If you would report an undocumented immigrant to ICE you would have reported me to the Nazis and I don’t fucking trust you
A note:
I live in a state where you “have to” report anyone you suspect of being undocumented (that wonderful hellhole of Arizona). Now in practice this law has fallen far short, thank goodness. But if you live in such a place and they start enforcing it, here is how you get around it:
Assume everyone who doesn’t speak English is visiting.
Never ask about their job, because if they tell you they work here then you know they’re not visiting. You see them a lot for several weeks or months? Hm. Someone in the family must be ill. That’s terribly tough. They always dress in old, ratty laborers’ clothes? I feel you, my dude, I can’t afford new clothes either, and my dad has the fashion sense of an aardvark, so sometimes it’s not even about “affording” them. They say they’ve been here for years? You must have misunderstood. Spanish isn’t your first language, after all. First and last name? It never came up, or you don’t recall–you meet a lot of people.
And then, if you’re asked: no, you haven’t seen anyone residing illegally in the United States. Just people visiting.
Very good very important addition
Some people do actually visit for work purposes.
They get sent somewhere by their employer to… conduct or receive training, fill in a labor shortage, evaluate processes and policy adherence, inspect facilities, provide in-person expertise, collaborate on a project…
Many possible things. I know a guy from Austria who keeps coming back to my town for work-related reasons, but who lives and primarily works in Austria. He’s an engineer for a company that has a US branch located in my area, and has been sent out repeatedly to help with their machinery. My boyfriend’s been sent by his job to both London and Ukraine, and people who work for the same company have been sent here from both places.
So even if someone mentions their work when you haven’t asked, it’s entirely possible to assume they’ve been sent on a temporary basis because of such a situation (you’ve seen them repeatedly for months? It must be an intractable problem, having been held up, or perhaps they keep having to return). How wonderful that their employer values them so much as to send them to another country to help business operations there! They’re wearing grungy clothes? Perhaps it’s just because you only see them when they’re off work and wearing what they find more comfortable. Maybe they only packed a few sets of nice work clothes and don’t want to dirty them unnecessarily by wearing them while out touristing in their down time. Maybe they’ve been engaging in some sort of hobby like dirtbiking, playing rugby, or volunteering at a community garden because they like plants and meeting people while doing helpful things, and of course they’re going to wear grungy old stained clothes for that kind of thing rather than their office attire!
Me reading dystopian fiction growing up and internalizing the message in the narrative: there’s no place for me in this world, I’d be dead the moment the regime took hold. I’m not strong enough. I couldn’t stand the suffering. Maybe the narrative is right. Maybe only the strong survive.
Me now as an adult getting ready to rip the pin from the grenade with my teeth and brandishing a molotov cocktail in the other hand: IF I GO DOWN I’M TAKING YOU MOTHER FUCKERS WITH ME, BRING IT ON IF YOU THINK YOUR HARD ENOUGH. YOU THINK YOU’RE SCARY? MY IMMUNE SYSTEM IS EATING ITSELF AND I HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE. COME GET SOME
We used to talk about how we would survive a zombie apocalypse, in high school, and I had one friend that would go, “Well you won’t last that long anyways, so why should we plan for you?” and I would agree, because I didn’t realize how deep I had internalized the idea that my disability made me not worthy of survival.
Flash forward to college, when my new friends and I are having a very similar conversation and I go, “I won’t last, so I guess I would just feed myself to the zombies” and my friends had a very strong response of, “NO, we are going to rob pharmacies. We will all learn how to get insulin from pigs or bacteria. You are not going down easy, you are too much of a fighter for that.”
I still remember the first time on tumblr, on a post discussing the zombie apocalypse, where I said “hey just leave me behind with the shotgun, I’ll only slow you down” and I think it might have been @undead-tealeaves who said “fuck that, we’ll pick you up and run while you aim” and honestly it might have just been meant as a throw away comment but it made me want to cry. And it meant a lot to me, it really did, like this was a comment from over two years ago and it still pops into my head and makes me feel emotional.
Like it really is the little things like your friends being like, come the dystopian government or the ends of the earth as we know it, whichever comes first, we have you. Because we have each other. And the survivalist community that is willing to ride and die for each other, will be the one that thrives and outlives the bastards trying to put us down. Hopefully long enough to see the new dawn, but hey, you don’t always get to see the garden you sow.
This shit right here is what pisses me off the most about almost all post apocalyptic fiction. Like bro I did not spend 2 million years evolving this big ass brain for the express purpose of social interaction JUST to leave squad behind when it gets rough. It is deeply offensive ™ to me as an anthropologist and this is why I love Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire because she does none of this nonsense.
Japanese child actress Mana Ashida (little Mako) was embarrassed that she couldn’t pronounce Guillermo Del Toro’s name so he gave her special permission to call him “Totoro-san” instead.
“The propulsion by the universality of Thought is the absolute worth of civilisation.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right
my great-grandfather had to leave italy in the 20′s because he hit a fascist with a tuba, so if you think I am going to take this sitting down you are going to have to catch these hands and also this tuba
Fun story my Great Great Grandma left Germany in the 1920s because she had family in the US and could get citizenship pretty easily and once she was over in the US she then smuggled over 15 jewish families out by forging family documents so now my aunts are currently in the process of trying to tell the real ones from the fake ones because my great gran just died and there are legally over 100 surviving descendants but we know that math is a lil screwy.
I’m pretty sure that when you lie that someone’s your family to help them escape the Holocaust, you become actual family regardless of blood ties. I don’t make the rules that’s just how that works.
That orange assh*ole is always doing something evil to distract from something even more evil!
The plight of those immigrant children is emphatically not a distraction or a less significant evil. Dragging children from the arms of their parents and putting them in concentration camps is a crime against humanity, is what it is.
The Trump administration wants both. They want ethnic cleansing and destruction of the social safety net. Neither is acceptable. Defend immigrants and the poor, disabled, and elderly.
Do not fall for the lie that you have to pick one or the other.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.