The Immigration Debate Takes to the Streets
In Quebec, the question of how to “reasonably accommodate” religious minorities has morphed, over the past year, into an all-consuming debate over immigration. It has tangled together every conceivable strand of Quebec’s identity issues: language, religion, ethnicity, sovereignty and geography.
Many people, myself included, have become frustrated with the xenophobic tenor of the discussion and the lack of strong voices in support of immigrants and ethnic minorities. While politicians like Pauline Marois cynically exploit (and obfuscate) the issue with appeals to linguistic nationalism, and old-stock Quebeckers in homogeneous villages fret about the threat posed to their culture by immigrants who reside hundreds of kilometres away in Montreal, the real problems faced by immigrants — barriers to employment and discrimination, notably — have gone largely ignored.
Still, as painful as this whole process as been, it has remained abstract. Some might say that this is because the people most fearful about immigration are those who live in the most homogeneous settings. I certainly haven’t experienced any tension on the streets of Montreal or in the day-to-day interactions of its culturally diverse citizens.
That isn’t quite the case in Prince William County, Virginia. Over the past several months, this exurban area on the fringes of metropolitan Washington, DC, where one-fifth of the population is foreign-born and nearly half is non-white, has been the setting for a sometimes vicious quarrel over immigration and, more specifically, Latino immigration. More specifically, the debate has revolved around a resolution that would force police officers to verify the immigration status of anyone suspected of being in the United States illegally.
In response, two filmmakers have taken it upon themselves to document the conflict. Annabel Park and Eric Byler, Asian-Americans who grew up in Prince William County, have launched 9500Liberty, an interactive documentary that straightforwardly explores all facets of the debate. Park and Byler are editing their footage as they shoot it and uploading it to YouTube as quickly as possible, giving viewers the chance to shape its direction and engage with it in a way that would not be possible with a traditional film.
So far, the filmmakers have documented county meetings, interviewed key players in the debate and shot confrontations between supporters of the crackdown on illegal immigration and its opponents. The most-viewed video, which you can watch above, deals with the so-called Liberty Wall, a large banner that urges Prince William County residents to “stop your racism to Hispanics!” After it was erected, several attempts were made to destroy it.
Byler and Park’s project has been widely viewed and discussed. Like any documentary, it creates an opportunity for reflection. That’s something we could use here in Quebec. Unlike the proposed resolution in Prince William County, or even the larger debate over illegal immigration, the question of reasonable accommodation is astoundingly vague. That, in large part, is the reason why it has veered so drastically off course. What we need, most of all, to explore, as honestly as possible, the ground-level reality of immigration and multiculturalism in Montreal and Quebec.
Tags: Migration, Small Towns
