Category: Immigration

Click Here for more information and to RSVP

As regular readers of my SWCamborne will know for almost two years now I have been working on a documentary film about immigration.  Click here to read my first post about it.  Specifically I wanted to make a film that asked the question: “Is there a basic human right to migrate?”  It has been terrific learning experience.  Technically about how movies are made and intellectually about the immigration issue.

The final product, thanks to Dave Szamet and Brian Ging, is much better than I deserve.  It is so good in fact that we have submitted it to the Sundance Film Festival with a reasonable chance of being selected.

The press release on the submission begins:

Los Angeles, CA (October 1, 2007)—Camborne Productions announced today that the new feature documentary Beyond Borders has been submitted to the Sundance Film Festival. Subtitled “The Debate Over Human Migration,” the film takes a wide-ranging look at the subject of immigration, both from historical and modern perspectives. Prominently featured is the current fight over Mexican immigration in the United States. To read the entire story click here.

To learn more about the film visit its web site:
http://beyondbordersfilm.com/

Or come to a private benefit performance on November 15, 2007:

Be sure to RSVP space is limited

This really is the beginning of an important movement.

In a beautiful ceremony at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles on August 19th I was presented with the plaque above for my web site and writing in support of the Mexican people.

I gave the Consul, Ruben Beltran, an original map showing the US Mexico border in 1841.

Thanks to Joel G for organizing the event and for his continued good humored support of my efforts with regard to immigration.

Read the press release.

In the last two hundred and fifty years humans have made remarkable progress in many areas. Average life expectancy has more than doubled. The variety of consumer goods available to people in the developed world would astonish Louis XIV. Liberty and free speech are on the rise. Slavery has almost been ended. Women have started to be given equal treatment. In many parts of the world women are gaining reproductive rights and homosexuality is becoming less of a stigma. But all of these gains have exposed a great injustice that befalls most of the world’s peoples. This injustice is the accident of birth.

Because of barriers to migration, erected by sovereign states, most people are fated to live the lives they were born into. There is nothing they can do about it. It is the position of Radical Migration that this is wrong and that the time has come to do something about it. People should have the Right to Migrate. Sovereign states should not be allowed to stop this migration.

The Right to Migrate will become the next great human rights struggle.

When people have the Right to Migrate the ability of governments to oppress people will decrease and the ability of people to take action to improve their lives will increase. This is a great good.

For more information on the Right to Migrate visit radicalmigration.com 

Migrant’s rights will never be secure until everybody has the Right to Migrate.

Working on the problem of rights for migrants is important but it is like working on curing the symptoms rather than the disease.

The underlying problem, the disease, is that nations have not yet recognized that there is a basic human Right to Migrate. After the Right to Migrate is accepted then the rights of migrants will be much easier to secure.

For more information on the Right to Migrate visit radicalmigration.com

The debate in Congress is heating up about what to do about migration. The House passed a bill that would try to eliminate migration by using force both inside the country and at the borders.

The Senate Judiciary Committee led by Arlen Specter is trying to find a way to rationalize the existence of the eleven million undocumented people who are already here without calling it an amnesty and in a way that makes it seem like we don’t condone migration except through our legal channels. Reread the last sentence it has two contradictions in it. Contradiction one: Anyway you look at it allowing the undocumented to stay is an amnesty. Contradiction two: if we had an amnesty in 1995 and an amnesty by another name in 2006 it is hard to deny there is a trend. King Canute could not stop the tide and the US Congress cannot stop the flow of migrants to where opportunities are. Attempts to stop the flow will always fail and will cause misery, angst and bad behavior.

Peter Drucker the great management writer from Claremont wrote that if an organization has to keep making more and more complicated rules to maintain an outcome it desires; it should re-examine the underlying assumption that led it down the path to this increasingly complicated outcome. He suggests that the organization ask; “What are our basic assumptions about this issue?” In the case of migration, sovereign nations assume they have the right to restrict migration solely for the benefit of their current citizens. This is the incorrect assumption that causes the contradictions that Arlen Specter and his colleagues are trying to resolve.
Sovereign nations must recognize that people have a basic human right to migrate, that in balance it is almost always good for the receiving nation and that it is impossible to stop anyway.

So should people who believe in that the Right to Migrate as a basic human right support the legislation now in Congress. Making laws is a complicated process and the final bill will not recognize the basic right to migrate but if it, in the margin, moves in the direction of giving permanent status to the undocumented and does not build more walls between us and our neighbors it is a good thing.

But the real battle for Radical Migration is to change the debate. The ethics have changed. In a world with “liberty and justice for all” people must have the right to migrate. Nations that do not allow migration are on the wrong side of history. Walls are wrong.

For more information on the Right to Migrate visit radicalmigration.com

The WSJ (Wednesday March 15, 2006) reported, in a three line blurb, that “China refuses to take back 39,000 citizens who have been refused entry to the U.S. and are languishing in detention centers, according to Chertoff.”

Where are these detention centers?

What would happen if Mexico took a similar approach? The U.S. detention centers would fill to the brim in no time and adjustments would have to be made.

Mexico should support its citizen right to migrate with acts of courage like this.

For more information on the Right to Migrate visit radicalmigration.com

The immigrant trails into the United States from Mexico are this generation’s underground railroad.

For more information on the Right to Migrate visit radicalmigration.com