Last night was Clifton; tonight was Lawrence Township. The statement I gave in Lawrence was essentially the same as the one I gave in Clifton, so I won’t reproduce it. Just a few thoughts and some pictures tonight.

I was gratified at how receptive Lawrence Township was to us. They not only put us on the agenda, but gave us a dedicated spot at the beginning. About a dozen people spoke in defense of the ITA, for about an hour. Lots of activists from Resistencia; one activist from Latino Action Network; and one woman from the Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party of Monmouth County, a MAGA stronghold more than an hour away.

I was particularly pleased to see the presence, for the second time on this “tour,” of students. The first time was a pair of Rutgers University students at the Middlesex County meeting a few weeks ago, members of City Bureau’s Documenters Network. Tonight it was a trio of students from the Hutchins Institute for Social Justice at the Lawrenceville School down the road, giving a presentation on the Immigrant Trust Act. I only wish there was more of this kind of thing.

But of course there is more, if you know where to look. Every migrant defense group in New Jersey is full of student activists, and virtually every center of migrant activism in the state is associated with a university town–Princeton, Trenton, New Brunswick, Newark, Bloomfield, South Orange, Madison, Paterson, Jersey City. Unlike a lot of advocates of spectatorial learning, I regard that as a good thing even from a purely pedagogical perspective. Aristotle and Dewey were right: political education divorced from practical experience is a waste of time. There’s no point in piling up practical truths you have no interest in practicing.

The woman from Monmouth County expressed surprise that these council meetings have been so little discussed within Democratic (and one presumes, Republican) Party circles. “Where’s Mikie? Where’s Murphy? Where’s the press?” Not here, I told her, and laughed.

It’s something you have to get used to–being ignored, I mean. The migrant defense movement means nothing to the people in power. Undocumented migrants don’t vote. Migrant defense activists aren’t major financial donors. Private equity isn’t affected or bothered by ICE raids. It’s an understatement to say that neither party will suffer significant consequences if a couple of thousand migrant lives are flushed down the toilet. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans could care less what happens in the streets of Clifton or Lawrence or Atlantic City or Paterson or Trenton. When did Mikie Sherrill or Phil Murphy, much less any Republicans, ever show up at Elizabeth Detention Center during the first Trump Administration? Life will go on for these “liberals” through the rise of fascism as it did up to that rise. Their job is to convince people that “fascism” is an exaggeration, not to stop it from happening.

This is nothing new, of course. It’s been happening in slow motion for decades, under every administration since Nixon, Democrat and Republican. For a good summary, I suggest reading Sarah R. Coleman’s The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America (Princeton, 2021), which I hope to blog about here soon. The tl;dr is that neither party is innocent: evasion and moral abdication are bipartisan pursuits. One of the most “compelling” anti-migrant argument originates with the Democrats, after all: migrant labor depresses the wages of unionized domestic labor, and should therefore give way to unionized domestic labor. Migrant labor is cheap, but what’s cheap is by definition expendable. So don’t look to the Democrats for salvation.

Solo el pueblo salva el pueblo, goes a Resistencia chant: only the people can save the people. Migrant defense is fundamentally a form of anarchist self-governance, the desire for self-government divorced from the hierarchical, corporatized structures of the modern nation-state. It sounds pie-in-the-sky until you see it enacted before your eyes, and see the contrast with the evasions and opacity of business-as-usual politics. In migrant defense circles, by contrast with official ones, people are motivated by justice: they organize and show up for one another. They don’t make excuses and don’t sling evasive bullshit. The bonds of solidarity they form last through each victory and defeat. Victory and defeat are episodic. Solidarity is forever.

The fundamental goal of Resistencia en Accion is not the passage of any particular piece of legislation, salutary as that might be, but the sheer act of organized, collective self-assertion. We’re here not to petition, but to declare. We’re here, all of us. Pass this legislation as much to defend us as to remind yourselves of our presence. Whether it passes or not, whether you remember or not, whether you care or not, we’ll be here. You may not remember, but we won’t let you forget.