5-16-06, 12:38 am

From the mid 19th century to the end of World War I, unrestricted immigration to the United States from Western and Eastern Europe transformed what had been an overwhelmingly Protestant Christian nation of free farmers and laborers from the British Isles (and to a much lesser extent Western Europe) and slaves of diverse religious backgrounds seized and transported from Africa into a diverse multi-cultural, multi-national society. A German, Italian, Polish and Yiddish press, along with many others existed for generations and still exists for newer immigrants. Many groups clustered in ethnic communities and continued to speak their native languages for a number of generations, given the size of the country, the relative isolation of many rural areas. Ethnic clustering and ethnic divisions, the establishment of an ethnic hierarchy in which groups looked to their own middle classes rather than to general labor solidarity, was a major prop of capitalist power and was encouraged by the ruling class.

German immigrants, for example, who came here fleeing from both economic crisis at home and the failed liberal revolution of 1848, strengthened greatly the anti-slavery movement and fought in significant numbers on the union side during the Civil War. There was even a German language version of the 'Star Spangled Banner,' which was seen as an expression of immigrants identification with the nation, unlike in recent days when a Spanish language version produced sharp attacks from the right and a statement by Bush that the 'Star Spangled Banner' should be sung in English. Also there were Irish immigrants fleeing the genocidal potato famine who faced intense religious and ethno-cultural prejudice. (I use the word genocidal because the famine not only took the lives of 25 percent of the Irish population but also because it was a result of many generations of British imperial policy and free trade ideology that permitted the Irish to starve while crops and meat were exported from Ireland.) Since slavery made color racism the foundation of all forms of oppression in the United States, immigrant groups were defined as 'non white' and became 'white' as they rose in the society or were placed above a more recent group of immigrants.

Bush, whose 'compassionate conservatism' in 2000 was crafted with a few Spanish words, talked about immigration Monday night. He put forward a plan which would be comical if the question were not so important. Cosmetic increases in the border patrol; the use of national guard forces (who already are being massively misused in Iraq, given their traditional role as a domestic force) until the increases in border patrol numbers are completed; a 'guest worker' program to act as a safety valve and the possibility of citizenship for 'illegals' who come forward and pay a $2,000 fine for their 'crimes.' None of the major issues – the impoverishment that drives the people to come, the crimes of the employers who knowingly use them and profit from them, even any realistic policy with any chance to curtail illegal immigration is either addressed or put forward in the Bush 'plan.'

Past and present immigration have many things in common. Both are largely the result of severe economic dislocations effecting regions under the sway of industrial capitalism. Although there were immigrant populations fleeing political and ethnic religious persecutions (the Jewish minority in the Czarist Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires is the best known but by no means the only example) and immigrants with some property and skills pulled to the United States by agents of land developers, steamship companies and factories preaching a gospel of easy money, the great majority of immigrants were poor peasants and handicraft workers whose labor had been made superfluous by capitalist mass production, 'free trade,' and the export of capital from the more developed regions.

Free immigration of course did not apply to East Asians, who faced 'oriental exclusion' legislation as early as the 1880s, even though Chinese labor had been as essential to the construction of the Western spur of the Transcontinental Railroad as Irish labor had been to its Eastern spur. Mexicans, who were the indigenous population (albeit a small one) of the Mexican Northwest before it was annexed and became the American Southwest in the Mexican-American War (1845-1849), crossed a demilitarized border seeking work but often faced vigilante violence and forced expulsions when their labor was not needed.

Also, free European immigration was challenged both by large sections of the organized labor movement, for whom it was a matter of wage competition, and also by White Anglo-Protestant Supremacists, who campaigned from the 1880s on for immigration restriction legislation that would limit European immigration to the British Isles and Northwestern Europe. Led by groups like the American Protective Association, the restrictionists built powerful lobbies in Congress, sponsored racist scholarship like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1915), which portrayed most of the Catholic and Jewish immigration as genetically inferior people whose low intelligence and high birth rates threatened to destroy American enterprise and social cohesion if their migration was not ended. The WWI hysteria against foreigners manipulated by both the government and conservative business interests and postwar xenophobic red scare enabled right-wing Republicans to enact legislation in 1924 that not only ended free European immigration and reduced the total number of immigrants but established a 'quota' system that sharply restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. This quota system was a factor in prevent Italian and other anti-fascists and most dramatically, Eastern and Central European Jewish people from immigrating to the U.S. to escape Hitlerite persecution and eventual genocide. The quota system established in the 1924 National Origins Act was eliminated by the Great Society Congress in 1965, creating a much fairer system that allowed for non-Europeans to become U.S. citizens. However, the number of immigrant was still limited.

The new legal immigration to the U.S. has been positive. The establishment of South Asian and African communities which previously were non-existent in most of the country has developed, and a significant expansion of East Asian communities has both enriched American culture, significantly upgraded American cuisine, and created what may eventually be the most dynamically global multicultural society in human history. Many of these immigrants have, unlike the European immigrants of the industrialization period, come to the U.S. with professional education and skills which have made an important contribution to medicine, computer science, and the arts, sciences, and professions generally. These legal immigrants who in considerable numbers have become US citizens are invisible for and to the national chauvinists who call for draconian methods to block illegal immigration with no interest in the effects of NAFTA and IMF-World Bank policies on Mexico and Central America; who support arrests, imprisonment, and deportation of undocumented workers but have no interest in interfering with the employers who hire them; who seek to chase undocumented day laborers out of downtown districts where they congregate because that is bad for business but eat in the restaurants and work in offices in which those undocumented workers provide service labor.

The Bush speech, filled with empty posturing to those willing to look and listen, addresses any of the relevant questions. The 'guest worker' provisions are reminiscent of the ill-famed 'bracero program' between the U.S. and Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, a program condemned by labor and human rights activists as unrestrained exploitation. There is no Pan-American plan to reverse the impoverishment of rural Central America (including Mexico) of the kind that New Dealers advocated in the 1930s and 1940s or, even with its failures and anti-Communist subtext, the Alliance for Progress program for Latin America put forward by the Kennedy administration in the 1960s. There is no understanding much less policy to develop infrastructure and raise living standards in ways that would reduce wage competition and provide for a much greater regional market for both U.S. and Mexican/Central American goods, not U.S. firms establishing 'enterprise zones' in Mexico and Central America to produce goods for the U.S. mass market and agribusiness firms taking over land to produce fruits and vegetables for the U.S. market.

The suggested increase in border patrols over a number of years is more of a joke than anything else, given the size of the U.S. Southwestern border. When one looks at the Bush administration’s use of troops to occupy Iraq and war preparations against Iran, it shows both what the administration’s real priorities are and Bush’s general contempt for the intelligence of the American people. Even if the border patrol were increased to 50,000 the problem would not be overcome.

Desperately poor people have already died of thirst and hunger attempting to cross that border. For anyone to believe that an increased security presence of the size that Bush is calling for will deter both the people and the criminals who have made smuggling them in into a lucrative business is comparable to believing against all evidence that Iraq was supporting Al Qaeda and producing weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion

The promise of possible citizenship connected rather fantastically to the fine is also, coming from this administration, rather like a police promise that a confession will ensure a suspect a light sentence.

The AFL-CIO has come forward with a call to organize and grant citizenship rights to undocumented workers. Such a policy would eliminate the incentive for employers to hire such workers at sub-minimum wages and often off the books, use their status to super exploit them, and make them in effect a drag on wage rates. Such a policy would also eliminate the campaigns to deny undocumented workers public assistance, remove their children from schools, and also end the corruption associated with their paying into social security accounts for which they have no possibility of reaping benefits.

Citizenship rights should of course go along with this program, since it is against the interests of all citizens to have millions of people existing in the political twilight zone that undocumented workers currently find themselves in the United States.

Such a program will both address the problem and answer the Bush administration, which wants to both maintain the cheap and very vulnerable labor that undocumented workers represent and continue to reap political benefits by appealing to those who blame undocumented workers for wage stagnation, job loss, and other conditions created by capitalist 'globalization,' which is a cause rather than an effect of illegal immigration to the U.S and industrialized countries.



--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.