On Sat, 6 May 2000, Nathan Newman wrote:
>
> > The only thing the Euroleft has lacked, I think, has been
> > radical cultural theory, where the US scene has been much
> > livelier in many ways.
>
> They also lack any serious defense of immigrant workers. The basic
> reality of the last decade is that the Left in the US successfully
> fought off attempts to limit legal immigration, while Europe is now
> engaged in a pretty tough round of immigration restrictions.
Another way to look at this is that the Euroleft is facing the backlash that the American Left faced 5 years ago. If you go back to mid-decade in America, with the passage of Prop 187, it looked like the left was getting creamed -- it's only 5 years later that it looks like the California pro-immigrant forces won in a rout. And wasn't the 1996 Immigration Act a bad thing on the whole? The Left can claim to have prevented even worse, but so can the Europeans. And on the other side, the one thing the German left can claim as its first and maybe only achievement is the change in the citizenship law. That was clearly progress, epochal in its own small way, and in the course of it they fought off a vicious backlash that still has life in it (in the North Rhine-Westphalia campaign, where hopefully it dies).
Sometimes I think the two party system makes Americans look better than we deserve. If we had a parliamentary system, and you gathered all of our anti-immigrant votes in one bucket, everyone would say Look, they have a National Front that gets 15% of the vote. And I can easily see them growing full of protest votes some election cycle and terrifying everyone. But because such currents can never come to clear expression (thank goodness) under our permanent grand coalition, our anti-immigration tendencies look like a string of local and contained outbreaks rather than a continuing strain of national character.
Oh, and one last thing. It can be argued that the Europeans are facing a bigger immigration "threat" than the US has so far contemplated. Eastern expansion of the EU contains the possibility that in 4 years, every worker in Poland could freely work in Germany. Of course that won't be the law, and even if it were the law, it wouldn't be the reality, because most people don't just up stakes like that. But still -- can you imagine the reaction in the US if we were even contemplating a law that would completely open the border with Mexico?
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com