Report-back Following the Closure of Stockton “Respite Center”
Far-right and fascist anger is rising and showing its destructive face across many countries as migrants and asylum-seekers request the most basic human decency. In the UK, pograms by fascists have already burned down a library and a migrant hotel in early August. To combat growing right-wing ideology and hate, we must unite and build solidarity as anti-fascists across the UK are demonstrating. Through our football league, that has become our central goal.
On August 5th, with almost no warning, the city-run “respite shelter” at 359 Stockton Street, where many of our teammates and friends have been living, was shut down. They were kicked out at an early hour and given no help in finding their new housing assignments, other than crumpled printouts with directions to shelters as far away as the Rockaways, only in English which many of our friends are doing their best to learn. Mariel Acosta, a volunteer at Bushwick City Farm, said: “None of us from the community or mutual aid groups knew about this. We learned about the shelter potentially closing just two days ago.”
Most pointedly this demonstrates the dehumanization of asylum-seekers and other (im)migrants arriving to our city by agents of empire. As many organizers and scholars of immigration have pointed out, there is a contradiction at the core of capitalist nationalism: while laws, policing, and housing policies are setup to nominally “deter” migration, the labor of those people arriving is fundamental for capitalism — what Immanuel Ness calls “migration as economic imperialism.”
New York City has always been a city of (im)migrants. However, the city’s immigration, asylum, housing, and economic policies have also always acted as technologies for policing arrivals and making their lives incredibly difficult. From tenements operated by slumlords in the early twentieth century to today’s predatory landlords shoving people into expensive, overcrowded, and unsafe basement apartments; from historical migration quotas to today’s brutal, underfunded shelter system, (im)migrants and community-members have always worked together to help each other. Today, in NYC so-called “respite centers,” asylum-seekers are separated from each other by sex and age, making it very hard to meet people and build community.
By organizing and playing with our asylum-seeker friends, we have seen firsthand the city’s draconian migration policies, underfunded shelter system, and the destructive actions of the Eric Adams administration. But we have also found a way to build community. Our league, where we play together at least twice a week, share food, and build friendships has at least offered some consistency and a space for meeting people from different backgrounds and experiences. Together with Newcomers FC, Bushwick CityFarm, Club A, and other groups, we have been working with our new friends to combat the isolating conditions they are forced into by elected officials and underfunded city services. We have worked to establish some continuity and a space for mutual care and collaboration while the city works to make their assimilation and community-building as hard as possible.
Key here is the fundamental difference between charity and mutual aid. as the Art Workers’ Inquiry group of Red Bloom Communist Collective defines it: “Unlike charity, mutual aid does not function according to a logic of morality… Mutual aid is a relation that builds working-class power, solidarity, and capacity, enabling the working class to experiment with self-determined structures of care that begin to offer alternative forms to capitalism.” In our league, we work together to solve problems. When players on Newcomers FC mentioned that they would like the play more often than our league schedule allows, they offered to self-manage those pickup matches. For our league’s matches, generally the equipment committee of the Autonomous Football League brings the balls, goals, and so on. However, starting about halfway through last season, newcomers to NYC started to take down the goals and store the materials themselves. This is community in action, mutually working together to make sure we can continue to grow together.
Comrades are mobilizing to provide help at this time in numerous ways. One initiative that is ongoing is providing backpacks for recent “arrivants,” as artist and organizer Shellyne Rodriguez terms people who arrive somewhere not as settlers. Unfortunately, they cannot rely on any stability from city-provided housing. Bags are a basic but crucial necessity so that they can transport their stuff when they are forced to travel long distances between shelter to shelter. Legally, every single person must be reassigned to a different shelter, though we know of at least one person who was not provided housing. If you know someone who was not, please contact @club_a_nyc
On Sunday, August 18th, the Autonomous Football League will be hosting our semi-finals and finals! If you’d like to come and cheer folks on, please contact us here for details. We will also be collecting and distributing men’s clothing to our Stockton guys during the evening. We especially need backpacks, sweaters, and new socks and underwear.
