A Brief History of Migration / Immigration

Presented at the Snowbird Symposium of the Center for Global Justice
on 15 February by Arturo Yarish

Introduction:

“Those who forget the past are….”

Why are we forced to revisit major political, economic and social issues that we assumed had been reasonably resolved during the post WWII period? Migration is only one of many “wedge issues”--such as welfare reform, capital punishment, gender and civil rights, same-sex marriage, and the attempted privatization of Social Security--that are promoted to divide us. As has happened frequently in our history, too frequently in periods increasing economic stress, the cultivation of fear and suspicion reemerge as tactical instruments in the current larger “divide and conquer” strategy. Under the general conservative political slogans of individual responsibility, privatization, national security and cultural superiority, social tensions charged with overheated emotional rhetoric are used to divide people and keep them off balance. Rather than correct economic inequities that aggravate social anxieties, policies are designed to increase insecurity. In our time of increasing economic instability--marked by rising unemployment, declining savings, increasing debt, the surging cost of living essentials, and generally declining living standards--the sense of deepening scarcity is expanding. In this period of economic contraction and financial distress, the immigrant question arises as another facile topic proven to distract the public from a critical examination of a long series of failed economic policies. Politically it’s easier to use fears to ignite social animosities toward 11 million plus migrants rather than to explain why the US has lost about 43 million jobs since 1979. Scapegoating minorities has been repeatedly and effectively used to deflect public attention from the real causes of social and economic stress.

The fundamental conflict in our society between the authoritarian nature of corporate organizations and the foundations of popular democratic ideals forms the conditions of constant tension between the small and shrinking minority of the haves from the increasing majority of the have-nots. The constant sociopolitical problem for the wealth-based minority is to control the growing majority of discontented have-nots. As economic instability tends to heighten social discontent, the minority pulls more feverishly at its lever of power and influence, first to convince and then to coerce the majority to conform to the norms of the corporate capitalist agenda. The tendency for the authoritarian corporate style of organization to override democratic principles requires the constant measured distribution of rewards and punishment as an instrument 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 many others. Quiescence and passivity are nurtured and cultivated in a climate of apprehension built on intensifying competition, insecurity, and fear resulting in a growing suspicion of “the other.” Suspicion and fear of foreigners or anyone who may be different are the standard psychological instruments to divide the majority opposition throughout our history.

In the current political climate in the US we are not observing a political defense of conservative values, we are witnessing the formation of a new reaction as well as a political regression accompanied by familiar forms of repression. From the resurgence of hate groups to attacks on the foundations of scientific principles to neo-nativism, we are encouraged to march backwards into the darkness of the most shameful moments of our history.

Current anti-immigration sentiment appearing 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 xenophobic attitudes extending back to the Alien Sedition Acts. Throughout our history, particularly at moments of economic and political crisis, the instruments of propaganda have been repeatedly mobilized to construct “the other” among us. The archetypical images of the evil other are too familiar: Papists, Anarchists, subversives, and Communists, often blended with racism and anti-ethnic stereotyping, were made into the threatening “other.” The historical patterns and consequences are very familiar. Anti-something or someone sentiment is popularized codified and then followed by official political repression. The demonized other are hunted down, rounded up, criminalized, jailed and sometimes murdered. The shamefully tragic incidents are too numerous to list, but we know some of the names that symbolize the tragedies and should be recalled: Dred Scott, Elizabeth Curley Flynn, Andrea Salcedo, Saco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, Scherner, Chaney, Goodwin, Leonard Peltier, Mummia Abu Jamal, Pedro Albizu Campos, and more recently Filiberto Ojeda Rios. Blacks, indigenous people, the foreign born and the poor are marginalized and made into the feared other. We are again at the fork in the road of major historical decisions. In the midst of economic stagnation and wildly irrational anti-foreign sentiment, new fears are being cultivated. We are told our southern neighbors will take our jobs and dilute our cultural values. While old fears are repackaged and given new labels, we must strive to identify them and form the foundations for broader respect and understanding. Will we resurrect the racist ghosts of our tragic anti-immigrant past or will we insist upon equitable family-friendly solutions based in ideas of human rights and social justice.

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

New nativism along with its strong anti-immigrant expression runs counter to the calculated labor needs and interests of transnational neo-liberalism. Demographers tell us that the current native US birth rate of 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 twenty five years. The estimated eleven million undocumented workers that are currently in the US cannot come close to filling the deficit. New and increasing anti-migration sentiment is not a jobs-related issue; it is a labor control and intimidation policy. When the US Chamber of Commerce recently called for a rationalization of immigration to fill the projected labor shortages, we can immediately identify this proposal as a classic working class concern. National and transnational capital will strive to reduce labor costs and many workers will immediately sense the threat of a glutted labor pool. The instruments of coercion have been put in place. US workers, who have lost 43 million domestic labor market jobs and good paying jobs, have just concerns, but their working class history tells them that their future strength lay 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 pressure on wage rates. The history of racial and ethnic animosities, which have blocked working class unity in the past, must now be overcome through new forms and methods of education, cooperation and mutual support. We will need to be more creative than ever.

Today 15 February 2006 my colleagues and I have chosen to analyze the bills coming before the US Congress, set them in historical context and critically review them from the point of view of workers and their families on both sides of many borders.

As we listen thoughtfully to our panelists, I encourage everyone to engage the discussion with a reflection on Phil Ochs 1960’s poignantly prescient lines “losing the links on the chain.” While gleaning important information from a careful analysis of the political and economic motives and policies, we must think of solutions that will guide us to realize our cultivated notions of social and economic justice. To paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg, our choices are clear: Humanism or Barbarism. Corporate neo-liberalism has 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 that will rival the worst of humanities’ historical excesses.

As we summarize and examine elements of the legislative proposals, we should expand our thoughts on to a broader more inclusive view of the issue. Migration is not a cause of domestic problems. It is a consequence of a long chain of international, economic structural changes brought about by the aggressively predatory financial shock therapy of structural readjustment plans and degenerative trade agreements. Now migration, from 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.

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 commodifaction of labor on both continents and the Caribbean Islands . Briefly stated the early redistribution of native labor in the form of encomienda and the 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 in the Americas --which began later in the 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 into the present stage of transnational neoliberalism. Capital’s mobilization of labor throughout American History was accomplished largely by force, both economic and military. Whether through the semi-tribute labor system of encominenda or enslavement of natives 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 FOCUS QUESTIONS AND TOPICS

WHO ARE THE MIGRANTS/IMMIGRANTS? Americo Vesppuci 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 indigenous 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.

WE MUST STRIVE TO PUT THE CURRENT MIGRATION INTO A CLEAR HISTORICAL FOCUS. One excellent reference is to us, to our personal history. When we examine the continuing American Diaspora 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. US based anti-immigration sentiment is at odds with the concrete realities of the migrant history of all the people of the Americas, and it is a real emotional reaction to ways racism has been used to divide and control our political-economy 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.

THE LONG VIEW:

A brief review of, transatlantic, transcontinental and intercontinental human wandering leads us to note, borrowing from Chomsky, this is “Year 504” and The Diaspora continues. Why, after five hundred years of exploiting some of the richest 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 richest resource regions some of the poorest? 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 or no planning, and irreparable damage to our environment are some of the economic causes pushing the new migrants. Throughout this entire period we have allowed our fears of “the other” to be manipulated against our deeper common human needs. 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….

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 imperial design inherent in Manifest Destiny turned its face southward and to the 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. 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 it 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?

The history of colonial expansion and economic domination of the Americas is, not was, the ongoing, repeatedly 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 and too many who insisted on their racial purity and superiority, and those who were and are maligned, demonized and segregated. It is a brutal 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-BORDER 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 very familiar with the pain we have felt for others and ourselves. 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,” was the shadowing companion to widespread ethnic hatred repeatedly demonstrated through employment discrimination, intimidation, “internment”, deportation and murder. The successive waves of newcomers, to the Americas have had to endure the continuing outrages of segregation and ethnic and racial profiling. We have allowed ourselves and we continue to allow ourselves to be used against each other. We must ask ourselves how did we allow 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 helpfully when we decide that we will not perpetuate past abuses, 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 our immigrant American 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 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 recent 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 then 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 veil 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 the differences because it takes effort to form social bridges to mutual respect and understanding. We can start again by thinking of ourselves as the privileged migrants with a more sensitive view toward the “other” 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 driven to migrate by powerful international political-economic forces. 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 and famous historic settings as in SMA. 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 would 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 ongoing 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 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 enduring power of the push of economic stress as the primary motivator of the forced migration of people from their lands. The history of the long American Diaspora from the 1500’s to the present is bound up with 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 COMMODITY

The control and the misuse of labor sources were and remain central to the long colonial history of economic exploitation of the Americas. Cash crop farming and mineral extraction required vast supplies of human labor power necessary to impose new modes of extracting wealth from the natural bounty of the Americas. Conqueror-settlers brought with then new agricultural and mining practices that required a redeployment of native labor. The newly introduced labor practices aimed at export-oriented monoculture completely changed the earlier organic native working relations to the environment. Later, as agriculture gave way to industrialization, 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. 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 the 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, and 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 Americans, 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 the 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, African slaves replaced indigenous labor. We are familiar with the terms: encomienda, human slavery, indentured service, contract labor and many other schemes and capitalist dreams to reduce the cost of production of sugar cane, cotton and now cars. In each new phase of forced or coerced labor the characteristic divide to control methods 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 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.” scpoint@mindspring.com

The patterns of forced migration and the methods of worker control have been eerily constant over long periods of American Colonial history continuing into the present. The basic coercive techniques of labor control through 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 are 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 the 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 enforced commodification of labor is accompanied by the threat and actual use of force. Each historical phase of the separation of human beings from their means of subsistence was based on economic decisions backed up by force. 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 occurrence in our history but the precursor and companion to of repeated use of military force throughout the Americas. From the violence of the KKK to Gun Boat Diplomacy and the out-right subversion of governments, the stick is ready to make way for the “free” exploitations of land and labor by Capital.

Presently in the Mexican and expanding general migration of many Latin American people northward we see the familiar repeat of a powerful economic historical process. Increasing poverty, displacement of ejido farmers, the economic stresses on the middle income earners and declining employment opportunities are all pushing, compelling, rising 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 wandering 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 Americas, 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 forty 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 and 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 worldwide. The continuing and expanding international neoliberal process of the labor mobilization and resource exploitation affect us all. We are all attempting to respond rationally and intelligently to the narrowing and closing options as best we can. While we North Americans from the US and Canada and increasing numbers of Europeans are attempting to find alternative satisfying lifestyles that will allow us to survive on our 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 losing sight of the problems we face collectively.

WHAT ARE SOME SOLUTIONS WE CAN RECOMMEND?

The immigrant question for ordinary people like us on all sides of the many American borders and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean must be framed in terms of our common human needs, set within the knowledge of our necessary growing respect for human rights and 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 deprivation, hunger and fear. From the forced removal of the Tainos to Spain, through the forced removal of Cherokees from the Carolinas, to the 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 one will be called a migrant and the other, will first be called unemployed, then a welfare recipient, both will eventually be called bums. Both are victims of Capitalist’s profit calculations. As the unwise use of resources intensifies, unemployment and competition for jobs and living space will increase. We have to create new social criteria for a new calculus of satisfying human needs. Seeking out collectively determined economic alternatives to the present destructive nature of capitalist competition is an essential precondition to forming a new paradigm of social relations founded on and directed toward satisfying our common human needs.

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 lose 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 neoliberalism. One of the most chaotically extreme forms of the individual response to the neoliberal 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 all expendable, substitutable units of labor. We will continue to face the challenges and increasing dangerous consequences of neoliberal production methods that are designed to reward the few by exploiting the many. Individually we cannot correct the long train of historical sociopolitical errors. Individually we will remain enclosed in our fears and our suspicion of the other fearful and isolated workers. However, if we lend our combined voices to the side of demanding the fulfillment of human needs, building a new form 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 humanitarian resolution of underlying problems pushing the persistent labor migration question. 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 a partner. He and she are the living reminders of our own 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 the actual construction of cross-boarder cooperation, built on mutual need, respect and support. 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 globalizing ideas of economic justice for all humanity. That is, we must universalize our concept of our common human needs against the particular and private accumulations of wealth.

We cannot afford to repeat the social mistakes of our history because we will divide ourselves against ourselves. We have a choice but a very short time to begin exercising it. We merely need to make a rough assessment of the collective social loss, intellectual talent and creativity due to segregation. 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 have the opportunity to overcome our cultural differences and celebrate them as our new foundation for unity or we can face each across the divide as “the other” and bury each other in an endless conflict of labor competition. We can revisit our history, critically evaluate what we have done successfully, reinstitute our organizing traditions and work together for new creative solutions.

THE MANUFACTURING OF “THE OTHER”

First we must reexamine Capital’s continuous and effective use of the process of divide and conquer. We are again compelled to study its propaganda in order to construct innovative methods of cooperation. We can close this destructive period of the transnational’s manufacturing of world-wide social disorder if we build a larger unity of human need based upon democratically constructed production methods 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 grandparents fled Italian economic hardships and fascism, Russian Pogroms or the Nazi’s. They and we together are swirling in the vortex of privatization. In our own time since World War II 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 North Americans 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 own fears and frustrations are blinding us from creating the necessary alliances that will help us overcome the rapidly forming economic and political debacle in the USA. Today we come 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 them and 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 neoliberal assault throughout the Americas, at home and abroad, 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 neoliberal corporate battering of the Americas. At home and abroad we have suffered an on-going corporate assault on our economic and social security. Neoliberal economic and social policies have reduced incomes on both sides of the Rio Bravo, have increased unemployment and poverty, forced migration and heightened mutual suspicion to such a 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 relearn 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 !

Originally presented in a shorter version by Arturo Yarish at the Snowbird Symposium of the Center for Global Justice on 15 February 2006.

Posted for Critical review and comments as a contribution to a broader evaluation of alternatives to neoliberal globalization to fulfill common human needs.