Author: mopress

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / OpEdNews / Indymedia Houston / North Texas / UrukNet

There are at least 50,000 of them: migrants of “irregular visa status” who have crossed the border into China, partly to escape persecution from North Korean authorities, partly because of hard times.

“Human traffickers systematically target the women, who are usually hungry and desperate, by approaching them in the border region and promising them food, shelter, employment and protection. Once the traffickers have gained the women’s confidence, the women are lured to an apartment, confined and then sold to local men.”

And so it becomes the duty of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants to write a letter to the government of China. Actually this letter is sent by two Rapporteurs, including the one who handles questions of torture. As with many of the letters sent by the Rapporteurs, several months pass without reply.

Or take the case of “Ms. Suprihatin, a 23 year old Indonesian domestic worker living in Hong Kong.” On April 24, 2005, she was rushed to the Queen Mary Hospital after falling 19 floors. Her employer assured authorities that Ms. Suprihatin had jumped out of despondency over her inability to help relatives caught in the recent tsunami.

But two friends of Ms. Suprihatin tell another story. They say she has no tsunami relatives. She was pushed from that window, she told them before she died on May 3. Chinese authorities in Hong Kong have promised the Rapporteur that if sufficient evidence is forthcoming, criminal charges will be filed.

Since his appointment on July 29, 2005 as UN Rapporteur for the Human Rights of Migrants, Jorge Bustamante has tended to these letters, writing to governments of the world, informing them about migrants who are being mistreated often to the point of death, and waiting to receive return signals that the governments care.

In his first annual report of correspondence on March 27, 2006, Mr. Bustamante was able to thank the government of the United States of America for a “prompt and detailed reply” regarding a migrant worker from India who was held captive for four years in New York by a UN diplomat from Kuwait. USA authorities acknowledged the suffering involved and noted that they had to contend with certain protections of diplomatic immunity.

This week, as Mr. Bustamante tours a global frontier of migration north of the Rio Grande, USA authorities are not behaving so splendidly. The April 27 press release from Geneva was clear as could be: Mr. Bustamante would be visiting the USA with particular interest in migrant detention centers such as the T. Don Hutto prison in Taylor, Texas. He would visit Hutto, said Geneva on April 27. Oh no he wouldn’t, said the USA on May 3. And news of the government’s refusal flew out across the AP wire.

“This is really good news, folks!” said Texas border activist Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr. “This whole thing more than amply exposes the epitome of Texas corruption . . . and how it goes all the way to the White House. Corruption that is the stench of Washington . . . and traumatizes our own country and the entire world.”

In fact Johnson-Castro had chatted by telephone with Rapporteur Bustamante on April 30. The Texas activist wanted to stage a proper show of solidarity with the Rapporteur’s appearance at Hutto. Neighbors holding signs, a few words over a bullhorn. All at a safe distance across the street. There have been seven of these little vigils since mid-December, 2006. Today’s will be vigil eight.

And, yes, Mr. Chertoff, there will be a vigil today. Maybe a little louder and a few folks larger than the one planned last week, but there are some things the Department of Homeland Security does not yet control. And Hutto Vigil VIII is one little sign that citizens of the USA still consider themselves part of a global “yearning to breathe free.”

The vigil will last from 10 a.m. to sunset and will include a back-n-forth walk across the street from Hutto prison all day long. As with previous vigils, the focus will be on the children inside. About 200 children at any given time are locked up at Hutto for the fact of being migrant children. Up until today, USA authorities could claim they were sort of proud of the way these children were kept. But proud authorities don’t go around hiding from UN visitors, now, do they?

“The Special Rapporteur intends to carry out his work within the framework of
international human rights instruments, and considers the International Convention on the
Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families a major
instrument for the promotion and protection of the human rights of migrants,” wrote Bustamante for his first annual report of December, 2005.

The convention on migrant rights is another of the UN treaties that the USA has failed to embrace. Johnson-Castro is ever fond of mentioning the convention on child rights as another.

“The Special Rapporteur also refers to the fact that reluctance to recognize the demand for the labour of migrant workers, which is a common factor among host countries, acquires heuristic importance when it becomes clear that there is some relationship between that reluctance and the appearance of anti-immigrant ideologies often tinged with xenophobia and racism. Denial of demand is an important issue as it is one of the main factors that leads to irregular migration, a situation at the core of much of the abuse and numerous human rights violations suffered by migrants.”

Of the 200 or so children now incarcerated with their parents at Hutto prison, how many would say that their families looked forward to working in the USA? How many would say their families had reason to believe that they would be put to work, hard and fast, by yanqui employers? We know a few children of Hutto whose families had worked quite long and hard in Texas.

One thing the Rapporteur would like to see is honest data collection on “de facto” employment practices involving “irregular migrants” so that we can look the facts straight in the face and stop lying about them. Yet, it is the great American genius to put precisely those people to work hardest who have been best disabled from claiming very much in return. As the Rapporteur says, this is the “heuristically interesting” line of analysis that gets you from hard workers to racism every time, and not just in Texas, where these dynamics are assumed to be inbred.

So it will be important as we look for pictures of protesters at Hutto, chanting into a subtropical Spring, that we remember clearly this is not just about Texas. When the Rapporteur wrote the following words in September, 2006, he was talking about migrants across the world:

“The situations in which violations of the human rights of this group are alleged to have occurred during the period under review, giving rise to the intervention of the Special Rapporteur, include allegations of: (a) arbitrary detention, including of children; (b) inhumane conditions or detention; (c) illtreatment in the context of border control; (d) deaths as a result of the excessive use of force by members of the police and security forces; (e) collective deportations, summary expulsions and violations of the human rights of deported persons; (f) impunity for crimes committed against immigrants; and (g) gender violence.”

Remember, Hutto Vigil VIII begins with what
we see in t
hat imperial war zone called “the six flags o’ Texas” but it connects most deeply to everything else that otherwise goes unheard.

The following items appeared previously at the site announcements section–gm

Thank you, dear reader, for helping to make this a wire story.–gm

Associated Press May 2, 2007, 7:30PM

DALLAS — A Palestinian man and three of his four adult children have been released from a West Texas detention facility, where they claim they were mistreated while being held in an immigration case…
[Attorney expects Ahmad’s release on Monday, May 7.–gm]

After Five Weeks of Vigiling, Dr. Asma Salam Praises God

(Photo by Trish Majors)

“I’m just so happy!” says Dr. Asma Salam over the telephone Wednesday night, laughing to the verge of tears. For the past five weeks she has kept a vigil for the freedom of the Hazahza family. See full story below…

On Telling the Truth to Yourself

When all is said and done, all resistance is a rupture in thought, through a declaration of what the situation is, and the foundation of a practical possibility opened up through this declaration.

Unlike what is often upheld this does not amount to believing that it is the risk, very serious indeed, which prevents a good many from resisting. It is on the contrary the non-thinking of the situation that prevents the risk, or the examination of possibles. Not to resist is not to think. Not to think is not to risk risking.

— Alain Badiou, MetaPolitics [p. 8]

Canto for a Cinco de Mayo Weekend

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch

Many call themselves philosophers, but who tells you one day “that you should eat nothing the day you are arrested” and then the next day that “children do not disturb thought.”

Who is this philosopher who runs the department of education for the revolution yet who never refuses a child to his study. The adults, of course, you have to keep away from the study. Their faces sneer why and what not, so you can’t work. But the children play with their own time.

Did the philosopher work near playing children when he spun a myth of the cosmic race, la raza cosmica, a new people of peace born from the rainbow reunion of earth’s scattered families come home to Aztlan, North America’s Southwest (and putting an end forever to little boy bullies who fight you the first day of school, the way they all fought the boy Vasconcelos on his first day at school in Eagle Pass.)

So the philosopher’s name is Vasconcelos, and the only reason you don’t remember him as long-time president of Mexico is because the question was never posed to the Mexican people. No, check that fact. The election was held, and Vasconcelos won big, but the New York press was in charge of announcing the results. So it never happened that Vasconcelos became the philosopher-president of Mexico. The Associated Press correspondent was sent in to secure the philosopher’s acceptance of the way things really are, but he chose exile instead.

“Why don’t these immigrants go back to Mexico and fix their own problems?” is a question I hear from very close sources lately. The life of Vansconcelos reminds us how busy the American Ambassador can be, getting in the way of the Mexican people. If Mexico had been left up to the Mexicans in 1929, para ejemplo, you could study the history of the Vasconcelos administration today.

The case is not so one-sided with Cinco de Mayo. I don’t know if you caught the quote from a right-wing think tank this week, responding to news that Mexican immigrants were singing the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish. “Would the French sing their National Anthem in English!” decried the distraught think-tank smarty-pants, just as Mexican people all over the world were preparing to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.

On the one hand, it was ignorant timing to raise the spectre of French patriotism as all-American standard this week, since Cinco de Mayo celebrates the day that General Diaz pulverized an army of invading soldiers from France. Not to mention the lasting damage done to French standards in America by the right-wing “freedom fries” movement.

On the other hand, nobody at the table complains when a rash player tips his cards. Everybody else this week is trying to work out some kind of alliance “on the fly” between a quite impressive showing of immigrant activism and a generally dispirited homeland workforce that forgets to believe in anything bottom up. But not the think-tank boy genius! In response to yanquis and Mexicans in pairs, he plays the French for trumps!

Cinco de Mayo reminds us that there are times when the USA and Mexico actually sort of get together under the table, with yanqui moguls selling just enough hardware to keep the Mexican Army strong enough to, you know, protect the soft underbelly and all that. Try this structure of perception the next time you see a story about machine-gun-loaded Hummers on the “wrong side” of the Rio Bravo.

I know Richard Rodriguez has already thanked immigrants for cleaning the swimming pool, but I’d like to thank them also for trying to elect a philosopher president in 1929 and for defending themselves so well on Cinco de Mayo, Sept. 15, and 1910. Against the French, the Spanish, and homeland dictators, the Mexican people have fought hard enough to sing about red glare in Spanish. As for the yanquis, it would be better if their well-paid thinkers spent time putting the works of Vasconcelos into English. Viva Vasconcelos!

A response to Brad Carson’s “Democrats Must Fight Illegal Immigration” (no link).

I find the former congressman’s writing incoherent, possibly fascist; he admits that immigrant-rights Democrats offer genuine policy solutions “that are desirable and should be enacted at once” (as we’ll see below) yet he argues that Democrats should follow anti-immigrant Republicans because: “While the opponents of immigration no doubt include nativists and xenophobes, the vast majority of those who oppose illegal immigration do so on sound public policy grounds.”

Immigrant-rights Democrats have THE desirable policy solutions, yet instead of convincing more voters of this fact, the party should switch sides on the issue?
And the party should do this why? Because most
anti-Immigrant voters are able to articulate
non-racist motives? Huh? But what would be the real
motive for betraying a united labor policy?

In the end, the former Congressman offers a fascist gambit. The voters to whom you propose to betray your principles can articulate their reasons in non-fascist form, okay. But deep down you can’t say that these non-fascist articulations constitute your reasons for switching sides, because you’ve already stipulated that the side you are on already has the better policy formulations. But since you have been supplied with non-fascist reasons for doing the fascist thing, therefore you should do the fascist thing? Jesus.

A wedge issue is not “treating the EXPLOITED CITIZEN WORKERS fairly”. In fact, the formula serves as quite a slogan of solidarity, actually. The wedge comes when people claim that ALL exploited workers CAN’T be treated fairly because some are citizens and some are not.

For example, the former Congressman plays loose with the facts of immigrant impact in order to make the threat more vague than it has to be. The Dallas Fed has recently pegged the impact of immigrant wages to about 3 percent (or less).

For three decades the real wages of USA workers have been declining steadily, and there are overwhelming causes for this that have nothing to do with immigrants. For example, what do immigrants have to do with Texas Right-to-Work laws? With NAFTA? With refusal to fund a top-class school system? With outsourcing? With Wal-Mart’s falling prices based on globalized wages? Why have exploited CITIZENS VOTERS not been able to better secure their political interests in either of our one-party regimes since the 70s?

The wedge comes when instead of pledging to overcome a divide-and-conquer situation, instead of seeing in the immigrant-rights movement a possible source of solidarity vs. Republican lockgrip on labor policy, we start trying to figure out how to divide exploited workers from each other. The wedge comes when we don’t really mean ALL EXPLOITED WORKERS after all.

Here’s the passage where the former Congressman says that the real problem is Republican control of Congress and then argues that the weakness of the Democratic party would be a better guiding principle than rights for ALL EXPLOITED WORKERS:

“many Democrats are pushing an increased minimum wage or card-check unionization or – again – more funding for education. They argue that these policies would have a more direct effect on the incomes of
lower-skilled workers. And these policies might, in
fact, be sufficient to resist the effect of illegal
immigration, and, in any event,[QUOTE] all are
desirable policy and should be enacted at once.
[ENDQUOTE]. But there is no political consensus for
such policies, and it is difficult to imagine that the
Republican-dominated Congress would even consider
them. It is irresponsible to hold on to the illusion
of their possibility.”

So, the wedge comes when Democrats have more respect for REPUBLICAN CONTROL than for the principle of fairness to ALL EXPLOITED WORKERS. That is the wedge that divides exploited workers precisely at a time when the possibility of a strategic alliance looks most electrifying.

In sum, if there is a diagnosis of the former congressman’s logic, it is the plain logic of fascist nationalism. Of course, fascist logic can be quite popular among voters in the near term (have you seen film clips of those old Klan marches in DC?).

These are hard times in some ways, but they have been made just a little bit lighter by the immigrant rights movement, if we’ll figure out how to build some kind of alliance between ALL EXPLOITED WORKERS.–gm