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Nativist Hysteria Versus Common SenseApr 07, 2006
Bruce Dixon
MULLICA HILL, New Jersey – Last weekend in Los Angeles somewhere between half a million and two million legal and illegal immigrants and their supporters hit the streets protesting the same federal legislation that brought at least three hundred thousand into the streets of Chicago two weeks earlier, and smaller crowds in dozens of other cities. As this article is written, the U.S. Senate has just stricken the most onerous provisions of pending immigration bills which make an instant felon out of anybody “illegally present” in the U.S., and lay a felony charge of “human smuggling” on anyone rendering medical care or other services to the “illegal humans” among us.
In Georgia where both Republicans and some right-wing Democrats like State Senator Kasim Reed of Atlanta proposed state level measures which echoed and exceeded the petty viciousness of congressional Republicans, similar proposals still live on.
How should black people view the wave of immigrant labor that has undeniably impacted us? How do we make sense of the current anti-immigrant hysteria? Can African Americans benefit from following the lead of Lou Dobbs and Senator Reed, blaming and scapegoating immigrants for lowering wages? Or do we help our people best when we stand up for a living wage and dignity for everybody? While the answer seems clear enough to us, some Black Commentary readers are not so sure.
Y. Denise asks, “Why should we, of all people, fight for the rights of immigrants; regardless of the trials they go through to get here? Why is it that these groups can hate us, and openly and heinously undercut us at every turn. I am not just talking about Hispanic groups; I am also talking about other blacks. I never see any of them coming to our aid – in anything, and you have the nerve to say that we have to be on their sides? Many don’t even live in our communities, don’t support our communities and they don’t hire from our communities. How much more self-destruction can we heap upon ourselves? Their fight has nothing to do with us at all.”
Denise raises an unrealistic but oft-heard complaint about small retail immigrant business people that needs answering. Why don’t those small businesses in our community hire more of us?
In the first place, hours are long and income is low for most startup small businesses, and most fail within a year of startup. Job One is just staying in business. For immigrant business people, Job Two is to hire their own families. Family work is cheap, sometimes for mere room and board. The business owned by a family or close friend is also the prime place to land for newly arrived relatives and close friends with limited language skills and sometimes with no papers.
For small operations with low profit margins, hiring an American who expects to get paid a living wage and on time can be a huge additional expense. And if you do it, you’ll have to explain to the extended family why that spot is not available for your sister-in-law or cousin Isaac. Job Three is to send money home, because of course everybody back in the old country imagines you’re rich. You’re in America, after all.
Given all this, it just ain’t realistic to suppose small immigrant retail businesses will hire a lot of their American neighbors. Some. But not a lot. We need to get over that expectation.
Denise seems to imagine immigrants hate and “undercut” us. With all due respect, we suspect she may be projecting in the first instance and misdirected in the second. There are many voices in the ears of immigrants. White America teaches everybody to hate and fear black folks, and immigrants bring along their own helpful baggage as well. Cultures across the planet have ancient traditions that put lighter skinned people higher on the social pecking order than darker ones. Dark skinned Mexicans and Indians – the ones from India – are socialized to hate themselves, much the same as we are.
But immigrants bring other stuff to the American table, too. In the countries they hail from there are traditions of working class militancy and solidarity deeper and more widespread than anything here, and traditions of broad left wing social movements tougher and more enduring than we see here in the U.S. In Mexico, Nigeria, Indonesia and Brazil, in South Korea and Columbia, farm, factory and service workers join unions by the millions and fight for their own rights, often at great personal cost.
These are traditions that black America can use and learn from, traditions that will raise all our standards of living if we choose to adopt them. But they can’t be put into play as long as immigrants don’t have the same right to live, to organize, to bargain collectively and to strike that every one of us has. Immigrant labor only “undercuts” the wages of black Americans when immigrants can be threatened with jail or deportation for standing up to their employers. Their fight has everything to do with us. If black America refuses to make common cause with them, we cut our own throats.
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