"Injustice Anywhere": The Parallels Between Homelessness and Immigration

I live in Arizona, which these days is like saying one is from Germany circa 1939 or Mississippi in the 1960s. You're probably familiar with our draconian immigration laws, including the implications for racial profiling, expanded police powers and a general attitude of exclusion and intolerance. When we consider these trends, there are actually strong parallels with the treatment of homeless people in America. Whereas Arizona's anti-immigrant stance has yielded national outrage, and rightly so, far less attention has been paid to the fact that homeless people are treated this way every day in cities across the country. Here are a few similarities to consider:

"Show us your papers." Homeless people experience routine ID checks, police stops and profiling based on external criteria including physical appearance. In fact, they will often have their IDs taken or destroyed with the implicit intention of making their lives more difficult to navigate. One of the basic struggles of homelessness actually is possessing the proper credentials and identification in order to access services and potential opportunities for education, employment or housing; without the right papers, one can get caught in a self-perpetuating state of disempowerment, as immigrants often experience here.

Forced migration. Being chased from place to place and town to town, people living in a state of homelessness are oftentimes forced into a state of perpetual motion. "No trespassing," "no loitering," "no camping," "no sitting" — to someone without a private shelter the world is a constant set of prohibitions and restrictions. This has the effect of requiring one to keep moving in an attempt to find a safe haven, even if only for a moment. The sense of vulnerability in such a state is palpable and debilitating.

Status crimes. Although denied by officials and policy makers, laws targeting behaviors such as urban camping and sidewalk sitting are intended to impact a particular class of people, just as Arizona's anti-immigrant laws do. Proponents argue that it is only conduct being prohibited, not categories of individuals, but these claims are belied by the reality on the ground since the conduct in question is often unique (or nearly so) to the class intended to be criminalized. As the French writer and Nobel Prize-winner Anatole France once poignantly said, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread."

Persona non grata. In this manner, homeless people are made to feel as though they are unwelcome wherever they go. Rather than being viewed as guests or visitors with the attendant hospitalities that ethics, scripture and good sense ask us to render, they are viewed as nuisances or even subhuman intruders. Walls, spiked benches, "bum-proof" bus stops and other forms of medieval architecture in our cities are utilized to communicate that one is most definitely not welcome.

Scapegoating. Immigrants are blamed for burdening the state's economy by draining social service agencies and other public resources; further, they are said to bring danger to the community and thus create an environment that makes people afraid to visit the state and otherwise conduct their business here. In typical fashion, cities seeking to enact anti-homeless laws almost always cite the negative impacts on commerce and the allegedly unruly behavior of homeless people as the primary "trigger events" for public behavior ordinances. Like immigrants, homeless people are also viewed as a drain on resources, and therefore function as convenient scapegoats for a bad economy and poor stewardship by elected officials.

No aiding or abetting. Anti-immigrant laws reach beyond the targeted class to further criminalize those who would help them, including human rights advocates on the border and even someone who provides transportation or shelter to an illegal immigrant. Likewise, those who provide food to homeless people are often criminalized themselves, not to mention being accused of everything from "enabling the lifestyle" to abetting a deviant sub-class. Meanwhile, corporate-hired envoys will often distribute literature reminding passersby not to provide assistance to homeless people in the perverse logic that "a handout is not a hand up."

Ethnocide through attrition. If you add all of this up, it is not an overstatement to suggest that such policies and practices have ethnocidal (i.e., the decimation of a people and their culture) implications. When a category or class is hounded in their wanderings, denied access to basic values of peace and security, scrupulously rendered unwelcome wherever they go, punished for basic life-sustaining activities and prevented from even asking for or receiving assistance, this is a potential path to annihilation. Immigrants and the homeless alike face exactly this prospect. As I often take pains to point out, eradicating homeless people is not the same thing as ending homelessness.

If there is a saving grace in all of this, it may be that the parallels between homelessness and immigration are instructive in calling our attention back to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous insight that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." The sooner we recognize this sense of "interlinked oppressions" and see our destinies as mutually interdependent, the sooner we can begin moving from single-issue crisis management strategies to wider engagement with the possibilities for creating a system based on the values of equity, justice, compassion and diversity. That "promised land" yet awaits our overdue arrival.

Photo credit: banspy