For other groups, simply getting a foot on American soil was enough to get the equivalent of a green card and allowed an opportunity, again, if not for citizenship for oneself, then citizenship for one's children.
Right now - as I've been saying over and over - the law is DESIGNED to create a legal underclass of immigrant workers. Again, ALL illegal workers are effectively subject to an "exclusion act". Now this, to me, is totally unacceptable. I cannot abide the creation of a huge legal underclass. How this makes me "racist", "anti-immigrant", or "nativist" is completely mysterious to me. Somehow simply calling an illegal worker "illegal" - an inarguable, material fact - is racist? What the fuck? The person's race is immaterial. The Romanian guy I got out of the detention center and drove to meet his family in Southern Washington state was white and he was an illegal (well, actually his brother was, it was an identity mix-up).
I don't want immigrants out of the country. I'd love nothing better than to have millions more citizens. But the FACT that must be faced is that American capital will try, has tried and will continue to try to import illegal labor and create conditions under which these people have no citizenship rights at all. You all can blithely accept the status quo and pretend that you are being wonderful human beings by PRETENDING that the law is not as it is. I think you are bullshitting yourselves and doing a disservice to illegal immigrants.
The answer is to get people to citizenship as quickly as possible - either here in the States or back in their home countries (or in third countries). What is NOT the answer. What is NOT acceptable. What helps nobody but American capital is to pretend that illegal immigrants are just like citizens. They aren't. The law treats them differently and although immigration rarely bothers to do anything about illegal immigrants, when they do it's an awful process.
There are really good, rational, humane reasons not to have open borders. As weak as our immigration system is, at least it keeps down the number of desperate people who would come here and be taken hideous advantage of. Citizenship is important. It's the concept on whichall other rights are built. And since there is no such thing as "world" citizenship, we on the left should not encourage people simply to throw their right away.
Again, and to be clear. I would love it if American would make millions more people citizens every year. But at the same time, there has to be an organized process that keeps American capital from creating a legal underclass. That is just basic to protecting worker rights.
boddi
On 12/21/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/20/06, boddi satva <lbo.boddi at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Yoshie, the case you're trying to build is a bogus case. You are
> > trying to contend that teh status quo for illegal aliens is something
> > we can build on. It's not.
>
> In any social struggle we begin with the existing conditions, not from
> a utopia. Today's undocumented workers are demanding amnesty, and we
> should support them. But even if undocumented workers who are already
> here won amnesty, that is not the end of the story. As was the case
> with the amnesty of 1986, not all will be eligible for any amnesty
> that Washington might conceivably grant, and after amnesty, more
> undocumented workers will come, especially from Mexico but also from
> elsewhere. As long as a great disparity in wages and benefits exist
> between the USA (as well as other rich nations) on one hand and much
> of the rest of the world on the other hand, people will come here (and
> go to other rich nations and even only just relatively richer nations
> than their homelands) looking for jobs.
>
> On 12/20/06, Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> > In truth in U.S. history this kind of thing has gone on with immigrants in
> > one way or another but mostly regionally and with much more potential for
> > change of status.
>
> That is not true. Conditions for many immigrants were a lot worse in
> the past. Some, like the Chinese, Japanese, and so on (beginning with
> the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,
> <http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=47>), were
> categorically excluded from citizenship, and organized labor, except
> the anarchist and communist margins, was all anti-immigrant. When the
> Japanese were put into concentration camps, most leftists ignored them
> completely. During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of
> Mexicans, both US citizens and non-citizens, were deported, and the
> Mexican population in the USA "dropped 40%" (Richard D. Vogel,
> "Mexican and Central American Labor: The Crux of the Immigration Issue
> in the U.S.,"
> <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/vogel200606.html>).
>
> Objective and subjective conditions for struggle are much better
> today. Categorical racial and ethnic exclusion of the sort that
> existed in the USA has been abolished. Even the mainstream of
> organized labor is generally opposed to the criminalization of
> undocumented workers and doing what it can to organize them, for
> immigrant workers, documented and undocumented, are the present and
> future of the labor movement. Undocumented Latino workers have strong
> allies among documented Latino workers and Latino citizens, some of
> whom have conquered some political power, for in many cases Latino
> families are composed of people of various citizenship statuses.
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
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>