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NEWS & LETTERS, June-July 2006LeadImmigrant struggles and the response to globalized capitalby Htun Lin Faced with huge protests by immigrants, on the one hand, and a split in the Republican Party between racist xenophobes who want to criminalize all immigrants and business interests that want to exploit immigrant labor, George Bush weighed in on the debate on May 15 by taking his approach to most issues--militarizing it. Bush called for 6,000 National Guardsmen to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border and for a hundreds-mile-long chain link fence to be built along large parts of it. However, Bush has neither mollified the demands of immigrants for human dignity nor has he tried to silence the growing chorus of reactionary sentiment in Congress and elsewhere that wants to scapegoat immigrants as part of an effort to deflect attention from the real crises undermining the quality of life in this country. The Senate's decision to declare English the "national language" of the U.S. is but one expression of a rising backlash to today's protests by immigrants. NEW KIND OF MAY DAY On May Day, long recognized internationally as the day celebrating labor’s radical origins, over a million immigrants took to the streets all over the U.S., not just to march but to show the country what "A day without immigrants" ("Un dia sin inmigrantes") looks like. It was, in effect, a mass strike, impacting among others agricultural production, construction, meatpacking, and service industries. In many places, the demonstrations were multiethnic. Hundreds of thousands marched in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, New York, and many other major and minor cities saw the largest demonstrations in their recent history, such as Denver with 75,000. For many small towns this was their first demonstration ever. The May Day demonstrators, demanding respect and dignity for their everyday labor, deepened the meaning of the immigrant movement’s main motto "Ningun seres humano es ilegal" (No human being is illegal), a message adorning many a T-shirt in the marches. It was the latest chapter in an immigrant movement triggered by a draconian law, HR4437, introduced by Rep. Sensenbrenner and passed by the House in December, which would immediately make the estimated 12 million undocumented workers in the U.S. into felons, as well as anyone who aided them like health care workers and church groups. May Day witnessed the power of labor in a way the labor movement hasn’t been able to demonstrate in a long time. In all of last year, labor union strikes in the U.S. involved 100,000 workers. In contrast, on May Day a dozen Tyson Foods plants were shut in the Midwest as well as eight Perdue chicken processing plants. Operations at the ports of Long Beach and L.A. were nearly closed as truckers stayed away. Low wage fast food workers have been singled out for organizing drives for years to no avail, but on May Day many a McDonald’s was closed as were other restaurants. Many high schools and middle schools experienced walkouts of students who joined the protests. CLAMPDOWN ON IMMIGRANTS All this happened in spite of rampant rumors of immigration raids that would take place at the demonstrations. It was no accident that Homeland Security chief Chertoff conducted highly publicized raids right on the eve of the march at more than 40 work sites of the pallet manufacturer IFCO in which 1,000 employees were arrested. One worker at a southern New Jersey nursery said, "People are worried. You wonder if the immigration Gestapo are coming to you." Officials from the INS (now called the "Immigration and Customs Enforcement" under Homeland Security) claimed that the raids, called "Operation Phoenix," were only part of their "standard day-to-day law enforcement" to "catch and deport fugitive illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds." Elias Bermudez, talk show host for a Spanish language radio station, said many believe they are being punished for participating in recent protests in favor of legalizing the status of many undocumented immigrants. To the protesting immigrants these raids are part of the effort, reflected in HR4437, to turn them all into felons. There’s a new emphasis on disciplining and punishing workers, documented or not, for even daring to come out of the shadows and speak up. Most undocumented immigrants won’t contest unfair workplace issues because they fear such retaliation. This is the reason undocumented workers are in such high demand and why they know the right wing’s "rule of law" is a farce. In other words, passed or not, the current "law mongers" in Congress know the concrete effects on the ground of such fear mongering. Recognizing this, many marchers wore T-shirts inscribed with, "we are not criminals," and "we are not terrorists." Refusing to be cowed forever, undocumented immigrants have only begun to emerge from the shadows. The price of "free speech" is only beginning to surface. At a foundry in Stockton, Cal., one woman was instructed to translate to the crew that "whoever didn’t show up on [May 1] might as well not show up on Tuesday." THE CONTEXT OF GLOBALIZATION The massive immigration into the U.S. in the last 15 years cannot be separated from the impact of "free trade" agreements such as NAFTA. Capitalists demanded such open and free movement for commodities and capital, but not humans, in order to restructure production globally. The opening of these markets to large U.S. agribusiness, with its heavy state subsidies, devastated rural communities all over the Third World, especially in Central and South America. Forced off the land, millions saw their livelihoods uprooted and became part of global capital’s reserve army of the unemployed. In addition, right-wing terror in the form of death squads in Latin America created countless refugees seeking a new home. One Salvadoran at a San Francisco rally said, "A lot of people here say, ‘If you don’t like how you’re treated here, go back.’ The long war with the U.S. sponsored paramilitary destroyed everything for us. There is nothing left for me to go home to." All over the world, from Mexico to China, from Korea to Africa, hundreds of millions of people are displaced by the onslaught of capital into every corner of the earth. As more and more of the rural populace is forced off the land, former farmers migrate directly to centers of capital, such as the enterprise zones in China and European centers like France, Germany, and England. In the case of Latin American refugees, they migrate to the U.S. instead of (as in the '50s, '60s, and '70s) first taking jobs on the Mexican side of the border, in industrial centers, called maquiladoras. Those jobs are now disappearing in Mexico, largely because foreign capital has been pulling out of Mexico in favor of investing in areas with even lower wages, like China, where the average peasant has a level of agricultural productivity one-one-hundredth of a farmer in the U.S. Bourgeois economists thus insist that "there are too many farmers" in China and elsewhere and would like to see half a billion more thrown off the land and turned into a source of even cheaper wage labor. FREE TRADE, UNFREE PEOPLE At the same time, the billions of dollars doled out by the U.S. government in this era of "free trade" in farm subsidies keeps the cost of capital and mechanization of American agribusiness artificially low, giving them a further advantage over small family farms (American as well as south of the border), which in turn spurs greater migration. Thus, the capitalist engine NECESSARILY creates a massive army of unemployed in the form of immigrant labor. AT THE SAME TIME, representatives of capital who support this process claim that we should either restrict immigration or DISCIPLINE it through a "guest worker" program. Such a program, which is supported by Bush and other big corporate backers in Congress, is a method used by two-faced politicians who on the one hand see the crucial need for low paid and easily exploitable immigrant labor, while on the other hand see the need to placate their right-wing base which is hysterical over the increasing population in their midst of people who "don’t speak our language." In fact, Bush’s repeated assertion that his "guest worker" program is "not an amnesty" program in his attempt to reassure his xenophobic base, makes sense because, in truth, the "guest worker" will be more like an INDENTURED servant rather than a "guest," reminiscent of another era of primitive capital accumulation. While many of the liberal politicians have illusions of being generous in their current proposals, as seen in their support for the Kennedy-McCain Bill, 20 years ago, it would have been unthinkable for even a moderate Republican to support a "guest worker" program, let alone a liberal Democrat. Such a return to a "Bracero" program was considered a province of the far right. It is a sign of how retrogressive politics have become in this country that an OPEN attempt to use immigrants only for their labor power while denying them all basic human rights is considered part of a "productive compromise." THE HISTORIC CONTEXT In another era, imported Chinese labor played the same role and the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted by Congress to placate the fears of rabid xenophobes such as Dennis Kearney. Kearney headed the White Workingmen’s Association, which objected to capitalist financier Leland Stanford’s massive importation of Chinese "coolie" laborers to finish his project, the transcontinental railroad. Much of the rhetoric by Kearney then, echoed now against Spanish-speaking immigrants by demagogues like Patrick Buchanan, was not in support of native workers based on labor rights, but appealed to a "culture war," by scapegoating the non-English speaking "Chinaman and his heathen ways" and raising the specter of hordes of foreign workers overtaking American towns. Fervent Reaganites may reminisce about his clarion call for Mr. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," but in practice, they are calling for their own 700 mile wall across the U.S.-Mexican border. The point of any immigration "reform" legislation is to placate the racist xenophobes and yet keep the supply of disciplined immigrant workers coming, while further reducing them to the status of "persona-non-grata." Such a fate is experienced by the millions of Chinese peasants in their own country, which is the bargain basement global sweatshop for capitalism. Migrant laborers flow from rural China into the manufacturing urban centers, with no right to stay unless they can find work, which is precisely Bush’s selling point for his "guest worker" program. The Mexican and Salvadoran rural migrant is not all that different from the Chinese rural migrant in the global context. When Lee Kyang Hae, the former head of the South Korean Federation of Farmers and Fishermen, committed public suicide at the 2003 Summit in Cancun, protesting WTO’s agricultural policies, demonstrators of many nationalities chanted, "We are all Kyang." FIGHTING "DIVIDE AND RULE" Some labor advocates feel compelled to answer the right-wing nativists who pose red-herring questions, like: "Does the illegal Mexican immigrant worker take jobs away from American citizens or not?" and "Are they a net benefit to our towns and cities or a liability?" Undocumented workers DO compete for low-wage jobs. They are also used to discipline all workers. In the past, waves of immigrants have been used to break strikes of organized workers. Capitalist interests benefit while both kinds of workers--native and non-native, organized and unorganized--lose. Deporting Mexican workers does not mean the capitalists will raise wages and hire more Americans. They can and HAVE simply moved to more disciplined and lower waged enterprise zones such as China’s. That is why, currently, powerful sectors of the business right like the Cato Institute and the WALL STREET JOURNAL are against any restrictions on immigration. Answering some inflammatory anti-immigrant signs which read, "You don’t have rights, you’re not even citizens" and "Go back and protest in your own country," a young African-American woman at the May Day protest in Oakland said, "They are speaking out of ignorance. They have obviously subscribed to some of the arguments made by some of our community leaders who claim to be advocates for us by blaming the Mexicans for our unemployment rate. They have fallen for the right-wing establishment’s propaganda, which wants to pit one group against another. That’s exactly what they planned. Divide and conquer. We must fight against this by uniting with each other, not falling for the politics of racial division. We’ve got to see the bigger picture. We have to think for ourselves. We’re all human beings." Another African-American youth said, "How can anyone not see the similarities? They have already succeeded in making millions of us young Black men into felons. They are now ready to make 12 million Latinos felons. We cannot afford to buy into the politics of scapegoating." Capital’s consolidation and globalization pits one group of workers against another in its never ending appetite for ever cheaper supply of labor power. Recognizing and rejecting this "politics of division," a young speaker from the local NAACP at the May Day rally expressed solidarity with the immigrant struggle in terms of the need for "all individuals regardless of race or nationality to be treated with respect and dignity," invoking the legacy the unfinished Civil Rights Movement. Capitalism continues to turn back the clock on the conditions of life and labor for the broad majority of African Americans who have always challenged the racist character of American capitalism. Today’s marchers are taking many cues from the Civil Rights Movement, reconnecting with its high point, expanding from civil rights to include labor. Their demand to be recognized as human beings echoes the Memphis sanitation workers that Dr. King came to support when he was assassinated in 1968. Doing the work "no one else would do," the sanitation workers each had signs declaring "I am a Man." The future of the movement hangs on recognizing this commonality. Many have been inspired by the rapid development of the movement of immigrant workers, which has reached a crucial point. Its humanism has asserted itself against the political system that reduces human beings to legal entities and is now confronting the inhuman domination of globalized capital. The undocumented immigrant worker today asks, "When do I become a FULL HUMAN BEING?" It is a beginning that demands the firmest solidarity from all. |
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