Posted by TheBlackList on July 25, 2008 at 10:29am
NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL
In April 2006, hundreds of thousands of immigrant rights protestors
marched in cities across the United States. They countered prolonged
debates about the pros and cons of comprehensive immigration reform with a short but sweet affirmation, scrawled on placards: "No Human Being Is Illegal." Their direct assertion challenged the deeply entrenched practices of our government and a deep wellspring of racism in our culture. Their actions also evoked traditions of protest, organization, and resistance.
Since the days of slavery – well before the establishment of the United
States itself – the government, buttressed by popular culture, included some residents as citizens and excluded others as outsiders, as what historian Mae Ngai has called "impossible subjects." Not only were slaves defined as outside the political and social community, but freed slaves and their children were typically excluded from citizenship. The federal constitution counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. The Naturalization Act of 1790 offered citizenship to "free white persons." The Alien Act of 1798 authorized the president to order the deportation of any alien "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States" during peacetime. Once the government began to regulate immigration, argues Professor Ngai, it had begun to create the "illegal" alien.
Race was the central criterion by which such decisions would be made,
and thinking about race was shaped by popular prejudices, beliefs, and
passions. A dual process cast the racially different as "other," while
securing a place on the inside for all of those accorded "white" status. The outsiders were vulnerable to the worst forms of economic exploitation, from slavery and servitude to sweatshops, in the most dangerous conditions at the lowest wages. Yet they enriched their employers. Just a step above these outsiders on the economic ladder, from their own position of insecurity, simultaneously threatened by the wealth and power of those above them and the lack of power manifested by those below them on the socio-economic ladder, working class whites struggled to hold on to what status and privilege they had. They practiced discrimination and even mob justice at times, and they sought laws, court orders, and enforcement from the state to shield them from competition with the outsiders. And hence a pattern took shape which would be seared into the American body politic. When insecurity
spread among working class whites and popular discontent threatened to
swell, the elite and the state responded by scapegoating and exorcising "the other," both people of color and immigrants.
This pattern has dominated our society since its founding to the
present day. When the industrial revolution undermined the independence of
white artisans in the first half of the 19th century, they began to organize
unions and independent political parties. But one state after another
revised its voting qualifications from property ownership to whiteness and
maleness and the discontent subsided. The deep depression of the 1870s and
the political turmoil it occasioned led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882, the first law which proscribed a particular race. Amidst the economic
and political turbulence after World War I, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed
Act of 1924, the nation's first comprehensive immigration restriction law. It
established numerical quotas on immigration and a racial and national
hierarchy that favored northern and western Europeans over southern,
central, and eastern Europeans, most of whom at that time were not
considered to be "white." An enforcement bureaucracy blossomed, attentive
not only to borders and ports, but also to cities, fields, factories, and
mines throughout the country.
Not only were barriers to immigration constructed, but the members of
those banned groups who did live in the U.S. were treated as suspect. Dominant
popular attitudes, shaped by and expressed through cartoons, commercial
advertisements, newspapers, radio, film and humor, rendered all members of
these groups "alien," "other," not-quite American. And the authorities,
from the local police to the U.S. Supreme Court, enforced these attitudes
through exclusionary laws and punitive actions.
Even those groups who had attained some level of "insider" status would
discover how easily it could be revoked. During the 1930s Great Depression
and World War II, Mexicans, Filipinos, and Japanese residents were marked as
"illegal" immigrants despite having entered the country legally, having
become legitimate citizens, or even having been born here. They were
stripped of their property and their rights, some to be interned and others
to be deported. Even the third generation U.S. citizens in their groups
were rendered "illegal."
The Immigration Act of 1965 was supposed to change much of this.
Influenced
by the civil rights movement, on the one hand, and the Cold War, on the
other, the new law was to set aside old prejudices and establish a new day
of openness and fairness. Racially-based quotas were dropped, and broad,
regional categories were created.
Ironically, the post-1965 era also marked the transformation of the
global and American economies into the turbulence generated by neoliberalism
and free market economics. Rapid, profound changes swept Central and South
America, Southeast and South Asia, and parts of Africa, occasioning
unprecedented population movement, from countryside to city, from country to
country, even from continent to continent. By the late 1980s a significant
part of that population movement headed to the United States. Free trade,
the importation of less expensive farm products, the export of capital and
the opening of factories, exploration for raw materials, war and the
presence of the U.S. military, tied Hmong, Vietnamese, Salvadorans,
Mexicans, Liberians, and others to the U.S. Simultaneously, war,
discrimination, drought, and political and economic crises pushed Somalis,
Eritreans, Oromos, Guatemalans, Indians, Pakistanis, and others to leave
their homes and seek peace and security elsewhere, including the United
States. From nursing homes to meatpacking plants, from taxi cabs to
cleaning buildings, they provided cheap labor with little ability to stand
up for their rights.
The very same economic shifts were sweeping the U.S. domestic economy,
destabilizing manufacturing and undermining the economic security of
American workers. They feared losing their jobs, while they were becoming
increasingly aware of the presence of new non-white immigrants in their
communities, many of whom were willing to work for longer hours and less pay
than they were. Politicians, demagogues, radio talk show hosts, and the
like found this to be fertile ground for the replaying of that historical
nativist script. Scapegoating immigrants, especially non-white immigrants,
was a path to fame, fortune, and political power.
Recent events have delivered this package to our doors in the Midwest.
Two glaring experiences demand our attention, each different in its
particulars but similar in its construction. Both grow out of the
historical power of racism and its incorporation by the practices of the
state.
The Twin Cities has become home to the largest Liberian community in
the U.S., even as the federal government denies many of them permanent
residency status. Two decades of civil war and disorder, on top of a
century of economic neocolonialism, much of it facilitated by U.S. weapons,
money, and intervention, have demolished Liberia's infrastructure and left
its unemployment rate hovering at 80%. Meanwhile, by their own accounting,
Liberians working in Minnesota are sending $8-10 million a month to family
members back home. Yet our federal government only proffers "temporary
protected status" to tens of thousands of displaced Liberians, with a
time-clock ticking away towards expulsion in March 2009. When Sierra
Leonean immigrants lost their temporary protected status in May 2004 they
were transformed from "refugees" into "undocumented illegals" with one sweep
of the bureaucratic hand. To add insult to injury, our government has
introduced a DNA testing program in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia,
requiring applicants for immigration to the U.S. to "prove" their familial
relationships with immigrants already here. Liberian immigrants are treated
as potential criminals before they have set foot in the U.S. and they live
each day here with one eye over their shoulders.
Central American immigrants have not fared any better. In the last
decades of the Cold War, dictatorial and military governments in the region,
often funded by the U.S., waged virtual warfare against their own
populations. Since the rise of free trade and neoliberalism in the last
decade, self-sufficient agriculture and artisanal production have been
battered by the import of cheap agricultural products and mass-produced
commodities. Millions of displaced peasants and village-dwellers have left
their homes, seeking jobs which enable them to support their families. Due
to immigration restrictions, which persist despite the 1965 law, many of
them have entered the U.S. surreptitiously, without legal documents. As
economic insecurity for many white workers in the U.S. has worsened and as
politicians and demagogues have fanned the flames of fear, these immigrants
have been increasingly targeted by authorities.
Once the government assumes the task of separating citizens from
"impossible subjects," Professor Ngai points out, "the border" is
everywhere, not just between countries. Thus, the border has come to the
Midwest. Indeed, in the two years since the immigrant rights marches of
spring 2006, there have been federal ICE (Immigration and Customs
Enforcement) raids of workplaces, especially meatpacking plants, in
Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska. Two months ago, 900 ICE agents raided the
AgriProcessors plant in Postville, Iowa, the largest kosher meatpacking
plant in the country. This was the largest such raid in U.S. history, with
the most severe consequences. Nearly 400 undocumented packinghouse workers,
mostly indigenous men and women from Guatemala, were rounded up, and charged
with the felony of "aggravated identity theft" for having used false social
security numbers. They were separated from their children and relatives,
chained, interned in tents in the Waterloo cattle grounds, and pressured to
plead guilty. Nearly all of them did. The men are serving five month
prison sentences, while the women are under house arrest, wearing electronic
ankle bracelets, unable to work or earn any income. When the men complete
their sentences, they and their partners will change places for another five
months. The women will go to prison and the men will be under house arrest.
Then, all will be deported.
Liberians and Guatemalans in these cases, and many other immigrants in
other cases, are being rendered illegal by a state bureaucracy which invokes
terrorism to justify budget increases for ICE while cutting back on social
services. Borders and boundaries are sharply defined, by the logics of the
state, with some of us on the inside, others of us on the outside. Men,
women, and children fleeing regimes which have wreaked havoc in their
communities seek ways to survive. When they get to the U.S., some find
dangerous, dirty, and low-paying jobs. Some do better economically but live
in fear of deportation and the loss of anything they have built here.
Not all Americans are content with this state of affairs. Informed by
the stories of protest, organization, and resistance that are also part of
this country's history, American people have consistently challenged both
popular racism and the actions of the state. Time and again, those directly
hurt by racism and state policies have been joined by ordinary women and men
who were moved by conscience to mount movements seeking social justice. Some
people organized to free slaves in the Underground Railroad or challenged
the very institution of slavery as abolitionists. In the next generations,
workers, farmers, and farmworkers of color organized together with their
white counterparts in the Knights of Labor, the Populist movement, and the
Industrial Workers of World. They sought a democratic and egalitarian
America in the face of the rising power of corporate elites and robber
barons. Southern and eastern European immigrants joined with African
Americans who had migrated from the South to lead the industrial union
movement of the 1930s. In the midst of the Great Depression, this movement
sought economic security, fairness and dignity in the workplace, and a voice
for workers in the nation's political life. Sleeping Car Porters, hospital
workers, government employees, auto workers, coal miners and many others
mobilized their unions to support the civil rights movement, while the
United Farm Workers of America brought its values and vision to Latino and
Filipino migrant workers. Workplace and community-based organizations,
churches, and social justice groups of all sorts have stood up time and
again for fairness, equality, and inclusion, even when it wasn't popular.
This history has been as complex and rich in the Midwest as it has been
anywhere in the U.S. Currently, in Minnesota, organizations and individuals
– religious and/or faith-based, labor, and rights and justice advocates –
have formed a network to support permanent residency for Liberians and fair
treatment and a path to citizenship for the Postville immigrant workers. Twin
Cities-based Jewish Community Action, drawing on its interpretation of the
complicated historical narrative of Jews – as "strangers" on the one hand,
and as advocates of social justice on the other – has played a leading role
in the organization of the Committee for Permanent Residency, "CPR," which
has focused on the insecure immigration of Liberians in the U.S., and in the
organization of material aid and a support rally in Postville on Sunday,
July 27. They have organized through synagogues and temples and Jewish
organizations, newspaper, and websites, and they have advocated on behalf of
"Hekhsher Tzedek," an expansion of the definition of "kosher" to include
issues of worker treatment and the right to organize. As partners and
advocates on their own behalf, immigrants themselves have been a major part
of these efforts, bringing their neighbors, offering contacts and critical
information, and acting from deep experiences of coalition and courage. A
partial list of participant organizations is suggestive of this widening
network: the Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network, Centro Campesino, the
Advocates for Human Rights, the Organization of Liberians in Minnesota,
United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789, UNITE-HERE Local 17, the
Workers' Interfaith Network, and a number of synagogues and churches.
The stories of exploitation, abuse, and disrespect have disturbed those
of us participating in these organizing efforts. We have also found
inspiration and hope from history and from each other. Most of all, we
cannot stand idle while the state, greedy employers, and racist
organizations and individuals act in our name. It's time for all of us to
march with those immigrant rights signs: "No Human Being Is Illegal!"
Peter Rachleff
July 21, 2008
Peter Rachleff is a Professor of History at Macalester College in St. Paul,
and a specialist in labor and immigration history. He has been working on
immigrant rights issues with Jewish Community Action, but he alone is
responsible for the ideas expressed in this article. If you are interested
in participating in these projects, wish to make a contribution to immigrant
support, or wish to comment, please email him at rachleff@macalester.edu.
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