Community members and immigrant advocacy organizations gathered Tuesday evening at Maritime Heritage Park to fold origami for an art installation celebrating immigration and write postcards to the City to advocate for an immigrant resource center.
The art installation, which is a collaboration between the Whatcom Peace and Justice Center (WPJC), Imagine No Kages and other advocacy organizations, will eventually feature 10,000 origami butterflies, as part of a community campaign called “Migration Makes Us Stronger.”
“The butterfly … is a symbol of immigration,” said Aline Prata, executive director of the WPJC, which advocates for social justice and nonviolence in Whatcom County. “[The butterfly] connects us to nature and to this idea that nature sees no borders, and that we should all be connected through the right of migration.”
A luna moth is tattooed on the hand of Theresa Warburton as she folds paper into a butterfly at Maritime Heritage Park on July 26. (Andy Bronson/Cascadia Daily News)
Volunteers also wrote postcards to Mayor Fleetwood to advocate for a city-funded immigrant resource center. This center should be a “self-led community-based grassroots space where people can exchange information and access to resources,” Prata said. “I think the vision really depends on a collective construction based on immigrants at large.”
Liz Darrow, who serves as the media coordinator for immigrant advocacy group Community to Community Development and holds a seat on the City of Bellingham’s Immigration Advisory Board, said that she was optimistic the city would fund the center.
The Immigration Advisory Board presented to Bellingham City Council on May 9, and council members were unanimously in favor of the center, Darrow said. Fleetwood is drafting proposals for the center, which Darrow expects to be released in September.
Josh Cerretti, who co-founded the prison abolitionist organization, Imagine No Kages, and serves as the director of WPJC’s board, said resources like the proposed center are important to INK’s work against mass incarceration in a county that has seen “the surveillance and criminalization of immigration through a hyper-militarized border force.”
Danielle Siedlecki, bottom, and others fold paper into origami butterflies. (Andy Bronson/Cascadia Daily News)
“Abolition is … about creating and growing the kind of resources that render them irrelevant and unnecessary,” Cerretti said. “An immigrant resource center goes a long way to providing the kind of resources that people need to thrive here, without having to turn to these systems that also are really involved in punishment and violence.”
The postcards, Darrow said, are meant to maintain momentum for the project. “It’s a nice opportunity to contribute” to the vision for the center, she said.
“[The city] will come up with something,” she added. “And we’re optimistic that it will be a good thing.”
