IMMIGRATION & UNIFICATION
Part One
by
Stan Goff
Military/ Veterans Affairs Editor
© Copyright 2006, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. This story may NOT be posted on any Internet web site without express written permission. Contact admin@copvcia.com. May be circulated, distributed or transmitted for non-profit purposes only.
The Property-Deed Version of History
April 13, 2006 1300 PST (FTW) - ASHLAND - There is a tendency to zero out history’s trip meter on the same day one gets his first property deed. Everything up to that day is transformed into a kind of historical gestation. We were merely in the waiting room of some cosmic maternity ward until that moment, anticipating the arrival of validity.
These kinds of fictions are the floor joists of our denial; and the tectonic immigrant upsurge of the past few weeks has broken through the flooring and forced a lot of people to look at them.
Let’s get something straight about immigration. If your ancestors didn’t speak Athabascan, Iriquois, Algonquin, Caddo, Muskegon, Sioux, Numic, Keresan, Hokan, Algic, Benutian, Sahaptian, Tangan, Eskimoan, or Salishan… and you live in the United States, you are the immigrant.
You can produce all the property deeds written in English that you want, at some point the paper trail leading to that deed is written on with blood. Property is a legal fiction. So are political boundaries.
And as the old saying goes, “The Mexicans aren’t crossing the border. A while back, the border crossed the Mexicans.”
The Flutter Valve
In the case of the United States ruling class, those political boundaries have served for some time as a kind of flutter-valve. That valve allows free movement of the one percent of our population that now owns sixty percent of all stock and forty percent of all wealth in the US (the richest two percent owns fifty-six percent (!) of the wealth). They can move freely around the world in search of fifteen-year-old girls who will work in a sweatshop ten hours a day for two dollars, while they are sexually preyed upon by their bosses. And this dominant class can move freely to dispatch armies of their own working class to seize nations with the misfortune of being on or near diminishing underground oceans of fossil energy. But the same valve tightly regulates the movement of working people. So-called “illegal aliens” (how a person can be illegal is still a mystery to me) are not kept out of the US; their flow is regulated—officially and unofficially.
These are actually the ideal workers from the point of view of many members of the US business class. Bosses can treat them like shit, work them like animals, refuse them benefits, and—more frequently than many realize—refuse to pay them. If they say anything, then the boss can make that anonymous call to la migra.
It’s remarkable to me that people here can still believe these undocumented workers are merely here to cash in on a good deal. Plenty of people still believe that undocumented immigrants actually come here and collect “welfare,” when that system—which was only partially available to the poor who were legally-recognized US citizens—was torn to pieces several years ago.
How many of us would take on all the physical risks associated with an illegal border crossing, the dangerous association with the ruthless border-coyotes, living in constant fear of discovery, to live in a place with an unfamiliar culture and a foreign language, along with being treated like shit, worked like animals, refused basic benefits, and sometimes refused pay for work done…for a pay raise?
The Risk Takers
We never stop to ask the question: Why would anyone risk that? What were the actual conditions that drove these folks to undertake such a perilous journey to live such a perilous existence?
That’s why people were shocked when millions of immigrant workers and their children walked off their jobs and out of their schools on April 1st. We have seen a very cautious and circumspect population painting our houses, doing our landscaping, cleaning our parks and subdivisions, building our stores, repairing our roofs, babysitting our kids, and making our greasy hamburgers. We did not understand the depth of the resentment at a thousand little offenses borne each day, or the tinsel-strength of the courage it has taken for them to be here at all…because they were them. The foreigners. The aliens.
When I was at State University of New York - Stony Brook (SUNY-SB) last week, I spoke to a class of young people, many immigrants from all over the world, but mostly the more privileged stratum of immigrants, documented, T’s crossed, I’s dotted. One young Colombian woman, whose father is a businessman—someone who has partnered at some level with that special class of Americans who pass effortlessly across those international political boundaries—asked me a question.
“I wonder why is it,” she remonstrated, “that we can’t have a system in Colombia like we have in the United States.”
She was a decent person, and her question was sincere, so I was no shorter with her than was absolutely necessary.
“Because,” I explained, “it is the same system. The poverty and disorder of Colombia is the price paid for our affluence and order here.”
The system is global.
Hunger & Resentment
It is US policy that has indebted the nations of Latin America, that has forced them to export their wealth to the US in order to pay off un-payable external debts. It is that same policy that has transformed the indigenous agricultural systems that fed those nations and supported the rural populations into an expanding export enterprise—mechanizing production, enclosing massive swaths of land both private and common, and pouring the former rural populations into hellish, overcrowded urban slums. In the countryside, people were poor, with food. In the cities, they are poor, without food. Hungry people take risks.
The seismic uprising of immigrants, led by Latinas across the country is one of the most significant political events of the last decade.
On April 10th, I attended one of hundreds of rallies that happened across the country, this one in Siler City, NC, where several thousand people attended. At that event, as at other events across the country, the participants wore white t-shirts and carried American flags. This is extremely significant, but not because of the specific tactical content of the flags (to demonstrate clearly that this was not anti-American). It was significant because it was a visible demonstration of collective discipline. This is a nightmare for any ruling circle: a population of millions of people, who are absolutely necessary to the smooth continuation of capital accumulation that can be disciplined to a singular political project.
Everyone should see the political comedy film, "A Day Without a Mexican," in which California wakes up one day and all the Latinas have disappeared. Oddly enough, this film and these recent uprisings prefigure the biggest nightmare of all for elites: an immigrants' general strike. You can bet the one-percenters have thought about this.
The Bill
In December, clueless as usual to anything outside their own narrow cultural paradigm, Republican leadership—responding to their most brittle-brained, xenophobic base—passed a bill that would not only change the charge of being an undocumented person from a civil to a criminal penalty, but pose criminal penalties on any priest, food bank worker, employer, landlord, or passerby who in any way assisted said undocumented “criminal.” The bill further proposed an Israeli-like 700-mile “fence” along the US-Mexico border.
The implications of this, of course, even for the US business class, were astounding…and well nigh apocalyptic. So, with John McCain as their spokesperson, the Senate offered an “alternative” proposal: Allow workers to stay for ten years (!) with guest worker visas (called braceros, the status “enjoyed” by contract stoop labor in the lettuce, strawberry, and tomato fields) as the pre-condition for applying for full citizenship. Meanwhile, employers would hold them in virtual indentured servitude.
David Bacon writes in “Congress Must Face Reality - Immigrants Want Equality”:
A concerted effort by some lobbyists is underway in Washington, however, to convince legislators that guest worker status, while unpleasant, is something immigrants themselves are prepared to accept. But outside the beltway their proposal is meeting a rising tide of rejection In New York City, Desis Rising Up & Moving and 20 other grassroots groups formed Immigrant Communities In Action, and condemned both House and Senate bills for not halting the wave of detentions and deportations visited on Muslim communities since 9/11.
Another coalition, which includes the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, the Chinese Staff and Workers' Association, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, also rejects guestworker programs. Like the Teamsters, these groups say Congress should abolish employer sanctions instead, since they're often used to retaliate against undocumented workers who demand labor rights.
The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights criticizes both the Senate and House bills because they hold "no promise of fairness in immigration policy and would undermine the rights, economic health and safety of all immigrants and their children. Congress needs to go back to the drawing board to come up with genuine, positive and fair proposals."
The counter-proposal, and not just the initial House bill that would criminalize half the country, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The sleeping giant that was Hispano-America awoke, and when it stirred, the rest of immigrant America woke with it.
[Next week, Stan concludes his analysis by showing us direct links between illegal immigration and the US war effort in Iraq. He also offers us an explanation as to why we haven’t been forced to reinstate the draft. There are glimmers of hope for all of us. – MCR]
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