Immigrant Advocates Must Change Strategy to Win Comprehensive Immigration Reform

OK, folks, time for a think piece. It's going to be a bit of a wild ride compared to some of my more straightforward editorials, but I felt the need to develop some ideas this week at a bit more length than normal. Because some discussions just can't be truncated. So in this piece I'm going to argue that immigrant advocates (from both immigrant and citizen backgrounds) are going to keep losing important battles in the fight for comprehensive immigration reform in the U.S. unless they a) start talking real politics and economics with people again, and b) start organizing citizens - especially in the suburbs - in addition to immigrants.

It should go without saying that Open Media Boston is a publication that stands up for the rights of immigrants to the United States - just as we stand up for the human rights of all people. That statement must be underscored with the fact that before I was this publication's founder, I was a long-time activist for comprehensive progressive immigration reform. This should come as no surprise given that I was a labor and community organizer for an even longer-time before starting direct work with immigrant communities, and it become more and more obvious to me that the problems being suffered by American workers from the 1960s on were directly related to the rise in immigration from the global south (which in the case of the U.S. has primarily involved people from Central and South America) during that same period.

Quickly, I'm not referring the spurious right-wing analysis that people are coming from the global south simply to take "our" jobs. I mean that the rise in immigration is directly related to the excellent job that largely U.S.-based multinational corporations have done in convincing successive American administrations for over 100 years to lend diplomatic and military assistance to their project of extracting raw materials from countries "south of the border."

Largely by dint of propping up military dictatorships that supressed democratic aspirations throughout the Americas (and then the world), and stopped unions and left-wing parties from gaining control and forcing the mutlinationals to ... you know .. pay real money for the stuff they preferred to essentially steal from countries poorer than the U.S. Many times countries that were poorer than the U.S. only because we developed an advanced industrial economy first, not because they had less resources than we did.

Skipping lightly over decades of history, the big U.S. corporations got so rich from taking other peoples raw materials and forcing them to buy back our finished goods at prices they weren't allowed to refuse that unions and left-wing organizations (not usually political parties here) managed to win reasonable labor reforms that ensured that almost 40 percent of U.S. workers could join unions and start to enter the middle class by the 1950s. Many other reforms followed the rise of large-scale industrial unionization from the 1930s through the 1960s like Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, vacation and sick pay, and so on and so forth.

But by the mid-1960s, some corporations began to look around and say "hey, why should we let American workers continue to have it so good? They're costing us too much money, and getting too full of themselves with their expectation of an ever-improving standard of life thanks to collective bargaining and fairly robust pro-worker regulatory regimes in much of the country. So we need to start moving our manufacturing operations first to the South of the U.S. where unions were mostly kept out in the 1930s and 40s, and then to other countries where our control of U.S. foreign policy guarantees us 'favorable labor and taxation conditions.'"

In other words, big corporations started to use their political muscle to move their factories and other operations to countries where they didn't have to pay workers fairly and where they basically didn't have to pay taxes.

The "Great U-Turn" in the world economy in the early 1970s only accelerated this drive to lower labor costs - and technological improvements like cheap regular air transport, improvements in global telecommunications and the rise of computers in the workplace made it ever easier for companies to run a far-flung global economic empire. In the 1980s and 1990s, multinationals actually started selling off and even simply destroying their U.S. operations - the better to focus on operations in countries in the global south. Hundreds of thousands of American jobs went abroad to "export processing zones" where corporations basicaly ran dictatorships and ran roughshod over an army of workers that could truly be called "wage slaves." Add to this the destruction of the agricultural sectors of countries like Mexico via trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, and you had situations where millions of people in Central and South America started moving north trying to get into the U.S. and get better jobs than were available at home (although with endemic double-digit unemployment in those countries, huge numbers of people simply didn't have jobs at all).

Meanwhile, many U.S. unions refused to fight the corporate onslaught - and actually got into bed with them through the device of "team management" in the 1980s, which encouraged workers to pretend that they had common interest with their bosses even when that clearly wasn't the case. Unions allowed corporations to start getting rid of even more good permanent full-time unionized jobs by letting corporations start hiring large numbers of contingent workers (temps, part-timers, day laborers, contract workers and so on). And many new industrial sectors like the computer and later information industries were allowed to remain completely ununionized.

We're now raising up a second generation of young people that have no expectation of lifelong employment or a career of any kind. And people my age (43) and younger basically have no job security and no pensions for our old age; so we are all - in a word - screwed. Unless we fight back. A theme I'll touch on repeatedly in the future, no doubt.

Returning to the main theme of this editorial, though, giant corporations can now have their cake and eat it too. They've successfully destabilized working people in most parts of the world - and now the less scrupulous among them that back the hard right-wing in the U.S. can help foment anti-immigrant hysteria to somehow blame this political economic turn of events on a bunch of poor people from the global south. Even as these self-same corporations manipulate the gray areas of the remants of a rational immigration policy that they've helped distort for decades to import huge numbers of so-called "illegal" immigrants into the U.S. to simultaneously act as what Marxists like me call a "reserve army of labor" that will work any job for any wage no matter how low in a desperate attempt to keep their families going, and a convenient scapegoat that as an added bonus is very difficult to unionize because the same employers that import them here can call up Immigration and Customs Enforcement at any time and have them deported.

Arriving at my point, most leaders of immigrant advocacy organizations and their citizen allies in the U.S. of 2010 choose to pretty much ignore all this information. And in some ways to turn their backs on the political left - who have often been their only allies at many points in American history.

And I think that's why they are currently losing the battle for comprehensive rational immigration reform in the U.S. - and handing victory after victory to right-wing corporate leaders and their simple nativist minions.

Instead of very hard look at this situation ... and realizing that working and middle-class U.S. citizens really are losing their jobs and really are being forced into direct competition with immigrants for the same jobs - and then calling more consistently (and loudly) for global and national labor reforms that would benefit all working people and start to reign in corporate power ... most immigrant advocates seem to have decamped from using political economic arguments to using 3 alternative lines of argument.

1. Moral. Example: "If this bad anti-immigrant bill passes into law, poor Maria will go without medicine and have to go home."
2. Cost/Benefit (here we see what I view as the negative influence of too many "helpful" social science academics acting as consultants to immigrant advocates). Example: "This bad anti-immigrant law will cost the people of Massachusetts more money."
3. Patriotic. Example: "Please pass this reform that will allow us to join the armed forces so we can prove we're loyal to America." [Note: this is exactly what one of my Greek immigrant grandfathers did in World War I.]

There are many problems with such arguments, but the biggest one is that the nativist right-wing can easily make hash of any of them - and beat immigrant advocates over the head the left-overs at the end of any given day.

For example, here are classic right-wing refutations of the 3 example arguments I use above - with tongue slightly in cheek.

1. Moral. Example: "We have lots of poor Americans already. Maria is stealing resources that should go to them, and so should go home."
2. Cost/Benefit. Example: "This good law will save money by stopping immigrants from leaching precious public funds that should go to citizens."
3. Patriotic. Example: "Why should illegal aliens be allowed to join the armed forces while good conservative Americans are being denied as 'extremists?'"

So what I'm saying here is that immigrant advocates will only convince a small number of citizens with such arguments, and would do far better to start stressing political economic arguments again. Like "American working people should back immigrant rights; so that we can work together for a world where everyone can live wherever they like and have a decent job in a democratic society with lifelong security and social benefits."

Which brings me to my second point.

My observation for many years is that immigrant advocates often do a bang-up job of organizing other immigrants to push for reform - which is great and necessary.

Problem is most of the immigrants they are organizing - usually new immigrants - can't vote. The people that can are all those working and middle class Americans who have been seeing their economic fortunes erode for around 40 years now. And with the implosion of the housing bubble, the resulting foreclosure and financial crises, and the massive job loss and insecurity that's followed, these increasingly angry citizens are looking around for someone to blame.

As has been the case on numerous occasions in history, it is fairly easy for elites to manipulate public opinion to encourage working people to act against their own best political economic interest.

That best interest - in the eyes of the political left (by which I don't generally mean Democrats for those of you reading me for the first time) - involves the government takeover of the financial industry and several key industrial sectors like auto, a restoration of workers' right to unionize, genuine universal healthcare, a massive government jobs program, the reinstitution of the regulation of corporations, the reinstitution of a progressive taxation system, etcetera etcetera. All these coupled with a new foreign policy that would eliminate the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank (etcetera etcetera), cancel all the debt from the global south to the global north, pay reparations for resource extraction, job destruction and political adventurism in those countries, and the creation of a revived United Nations that would act for the furtherance of human rights and not in the interest of the rich and powerful.

A tall order? Absolutely. A pipe dream? Maybe. But a nice one. Certainly a dream worth fighting for. A world where there is no longer the war of all against all so that a few can make fat profits on the backs of the misery of the many.

And where "native" Americans (chuckle chuckle) think that their best interest is to fight against poor immigrants rather than the rich and powerful.

So all this verbiage has been leading up to my conclusion - and I'm hardly alone in saying this: immigrant advocates are only going to start winning victories and developing the political muscle to stop right-wing legislation like Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and Mass. Senate budget amendment 172.1 dead in their tracks if they start to organize working and middle-class American citizens and develop a solid joint political program that respects the needs of both camps.

This means, among other things, starting to organize the still mostly-white and sometimes racist suburbs - as well as working and middle-class enclaves in the cities.

Naturally, I absolutely do not mean that immigrant advocates must do this work alone. Far from it. Progressive organizers in all sectors will need to get with the program and offer more real material and political aid than we ever have before.

This has to be a big team effort between immigrants and citizen allies. But if we succeed, working people in many nations will be better off than ever before in history - including the U.S. And how cool would that be?

So, I'll stop here, but that's what I think needs to happen. And happen fast. Between five and ten years ago, I pushed this kind of strategy with friends without much success. No one wanted to fund that kind of work. Other immigrant advocates didn't agree it was the right way to go. And that was their prerogative, obviously.

But I'd ask people who don't think it's important to talk real politics and economics among people that have the vote, has focusing almost entirely on organizing immigrant communities worked towards the cause of justice for immigrants?

I mean really? I won't answer for you, but I'd like folks to think about what I've said here. And, as always, holler back with comments if you want to have some dialogue.

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston