I will be at the March for America on Sunday, but the 7th Anniversary of the United States invasion of Iraq is on Saturday and that is something that I have marched against. There are a flurry of protests and remembrances planned across the country and a march on Saturday in DC against the ongoing 7 year war in Iraq.

Pero why is neither side talking about where the two issues, immigration and war, intersect? Is this one of the glaring failures of “reform” movements that are single issue and don’t talk about how different policies inside the United States feed each other?

What am I talking about?

While the face of wartime motherhood in the media was Cindy Sheehan but it could have been the mother of Jose E. Ulloa, or the mother of Jesus Alberto Suarez del Solar, or the mother of a young Latino soldier whose funeral bells I could hear from my apartment, Sgt. Alex R. Jimenez. This is not an attempt to disrespect or diminish the work of Cindy Sheehan or the death of her son Casey but rather to point out, that as support for the war waned, efforts to recruit soldiers from low-income communities of color were stepped up. Recruiters targeted schools and subway stations and they still do, promising money in a tough economy and promising legal status in the midst of a broken immigration system.

Overwhelmingly, however, what many young men of color have gotten from their service in the Iraq War, is death. In 2007, El Tiempo reported that Latinos represented less than nine percent of those enlisted in the army, but made up 11 percent of deaths in the Iraq War. Sometimes it is only after death that these immigrant soldiers are granted legal status, like what happened to Jose Gutierrez. There is now a widow benefit, but the wife of Alex Jimenez had to fight deportation after her husband when her husband first went missing. But is their a parental survival benefit or have the parents of U.S. Army Private Armando Soriano, also killed in Iraq, been deported to Mexico?

The recruitment efforts marketing the U.S. military to Latino immigrants is only a piece of the bigger picture. The seven year long war has created millions of refugees from Iraq. A recent report says that about a third of those are living “as squatters in slum areas”. Iraqi refugees who have been placed in the United States face poverty and racism as their faces and lives still are painted as “terrorist” in order to support the war. Is this the freedom and democracy Iraq was promised?

While D.D. (Detain and Deport) Napolitano has cut funding for the fence along the U.S. – Mexico border, one of the excuses, er justifications for heightened security at the borders has been the threat of terrorism which can be directly linked to the Iraq war. So whether you are participating in anti-war events or in the March for America on Sunday, remember how the lives of immigrants are tied to the U.S.’s bloodthirsty desire to show it’s supremacy over Mexico and Mahmoudiyah.