By:Arturo Yarish,

November, 2010

Translated by  (Courtesy of the author)

Why are we, the Majority ordinary working people of the United States, willing to revisit the most shameful moments of our racist, anti-immigrant history that can take us back to a period long before the social advances we made through the Civil Rights Struggle. Why are we willing to tread dangerously close to accepting an unequal legal status for guest workers that will open the back door on some of the most odious moments of our combined American History? Why are we again willing to legally sanction a second class of guests in our Country? Will we allow our closest Latin American neighbors, Mexicans and others to be classified as a lower order of humanity? The long term political implications of any guest worker program that makes visiting workers the present equivalent of indentured servants destroys our collectively held notion of equality and will undermine workers rights every in the United States and throughout the Americas.

Racial and ethnic prejudices, deliberately attributed to many new immigrant minorities are resurfacing as emotionally charged, divisive issues in our time. Migration is only one of a long historical list of interrelated “Wedge Issues”, which have been habitually used by the fearful few to divide the many immigrants against each other. Issues of race, gender, ethnicity, language, and cultural values mingled with questions of loyalty are again consciously raised to foment an atmosphere of suspicion of “The Other”. Why are we reliving our past errors? Can we not recognize the old tactics in new forms? Instead of celebrating our cultural diversity, skin color, language and ethnic preferences are used to separate us. The Migration question has been correctly called the Civil Rights issue of the Twenty First Century but we should also recognize it as a paramount social and economic justice issue which we must resolve now.

The Migrant / Immigrant question is in fact an inescapable and complete résumé of the social history of the Americas. The imported workers, slave, indentured or free, brings in his or her person the full influence of deeply ingrained customs and traditions which have been often disparaged and used against them in their new home. The most evident, superficial differences have been consistently used to categorize and isolate one immigrant group from another until suspicions of the other heighten anxieties, ignite fears, inflame anger and cultivate prejudices which are mobilized to intimidate the segregated groups. Exaggerated differences among Immigrant and migrant groups have been historically used as an instrument to control the work force. From Roman slavery to race based slavery in the Americas and in to the wage / debt slavery of the industrial era, mixing the work force racially and ethnically has been a long practice of controlling the labor force through division based on cultivated notions of extreme differences. The other side of the migrant / immigrant story is the continuous struggle to over come intimidation and fears in order to build cross cultural, multiracial working class unity in face of many forms of oppression.

As has happened frequently in United States’ history, too frequently in periods increasing economic stress, the deliberate promotion of fear and suspicion reemerge as tactical political instruments in the larger “Divide and Conquer” strategy. We must ask why is so much effort and national treasure put into the propaganda which is intended to divide the working many against each other? Unquestionably the answer is the profit that hinges on driving down the cost of labor in the capitalist production process. Through every phase of the Five Hundred Year European and the present, United States’ domination of the Americas, the accumulation and concentration of unparalleled wealth was made possible by the divisions created to control the indigenous and imported labor force of both Continents. If we are fighting against each other we cannot fight for each other.

Largely under the present influence of the Radical Right in the United States, legislation , and programs popularizing slogans which stress individual responsibility, privatization, national security and cultural superiority, delivered with emotionally charged rhetoric are again openly promoted to intimidate and control the labor force by dividing people and keeping them off balance. Today, as through Five Centuries since the Conquests of North and South America, the mobilization and control of labor force is at the center of the Neo-liberal Globalization project to drive down wages and maximize profits. In every phase of production and transportation the cost of labor is the key to the Capitalist’s relentless drive to maximize profit at any human and environmental cost. The Neo-liberal economic project, openly and aggressively discriminates against workers by attempting to restrict their movements in order to allocate their skills as Capital may determine. While leaving Capital free to roam the world in search of lucrative investments, workers confront walls and exclusionary rules intended to limit their geographical movement for maximum exploitation. Currently proposed schemes such as the Guest Worker Program are nothing less that labor control programs reminiscent of various odious forms of contracted labor.

We are forced to relive our past errors because we have not fully learned our own Working Class History or the Capitalist’s methods of controlling and exploiting labor. Because we have been distracted by obscuring issues of racial superiority and economic insecurities, we have lost sight of the larger social picture of the overriding system of unrelenting economic exploitation that pits every worker against the other. We have not learned well, we have short memories and we have not taught our children how to defend themselves from the repeatedly used tactics and strategies that have divided blacks against white, Irish against Italians , Christian against Jew and now many fearful people of the United States against the Mexican Migrant workers. Must we retrace our errors? Will we fall for the same tricks and lies. Will we allow our fears to be heightened and manipulated by constructed fears.

Rather than correct the accumulating economic problems that aggravate escalating social anxieties on both sides of our common border, policies are concocted to increase insecurity that breed social tensions which are then successfully used to divide us. Real human fears and anxieties are manipulated and given images of the supposed enemies. For example rising crime rates, are given an ethnic or a racial face. As we more deeply enter the Twenty First Century, the accumulating negative social consequences of the Neo-liberal economic policies of the past thirty years are becoming increasingly evident and someone needs to be blamed. While we may occasionally glimpse crime in the board room, it is now the cross border march of the desperate dark skinned millions in search of work who are made the focus of public attention as the major threat to economic security and social stability. The interrelated long-term trends in falling wages, declining savings, increasing public and private debt, surging cost of living, and generally declining living standards, are resulting in a real and widespread sense of insecurity which must be officially explained away by turning public attention to external threats that amplify public fears of manufactured enemies pounding at the gates. Yet, as we look more closely we will learn it is the Neo-liberal, Capitalist cross-border assault on the living standard of working families through out the Americas which is destroying employment opportunities and living standards that are driving displaced workers in a frenzied international march for jobs.

In this extended period of economic contraction and financial distress, the migrant labor question arises as another facile, socially-charged topic proven to distract the public from a critical examination of a long series of failed domestic and international economic policies. Politically it is easier to use fears to ignite social animosities toward 11 million plus Mexican migrants, not to leave aside the many other immigrant groups, rather than to explain why the US has lost about 43 million jobs since 1979. Scapegoating minorities has been constantly and effectively used to deflect public attention from the real causes of social and economic distress. Building a wall along the Mexican/United States’ border is a cheap, offensive material fixture put in place of substantive programs that could be designed to raise living standards on through out the Americas. Despite the shameful construction of The Wall and detention centers, Capital needs abundant supplies of low-priced labor on all side of many borders. The goal of Capital is not to increase living standards but to increase profits. The Wall and the proposed Guest Worker scheme is part of the Neo-liberals plan to keep labor supplies available at the cheapest price for future exploitation. At this critical moment when ordinary working people on both sides of the Mexican/ US Border need, more than ever, to develop common bonds of trust cooperation and mutual support, the ruling class is sharpening divisions accentuating fears of the external and internal threats to life while they in fact threaten our common livelihood.

The rising rate of profit of the few and their relentless efforts to increase their profits against the declining living standards of the many throughout the Americas is fueling the intensifying political conflict between the authoritarian tendencies of transnational corporate organizations and the those of the majority who are calling for relief from escalating exploitation and deepening poverty. The conditions of constantly rising tension between the small and shrinking minority of the haves and the increasing majority of the have-nots is meet by growing efforts to control the world wide conditions of work. The invariable social/political problem for wealth-based minority is to control the growing majority of the discontented workers by limiting their physical movement and legal status. As economic instability tends to heighten social discontent, the minority pulls more feverishly at its levers of power and influence, first to convince and then coerce, the majority to conform to the norms of the capitalist methods of labor exploitation. The tendency for the authoritarian corporate style of organization to over ride human needs and democratic principles requires the constant measured distribution of rewards and punishments as instruments to shape public compliance. At each level of popular resistance the rewards for the few are increased while instruments of coercion are also brought against the many others. Quiescence and passivity are nurtured and cultivated in a climate of apprehension built on intensifying competition for fewer jobs, increasing social insecurity, and the deliberate construction of fear resulting in growing suspicion of “The Other” becomes more calculated. Suspicion and fear of foreigners or anyone who may be different is the standard psychological instrument used to divide the majority opposition throughout our common history.

In the present economic climate in the United States we are not observing a political defense of conservative values, we are witnessing broad radical attack on long respected Constitutional principles and social gains won over the past hundred and fifty years of working class struggle. For the past thirty years we have been living through the formation an anti-democratic, political regression, which is employing all the typically familiar forms of economic coercion and police state repression. From resurgence of racist anti-immigrant hate groups and the expansion of the Police State institutions we are encouraged to march backwards into the darkness of some of the most shameful moments of our history. “Compassionate Conservatism” now shows itself as nothing but an empty slogan, code phase to cover up for officially abandoning the majority to more rapacious exploitation.

Current Anti-Migrant sentiment ragging in many parts of the US is reminiscent of an extremely narrow minded Nationalism tinged with racism and a strange Neo-Nativism that resonates through a long history of vicious xenophobic attitudes extending back to the Alien Sedition Acts. Throughout United States’ history, particularly at moments of economic contraction and political crisis, the instruments of propaganda have been repetitively and effectively mobilized to construct “The Other” as the enemy living among us. The archetypical images of the evil other are familiar throughout United States History: Papists, Anarchists, subversives, Communists, socialist, dark-skinned people, even people called “pinkos” and non-conformists were and are often blended in a murky mix of racism and anti-ethnic stereotyping to emerge as the threatening “Other”. The historical patterns and consequences are too familiar. The creation of “The Other, is a prelude to their isolation, dehumanization and the necessary preconditions to categorizing the other, as second or third class, near-humans who are denied full legal status or social recognition.

Anti-something or anti-someone sentiment is popularized, codified as with the Black Codes which are invariably followed by official, political repression. The demonized others are hunted down, rounded up, criminalized, jailed and sometimes murdered. The shockingly tragic incidents are too numerous to list but we know many of the names of victims that bring those tragedies to mind. Naming only a few we recall: Dred Scott, Emma Goldman , John Reed , Joe Hill, Andrea Salcedo , Sacco and Vanzetti , The Rosenbergs, Leonard Peltier, Mummia Abu Jamal , Pedro Albizu Campos , and more recently Filiberto Ojeda Rios. Blacks, indigenous, native born, foreign born, the marginalized, the poor people are again and again made into the feared other, persecuted as criminals, misfits, social deviants but their real crime has always been their perceived threat to the existing Capitalist disorder.

We are again at the precipice, facing a social test of major historical proportions. Will we rise above the repeated manipulations of our fears? The current migration issue is not a simple economic issue, but a key social issue that touches the core of our sense of human decency. Again in the midst of economic stagnation, and wildly irrational anti-foreign sentiment, new fears are cultivated to isolate and control the internal population by dividing us from our closest southern neighbors. We are told our Mexican and our other Latin American and Caribbean neighbors will take our jobs and dilute our cultural standards maybe even dance with my sister. While old manipulations are repackaged and given new labels, we must strive to identify their sources, clearly analyze the purpose of the forming political and economic policies in order to build more solid alternative intercultural, social-economic foundations upon which we can develop broader international working class cooperation. Will we allow the resurrection of the ghosts of our tragic racist, anti-immigrant past or will we insist upon equitable, family-friendly, and social justice based solutions. Will we end, once and for all, the destructive effects of social, racial and ethnic prejudices that divide us and build new forms of social solidarity or accept the Barbarism that will surely destroy us all?

“MEN (WOMEN TOO) MAKE THEIR OWN HISTORY BUT THEY DO NOT MAKE IT JUST AS THEY PLEASE;…”.

The current of new nativism along with its strong anti-immigrant expression actually runs counter to the recent calculated labor needs and interests of domestic and transnational Capital. While anti-foreign sentiments will play a divisive role that must be addressed, at the moment domestic capital’s need for cheap labor is the economic factor. Demographers tell us that the current native US birth rate, at 0.92%, is below the replacement rate. The three “Baby Blips” of 1973, ’83 and ’93 cannot fill the projected job vacancies that will appear when 77 million Baby Boomers begin to retire over the next five to seven years. The estimated eleven million undocumented workers that are currently in the US will not come close to filling the labor deficit. New and increasing anti-migration sentiment is not a jobs related issue, it is a Labor cost control and intimidation policy. When the US Chamber Commerce recently called for a rationalization of immigration to fill the projected labor shortages, we can immediately identify the Chamber’s strategy for filling the anticipated labor gap. The developing corporate consensus for a Guest Worker Program is designed to meet the projected labor short fall by limiting migrant workers rights and driving down the general costs of production. By limiting the rights of Guest Workers, the rights of domestic, native born workers will be undermined because the national work force will be constantly confronted by ever ready replacement work force. The continuing tendency of transnational corporations to produce in foreign counties combined with the effects of more advanced production techniques will deduce the need for labor within the US borders but not sufficiently to fill the labor gap left by the projected retirements. The expanding presents of an a controlled second class group of workers is a momentous working class concern. National and transnational Capital will use the Guest Worker program to reduce labor costs on both sides of the border and workers will immediately sense the threat of a glutted labor pools. The instruments of intimidation and coercion have been built into the guest worker programs. US workers who have lost 43 million domestic labor market jobs, good paying jobs, have just concerns but their Working Class History tells them that their future strength lays in international labor solidarity yet to be constructed. Faced with shrinking union membership, increasing organizing restrictions, and rising layoffs, workers will see immigration as a new threat to job security that will put downward pressure on wage rates and reduce benefit packages. The history of racial and ethnic animosities which have blocked working class solidarity in the past, must now be overcome through new forms and methods of education and organizing designed to develop international cooperation and mutual support. We will need to be more creative than ever. Our renewed ingenuity and creativity must be based on a combined labor/community organizing strategy which integrates the work place and home place.

While we must critically examine all elements of the guest worker legislation and be prepared to insist upon changes that will insure worker equality, we should prepare out strategies to rebuild working class solidarity. As first step we must point and convincingly argue that migration is not a cause of the domestic problems but the consequence of a coordinated military-economic assault throughout the Americas. The structural changes brought about by the thirty years of the aggressive, predatory financial “shock-therapy” of structural readjustment plans and degenerating trade agreements are forming the newest conditions forcing million into the cross- border march for jobs. Now that migration from the point of view of the latest US Chamber of Commerce position, is seen as a part of the solution to anticipated labor shortages, we must recognize that the proposed bills are an attempt to reduce the anticipated labor deficits in favor of domestic and international corporate priorities and organize to insure that All Workers in the United State enjoy at minimum all the protections of the United States Constitution.

I present my argument as a defense of the thesis that the history of managed labor flow to the Americas was and continues to be an integral element of the systematic commodification of labor on both Continents and throughout the Caribbean Islands. Briefly stated the early redistribution of indigenous labor in the form of encomienda and near simultaneous introduction of African Slave labor defined the European methods of labor reallocation corresponding to their new styles of production in the Americas. Later Capital’s commodification of Labor power throughout the Americas, which began later in same general period of the conquest and resettlement along with its production methods, formed the basic conditions that continue to effect the international reallocations of labor power in to the present stage of transnational Neo-liberalism. Historically Capital’s mobilization of labor power on both continents was accomplished largely by force, both economic and military. Whether through the semi-tribute labor system of encomienda or enslavement of indigenous people and Africans, from the first years of permanent settlement of the Americas, labor was redeployed with the overall objective of producing for an export market. As in England during the Enclosures, organized violence was the instrument.

MIGRATION: The Continuing History of All the Americans.

The Migrant / Immigrant question today reemerges with full economic force on the Political/Social Agenda as a résumé of the Five Hundred year Labor History of the Americas. No one is exempt. No one can escape the consequences of capital flight and capital invasions. Although we face enormous military and economic forces we are not defenseless. Workers through the Americas should draw on our long and valiant traditions of struggle and organizing skill to shape social change in our image. We must find the threads of our own history and sharpen our analytical skill to launch cooperative search for alternative to Capitalist Globalziation. As Workers throughout the Americas are again compelled to relocate in response to rapidly changing political-economic conditions and every phase life in the sending and receiving areas is affected we must reach out to each other. The constant historical need for new labor sources in all part of the Americas is making us all workers of the world. We are no longer permitted to see ourselves as only Mexicans, Puerto Rican, Haitians or Texans. Globalizing Capital is making us all international workers of a global work force. We must organize globally.

We must strive to put the current migration into clear historical focus and identify its specific contemporary character. One excellent reference is to ourselves, our personal history. When we examine the continuing Diaspora through out the Americas since the European invasion, we must situate ourselves in the context of the European conquest and resettlement and the long history of European and US Economic domination of the Americas. Few of us have been permitted to live peacefully in one geographical location for very long. Within the United States alone, since the Great depression, we have lived through one of the most significant population shifts from the rural areas to cities ever experience in All of United States’ history. US based Anti-immigration sentiment is at odds with the concrete realities of migrant history of all the people of the Americas but it is a real emotional reaction to ways racism and ethnic hatred have been repeatedly used to divide and control our societies for centuries. The tactics of Divide and Conquer are not new but we, the ordinary people, seem to forget the pains of our own place on the migrants’ trail.

Who are the migrants / immigrants? Americo Vespucci or the Caribs , Jim Bowie or Santa Ana, Cabeza de La Vaca or the indigenous people he met on his way to Texas, Sam Houston, Zachary Taylor, William Walker or Benito Juarez, the Buffalo Soldiers or the Indians they hunted, the Mormons or the Orphan Train Children, the Ingenious people driven on to the Reservations or the Ex-Slaves wandering the Continent in search of their families, my parents and yours , Schwarzenegger and Tancredo or the young Mexican who crossed the boarder five seconds ago?

WHY HAVE PEOPLE MIGRATED? WHY DO WE CONTINUE TO MIGRATE?
WHAT ARE THE CONTINUING HISTORICAL PATTERNS AND WHAT IS NEW?
WHAT ARE THE REAL ISSUES? What are the powerful forces pushing and pulling migrants?
WE ARE ALL MIGRANTS / WE ALL HAVE AN IMMIGRANT HISTORY.
THE LONG VIEW:

A brief review of, transatlantic, transcontinental and intercontinental human wandering leads us to note, borrowing from Chomsky, this is “Year 515” and The Diaspora continues. Why, after five hundred years of exploiting some of the riches resource reserves of the World are people still wandering in search of gainful employment and social stability? Why are the people of the world’s riches resource regions some of the poorest?. And, why do the poorest lead the endless march for Jobs? Our conflicted history is punctuated by a long list of economic and social decisions whose consequences affect every decision we make today. Privatization, resource depletion, poor planning and no planning, and irreparable damage to our environment are some the Economic causes pushing the new migrants in the long march for jobs.

Since the European conquest and resettlement of the Americas, we can clearly note three broad phases of Migration: the general westward migration, including a constant view to southward expansion followed today by a reflux of South to North Migration of people from all over Latin America and the Caribbean . Almost immediately following the European’s North American costal resettlement, westward migration began. First across the Alleghenies, into the Ohio Valley and eventually across the Rockies, westward migration trickled and surged in response to technological advances and economic and political restraints or incentives. With “The Closing of the Frontier”, and the fulfillment of Transcontinental Conquest, the United States’ imperial design, inherent in Manifest Destiny, turned its face southward and to East. From Seas to shinning seas, US expansion leaped across the Pacific to the Philippines, into the Caribbean, Mexico and beyond to Central and South America. The history of continuing US economic domination is also the painful personal history of all the demonized people whose lives were and continue to be affected. It is our tormented collective history. It may not have been of our own making but it belongs to us. To avoid repeating its most grievous social errors we must revisit it, reanalyze it, grasp it as our similar but separate experiences, reappropriate it, understand the causes and redesign its future. This is not a history of impersonal events; it is an aching continuing history of an abused and exploited people–It is our history but it is not a history we have formed ourselves. Cultivated suspicion and distrust seeded racial and ethnic divisions. Racism and ethnic prejudice, the core elements of social divisions in the Americas were constructed and enforced by law. Too often we have been made the object of other’s designs. We must make ourselves the subject of our own corrective plan which begins with a clear understanding of why and how we must build a multicultural and multiracial unity across many perceived barriers.

This cursory review of who we are begs the question: who are the migrants? Throughout this entire period we have allowed our fears of “The Other” to be manipulated against our deeper common human needs. We have allow other to form our public image. Our conflicted history is also littered with the results of our continuous social errors: the English against the Spanish, Catholics against Protestants, Whites against Blacks, Whites against the indigenous people, Christians against Jews…. All against all has created an international working class bar room style brawl in which the Capitalist clean up after we beat each other up.

The history of colonial expansion and economic domination of the Americas is, not was, is

the ongoing, constantly contested, military /economic exploitative process which affects our thinking about ourselves as separate from “other people”: Anglos, Latinos, blacks, whites and all the shades of browns, but we are all Americans. Ours is the continuing history of a migrant people: those who came earlier those who arrived later; those who mixed and mingled; too many who insisted on their racial purity and superiority and those who were and are maligned, demonized and segregated . It is a brutal brawling history not completely of our making and those who do not know their history,”…are bound to repeat it.”. As we reexamine our history, we have the enormous potential to avoid our most agonizing mistakes.

CROSS-BOARDER AND INTERNAL MIGRATION.

For most of our migrant ancestors, the immigrant experience has been painfully punctuated by the long series of abuses they and we have suffered. In the mildest form of racial slurs and crude ethnic jokes, we are all too familiar with the pain we have felt for ourselves and others. The legacy of race hatred, prejudice toward women, and ethnic divisions has affected our social consciousness since the earliest colonial days. Race Slavery, the defining moment forming the notion of “The Other”, is the shadowing companion to widespread ethnic hatred repetitively demonstrated through employment discrimination, intimidation, “internment”, deportation and murder. The successive waves of new comers, to the Americas have had to endure the continuing outrages of segregation, to ethnic and racial profiling. We have too easily forgotten our own history which is why we have allowed ourselves and we continue to allow ourselves to be used against each other. We must ask ourselves how did we let this to happen and we should pause occasionally to think of the new migrants, the would be immigrants, in terms of our own treatment, the names we have been called, the conditions in which we have lived, and our own struggle to adapt to a new cultural environment. Yes, the United States is “The home of the brave”: the immigrant must be brave to survive. Perhaps we will become kinder, more sensitive, embracing and helpful when we decide that we will not perpetuate past abuses but protect the abused and embrace each other as brother and sister.

In a very small but meaningful way those of us who were born in the US can and should refer to our own physical movements around the Country as a way of sensitizing ourselves to the greater challenges faced by cross-boarder migrants throughout United States’ history. Many of us have been migrants in our own country. The Texan who moves to New York City or the Virginian who moves to Los Angeles makes significant social and cultural adjustments. Whether we have moved to change schools or to change jobs, we leave the familiar to arrive in unfamiliar social settings. Wherever we arrive we hope for new opportunities but we face many new challenges: learning to adapt to our new cultural setting and finding a place to live are major readjustment tasks. To heighten our sensitivity, I suggest that we pause to reflect on differences too: we know the language, customs and laws. However, we white ones seldom suffer the consequences of racial or ethnic prejudices. We usually move freely about the country with some resources which is rarely true of the cross-boarder migrant. To further enhance our sensitivity to the current situation, let’s reflect compassionately on the fresh victims of neglect, the people forced out of the Gulf Zone recently hit by hurricane Katrina and then let’s think of ourselves again. We are migrants too. Why do people migrate? Can we identify the general and particular historical reasons for migration. Why are the migrants treated as “The Other?

“THE OTHER” is manufactured

The notion of “The Other” is constructed of many sordid pieces. Sadly we must work overtime to push aside the vale of manufactured differences to glimpse our more profound similarities. Social differences, like racial differences, are minor in relation to our common humanity but we allow ourselves to emphasize them because it takes effort to form social bridges to mutual respect and understanding. We United State citizens can start again by thinking of ourselves as the privileged voluntary migrants and perhaps develop a more sensitive view toward the “other” forced migrants.

First we must recognize ourselves as participants in the continuing and expanding world-wide Diaspora but we know there is an enormous difference: some of us migrate voluntarily. ”We Fly, they Walk”! We are called Tourists, they are called Migrants. We are welcomed guests, they are called Illegal Aliens. We are greeted with a smile, they are confronted by the Wall of Shame, snarling patrol dogs and armed border guards. We travel for pleasure, they are forced to migrate by powerful international political-economic pressures. We eagerly seek out interesting, life-style alternatives, while they frightfully flee many countries where economic options are closing and political repression is increasing. We enjoy the pull of exciting attractions, beautiful beaches famous historic settings. We travel to enrich our lives: they migrate to eat. They suffer the push of deepening economic hardship, the effects of war, and new forms of Slavery. “…[T]here but for fortune go you and I”. Why should we assume that we will be exempt from the gathering forces of historical change. We can almost hear someone say: It Can’t happen here”. It has happened here too many times: when , why?

THE PULL AND PUSH OF MIGRATION

To clarify the on-going debate on the push / pull issue concerning the History of Migration to and throughout the Americas, we have to gain a clearer historical perspective by rethinking the commonly held myths. To achieve this perspective we merely have to reflect on Columbus’ first voyage; it set the pattern and the practices of nearly Four hundred years of European colonial domination of the Americas. Colombo, the Italian migrant to Spain became Colón and voluntarily crossed the Atlantic and shortly after arriving, claimed the land for Spain, enslaved Tainos and Siboney, and carried them to Spain as trophies. That’s kidnapping. The Three hundred and fifty year history of European Imperialism in the Americas must be the first analytical reference to the examination of the Push v. Pull argument of migration. From Columbus to Chavez, to expand the suggestion carried by Eric Williams’ title “…Columbus to Castro”, and couple it with Andre Gunder Frank’s historical analysis, I argue that we are continuing to experience the Pushing forces of political and economic domination as the primary cause of the continuing world-wide Diaspora of which the Mexican migration is only a part and not a very new part. If we include in our analysis the long history of the present causes of the continuing migration, the history of “The Development of Underdevelopment” as brilliantly presented in Andre Gunder Frank, we can clearly grasp that the power of the Push of economic stress as the primary motivator of the forced migration of people from their lands. The history of the five hundred year long, labor Diaspora across five continents from the 1500’ to the present is bound up with racism, the construction of modern imperialism, the emerging Capitalist system and its incessant and voracious demand for natural resources and cheap labor.

LABOR POWER BECOMES A COMMODTITY

The control and the misuse of labor sources were and remain central to the long colonial neo colonial history of economic exploitation of the Americas. Cash crop farming and mineral extraction required vast supplies of human labor power necessary to impose the new modes extracting the wealth from the natural bounty of the Americas. Conqueror-settlers brought with them new agricultural and mining practices that required a redeployment of native labor. The newly introduced labor practices aimed at export oriented monoculture and mineral extraction completely changed the earlier organic, native working relations to the environment. Later as labor intensive agriculture gave way to industrialization of farming and in factories a reorientation and a remobilization of the international labor force was again required. In each phase of the economic and social transformation, existing labor supplies proved to be numerically insufficient and at times in the wrong place. Through every phase of the emerging industrial project, labor was imported to fill the gaps. From African Slave labor, through the Irish peasant labor to the present cross-boarder flight, the destabilization of home-country conditions filled the international labor supply lines. Following the official close of the African Slave trade, by mid 1800’s, industrializing Europe expelled its excess labor force. From the 1840’s through the period of World War I, famines, civil wars, massive unemployment, racism and political and ethnic persecution pushed the European labor force into the Americas. The Irish, Germans, Swedes, Fins, Italians and Russians, our European ancestors, were forced out.

The Push / Pull debate should be properly framed between the push of people from their native land and the accompanying pull of new labor demands. In the case of the Americas, both the Americas, throughout the two linked American Continents, it began with Columbus and continues to NAFTA/CAFTA. Push predominates. In almost every case since the Reconquista to the present, people were first pushed off their land and then either forced to work on it or today forced to migrate internally or to leave: It did happen there and here. We should pause to consider some of the most tragic examples of forced migration: The expulsion of the Jews from Spain beginning in 1492, The push of the Potato blight in Ireland, the Italian labor exodus following reunification in 1870’s, and the North American “Dust Bowl Refugees” all represent similar moments of the history of the world-wide push from home to uncertainty.

When the indigenous people began dying in huge numbers in the first century of the Conquest of the Americas their labor was replaced by African slaves. We are familiar with the terms: encomienda, human slavery, indentured service, contract labor, prisoner labor and many other schemes and capitalist dreams to reduce the cost of producing sugar cane, cotton and now cars or shoes. In each new phase of forced labor the characteristic practice of dividing to control became an integral part of our combined but conflicted history. For example, when slaves gained their freedom in the British Antilles, East Indians were deliberately imported to Trinidad to break the back of the newly freed, black labor insurgency on the Island. We can easily point to repeated efforts of imperial and capitalist powers to divide us against each other. Race and ethnicity deeply rooted in the history of labor control, have been effective weapons of the divide and conquer strategy. William Lynch a West Indian Slave owner offered this explicit advice to James River Plantation owners in 1712. In a speech entitled “Tips on Keeping Slaves” he stated very precisely that “I use fear, distrust and envy for control purposes.”

The patterns of forced migration and the methods of controlling workers have been eerily constant over long period American Colonial history continuing into the present. The basic coercive techniques of labor control through physical force, fear and intimidation were adjusted to the styles of exploitation but fear and distrust remain central. When related to labor demands of the Capitalist mode of production, we note clearly they are repeated from its inception in England to the present in the Americas. Violence in all forms is the lurking threat if fear and intimidation fail. First people were separated from their means of subsistence and then they were pushed into what we call today the labor market. From the Enclosure Acts in England to the push of campesinos from their land today, we are witnessing a replay of the unnatural removal of people from their traditional means of subsistence. The forces we must recognize are direct and indirect economic and military coercion. Capital needs to make people “free” for exploitation in the market place. While the “freeing” process may take many forms such as the Indian Removal Acts and manumission to the present sale of Ejido lands in Mexico, the mass march of the forced commodification of labor is accompanied by the threaten and actual use of violence. Each historical phase of the separation of human beings from their means of subsistence was based on economic decisions backed up by power. Removed from their familiar source of survival and set “free” to wander to find work, the newly “Freed” men and women became identified as the other and were given names such as vagabonds or hobos and then made to be socially feared , ostracized and frequently jailed and hung. Oh, it can’t happen here in the US. It did and it continues to happen. Our shameful history of intimidation through lynching is not a remote or isolated occurrence in our history but the precursor and companion to frequently repeated use of military force throughout the Americas. From the Post Civil War violence of the KKK to Gun Boat Diplomacy and the out right subversion of governments, the “Big Stick” is always at the ready to make way for the “free” exploitation of land and labor by Capital.

Presently in the Mexican and expanding general migration of many Latin American people northward we see the familiar replay of a powerful economic historical process. Increasing poverty, displacement of traditional small farmers, the economic stresses on the middle income earners and declining employment opportunities are all pushing, compelling growing numbers of our southern neighbors to leave their homes on precarious journeys, walking long miles across dangerous terrain to find work. The new wave of Mexican migrants along with their wondering companions from all over Central and South America are responding to the shocking effects of new trade agreements which have closed economic options for working age people throughout the Americans, North and South. The unequal trade agreements, structural readjustment schemes, currency raids and coerced devaluations, are creating the new economic conditions for the forced mobilization of international labor supplies. Nearly fifty years of continuous dirty wars throughout the Americas and waves of economic depressions gaining increasing force in the 1990’s formed the tragically familiar conditions pushing the current wave of migrants out of Central, South America, Mexico and the Caribbean.

We must understand that we are not mere passive witnesses to these rapidly forming labor supply readjustments, we are also being swept into this continuing military-economic restructuring which is reallocating labor power world-wide. We are all affected by the continuing and expanding destructive Neo-liberal process of the labor mobilization and resource exploitation. We are all attempting to respond rationally and intelligently to the narrowing and closing options as best we can. While we North Americans from US and Canada and increasing numbers of Europeans are attempting to find alternative, satisfying lifestyles that will allow us to survive on shrinking pensions, our Latin American counterparts are attempting to survive in any way possible even if it means walking to work and dying on the way. While we are acting individually we are loosing sight of the problems we face collectively.

WHAT ARE SOME SOLUTIONS WE CAN RECOMMEND?

The immigrant question for ordinary working people like us on all sides of the many American borders must be framed in terms of our common human needs , and informed by our growing knowledge of the necessary respect for human rights and the fundamental human needs for Social and Economic Justice. People deprived of earning a living in their native region or countries are forced to make very difficult choices to survive. These are not free choices! They are conditioned by the violence of deprivations, hunger and fear. From the forced removal of the Tainos to Spain, through the forced removal of Cherokees from the Carolinas, to flight of Latin American and Caribbean people from their beautiful homelands today, we must recognize that we are all victims of an international resource grab and systematic labor exploitation that pits each of us against the other. We can stop being the victims when we recognize the potential for common victories to secure our basic human needs. There is little difference between a laid off Mexican Ford Factory worker and a laid off Detroit Ford Factory worker but the former will be called a migrant and the later , unemployed , then a welfare recipient , and latter both will be called lazy bums. Both are victims of Capitalist’s profit calculations. If we do not act collectively to counter the continuing rapacious exploitation of resources and the increasing unemployment and competition for jobs, the competition will be for brut survival. We have to create new social criteria for a new calculus of satisfying human needs. Rising profits for the few have become a clear measure of rising poverty for the many. Seeking out collectively determined, economic alternatives to the present destructive nature of capitalist competition is an essential precondition to forming new paradigm of social relations founded on, and directed toward, satisfying our common human needs. As rising profits for the few become the measure of increasing misery of the many, we can predict that the instruments of fear and coercion will be employed more frequently with greater destructive force.

At home and abroad we are thrown one against the other in the manipulated internationalized labor markets. As racial, ethnic and cultural differences are emphasized, we tend to loose site of our common and fundamentally interrelated human needs and aspirations. Presently we are witnessing a massive individual response to the accumulating failures of the expanding systemic problems of Neo-liberal globalization. One of the most chaotically extreme forms of the individual response to the Neo-liberal economic failures is migration. As long as Capital is organized and we remain atomized we, the victimized people, must fail. Jay Gould’s solution of hiring one half of the working class to kill the other half will not be necessary: we will savage each other. This will be the new Barbarism.

It is becoming increasingly clear that we are all victims, in varying degrees, of the corporate attempt to mobilize and redirect world labor flows to meet the exigencies of serial transnational production. Some of us are unemployed and others have never been employed. To the transnational corporations we are expendable, substitutable units of labor. We will continue to face the challenges and increasingly dangerous consequences of Neo-liberal, globalized, capitalist production methods that are designed to reward the few by exploiting the many. Individually we cannot correct the long train historical Social / Political errors. Individually we will remain enclosed in our fears and our suspicions of the other, fearful and isolated, insecure workers. However , if we lend our combined voices to the side of demanding the fulfillment human needs , build new forms of substantive equity and social justice grounded in solid economic alternatives, we have a chance to overcome our perceived differences and create the material conditions in which we can work toward the formation of a more humanitarian resolution of the underlying problems relentlessly pushing the new labor migration. Our first conscious point of reference must be to our own migrant history, our sense of human decency and our resolute commitment to avoid repeating the folly of our anti-immigrant history. Finally we must make ourselves the new collective subject of our own social design.

We must embrace the new migrant as partner. He and she is the living reminder of our own distant but painful, immigrant history. We must learn to accept the immigrant worker as our partner in survival. Transnational Capital is united; we, international labor, are divided. We must break through the notion of THE OTHER and adopt the slogan “¡SOMOS IQUALES!” When we fully see each other as equals, then we can celebrate our differences with mutual respect. Remembering that individually we will all continue to be victims of Capital’s insatiable drive for profit at any human expense, we must revise the slogan “People before Profit”. We must create the political framework for a “People’s Justice Diplomacy” which celebrates our diversity as a solid foundation for a new phase of creating an enduring multiracial and multicultural Working Family Unity. We will have to build this new sense of Unity out of actual construction of cross-boarder cooperation, built on mutual need, respect and support. Against the authoritarian rule of Capital’s autocratic methods we must raise the banner of cooperative democracy. We have no choice but to build a cross-boarder set of working people’s cultural and economic, self-help organizations by which we break down barriers and build trust. We must learn to overcome the imagined and constructed divisions of race and ethnicity to form the larger framework of our mutual cooperation in the fundamental work of mobilizing resources to fulfill human needs. That is we must universalize and promote our concept of our common humanity against the particular and private accumulations of wealth. We must confront capitalist greed with human need.

We cannot afford to repeat the social mistakes of our history because we will divide ourselves against our selves. We have a choice but a very short time to begin exercising it. We merely need make a rough assessment of the collective social loss of intellectual talent and creativity due to segregation as one historical example. Our knowledge of the incalculable losses socially constructed by racial and gender obstacles to opportunity should guide our insistent call to open all pathways to social opportunities to broader inclusion. Substantive social inclusion must be economically supported .We must begin soon, very soon, to formulate a new international worker and student migration policy, that provides for the unrestricted physical movement and educational opportunity for people throughout the Americas. We are the same Rainbow People. When José Vasconcelos entitled his famous book La Raza Cosmica he pointed out the direction of our future history. Now we must create the opportunity to overcome our cultural differences and celebrate them as our new foundation for Unity or we can face each as the other across the divide as “The Other” and bury each other in an endless conflict of labor competition. We can revisit our Working Class History, critically evaluate what we have done successfully, reinstitute our organizing traditions and work together for new creative cooperative solutions.

I encourage everyone to engage the discussion with a refection on Phil Ochs in the 1960’s poignantly prescient lines “loosing the links on the chain”. While gleaning important information from a careful analysis of the Neo-liberal political and economic motives and policies, we must think of solutions that will guide us to realize our advancing ideas and notions of social and economic justice. To paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg our choices are clear-Humanism or Barbarism. Corporate Neo-liberalism as been defined as a race to the bottom of the economic barrel but if we allow ourselves to be dragged into its vortex, we will find ourselves in a self-destructive abyss of racial and ethnic hostility which will rival the worst of humanities’ historical excesses.

THE MANUFACTURING OF “THE OTHER”.

First we must fully grasp Capital’s divisive, anti-democratic nature and then carefully reexamine its continuous and effective use of the process of divide and conquer. We will again be compelled to study its propaganda in order to reconstruct our innovative methods of cooperation. We can close this destructive period of world- wide capitalist social disorder, if we build a larger unity of human need based upon democratically constructed production and Fair Trade practices. The desperate Haitian, war weary Salvadoreño and Guatamalteco, the poverty plagued Hondureño , the NAFTA impoverished Mexicans are not any different than we were when our parents and grand parents fled Italian economic hardships and fascism , Russian Pogroms or the Nazi’s death machines. We and they, together are swirling in the vortex of social chaos brought on by Capitalist Globalization. In our own time, since World War Two, in the USA, we too have been experiencing one of the most extensive displacements of human beings the world has seen since the end of the European and American Civil Wars. We , people of the United States, have bought into the illusion of physical mobility as a measure of social mobility but in fact our standard of living has been declining since the late 1970’s; our debts have risen and our saving rate has turned negative ,our horizons are narrowing ,and our future is darkening. Our own growing fears and frustrations are blinding us from creating the necessary alliances that will help us over come the rapidly forming economic and political debacle in the USA that has spread throughout the world. Today we are coming frighteningly close to reconstructing “the other”. For our Mexican and other Latin American friends “The Wall “ says “Keep Out” it marks a new cultural divide between Us and Them . We should also be aware that the Wall encloses us. It marks them as “the other”, when in fact we are they and they are we. We must learn to recognize ourselves in each other. We together will have to overcome the remanufacturing of fear of the “other” by seeing ourselves in the other as ourselves. ¡Somos iguales!

Since the days of economic shock therapy theory of the Chicago School and their long Neo-liberal assault throughout the Americas, beginning with the expulsion of Arbenz, the Blockade of Cuba, toppling the Allende Government in Chile and continuing through NAFTA, ordinary peoples’ lives on both sides of the American North-South divide have been destroyed by the Neo-liberal corporate bludgeoning of the Americas. At home and abroad we have suffered an on going corporate assault on our economic and social security. Neo-liberal economic and social policies have reduced incomes on both sides of the Rio Bravo, have increased unemployment and poverty, forced migration and heighten mutual suspicion to the dangerous point that we see our neighbors as the intruding other and now some of us are convinced that he or she is our enemy. As we rethink our relation to others, we should revisit some of the lessons we learned during the Civil Rights Struggle. We must Re-learn that they ain’t the others but our brothers and sisters.

Let’s reexamine the ways the “other” is manufactured in our minds and embrace the other as our brother . Unidos en la lucha. ¡Venceremos !