por Jorge Mújica Murias
mexicodelnorte@yahoo.com.mx
Check this out: “The City (and I skip the name to create suspense…) is intercultural, expressed in the sociocultural diversity of its inhabitants, sustained by indigenous and original populations and their people, as well as in the different nationalities, origins, languages and creeds, among other social collectives”.
Then check this: The government (of such unnamed city) shall “Promote that all media contribute to the strengthening of all cultures and human mobility”.
And the check this other one: “In the City … no person shall be the object of discrimination or exclusion due to their migratory condition. The public administration will guarantee the enforcement of programs and services geared to promote access and universal exercise of human rights”.
And this last one: All migrants have the right to “Regularize its migratory condition and access to a fair job which integrates freedom, equal treatment and benefits, as well as to have an adequate way of living which ensures his/ her health, food, clothing, housing, medical assistance and public education in all its levels, according to existing laws.” Good, enit? Yes, it is, but it is not a law in North Carolina or New México or Texas, and even less from Georgia or Arizona. Even more, it is not a law in any place ruled by a Democratic Party supermajority like Illinois.
It is the new Law on Interculturality, Attention to Migrants and Human Mobility in México City, approved a couple months ago by the Distrito Federal City Council, and officially presented to the citizenship this week in México City.
Is, whether some people like it or not, a law in complete favor or the migrant populations, a left-leaning law up to the point where the Party of the Democratic Revolution could be classified as leftist.
Long Live Human Mobility
This one is, I believe, a good approximation to what we have fi gured it should be a rational immigration law to treat migrants. And I refer to “treatment” because, as a State law, it could not legalize immigrants, just like in the U.S. the Arizona-like laws can not criminalize them, as the Courts have stated already. The new Mexico City law can only decide on the City’s treatment of immigrants. It is a law which changes the term of “migration phenomenon”, which makes me feel like a weird person doing something no one else does, as if immigration was a new thing and not something started 4 million years ago when the fi rst human being left Africa and became the fi rst migrant of the world.
It is further, a law that does not look at immigrants like desperate lone workers moving only to find a job, but which includes “life partners, wives or husbands, lovers and live-in signifi cant others, as well as their bloodrelated relatives in a direct line without limit or degree, or up to the second degree in the case in a transversal line, and the people upon whom the migrant is related by guardianship or tutelage”. It is a law which rejects the US theory of the “melting pot”, the “E Pluribus Unum” which pretends that we all should forget our ancestry.
Instead, it calls to “have, keep and strengthen” the social and cultural” riches of all ethnic and national groups inside México City, and mandated the government of the City to create and enforce “support programs for immigrants and communities of a different ethnic origin regarding social, economic, political and cultural aspects, which should promote its visibility and to strengthen them in Mexico City”.
Furthermore, it is a law which mandates the City Government’s to “attend to and extend the rights (of the law) to people born or living in México City or who leave it to reside elsewhere,” and to have programs to “promote, safe-guard, and defend the rights of Mexico City migrants living abroad”.
So to speak, the government of Mexico City could take to court any employer who violates the Rights of a México City worker in case of violation of his/her rights in Chicago and, in any case, could stand up to Homeland Security and La Migra anywhere in the United States.
In closing, it is a law which gives migrants their right to a legal status, jobs, housing, food, education and clothing, in clear opposition to the Federal Immigration Law signed this week by Mexican President Felipe Calderon, which considers a crime to hold a paying job without the proper immigration documentation, punished with deportation. And then some people wonder why some people consider me to be a lefty…
