Immigration Politics: How to Weaponize Your Personal Crisis

A powerful essay from 'The Nation'

How to Weaponize Your Personal Crisis | The Nation: "Jose Antonio Vargas... could have continued to survive—even thrive—in this country by keeping quiet and relying on the aid of a few secret-sharers. But he decided that survival on those terms wasn’t enough anymore. “I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore.” And so Vargas went public, risking everything to join the thousands of young immigrants coming out as undocumented and pressing for a pathway to citizenship for themselves and others like them. ...

Call it the politics of personal crisis: it evaporates the middle and dissolves the equivocations that politicians use to disguise moral decisions as arcane policy. It calls out accommodation as farce, and it converts sympathy into radical energy. The moment forces allies to realize that individual acts of compassion are incommensurate with the crisis, and it makes starkly clear that it is not just more secret-sharers and charitable acts that are needed; it is systemic change."