No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border
More books in the category:
United States Immigration
by: Justin Akers Chacn, Mike Davis
Topics include:
CLICK HERE for more information and price
Countering the chorus of anti-immigrant voices, Mike Davis and Justin Akers Chacn expose the racism of anti-immigration vigilantes and put a human face on the immigrants who risk their lives to cross the border to work in the United States. Authors challenge the racist politics of vigilante groups like the Minutemen, and argue for a pro-immigrant and pro-worker agenda that recognizes the urgent need for international solidarity and cross-border alliances in building a renewed labor movement.
Reviews:
If you want to cut through the Right's hysterical wailing about immigration, buy this extremely readable book. It's filled with little known facts about immigrants (they have a higher employment rate than the general population; they pay more in taxes than they receive in government benefits), looks at the ebbs and flows of immigration to the U.S. and how it's been shaped by racism against different waves of immigrants, explains how immigration is manipulated by Corporate America to ensure they have a plentiful supply of cheap labor and how capital uses the fear of immigration to divide and rule the American working-class. The book examines how the border was created through wars of aggression on the part of the U.S., how policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement have devastated Mexico's small farmer class and forced them to look for work in the cities of the U.S., and brings the forgotten history of Mexican immigrants who engaged in bitter and bloody struggles against big agri-business in the South and West especially in the 1930s.
The closing chapters explain how the debate over immigration has moved progressively rightward in the last 30 years or so, as successive Democratic and Republican administrations have passed more and more draconian laws against undocumented workers, made the Border Patrol the largest federal law-enforcement agency with over 12,000 officers, and wasted tens of millions of dollars into creating walls at the border designed not to stop immigration but to push it into ever-more remote areas, increasing the likelihood that immigrants will die in the desert trying to get the U.S. and earn a better life. The racist politics of the Minutement, the new immigrants rights movement, and the struggle for a socialist world run by the world's workers without borders are the topics covered in the book's closing chapters.
Not only is this book indispensible for immigrants' rights and anti-racist fighters, it's also very much a history of the most exploited, oppressed, and marginalized part of the working-class: undocumented workers from Mexico, and Central and South America whose labor keeps this country going in a very real way. I would recommend getting this along with Sharon Smith's "Subterranean Fire" to round out one's understanding of the history and nature of working-class struggle here in the U.S.
An Argument for Open Borders: They conclusion they arrive at is that: "we must reject the language, legitimacy, and limitations of "illegality" and tear down the borders between us. No one is Illegal!" But the way they arrive there is from the perspective of socialists. The authors see the issue of immigration from a labor struggle standpoint. They discuss at length the history of the racism, xenophobia and class struggles that have influenced the United State's immigration policy throughout history. They see almost all events through the lens of labor fighting for rights against a united front of capitalists who thwart them at every turn. They only touch briefly on the topic of organized labors historic opposition to open immigration since it does not fit properly with the theme of the book. The books main message is: "Borders serve only to divide people and reinforce the power of capital over all workers." I agree with that sentiment but would add that borders also reinforce the power of governments over people.
The book is an important contribution to the argument for open borders and will help to convince labor socialists that less restriction on the migration of labor is a positive thing. It has some very good historical data about the treatment of migrants in the west that I have not seen anywhere else.
The book is a good read with a serious labor bias that has to be discounted to be able to appreciate the valid arguments contained in it.
Fair trade, working class solidarity, compassion, etc.: This book dismantles the narratives we hear from the establishment media regarding undocumented workers. It covers the history of oppression migrant workers have faced, including beatings from the KKK and the Order of Caucasians, among other vigilantes organized by agribusiness interests. It also covers the devastating impacts of NAFTA on Mexico's economy. Page 121 points out, "Over 1.3 million small farmers in Mexico were pushed into bankruptcy by cheap American grain imports between 1994 and 2004. Luis Tellez, former undersecretary for planning in Mexico's Ministry of Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources, estimates that as many as 15 million peasants will leave agriculture in the next few decades, many seeing migration north as the only option. . . Meanwhile, the deindustrialization of Mexico continues unabated. Mexico lost an unprecedented 515,000 jobs in the first three months of 2005 alone." What industry there is, is now found in the sites of hyper-exploitation known as maquiladoras. One negative review calls the book "Marxist." Well, the book is mostly just an honest analysis of the situation. Something that demagogues like Tom Tancredo avoid. Tancredo likes to whip up hysteria. His congressional district (one of the wealthiest in the country) has a large Lockheed Martin plant. Lockheed will be making a fortune on the further militarization of the border. Anyway, the book does include one quotation from Karl Marx, and I think it's worth repeating. Justin Akers Chacon writes: "Marx illustrated the self-sabotaging nature of the conflict between 'native-born' workers and immigrant workers in his analysis of the relationship between the English and Irish working classes when he wrote, 'The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus stengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.' Inter-ethnic and international class solidarity, or lack thereof, has been a determinant of the progression, inertia, or regression of the American labor movement. When nationalist or chauvinist sentiments are strong, the working class is weak, demonstrating the deep penetration of ruling-class ideology into working-class consciousness." This book also covers the conquest of Mexico, and the opportunities for organizing immigrants.
This new book written by Justin Akers Chacon and Mike Davis addresses the issue of immigrant-directed violence and multiple other aspects of the immigration story in these United States. Published by Haymarket Press of Chicago, No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the US-Mexico Border is, among other things, another excellent history from this press of the US told from a popular working class perspective. Black Liberation and Socialism and Subterranean Fire before it, No One Is Illegal provides a refreshing and educational take on the bitter and often brutal history of the US and the people's fight against its excesses. The text opens with an 80-page history of western vigilantism by author and historian Mike Davis. This brief survey covers several cases of farmworkers' attempts to get a fair wage and decent working conditions and the murderous reaction to those attempts. Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Okies, Mexicans and others each in their turn became the whipping boys and girls of the powerful agriculture and banking interests in California. Without shame, these interests hired goon squads and fascist sympathizers to beat, harass, and occasionally murder the organizers and participants of farmworkers' actions. Official unions like the AFL maintained their whiteness and encouraged racial prejudice amongst its members. Partially because of this, the New Deal purposely ignored the farmworkers when it provided protections that the rest of the workforce in the United States now take for granted. It is Davis' contention that the vigilante man--as he calls these extralegal forces--are back again in the form of groups like the Minutemen. The remainder of the book is written by Justin Akers Chacon. He picks up where Mike Davis left off. Chacon., a Chicano Studies and US History professor in San Diego, California, is an anti-immigrant activist and organizer in the volatile city of San Diego. He presents an economic history and study of the historically unequal relationship between the United States and Mexico, all of it in relation to the question of northward migration. Although Chacon explores and explains the situation in detail and in relation to the workings of international capital in specific periods, he puts forth early on that the underlying reason that people in Mexico are leaving their homes to find work in North America is because: "According to a study produced by the International Labor Organization, the wages of the Mexican working class fell faster than in any other nation in Latin America over the last few decades.(p. 13)" This fact does not even begin to tell the story of the peasantry, who have seen their crops devalued again and again, thanks to US agribusiness domination of farming in Mexico, along with the massive imports of cheap staples from the north after the adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The story Chacon relates is one of struggle. Within the broader struggle of the working people against the bosses, there is the uglier but no less real story of the struggle between workers of different national origins; even between the Chicano and the Mexican or the Mexican and the Salvadoran. Not only diversionary, these internal struggles have only made it easier for agribusiness and other corporate entities to keep all of our wages lower. The documentation that the author provides in this regard--anecdotal and statistical--proves this latter point only too well. From the beginnings of immigrant labor in the US to today's reality where immigrants are not only portrayed as economic competitors but as potential "terrorists" as well, the manipulation of the native-born worker by his bosses has served the system only too well. Despite this, there are multiple instances of workers uniting across national and racial lines in strikes and other job-related actions. It is Chacon and Davis' contention (and mine) that the May Day 2006 strikes and marches are but the latest example of the possibilities of working class unity. Chacon completes his section of the book by bringing it full circle to the fight against anti-immigrant and racist vigilantism. His target is the so-called Minutemen. While rightly lampooning their organization as being mostly composed of a bunch of weekend warriors, he nevertheless takes this group and the phenomenon they represent seriously. Directly challenging the Minutemen's claims that they are not racist, Chacon points out the propaganda of fear that this group uses: telling their target audience that Latino immigration is "a silent Trojan Horse invasion that is eroding our culture." Drawing the link between this idea of a superior culture and the rhetoric of white supremacists in the United States, Chacon makes it clear that the Minutemen's agenda is a supremacist agenda combined with a superficial economic analysis that blames non native-born workers for the economic uncertainties many US workers find themselves in thanks to the latest stage of monopoly capitalism--capitalist globalization (or neoliberalism, which is what Chacon and many others call this stage.) He cites the presence of known racists in the organization and the attendance of KKK members and neo-nazis at Minutemen events as further proof of the group's racist underpinnings. Unmentioned in Chacon's discussion of the Minutemen's economic analysis is that elements in the United Farm Workers took a similar view of illegal migration. Indeed, the view that it was the individual fault of undocumented workers that everyone else's wages were lower convinced the UFW to lead a 1969 march to the US-Mexican border to protest illegal immigration. Furthermore, UFW members in Arizona actually patrolled the border in that state, chasing undocumented migrants back into Mexico. Chacon does mention this aspect of the UFW briefly, but attibutes the union's stance against illegals to the leadership's desire to appease supporters on the right wing of the Democratic Party. Any discussion of the superficiality of an economic analysis that blames the individual worker forced to migrate because of the machinations of capital does not occur in his comments on Cesar Chavez and the UFW. On a similar note, it seems worth mentioning that today's UFW conitinues to lean towards legislation that restricts immigration. Like Samuel Gompers and other labor leaders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the UFW (along with the SEIU and UNITE) went on record supporting the so-called Senate compromise bill, known colloquially as Hegel-Martinez. Like immigrant rights organizer Nativo Lopez told an audience in New York last month, How is it possible that those three unions bolted from the AFL-CIO to create the new progressive Change to Win coalition, and they accepted the premise that contract labor in massive form could exist in the United States, with those unions be the beneficiaries by cutting deals with Corporate America for yellow-dog collective bargaining agreements, in which they would receive dues money from those contract laborers. (Socialist Worker 6/30/2006) Yet, even Lopez seems to have gotten part of his history wrong when he continued by stating that Cesar Chavez was rolling over in his grave because of these unions' selling out. Lopez was correct, however, when he pointed out that the current "compromise" bills offered by Democrats in Congress are bills written by and for corporate America. He was also correct in urging his listeners to combat such compromises. Perhaps the most important aspect of this book is its internationalism. Chacon and Davis operate with the understanding that the working class in each nation is not a national entity as much as it is a global one. This is especially the case in today's world of capitalist globalization and the ever-increasing movement of capital across borders. With this movement of capital has come an even greater movement of workers. National borders are only reinforced to control wages of workers of all nationalities and to create and maintain divisions within the international working class. Just like imperial war, immigration control is a tool of the imperial elites in their pursuit of domination and profit. If the immigrant rights movement wants to be truly successful, Chacin reminds us that it must keep this perception as its basis. Its essential demand must be the eradication of borders--especially those borders that restrict humans from crossing them. Reading No One Is Illegal is a great place to begin understanding the fundamental nature of this demand.
Resources: