LPPFusion joins with hundreds of high-tech firms and tens of millions of people in condemning President Trump’s Executive Order banning entry from seven nations. We support the inalienable right of freedom of movement for all.
Eighty percent of LPPFusion’s team are immigrants, born outside of the United States. We are part of the great global tradition of scientific and technological advance that relies on the movement and collaboration of researchers across all borders. But our work has been repeatedly harmed by US immigration laws. Two of our former senior researchers have left the United States because they were unable to gain permanent resident status for themselves and their families. Our present staff’s travel plans have been disrupted by Trump’s executive order.
We also oppose the present immigration laws of the United States as unjust, unconstitutional and harmful to all who live here. They have caused, and continue to cause, suffering not only for undocumented immigrants, but for documented immigrants, permanent residents, and citizens, both foreign-born and native-born. Attacks on immigrants’ rights undermine the rights of all who live here. These laws must be repealed.
Open immigration was, after all, the original “immigration policy” of the United States. Up until 1879, it was the policy of the United States to, in the words of an 1868 treaty between the US and China, “recognize the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects, respectively, from the one country to the other for purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents.”
Today, just as in 1868, nothing in the US Constitution gives the US government the power to violate this “inalienable right” to freedom of movement or to control who comes here or who leaves. The present immigration laws are all unconstitutional.
We will work with all to protest these policies through petitions, demonstrations and other means. We are confident that, with sufficient mass action, we will not only block these new policies but we shall overcome the broader injustice of anti-immigrant laws.
