[lbo-talk] Immigration and Race

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Tue Apr 18 11:51:09 PDT 2006


Marta wrote: <blockquote>
> If anything, Marta, cracking down on Latino immigrants and making
> California whiter will make it easier for the state and federal
> governments to cut health care and other services. Many of them
> English-speaking Anglos don't vote with you and they sure don't
> demonstrate with you for the Big Welfare State. But many of the
> Latinos -- and occasional disaffected Japanese who come here for a
> lark :-> -- do and will (if you can't communicate with them verbally,
> just smile a big smile and cheer when they march).
>
> ¡Hoy marchamos, mañana votamos!
>
> --
> Yoshie

I never singled out Latino immigrants. This thread started with remarks on Russians and Persian immigrants. Russians are "white," most all the eastern European immigrants are "white." I'm not sure where Persians are situated in the color line but don't imply that I have made this a brown race issue when I certainly have not.

Marta</blockquote>

Regardless of your own feelings, though, the fact remains that "Mexicans make up by far the largest group of undocumented migrants at 5.9 million or 57 percent of the total in the March 2004 estimates" (Jeffrey S. Passel, "Estimates of the Size and Characteristics of the Undocumented Population," 21 March 2005, <http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/44.pdf>), and the physical wall that anti-immigrant politicians want to build is one on the Mexican border, not on the Canadian border.

All migrants -- those who intend to stay here for a period of time and those who want to live in the US till they die -- feel the impact of more repressive immigration laws, but those who look non-white and those who can't speak English or speak it with a non-European accent -- especially poorer, darker-skinned Mexicans and other Latinos -- feel the hardest edge of them.

Mexico, as well as US organized labor, should have bargained harder on NAFTA and incorporated migrant workers' rights into it, so that Mexico-US-Canada will be closer to the European Union, but Mexicans haven't been able to elect a left-wing majority who might have, and US organized labor has little political muscle.

-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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