Racial Borders — Jean v Nelson at 35

Episode 6

Racial Borders, with E. Tendayi Achiume

The series concludes with a conversation with E. Tendayi Achiume, U.N. Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. In this episode, Achiume explores the global challenges facing immigrants of color and the “racial borders” that define our world.

Transcript

E. Tendayi Achiume: What's interesting also about the history of Haiti and of Haitian migration is how it's like the movement of Haitian bodies, of Black Haitian bodies has always been considered too emancipatory to be permitted. You know, there was a terror of Black, the movement of Black Haitian bodies from Haiti to say the US in the 19th century.

And today too, you know, I think of the movement of Black Haitians or Black African across the Mediterranean or wherever it might be, I think of that as Black sovereignty, as attempts to say, “I want to live a life on my own terms” and the hostility to that truly persists. And I think you know, coming back to Black Lives Matter, it's about yeah, Black self-determination.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: I’m Sarah Hamilton-Jiang and you're listening to “The Other Side of the Water: Immigration and the Promise of Racial Justice.” This episode marks the conclusion of our six-part series, exploring the legacy of the 1985 US Supreme Court case, Jean v. Nelson. Throughout this series we’ve explored a number of key themes including the beauty and the tragedy of the migration experience, the role of litigation in advancing equal protection under the law, the history of anti-Blackness and today's criminalization of immigrants of color, and how community and legal coalitions can drive social change in furtherance of racial justice for immigrants of color.

In today's episode, we'll continue to advance these themes in conversation with Professor E. Tendayi Achiume, professor of law at UCLA School of Law and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.

We hope you enjoy listening to our conversation about the racial borders that define our world and how a transnational approach to racial justice could transform the United States immigration system.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: Tendayi, we'd like to welcome you to our series. It's truly a pleasure to have you on our final episode today. Before we launch into the themes that we've been exploring in this podcast. We'd love to hear a little bit about you. Can you describe your work and your expertise?

E. Tendayi Achiume: Absolutely, so I wear two hats that are relevant for our conversation. So, one is I'm a professor of law at UCLA School of Law, and in my academic life, my research focuses on two different strands. So, the first half of my body of work focuses on xenophobia and xenophobic discrimination and looking at the legal frameworks, specifically the international legal frameworks that govern xenophobia. And then more generally, my work also focuses on the global governance of migration. So, the international law and policy governing the movement of people across borders. And within that, I focus on how colonialism, specifically different forms of European colonialism and the legacies of colonialism, have really shaped contemporary migration frameworks and I look at what this should mean for how the law applies to the way that people move across borders. So that's my academic life. And then in addition to that, I'm the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance which is really a mouthful.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: It really is.

E. Tendayi Achiume: I always feel like I'm going to get it wrong when I'm asked to say it, but essentially what it is, is that I'm an independent expert who is appointed by the UN. I don’t speak for the UN, but I speak to the UN and I'm supposed to provide UN member states with guidance on their human rights obligations on issues to do with racism, xenophobia, and discrimination, and also to just call to their attention the most pressing issues.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: Tendayi, you mentioned that your scholarship centers the role of colonialism in migration and immigration and I really appreciate this framing because I find it's much more common to see this framing in the European context, but I find that colonialism can often be divorced from conversations about immigration and racial justice in the United States. And yet the enduring legacies of colonialism have just as much relevance to the way that US society is structured and the way that immigration laws racialize Black and other immigrants of color. And I'd like you to speak about your article Migration as Decolonization, because in it, you consider how the law fails to incorporate the deep colonial roots of migration as it pertains to the so-called “economic migrant.” So can you take just a moment to describe your thesis in this article?

E. Tendayi Achiume: I was really interested in the concept of the economic migrant because the economic migrant is universally reviled in many parts of the world. And racialized as well. They'll talk about economic migrants where the economic migrant is the migrant of color. And typically, that language is deployed just before people say that these people actually have no claims to inclusion, right?

And so, in Migration as Decolonization, I argue that if we want to understand the relationship between economic migrants and the countries that are most invested in their exclusion, we have to go back to the colonial history of many of these countries. And if you look back at the colonial history of migration — and in migration as decolonization, I argue that the quintessential economic migrants were actually Europeans. You know, it was predicated on extermination of indigenous people, exploitation of their land, enslavement of others, all for the benefit of you know, metropolitan colonial powers.

As we know, and as scholars of neocolonialism have argued, you know, wherever decolonization took place it was formal in the sense that you still have these structures of colonial interdependence or neo-colonial interdependence, that essentially mean that the third world or formerly colonized territories remain subordinate to the first, right. But what essentially results—I argue in the paper, is that we are not in a world of formerly independent, of independent nation states that are all equal, we're in a sort of neo-colonial empire which is still characterized by sovereign interconnection.

That means that, you know, if you are an African living in Southern Africa, for example, there is still a relationship of domination with Europe that keeps you bound together in a persisting political association. One that means that you are not political strangers at all, right. And we can think of the persistence of this interdependence on unequal terms in part as a failure of reparations as well. There was no reparations for colonialism and slavery and all of the wealth that was extracted you know, and the kind of legacy of that wealth is very much a part of what makes the first world, the first world today.

The final point is to say that when we see economic migrants, so-called economic migrants who are traveling from parts of the world that are economically decimated in part because of colonial intervention and neo-colonial intervention, that movement to try and claim a better life, whatever that looks like, you know, whatever you want to put in the category of a better life—that should be seen as decolonial in the sense that it's an individual attempt to assert a greater capacity to self-determine in structural conditions of subordination. And so, we should understand that there is no right to exclude on a kind of political or moral basis, but we should be seeing the movement of economic migrants as decolonial and worthy of protection rather than as reviled and as something that is unentitled and bad, and that should be rejected. And so that's a general quick overview of the arguments of Migration as Decolonization.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: Another example of what you're describing in your article Tendayi can be seen in the treatment of Haitians who were seeking to enter the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. And in previous episodes in our series, many of our guests have highlighted the fact that Haitians fleeing political persecution were unjustly categorized as economic migrants and thus, they were denied the protections offered under asylum and refugee law. So, Haitians became the so-called “racialized and reviled economic migrant” that you referred to in your explanation. And I think the treatment of Haitians is an example of how important it is to consider colonial and the so-called post-colonial entanglements that mean that migrants do in fact have a right to inclusion in many of these countries that they're seeking to enter.

E. Tendayi Achiume: I think no international law course should be taught without the history of Haiti being the starting point. Because I think because you know, Haiti's independence and the rejection of Haitian independence by, at the time what understood itself as a liberal order, I think speaks to how Black sovereignty and Black self-determination seems almost antithetical to the liberal project.

And what's interesting also about the history of Haiti and of Haitian migration is how it's like the movement of Haitian bodies, of Black Haitian bodies has always been considered too emancipatory to be permitted. You know, there was a terror of Black, the movement of Black Haitian bodies from Haiti to say the US in the 19th century and today too. You know, I think of the movement of Black Haitians or of Black Africans, you know, across the Mediterranean or wherever it might be, I think of that as Black sovereignty, as attempts to say, “I want to live a life on my own terms,” and the hostility to that truly persists.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: I do think this point about the right to Black sovereignty is critical. And as we've explored in our series, anti-Blackness and attempts to diminish and even eradicate Black sovereignty are ingrained in the law in the United States. But I will add this isn't unique to the United States.

E. Tendayi Achiume: The thing about Blackness and anti-Blackness is that in so many parts of the world anti-Blackness, so rather the connotation of Blackness as subordinate and inferior just holds constant, right? It's a transnational and I would say global phenomenon. So, whether you are in Europe or you are in North America, or you're in Africa, Blackness is— especially in the immigrant context, is truly a marker of, kind of a target for subordination.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: The political weight associated with Blackness can have drastic implications for Black immigrants and migrants as they seek to cross borders. And this relates to your current research. So Tendayi, do you want to take a minute to talk about your current research on racial borders?

E. Tendayi Achiume: Yeah, so in my current work, I'm exploring this concept of, of racial borders, which operates at two levels. So, at one level, you know what I'm talking about when I say racial borders is referring generally to kind of territorial and political border regimes that on a disproportionate basis curtail movement, mobility and also just political incorporation. So, membership in the nation on a racial basis, right? So that international migration and international mobility basically function as racial privileges. And you know, when I think about territorial borders here, I'm thinking about actual border crossings. And then when I'm thinking about political borders, I'm thinking about citizenship. I'm thinking about nationality and the way that access to citizenship, access to nationality, access to border crossing, being able to move around the globe. We talk about all of these things—and by we, I mean, lawyers especially, talk about them in race neutral ways. But in actual fact, they function in fundamentally racialized ways, right? So that's one level at which I want to mark racial borders.

And then the second level is to really think about race itself as a special kind of border. And I'm not alone, I don't think in thinking about race as a border. But I'm interested in thinking about race as a border and tying it back again to the way we think about territorial and political borders. So, what is a national border? What is a territorial border? We can think of borders as sites among whose purpose is to enforce an exclusion, right. And we can think of race as doing similar work. It either enforces exclusion or inclusion, and that inclusion can be on an equal basis or on a subordinate basis. And I see Blackness in particular functioning as a site of exclusion, right, for Black migrants.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: And I think your work looking at migrants from African countries seeking to reach the borders of Europe describes this well.

E. Tendayi Achiume: There are so few pathways for legal migration to Europe, for Africans, right? So, most Americans will, when they want to travel to Europe, just go to the airport and travel to Europe. Except now we have a pandemic that I think is making Americans realize that borders can be closed. But outside of a pandemic context, that's what you do. But for African countries, you know, that's impossible. There are visa regimes and all kinds of restrictions that mean that the possibility of traveling, even if you can afford to travel. So, it's not just about class. It's not that you can't pay for the visa. It's not that you can't demonstrate that you have the funds. There are regimes that make it really difficult to travel. You add to that, border externalization and securitization processes which have meant that the EU is basically collaborating with African Union countries to limit the migration or the mobility of Africans to travel to Europe. What you realize is that the only bodies that we will ever find in the Mediterranean are going to be Black bodies, right? They are the ones for whom the borders of Europe are closed. And there's a scholar called Nicholas De Genova who is a sociologist who has described Europe's borders as racial borders which I think is absolutely true.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: You know, the tragedy of the migration experience is something that we've also explored in our series. In episode one, Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat described the meaning of the title of our series “The Other Side of the Water.” It's a common phrase in Haitian Creole, and it has a double meaning. She said that on one hand it describes those who had left Haiti and migrated to another country, but it also refers to those who have died and who have gone beyond the grave. And while the second meaning wasn't always necessarily connected to the migratory experience, the reality is that death was the companion of many Haitians who sought refuge in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Both Edwidge and Irwin Stotzky, one of our guests in episode two, described the harrowing memories of seeing images of the sand covered, washed up bodies of Haitians on the shores of Florida, following their attempts to reach the other side of the water. And so with these recollections from Edwidge and Irwin, and the parallels with what we're seeing today in the Mediterranean, these images of Black bodies they’re just truly horrifying.

E. Tendayi Achiume: I want to posit that the Mediterranean Sea we should really think of as a site of Black death, right? It's a site of racialized deaths. So, in 2017 media outlets reported the death of these 26 Nigerian girls and women who were aged between 14 and 18 and whose bodies were found floating in the Mediterranean Sea. And, of these 26 women when they were buried in Italy, only two of them had been identified. A Muslim woman whose name was Marian Shaka, and a Christian woman whose name was Osato Osaro. And both of these women were actually pregnant at the time that they died—speaking to the gendered nature of the racial borders that resulted in their death, right, the sexual exploitation and abuse that they experienced on their journey from Nigeria to the Mediterranean.

And when one of the survivors of this ship sinking (which is what kills these girls) and one of the survivors was interviewed about the motivations for why they were trying to cross the Mediterranean, they talked about how they were, you know, moving in search of jobs essentially. And there was an outcry about their deaths. You know, the human rights community was, you know, this is all bad, they shouldn't be dying in these ways. But at no point was it actually a point of discussion that the harm that had been experienced, or the injustice of the situation was a racial injustice. In that process, when I talk about racial borders, I mean the kinds of borders that mean that exclusion and mortal migration becomes a racial, you know, it's racially allocated that regime is the racial border, but then the Blackness of these women, like their actual bodies itself functions as a border, right.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: Tendayi that example is absolutely heartbreaking. And yet I'm glad that you took the time to share this story because not only does it speak to the intersectional vulnerabilities that present even greater challenges for Black migrants, but it speaks to the many examples of dehumanization and desensitization to Black death and to illustrate the scale of this, according to the International Organisation for Migration, the Mediterranean Sea has claimed the lives of 20,000 migrants since 2014. And I should note this includes Black and Brown migrants, but this figure illustrates the reality of the limitations of our immigration and migration policies, which is this very real possibility that migration in fact becomes a death sentence for Black and Brown immigrants.

E. Tendayi Achiume: Just coming back to this point that you're making about desensitization to Black death and to Black migrant death. I mean, this keeps me up at night, you know, and I think it is, it's just, and even in my work as a, as a Rapporteur...it is, I want to say that it's the darkest, it's even hard to put into words.

It really put into very kind of mortal terms, what it means to have race be a border and a very kind of mortal one where your desire to move for a better life to move from one part of the world to another, for reasons that are tied to, you know, the nature of those borders can very much result in your death on a racial basis.

And when we think about the images of migrants and refugees that catalyze international, transnational outrage, it is never the bodies of Black migrants. I think it's because of what you're describing. There's a dehumanization. There is a comfort and a very high tolerance of the death of Black people who are in places where we think they shouldn't be.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: I think about the many visuals we've seen of Black and Brown migrant deaths over the years. And as a Black person, there's a personal resonance and pain that I carry knowing that as you rightly said earlier in our interview that Black people are a target for subordination across the globe. But dehumanization is the essence of racism. And so if we're really serious about changing these tragic outcomes from migrants, we need to bring the humanity back to our immigration and migration policies. And I think this ties into the legacies of anti-Blackness that we've been describing in this series.

E. Tendayi Achiume: You know, I, in this, in this moment and in working on racial borders, I came across a story that may be familiar to many Americans. It had to do with the Chicago race riots which occurred in 1919 and the story of a Black teenager named Eugene Williams, who was swimming in Lake Michigan and this is on July 27, 1919.

So, he's swimming in Lake Michigan and what happens is that Williams inadvertently drifted to a part of the water that was unofficially considered to be a whites only part of the lake. There wasn't like an official policy of segregation, but everybody knew which part was the whites only and which part was the place where Black people could be swimming. And a white beach-goer who was outraged by him being there starts throwing rocks into the water and you can think of this as an act of punishment, but also an act of border enforcement I would say. The white beach-goer is trying to enforce the border between where the Blacks are allowed to be and where whites are supposed to be.

And so, he drowned, Williams drowned that day and there was a police officer, white police officer who was present, and there were several Black witnesses who were urging the white police officer to arrest the white man responsible for William's death, and he refused to do so, you know the police officer didn't and ultimately arrested a Black man instead right. And this triggered six days of protests on racial violence and sometimes referred to as the “Chicago Race Riots” and a big massacre of Blacks by white supremacists at that time.

And so, you know, this death of Eugene Williams occurs again as the result of him crossing over and, you know the body of water. He's in a part of the water that is not supposed to be one to which he is entitled to and it results in his death. And, you know, we might think about how this relates to what's happening in the Mediterranean now where Blackness in the Mediterranean results in a death sentence again, because your Blackness marks you as not belonging.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: The story of Eugene Williams really brings it back to the current moment that we're in in the United States right now. And just thinking about the consistency of racial injustice that after all these years continues to prevent Black people in America from simply living their lives, it can really be overwhelming. And for me, this connects to another point. As the Black Lives Matter protests expanded throughout the globe over this past summer, one of the things that really struck me was how people were resisting racial injustice in America, but they were also doing it in their own countries. And again, going back to the transnationality of anti-Blackness, it made me think of just how entrenched systems of racial inequality and white supremacy are throughout the world.

E. Tendayi Achiume: White supremacy is you know, is, is also something that is transnational and global as well right? And you see it in very explicit ways. So in my work as Special Rapporteur, I've been really stunned to see how transnationally coordinated white supremacist movements are. You know, they are mobilizing online transnationally to share funds. To exchange techniques of kind of racial terror, all of these sorts of things. There's that level at which white supremacy is transnational. But then there's also the kind of structural account of white supremacy that is probably tied to some of the earlier ways that I was explaining that borders work.

What has been hard in my work as Special Rapporteur, is realizing that the anti-Black movement, or even just the anti-racism movement, is not global in the ways that it needs to be to confront what is a global and a transnational project.

And there've been previous eras when it was, When I think there was more transnational collaboration was in the lead up to the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001. But I think that the generation above us would understand Durban as like a very powerful moment of mobilization within the UN framework. And it produced the Durban declaration and program of action which at the international level is a really powerful document that links racial injustice and racial inequality as products of colonialism and slavery and names them as structural problems that requires structural solutions. That document puts the need for reparations on the table. So many powerful things. So that was you know, August, 2001, September 11 happened right afterwards. And what you see within the UN is a dismantling and a kind of undoing of all of the hard work that had taken place in Durban and its replacement with this kind of counter terrorism framework that is itself racialized in many ways.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: So, this example that you're providing about the Durban conference and the post 9/11 landscape speaks directly to one of my concerns about the current movement Tendayi. You know, throughout history, we see movement and what feels like progress around racial justice. And then we always see pushback and we've seen this time and time again.

E. Tendayi Achiume: I also want to echo something that you're saying, which is a fear that I have as well. You know, we are in a moment where even within the UN for example, references to systemic racism rather than just racism. You know, the shift from talking about bad apples to thinking about systemic or structural racism is kind of a thing now. And I worry about that because it's not clear to me that we are actually on the brink of the shifting of structures. I feel we are instead experiencing a cooptation of radical claims that will then be assimilated to sustain structures that will continue on and on. There's a lot of adoption of the language of kind of racial justice without a real commitment to undoing the structures that sustain them.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: So how can we as activists, lawyers, advocates, organizers, policymakers, how can we think more creatively and ensure that these solutions to racial injustice have more permanence? And what are some concrete ways that you think we can really work more transnationally to disrupt anti-Blackness and racial injustice in immigration specifically, in the United States?

E. Tendayi Achiume: I think the first step is undoing siloing right? I think the siloing takes place in different ways. The siloing might be between people who understand themselves as lawyers and then people who understand themselves as movement actors, you know, and as somebody who's on the side of, you know, who's most steeped on the side of lawyering, I think that there is a very big gap and a lot that lawyers have to learn from movements and from immigrants themselves about what true border justice might look like. And sometimes it might be about forsaking the kinds of instrumental courtroom gains that lawyers are most tuned into focusing on to thinking about law outside of the courtroom, and thinking about the kind of legal reform that is rooted in the demands of movements that are willing to kind of take up, play the longer game, the slower game for the sake of truly transformative innovations.

Again, this is not to denounce the powerful work that lawyers do on a daily basis to alleviate the suffering of immigrants in different contexts. I think that work is also really important, but I think there's a need to shift strategy to longer term goals that are rooted not just in kind of palliative care, but in transformation.

And then within the immigrants justice movement itself, I think the siloing among the different groups, right? So, can there be coalitions among immigrants’ rights groups that represent people who are coming from different parts of the world? That’s representative of different racial and ethnic groups? And then getting rid of the siloing, having more communication, I think will then speak to what collaboration might look like.

I think this is a moment where for immigrants’ rights activists in the US, there’s I think a need to connect the project for immigrants justice to racial justice and thinking about what that means for anti-Blackness within the movement. But then in general, for the immigrants’ rights movement to also think about transnational alliances that might make it easier to dismantle structures of immigrant exclusion that seem purely national, but that have transnational dimensions as well.

I would love to see more engagement also between immigrants’ rights activists and indigenous peoples, and kind of people who are fighting for indigenous peoples within the US as well, right? Because again, I think border justice has to also be attuned to the settler colonial nature of this country and the kinds of injustices that inhere in that, and that have to go hand in hand. Natsu Taylor Saito, who's an amazing scholar at Georgia State has a book out that really tries to connect domestic struggles for racial justice in the US to decolonization of the US and other parts of the world. So, I highly recommend that book to your listeners.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: And then what about the next generation of lawyers Tendayi? How should we be thinking about racial justice in legal education?

E. Tendayi Achiume: I actually think that one of the biggest problems is the way that we teach immigration law and the way that we just teach law in general, right. So, I think I've been thinking most about what are kind of next steps for law schools and for law professors, right? Like how can we teach the law to students in ways that doesn't make them accept that as the baseline from which they must operate. How do we teach them to come out of law school, deeply skeptical of laws that are fundamentally unjust and ready to kind of remake these laws? That's the challenge that I am putting to myself so that the next time I teach, you know, whatever class it is, whether it's property or immigration law, How am I teaching in a way...am I teaching for the kind of future I want to live in? Or am I teaching for the past and a present that we agree is kind of fundamentally unjust. So, I think legal education as well, has to seriously be a site of decolonization for lack of a better word.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: We'd love to just hear your thoughts on the international human rights framework. There are several movements that are seeking to deconstruct and reimagine the criminal legal system and the immigration system due to their oppressive and racialized frameworks. Do you think we also need to deconstruct and reimagine the human rights system? Is this system so fundamentally flawed because it's working within this hierarchical, colonial racial structure? And if so, how can human rights practitioners operate with integrity? And, and what steps do you think we should undertake to work towards transforming the human rights system?

E. Tendayi Achiume: One thing is that I feel like I'm not a human rights dogmatist. I feel like we are in a time where we don't fully understand the potential and the capacity of human rights and it's conceivable that they will be exhausted, right. If there is an unwillingness to make the language of human rights relevant to the lived experiences of Black migrants you know then I guess we abandoned the human rights framework and we think about other discourses of emancipation because we can't fetishize any one framework beyond its capacity to actually deliver true emancipation.

That's not to say that we shouldn't be radically re-imagining, right? So, what this says to me is that for anyone in any part of the world who cares about borders, you have to understand what tools are in your toolbox for thinking about how you push towards more just borders. So, to me there's a need to engage with international human rights because they are very relevant.

And then the question becomes, what can they do? Now in my work, I've argued that there hasn't been sufficient fleshing out of what exactly the human rights of migrants are. Another problem within the human rights movement and the human rights framework is the marginalization or the neglect of racial justice as a project as well, right? This is the thing about systemic racism, it applies even to the international human rights framework, where there hasn't been sufficient attention to what the racial justice frameworks that we have at the international level might do for us.

So, I see at the international level greater potential than has been explored you know. I'll give you a very concrete example: The International Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination defines prohibited racial discrimination as discrimination also on the basis of national origin, right. So, national origin discrimination is considered racial discrimination and there's just no equivocation about that. Whereas in many different contexts, national origin discrimination is treated differently in domestic context from racial discrimination. That treaty has some equivocation about treatment between citizens and non-citizens. But definitely there are many domestic immigration policies that I would argue would run afoul of the prohibitions in, or the requirements in that treaty, which has been ratified by many different countries, the US included, but it's not one that is actively relied upon. So, you know, I think there is greater potential than we've seen.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: And I think in addition to what you're saying, the international community can also be useful for building transnational movements and coalitions.

E. Tendayi Achiume: So, you know, when the UN is having debates with its member states about issues to do with international human rights, if there is a transnational movement of migrants rights activists those would be fora for holding different states accountable for different practices that they're engaging in, in different kinds of domestic contexts. So, there's an advocacy dimension, I think, to the human rights movement that is also really valuable. So, it's not by any means, going to the international levels is by no means a silver bullet, but I think of it, I think of the international human rights framework as another possible framework for different ways of thinking and talking about what borders might be right?

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: I agree that there’s power in the international framework and there's power in solidarity. And I think this collective power can be the catalyst for reimagining a way to bring the humanity back to these legal frameworks. And I hope that one day immigrants of color will simply be able to live a life that allows them to succeed and that the law will provide for this and that it will allow them to have prosperity and not to be denied these things. And I think that many of the things that we've discussed today and that you've identified Tendayi could indeed lead to transformative reform for Black immigrants and other immigrants of color.

And Tendayi, unfortunately, our time is coming to an end. I really can't thank you enough for your insightful reflections based upon your work. They've really enhanced and expanded our discussions that we've had on the series. And my last question in closing Tendayi, how do you think advocates can give real substantive meaning to human rights and racial justice for Black immigrants, and other immigrants of color?

E. Tendayi Achiume: When I think about human rights and when I think about when they are most powerful. It's more about how the language of human rights and the concept of human rights are given meaning in lived experiences. So, I'll give you an example, which is not in the context of, of immigration, but it's in the context of when I started my rapporteurship, I traveled to Colombia where I had consultations with Indigenous rights activists and Afro-Colombian activists as well, who were using the language of human rights to advance, basically a kind of racial capitalism critique of the conditions under which they were living, right. They were using the language of human rights to speak to racial injustice and economic injustice in ways that were so radically empowering and actually kind of would have schooled any kind of, you know, human rights professor who has the doctrinal account of what human rights, you know, mean today.

And so, I would like to see more of that bottom up approach to thinking about how we give content to the meaning of the human rights of migrants. And I would say that it should be to, you know, the Haitian migrant who's willing to face death for the sake of living life on his or her or their own terms, it should be to those individuals to give meaning to what the human rights of migrants might be.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: And that was a powerful note to bring this conversation to an end. Tendayi, it really has been an absolute pleasure engaging with you today. Thank you so much for your time.

E. Tendayi Achiume: It's been a real privilege to be able to talk to you about these issues and I think it's such an important and a powerful debate so thank you very much for including me. I really do feel very kind of humbled and privileged to be able to have this conversation with you.

Raymond Audain: We hope you've enjoyed listening to “The Other Side of the Water: Immigration and the Promise of Racial Justice.” It's been an absolute pleasure for us to host this series.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: We'd really like to thank our guests in this series for their invaluable insights. And we encourage you to read their work and to support the work of the many incredible grassroots organizations who are working in this space.

Ellie Happel: We'd also like to thank the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, (and a very special shout out to our podcast producer Keecee DeVenny); NYU Law’s Center on Human Rights and Global Justice and our additional co-sponsors who helped to make this possible.

Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: This episode was produced by Keecee DeVenny of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and edited by Zach McNees. This episode features music by the Haitian band, Lakou Mizk. The song that opens and closes each episode is called Sanba yo Pran Pale. It is a collaboration between Lakou Mizik and the DJ producer, Joseph Ray. To revisit our series and our conference, Immigration, Equal Protection, and the Promise of Racial Justice: The Legacy of Jean v. Nelson, visit our website jeanvnelson35.org.

Thanks for listening.