‘Please consider this point, Senator Cruz: immigrants are not threats; they may in fact be our best teachers.’ In an open letter on the occasion of the US Congress elections, architect, urban researcher and WDCD14-speaker Teddy Cruz addresses his namesake Republican senator Ted Cruz from Texas. He urges the senator to embrace immigration reform.
Teddy Cruz, who is recognized internationally for his urban research of the Tijuana–San Diego region, strongly opposes senator Cruz’s anti-immigration ideology. In his eyes the militarized border between the US and Mexico ‘is a concrete symbol of the administration of fear behind your relentless efforts to block any reform to our unjust immigration system.
As Cruz told at WDCD too, he reckons undocumented immigrants to be ‘one of the lifelines of our economy’. Reason why he condemns ‘an urbanism born of surveillance and exclusion.’ ‘Today’s geographies of conflict are shaping the 21st-century global metropolis into a battleground between legal and illegal urbanization, formal and informal economies, top-down control and bottom-up transgression.’
Instead ‘we should recognize and celebrate the innovations of immigrants’, Cruz writes, ‘because their tactics of survival and self-made entrepreneurship form the core of a more emancipatory idea of the American dream.’ That is why, according to Cruz, ‘a society that is anti-taxes, anti-immigrants, anti-government and anti–public infrastructure only commits civic (and economic) suicide.’