Author: mopress

By Greg Moses

The Gringo Vigilante article has hit a bad nerve, and complaints are flowing in. Which is just the kind of thing we like to see. Lots of opportunity to listen and respond about civil rights issues today. This is a live one. Below are three emails to start with. But first, something I ran into while researching my replies:

As I was writing up the immigration story below, a report coming out of the Center for Immigration Studies argues that anti-aging effects of immigration will be modest.

Immigration in an Aging Society: Workers, Birth Rates, and Social Security (April 2005) By Steven A. Camarota

I didn’t find the study prior to publication of my little pro-immigration romp. Although the study would have dampened the tone of my “fountain of youth” effusions, it remains a credible conclusion to draw that the anti-aging effects of immigration trend in the beneficial direction. In other words the more immigration we have coming the younger we get as a nation, even though overall it is difficult to affect the large momentum of the aging trend.

Much of the discussion in the immigration study is misleading since it dwells upon the anti-aging effects of past immigration.

In the year 2000, immigrants who had arrived since 1981 were on average 33 years old (compared to nonimmigrant average of 36). But post-1991 immigrants were on average 28 point something years old. As time goes on, the difference between the average age of immigrants and nonimmigrants widens.

At the present time says the study there is not much difference between the average ages of immigrants and nonimmigrants. Which sounds so irrelevant that you have to wonder why they took so long studying past immigration in the first place.

The article does offer evidence collected from federal sources to address the pertinent question of anti-aging effects in the future. As with aging, so it goes with social security. The more immigration the better with similar modesty of overall results.

But what’s more important about the study is that practical effects of immigration one way or the other hardly surpass marginal to modest impacts. Which means that if one can not find in immigration a panacea for aging demographics, one can hardly blame immigration for severe structural ills either.

* * *

So far, mail is running 100 percent negative. One email from New York simply accuses me in the subject line of being “Another Liberal Idiot!!!” without any message attached. No doubt the author of the email sees enough liberal idiots in New York that the characteristics become self evident. And there are many days when I do miss that crowd. But imagining New York without robust immigration? Maybe it is simply the experience of walking the New York streets that guides my pro-immigration instincts. Dylan in his memoir calls New York City capital of the world. You couldn’t say a thing like that without immigrants. By the same token, I dream that San Antonio could become capital of the Americas.

Of course there is no way to put shipping lanes through San Antonio, so maybe Houston has to be the going chance for Texas. It is already a city with international flair.

* * *

Another email cites some interesting things to consider. At least the author takes some time to provide evidence:

The Wall Street Journal says we should open the border, because the immigrants will work for a “reasonable” paycheck.

The border watch people blames the EMPLOYERS for the immigration problem.

How can workers unionize if they get undercut?

Japan seems to do well without cheap labor

Should rich people not do their own laundry?

The combined effect of these items I take to support some kind of labor nationalism by pointing out that American workers would be in a better bargaining position as an island unto themselves. And I can see the logic. It does have some force to it. But labor nationalism is a volatile game to play within an American context. The weakness of American labor results in large measure from racism. And racism in an American context is difficult to untangle from labor nationalism.

The minutemen vigilantes claim all kinds of ways not to be racist. They claim to be only 92 percent of European descent. But then they post long diatribes against the Southern Poverty Law Center and Morris Dees. Their explicit message of “law enforcement not racism” has functional consequences not so simple to contain.

From an international perspective of human rights, it would be best if there were labor planning forums organized around robust worker power. I know that’s not happening. But the proposal at least establishes a conceptual approach to the problem of Mexico-USA labor relations which have to be thrown into a complex 500 year history. In the context of the American Southwest, immigration is a family issue in the sense of involving parties that have long and intimate acquaintance.

Or to use another analogy, the USA-Mexico border runs like a track through your typical Southern order of things, with Mexico on one side of the tracks and USA on the other. It fools no one to pretend that the inequalities between the two sides of the track result from entirely independent histories. Therefore it remains for me incredible to argue that any human solution can be confined to either national framework.

I don’t have any opinions about whether the rich should do their own laundry. Elton John once said (I believe to David Frost) that laundry represented a kind of emotional threshold issue for him because of his rampant wealth. One thing he had to work out as part of his general recovery was an ability to do his own wash. It had for him a kind of Zen value. I hope I’m not taking the point too seriously, but I would think that a progressive answer to the laundry question would depend on the labor conditions of the hired help.

BTW: Hope you enjoyed your visit to Texas, Sir Elton. It couldn’t have been better timed. Congratulations on your engagement. (Editor takes break to vacuum bedroom.)

* * *

A third email asks: “Such bizarre racism is quite unbecoming of a “progressive.” I understand that it’s cute and fun to characterize the Minutemen and by association all of White America as “gringos,” but think: when the Hispanic population outnumbers the gringos in America in 50 years, will your charming little race-based comments about White people as illiterate, greedy, and inherently evil be taken so lightly? When will the racism line reverse? I don’t understand this latent hypocrisy in your essay.”

Hmmm. I guess cute and fun come close to describing the intended tone of the article. But racism? I consider the article to be anti-racist. Whether the tone will hold up in fifty years is a good question — thanks for asking — and precisely the reason that I implore the borderland vigilantes to reconsider their posture at this point in time, while it is possible to lighten the still somewhat playful charges of idiocy, illiteracy, and greed.

* * *

Oh look, more negative emails coming in. Stay tuned.

Post 9/11 Doctrine Heads South

By Greg Moses

To paraphrase Forrest Gump: Gringo is as Gringo does. When for instance a row of 92 percent neo-Europeans unfold their lawn chairs in the Arizona desert to spy on Mexicans, things are beginning to look Gringo. When Schwarzenegger praises the work of that vigilante border patrol as it expands into California, that’s looking very Gringo too. But when nobody around you is able to express the least bit of concern, you know you’re living in Gringo Nation for sure.

Yes I know, Schwarzenegger and the border watchers share a language of legality. All they are doing, Schwarzenegger agrees, is assisting in the job of law enforcement because government has failed to do a proper job. But the plain word for this kind of activity is vigilante — not volunteer. And I shall explain why I say this.

When you volunteer for something like border patrolling, you go to the border patrol and say, may I volunteer? Either they have a volunteer program or they don’t and if they do have one, you get yourself coordinated with the proper authorities. The Minutemen showed up to the border independently and announced they would be performing border patrol activities.

If we take Schwarzenegger’s lead in adopting Minuteman language and collapsing the distinction between vigilante and volunteer, how do we stay straight at the same time with his claim that he approves of immigration so long as it is done in a legal manner? As soon as you’ve worked your way into this conceptual pocket, where legal order is most easily recognized in vigilante practice, well, you’ve made it official for the world. We are running a vigilante assisted immigration program.

Not only is Schwarzenegger exercising severe lapse of judgment in confusing his role as terminator with his role of Governor, but he is at the same time underestimating the racist antagonism that underlies the vigilante movement. We hope he does not have to see hugely ugly consequences in order to learn his lesson, but he is taking such an obvious risk in that direction that he can be fairly blamed for gross negligence if this little game he’s playing spills off the board into the streets.

Let me address the underlying racism of the Minuteman movement in a moment, but first let’s be sure we have this vigilante business nailed down, because in Gringo Nation, the vigilante nature of the Minuteman action is not easy for many to perceive. For instance, here is a fresh email:

You are one of many who has repeated the lie that the Minutemen are “vigilantes”. If watching the border and reporting illegal crossings to the border patrol makes one a vigilante, then there are neighborhood watches all across the country that need to be broken up. Given that nobody in the Minutemen has been charged with any crime, taking the law into your own hands is illegal, and that the Minutemen have been under extreme scrutiny, how are they vigilantes? Please explain. If you can’t, then please advise on whether you are stupid, ignorant, or simply incapable of telling the truth.

Okay, if I’m going to go around using Gringo language, then I guess I have to accept accusations that I’m a stupid ignorant liar. Touche. My chickens also come home to roost. But let me try to address the neighborhood watch question.

Here are two web pages. One for the City of Austin Neighborhood Watch Program and one for the Civil Homeland Defense of Tombstone. City of Austin Neighborhood Watch. Civil Homeland Defense of Tombstone. Do you see any difference here? Notice how the webpage for the Neighborhood Watch Program has been posted by the Austin Police Department with a city contact number. And yes, the Tombstone servants of the “sovereign citizens of these United States” also provide a contact phone number, but you can see that one group is coordinating their activity under law enforcement supervision while another group uses language that has a contemptuous vigilante tradition.

The MinuteMan Project offers plain reasons for their invitation to join their voluteer corps and seek training under the Civil Homeland Defense:

the men and women volunteering for this mission are those who are willing to sacrifice their time, and the comforts of a cozy home, to muster for something much more important than acquiring more “toys” to play with while their nation is devoured and plundered by the menace of tens of millions of invading illegal aliens.

Future generations will inherit a tangle of rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures with no common bond to hold them together, and a certain guarantee of the death of this nation as a harmonious “melting pot.”

The result: political, economic and social mayhem.

Historians will write about how a lax America let its unique and coveted form of government and society sink into a quagmire of mutual acrimony among the various sub-nations that will comprise the new self-destructing America.

Or as a Texas correspondent writes today, Mexican immigrants are “averaging us down.” He taunts: as editor of a Texas Civil Rights Review, I must be calling for a nation of “garbage collectors” that will put me out of business because none of them will be interested to read my work. That’s the gist of his argument in so many words. I wonder when his trash is not picked up, how long does he usually wait to complain about that?

Another correspondent with a Texas Tech email address sends me an article by Frosty Wooldridge, a smiling fellow with a spiffy eponymous website who says the USA is like the Titanic about to go down if we don’t steer clear of a cultural iceberg:

From stem to stern, our English language is under assault and our schools are drowning in ethnic violence, rapes, drugs and gang warfare. In California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, our hospitals suffer bankruptcies from non-paid services for 350,000 annual ‘anchor babies’. Ten million illegal immigrants displace jobs from America’s working poor and depress wages for many others. Leprosy, tuberculosis, Chagas Disease, hepatitis and other diseases ‘pour’ into our country within the bodies of illegal immigrants who avoid health screening before coming on board the United States. Even worse, clashing cultures with religions that celebrate ‘female genital mutilation’ and subjugation of women are growing in enclaves around our country. As Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself can not stand.”

These are the sentiments cresting in the MinuteMan Project. How is Schwarzenegger going to play nice with this movement and promote the immigrant ideal? Is Schwarzenegger’s immigration initiative something like Nixon’s China? Is he going to be able to open doors with this nationalist enclave and bring it out of its isolation? As I say, the risk he takes here he should well enough know. Having stirred this pot, he must be prepared to swallow the consequences.

Some of the MinuteMan sympathies come from self-described “pro-labor pro-environment progressives” who argue that, “If there were no illegal Mexicans, employers would raise wages to attract legal Americans to work.” And I have said from the very beginning of my work on Gringo Vigilantes that there is some force behind this labor analysis. But how much weight do we give to illegal aliens when we assess income tendencies in America? Or to put the question another way, do you know what a scapegoat is?

Real income (adjusted for inflation) has been stagnant for decades, unions have been falling apart, corporations have been seeking third world wages wherever feasible, and we have a plentiful border patrol already. Stories of crossings are not cakewalk stories. So with widespread secular trends that cut across all cultural groups and with law enforcement making things pretty
difficult already, how in the world does a “pro-labor pro-environment progressive” wind up sending ME the email of rebuke when I denounce my solidarity with Gringo Vigilantes?

May I remind my esteemed correspondent that I live in a Right to Work State? Do I see MinuteMen taking their binoculars into the galleries of my legislature? No the MinuteMen pay no attention to economics, unions, corporations, border patrols, or law making because all these things are felt to be out of reach. But they can spy on Mexicans. Their move taps into widespread frustration because people feel that things are slipping away from democratic control, a feeling that Schwarzenegger must admit that he has not been able to reduce.

Of course during times like these, when the answer seems so simple as unfolding a lawn chair, frustrated people will hear any alternative that is just as simple. But a national labor plan will be a truly complex and unprecedented thing to achieve. In order to achieve a national labor plan, we will have to take our eyes off of illegal Mexican immigrants and begin to speak with seriousness about everything else we know.

For instance, where is it written into economic law that the more an economy grows in population the less robust it must become in opportunity? What does an expanding population need in order to thrive? Do we have no answers? Will a shrinking population improve home economics? Shall we just split up into a thousand Luxembourg’s? Or do we have to think about other factors besides immigration and population growth in order to get the qualitative answers that we will need? Even without any immigration before us wouldn’t our economic assumptions require us to eat ourselves alive anyway?

From Mexican to cataclysm lies an obviously tempting scapegoat logic. Is this to be post-9/11 headed South? I’m beginning to feel just a little bit like I did on Sept. 21, 2001, the day after Bush Jr. delivered his post 9/11 manifesto. Has everyone around me lost their minds? Are we to be led so jubilantly into a vigilante future?

When immigrants huddled into New York harbor they disembarked upon a city that offered free colleges. So the answers are not very mysterious. Education is one principle of prosperity that growing nations can practice. In South Texas where is the education that awaits immigrants? The Texas Supreme Court will return from its Fourth of July break this summer to consider litigation over South Texas schools. The state legislature has wasted nearly forty years evading its plain responsibility to fund vigorous educational programs. As a consequence ignorance and stereotypes grow.

Health care also would count in this direction. With a robust public system of health funded like we fund blitzkriegs through Falluja, we wouldn’t be whimpering about our complete inability to visualize a healthy future as more immigrants arrive.

Or labor practices. Factories have been constructed along the borderline during the past generation, and they have been placed just to the South where they can dodge the jurisdiction of OSHA and the Labor Department. Meanwhile, as mentioned above, Texas holds firm to its Right-to-Work allegiance, making worker organization very near impossible on this side of the border also.

Education, health care, and labor policy. Here are three clear areas with outstanding records of wrong-headedness in high places. Instead of motivating responsibility in these areas however Schwarzenegger and his MinuteMen are making a scene over Mexican immigrants. These are old tricks of the Gringo Manual. Starve a population, then blame them for their hunger. Shoot holes through their school budgets then blame them for being unable to learn. Put the hospitals out of reach and blame them for not being well. Prohibit union power and blame them for serving corporate interest. And when they nevertheless make their way in the morning to work, by all means, be sure to blame them for that too.

By Greg Moses

There is enough wisdom in a few of the replies below to carry the reader forward. So rather than respond tit for tat to each of the emails pasted below, I’d like to clear new ground. Along with my article offering a steady human rights keel in our approach to migrant workers, CounterPunch posted a sobering article by Paul Craig Roberts on the continuing failure of employment policy in the USA. Americans who re-elected a zero growth President may now try to blame the Mexicans, but the Mexicans do not prevent the Chamber of Commerce from creating jobs.

It is entirely too predictable during listless economic times that workers of the world are tempted to set themselves against each other, their heated frustrations gladly fanned by well placed bellows of racism and nationalism. A Philip Randolph used to love saying: let the little dogs fight among themselves so that the big dog can run away with the bone. The little dogs in this case are the Minutemen and the migrant workers. The big dogs meanwhile are burying their bones overseas.

In his CounterPunch article (of May 12) Roberts says two things relevant to this discussion. First, the USA economy is only producing service work. And second, sixty percent of the new service jobs created have been filled by Hispanics.

Under these conditions, again, it seems quite predictable that frustrated workers find it satisfying to fan the flames under the feet of some Hispanic workers rather than under the feet of the Chamber of Commerce. Indeed Roberts verges on the suggestion that there is nothing the Chamber of Commerce can do.

But simply considering the Hispanic workforce, on what basis are we supposed to believe that their willingness to work in the new jobs has caused a no-growth economy? No, we have to see the loop in that logic. If Americans stand ready to work, where are the employers, what is their labor plan, and why are they feeling no heat?

Here then are the questions that need asking. Has “sundown on the Union” changed from prophetic lyric to good enough answer? Is there not a job policy proposal that would improve the employment picture? Has capital seriously and irrevocably begun its final emigration to another future outside the USA? And are we going to let the Schwarzenegger-Minuteman gambit play us for fools by duping us once again into scapegoat-style politics, transforming ourselves into a booted society too mean and stupid to create productive labor?

Jean-Paul Sartre says somewhere that when an economy sets out to “fulfill all the needs of the nation by mass production” then the workforce will never be large enough. But where an economy depresses itself in fear of depression, there we find too many people, too many workers, or in the fine words of Scrooge, a need to reduce the surplus population.

So here is the top question for Minutemen and border governors alike: is there any freedom left in your vaunted free enterprise? Then prove it. Reverse your cycle of depressing unfreedom and demonstrate that the nation you love most is the most capable of producing freedom and justice for all.

Attention to this line of inquiry begins to pull us out of the quagmire of immigration reform into a more serious and worthwhile question. Although we work against historical roots that tie us to a fate of racism, we know enough to pull away from those roots this time around.

Under the objective conditions of the global economy manifesting themselves right now in the USA, the one thing we should keep in front of us is a humanistic human rights civil rights commitment to finding a way out — together. If we continue to turn our fellow workers into alien populations and blame them for our troubles, we will have made ourselves all into little fighting dogs too busy to notice that the bone we fight over is already long gone.

Given the challenges before us, why don’t we see the heritage we adopt when we answer with Gov. Schwarzenegger that the most creative work to be done at this time is the building of higher walls and nationwide patrols? Gov. Schwarzenegger, you talk like a smirking despot. If the Minutemen are impressed by your plans, so much the worse for them, too. In your leadership we have found an utterly disappointing answer to the problem of freedom and justice for all.

* * *

You said: “I have visions of Mexican workers building
their own Northern wall.”

That’s a great idea, did Arnold come up with that? If
not, I’m contacting my senators and congressman to let
them know I’m all for this idea.

* * *

In your recent column I had to laugh when I read the quote by the Governator: “We have the money to do it. It’s not a lack of money. When we can afford the war in Iraq, we can afford to control our own borders.”

The fact is that we didn’t have the money for invading and occupying Iraq. It was only possible by means of borrowed money, mainly from China. It’s like someone saying, “I’m not broke. I have credit cards!”

Also, I’m not aware that severe California’s financial problems have been solved. Since the Governator assumed office, they’ve received much less national press, but I doubt the state is even close to being out of the woods yet.

* * *

Concerning your latest screed in Counterpunch in defense of illegal immigration, you may want to actually understand what a neo-conservative is before you banter them around, as it makes you look like an idiot.

In point of fact, neither the Goveronator Arnold or the Minutemen are “neo-conservatives”. Arnold is a liberal Republican, and the Minutemen are ‘Paleo-conservatives” along the lines of Pat Buchanan.

“Neo-conservatives” are in point of fact, ex-jewish leftists like David Horowitz and Elliot Abrams, and their motivation is defense of Israel. They are the intellectual muscle that used to be the “Scoop” Jackson wing of the Democrat Party, who at that time used the cold war, and the threat of Soviet Imperialism to justify … defense of Israel.

. . . .

I would hardly expect you to understand what you are talking about, since the rest of your article rests on the premise that attempts to enforce immigration laws is the same as the discrimination against native black people in the USA.

Such stupid assumptions and misunderstanding of facts just proves how little the LEFT is able to understand the issues, and engage in any meaningful dialogue on the important issues of today.

Foolishness by state or national officials will probably end only when the lenders cut them off, and then things should get very interesting.

* * *

Thanks again. I think your impression of the MP [Minuteman Project] as a PR pincer is spot on.

* * *

Another great piece. Things are just lining up rather conveniently aren’t they? National ID, guest slave worker
program, Schwarzenegger and the Minutemen. I’m really expecting [Texas Governor] Rick Perry to jump on board any week now.

* * *

Forget the guest worker program! Deport them all, secure the border and let them apply for a visa properly and immigrate to this country legally and properly as immigrants from Europe did in the early 20th century. Then they will truly be immigrants and not illegal aliens. Streamline the visa and immigration process so it can be done fairly quickly and with less red
tape.

Punish harshly corporations that hire illegal aliens. It’s not really about national security or anti-terrorism its’ about survival of the American melting pot (i.e survival of our multiethnic society). Why is it xenophobic to want controlled immigration and assimilation into the American melting pot? Have you ever heard of the term balkanization?

* * *

Your analysis of the immigration problem is interesting. But you say that “progressive activists” should “take to heart” the following quotation form Bacon: “Both sending and receiving countries are responsible f

or protecting migrants, and retain the right to determine who is admitted to their territories, and who has the right to work.” I wonder: Do you take your own advise–take to heart–the last half of this sentence? My sense is that you don’t.

* * *

If you take the time to read Hannah Arendt’s On the Origins of Totalitarianism (the section on totalitarianism) , the purpose of the political policy of “securing the borders” will become clear to you. Like in Stalin’s Russia, you couldn’t come or go without “government approval”. The wall that keeps folks out also keeps folks in. America is fast being made into a sort of prison. You can go to work and you can stay home and watch TV. Otherwise, it’s a risk. You can do your prison job and you can stay on your bunk and watch TV. Otherwise it’s a risk. If you have no job, then your worthless to the state and have no privileges, thus, to be discarded, ignored and disrespected. In other words, a third world country.

* * *

The party that preached fiscal responsibility has thrown it away. The people who supposedly worship the market will ram cheap oil down its throat or die (most likely, die). A very undiplomatic Bolton is sent to a very delicate diplomatic post. And the politicians that want foreigners out, will promote instead their illegal entry and their illegal driving. We seem to live in a very, very interesting time…

* * *

Note: the editor has also received an offer to join an “anti-immigration” group online for the purpose of discussing our disagreements “in a civil and friendly manner.” It sounds like something worth trying. Damu Smith sez if you want to do real spiritual work, you got to get out of your own house.–gm

By Sonia Santana

HB 166 died in the Texas House Legislature on Thursday
May 12, 2005. HB 166 was our best attempt at a verified
paper ballot trail for Texas this session.

The original bill filed by Rep. Aaron Pena (D-Edinburg) was amended in the Elections Committee by Chairwoman Mary Denny (R-Flower Mound) to the point it was simply a study bill. We can’t proceed too slowly on this issue in Texas for Rep. Denny’s tastes.

Despite the fact the bill was pretty uncontroversial by the time it reached the Calendars Committee, the powers that be, still could not risk their perceived loss of power. The bill had bi-partisan support with 4 Republicans on board including Mary Denny on the committee substitute version, and still it was quietly killed in Calendars with no vote scheduled on the floor.

Thursday was the last day bills in the House needed to be listed on Calendars for a vote this week. HB 166 never made the cut.

I mourn the death of HB 166, not only because I worked very hard on this bill, but because it is a huge loss for all Texan voters whose votes are not secure on electronic voting machines.

We wouldn’t even consider an ATM transaction without verifiable proof of our transactions, yet we have turned over our right to cast our vote without any guarantees of how your vote was actually cast or counted. Voter beware.

Sonia Santana is a voting rights activist in Austin.