NOII-Van is catching up with social media – Find us!

Posted by admin on Jun 1st, 2011

No One Is Illegal Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories is catching up with social media! If you believe in our organizing and agree with our basic principles of anti-colonial migrant justice and the “right to stay, freedom to move, and right to return”, then help us spread the message!

Youtube: Subscribe to our NEW Youtube channel for an inspiring video collection, including over 50 videos on Indigenous Self Determination:
http://www.youtube.com/NoOneIsIllegalVan

Facebook: “Like” our NEW Facebook Page and join our Facebook Group to receive daily news and video links:
Page: https://www.facebook.com/nooneisillegal 
Group: https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6252584281

Twitter: Follow our NEW Twitter for breaking updates on migrant justice organizing and local, national, and global campaigns:
https://twitter.com/noii_vancouver

Email list: Join our low-traffic email list for announcements:
https://lists.resist.ca/mailman/listinfo/noii-l

Website: Check our Website for regular articles and events:
https://noii-van.resist.ca or https://noii-van.resist.ca

Flickr: Check our our Flickr photo gallery for actions and events:
http://www.flickr.com/nooneisillegal

* ABOUT US *

No One is Illegal-Vancouver Coast Salish Territories is a grassroots anti-colonial migrant justice group with leadership from members of migrant and/or racialized backgrounds. As a movement for self-determination that challenges the ideology of immigration controls, we are in full confrontation with Canadian border policies; denouncing and taking action to combat racial profiling, detention and deportation, the national security apparatus, law enforcement brutality, and exploitative working conditions of migrants.

We seek an end to detentions and deportations and the violence of all forms of control. The popular conception is that undesirables are being expelled because they have failed the appropriate legal channels. However, an increasing number of migrants are being deported because of structural flaws in the system. Most migrants are prisoners of passage, criminalized simply for being poor and trying to migrate. Canadian immigration policies serve to consolidate the development of Fortress North America, using free trade to open borders to capital, while exploiting the people- mostly women- whose free movement it regulates through displacement, deportation, and the creation of hyper-exploitable labour on which the economy of the North is built upon.

We demand the abolition of exploitative temporary worker programs and status for all those who have been deemed illegals. The number of people admitted each year on temporary worker visas is now greater than the number admitted as permanent residents. The number of undocumented migrants is also ballooning, as hundreds of thousands are forced underground and endure extreme poverty, inadequate access to health care and education, low wages, dangerous working conditions, and the constant fear of deportation. The threat of deportation is inherent to what makes migrant workers and non-status people extremely vulnerable to abuse. Border imperialism serves Canadian industries that depend on exploitable and indentured labour in order to reap high profits while driving down the wages of all workers.

We aspire to workers control over their own production, not corporate wage-slave conditions that commodify human beings, especially women. Women of colour are particularly over-represented in work characterized by low wages, irregular hours, and lack of unionization and instability, such as garment work, domestic work, home support work, cooking, and dishwashing. People are not simply worth their value in capital or labour. Such ideas of worthiness are based on domination that has justified the dehumanization and genocide of peoples across the world.

Canada and its economy are built on the theft of Indigenous lands; exploitation of labour especially slave, migrant, and reproductive labour; and the global appropriation of natural resources. Government and corporate involvement in military occupations, most recently through the War on Terror and land takeovers facilitated by free trade agreements such as NAFTA continue to be a prime reason for the repression, destitution, and migration of millions of people. Locally, colonial policies from the Indian Act to residential schools, and anti-immigrant measures from the Japanese internment to Security Certificates, have reinforced racism and cast entire communities as racial outsiders.

In light of this reality, we assert that people have the right to remain in their homes in the face of global displacement due to land theft, occupation, environmental degradation, and other capitalist and imperialist forces. In light of the unfettered freedom afforded to capital and armies across otherwise fortified borders, people should be free to move whether due to persecution, poverty, or simply in order to flourish with dignity. People also have the inherent right to return to the lands of which they have been unjustly dispossessed.

The ongoing apartheid reality instituted through reserves and sweatshops is one that must be fundamentally uprooted and transformed. We place ourselves within the broader movement for global justice struggling against capitalism, homophobia, imperialism, occupation, patriarchy, poverty, racism and other forms of domination because we recognize that these are interconnected systems. We envision and actively strive for a humanity where everyone has the right to sustenance and the ability to provide it, where we are free of oppression, misery, and exploitation, and are able to live meaningfully in relationship to one another and in reverence for Mother Earth that sustains us.

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