Notes on Migrant Justice

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been involved in Resistencia en Acción’s campaign for a municipal level resolution, in Princeton, in favor of the Immigrant Trust Act. The ultimate aim of the campaign for municipal-level ITA resolutions is, of course, passage of the Act itself. The idea is to exert pressure on the state legislature through the municipal councils on the premise that the council resolutions provide a multiplier effect for public opinion.

The precedent here is the state law now in effect prohibiting the use of single-use plastic bags in retail sales, which passed through a decade-long campaign of citizen advocacy via the passage of local ordinances and resolutions. Whatever you think about that particular law–some love it, some hate it–it provides proof of concept for the strategy behind the campaign for the ITA municipal resolutions.*

Archange Antoine, speaking at Princeton Municipal Council

Unfortunately, we don’t have a decade to get this done. We have, at best, a few months. There’s been some support in the state legislature for passage of the ITA–State Senator Andrew Zwicker has been vocally supportive–but the bill is still stalled in the legislature. Local legislators Roy Freiman and Mitchelle Drulis have been sadly AWOL, among many others. We need to force the issue and get these people a clue.

Obviously, the municipal resolution strategy is a numbers game: it only works if a lot of municipalities sign on. So far something like 14 or 15 have (see the first footnote of this post for a list), but there are 564 municipalities in New Jersey. So we’ve got a ways to go.

Every campaign’s got to start somewhere. We just had a win in Princeton, and we’ve had more than a dozen wins before that. At my friend Sadaf Jaffer’s suggestion, our next stop will be Montgomery Township, just north of Princeton. Sadaf is a former mayor of Montgomery, a former member of the state assembly, an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University, and an outspoken defender of migrant rights. She and I will both be speaking at Montgomery Town Council next Thursday, Sept. 4th, at 7 pm.  Feel free to join us if you can. You don’t have to be a resident of Montgomery to attend or speak.

My own hope is to take this campaign on the road, across the length and breadth of the state–north, south, and central–speaking in every Town Council I can get to. At a certain point, we should hit a tipping point that tips us over. Time will tell. That, and a bunch of train tickets.

*I actually owe the plastic bag point to Alexandria Haris.