Immigrant Rights Are Disability Rights

 Immigrant Rights Are Disability Rights

Joe Stramondo

 

In 2019, a White disability rights leader with a national reputation, Bruce Darling, had a spectacular fall from grace because of comments he made about immigrants while meeting with former Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (CA-D). Darling accused Eshoo and other Democrats of not prioritizing funding for home and community-based supports disabled people need to avoid institutionalization and of “caring more about people who are not legally in this country than their own citizens who are disabled.” His words spread across social media like a Californian wild fire. Within days, he was pushed out of his leadership positions within national organizations and became something of a pariah. Darling’s words were so divisive because people rightly pointed out that a true commitment to justice for disabled people must recognize that many undocumented immigrants are themselves disabled and deserving of basic rights, not total erasure from the disability rights discourse. Intersectionality had started to become a priority for the disability movement, but apparently wasn’t among Darling’s basic values and still isn’t valued by most white disabled people.

In this political moment, as masked I.C.E. enforcers raid neighborhood restaurants and worksites, while the Medicaid many disabled people need for basic survival is systematically demolished, we must urgently examine the relationship between immigrant rights and disability rights.  This is not only because many immigrants are disabled. There is also the deeper issue that ableism, racism, and classism are inextricably bound both in how many people think and in how our society has been structured. Immigration is a disability rights issue and needs to be understood as such by the disability movement.

Historical examples abound of how racism, classism, and ableism are entangled within the United States. From the moment Columbus stumbled into the West Indies, European colonists believed they were justified when murdering, robbing, and exploiting the indigenous people living in the Americas because they believed these native peoples, by their nature, did not have the intellectual and emotional capacities granting them equality with Europeans.  In his letters, Columbus himself expressed this attitude, “They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

When more European settlers arrived with those they kidnapped from Africa and forced into chattel slavery, it was again based on the racist belief that Black people could not be equal members of society because of their supposed deficiencies in intellect and emotional regulation. In other words, the violent racism and classism of the original sins of America’s colonialism and slavery were both premised on the idea that non-white people were not equal in ability to Europeans. The suffering and exploitation of non-white peoples that built the United States was allegedly justified by the assumption that these subordinate classes lacked some crucial capacity or were, in a sense, disabled.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an attempt was made to lend credibility to this entanglement of racism, classism and ableism with the pseudoscience of eugenics. Francis Galton, now infamous for first advancing eugenic ideology, tried to establish a scientific link between race, class, and ability in a way that justified policy interventions to remove disability from society. He described eugenics as, “the study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.”  In the Unites States, such policies included the forced sterilization of those who were, or were perceived to be, disabled, especially if they were not white In the Unites States, such policies included the forced sterilization of those who were, or were perceived to be, disabled, especially if they were not white,.  However, eugenic policies also included the institutionalization of disabled, queer, and non-white people in an attempt to keep them from reproducing, as highlighted in Jess Whatcott’s book Menace to the Future.  Likewise, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the federal government began restricting immigration of specific racial and ethnic groups on the grounds they had inferior abilities that would make them a threat to the common good.  The very origins of pro-institutionalization and anti-immigration policies were linked by eugenic ideology.

From the launch of his first campaign for president, Trump unapologetically invoked this entanglement of racism, classism, and ableism to motivate the violence toward immigrants we are now seeing with his now infamous, barely coded eugenic dog whistle, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

It is no coincidence that Medicaid and the very same homecare programs Bruce Darling was fighting to expand in 2019 will now be devastated by Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” just as we see the military deployed to American cities to enforce his mass deportation efforts.  Both the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich via social safety net cuts and the rounding up of brown immigrants are justified in the minds of GOP voters by the notion that poor, disabled, people of color are a “drain” on social resources.  If the disability movement and our allies are going to respond effectively, we must recognize that these threats to disabled people and threats to immigrants are one in the same because the ideologies motivating them are one and the same.  Immigration is a disability rights issue.

ABOUT

Dr. Joseph Stramondo is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at San Diego State University, where he also serves as Director of the Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs. He has published over thirty scholarly papers and book chapters in the areas of bioethics and disability studies.  In the past, he has also done disability advocacy work with the Connecticut State Independent Living Council,  Little People of America, Michigan ADAPT, and Disability Rights Texas, among others.