If corporations can illegally pollute bodies of water, then people who are called “illegal” should have the right to drink water.

Alabama, shame on you.

After Georgia fell in line with Arizona’s racist and xenophobic attack on immigrants in the US, I decided that these nativist acts had to figure its way into my dissertation writing and teaching. I wanted to make sense of how the popular and mainstream debates on immigration weren’t being framed in terms race and racism. Except for a few reliable progressive sources, the immigration problem was singled out as a border control issue. An economic crisis and lack of jobs issue. The threat of “alien” invasion issue.

But there is so much to say about immigrants figure into the American racial order, more importantly, the ways in which the neoliberal American democracy institutionalizes segregation as the remnants of blatant Jim Crow racism.

Of course, in the past month, the “occupation” of the US has stirred and invigorated the sleeping American consciousness. I wonder how much of immigration/race issue has occupied these encampments, given that, Americans (broadly defined, not just white college students) have taken up, often, private property of cities and corporations calling attention to the broken-ness of the capitalist-cum-US-democracy system.

I wonder if anyone thinks of these occupations as illegal. I wonder if the politicians who, both are intrigued and disgusted by these occupations, think these people need water.