled vs unskilled labor is a construct to justify oppression

The work of liberation is fundamentally about dismantling boundary lines drawn through humanity

Since Eric Adams’s ignorant comments about “low skill workers,” I have had a memory come to me that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Sometime in 2016, I was invited to speak at a predominantly Latine city college on the topic of immigration and borders. I prepared speaking points connecting structural racism and oppression to exclusion and surveillance in order to highlight how the U.S. immigration policy was set up to perpetuate oppression and suffering. I planned to talk about how even though it seems like we have always had border patrol, the first U.S. border patrol was actually established as recently as 1924, with the purpose of enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Act by patrolling the U.S./Mexico border to make sure no Chinese people entered. I planned to talk about how arbitrary borders were and how disconnected one must be from the core of humanity to call a human being “illegal.” I planned to talk about the historical and present role the U.S. government has been playing in placed like Central American that destabilized communities, created underlying conditions for migration, and then dehumanize and reject migrants when they arrive.

[image description] an international border with bars and barbed wires with search lights shining through, casting a shadow of the bars onto the desert earth, with human figures in shadow silhouettes