Thoughts on the Crisis over “Illegal” Immigration

Viewed historically, today’s “illegal immigration crisis” in the US is nothing new. Foreign labor is imported in terms that maximize its exploitation. In the face of political resistance by “native” workers, a two-tiered labor market has been established, subordinating the new arrivals to inferior status (no minimum wage floors; no insurance against workplace accidents, unemployment, sickness; no protection from workplace health and safety hazards or harassment or promotion/retention discrimination or wage embezzlement; no rights to unionize, to stake claims on social services, fair housing, anti-crime protection; etc., etc.).

Similar situations, where a super-exploited caste of workers were denied some of the rights of the relatively privileged caste of workers, had emerged in early Colonial times and in antebellum USA (first differentiating the status of African slaves from that of European indentured servants then granting Europeans free settler status), as well as in post-Civil War times (with immigrant labor from Asia relegated to inferior status than immigrants from Europe—and all immigrants subordinated to inferior status relatively to American-born Whites, while, concurrently, post-slavery Blacks were legally construed as subordinate to all of the above).

In the 20th century, following the end of the “open door” to immigrants from Europe, the lower-tier ranks (typically one notch above that of African-Americans) were relegated to colonial labor from the Philippines and Puerto Rico, as well as Mexican immigrants (whose status was vaguely “confused” with that of Mexican Americans). Later on, a two-tiered immigration pattern allowed political refugees from the Holocaust and Communism, as well as brain-drain migrants from all over the world, to achieve full citizen status, while confining a broad influx of Asian, Caribbean/Central American, and African immigrants to the limbo of a vibrant “informal economy” mainly in the East Coast’s Megalopolis (Portland, ME, to Charlotte, NC) and the Southwest.

This trend is continuing today, generalized throughout the country, with brain-drain immigrants and “illegals” attracting strikingly uneven attention and receiving entirely different treatment.

What’s Happening? (Economics)

We should first consider the political economy aspect. Accelerating past trends, post-Cold War capitalist globalization combines centrifugal mobility of capital (i.e., from the capital-rich center of the global economy to its (poor) labor-rich periphery) with centripetal labor mobility (i.e., the reverse of the preceding motion). The result is a complex multi-tiered global economy where capital seeks to be paired with labor in terms that are most advantageous to the capitalists.

Such global pairing is nothing new, except that it now happens on a scale that is larger than even the one attained in the heyday of colonial imperialism, 100 to 150 years ago. This new imperial economy complements the ongoing imperialism of natural resource grabbing, whose momentum does not seem to have abated with the replacement of the old colonial empires by neocolonialism (the latter first having been rationalized in the guise of anti-communism and now continuing in the name of anti-terrorism).

In the periphery, the pairing of capital and labor calls for the subversion of national independence, so that peripheral states may impose and defend the interests of global capital against the interests of the vast majority of their own citizenry—a practice sardonically described in US foreign policy parlance as “nation building” or “exporting democracy” but more aptly described by such terms as “neo-liberalism” or “new imperialism.” Viewed in this analytical context, the current immigration debate, as formulated in the hegemonic political discourse, deliberately obscures the exigencies of pairing labor and capital at home—in the core of the global economy.

Whether “running away” to the periphery (sometimes with business investments, sometimes with troop deployment and/or “clandestine operations”) or “failing to block the flow of illegal immigrants” into the US, whether trashing environmental standards or consumer and labor rights and human rights generally abroad or watering down the same at home, the capitalist corporate-state complex that rules the American Empire (to coin a term!) is one and the same. However, the victims of this imperial process are not generally being thought to be “one and the same.”

On one side are the victimized peoples of the Pakistans and Mexicos, the Darfours and the Palestines of this world; on the other are the (Norte-) Americans (and West Europeans and other rich nations’ nationals) who are subject to terrorist attacks, cultural erosion, social (perhaps racial?) dilution, and the threat of deindustrialization and eventual loss of hegemonic imperial status. Puzzlingly in the middle, stand Japan, Korea, China, possibly India—listed here in descending order of affluence but ascending order of menace to Western hegemony; these are mixed cases of victimizers and victimized, perhaps aptly described as semiperipheral in the new global order.

What’s Happening? (Politics)

Secondly, we should consider the globalization of state power. Anarchic though it may seem to us, in the wake of Bush’s unilateralist foreign policy, the post-Cold War globe is far closer to experiencing global state power than was true at any time in the past for the planet as a whole. Not only is there “systematic deployment of institutionalized violence” (the classical definition of state power) in evidence through much of the world; beyond that, there is the threat of such deployment that informs the practice of particular and/or partial state entities—even where the main dominion of global state power (i.e., the US imperial state) does not formally extend.

Whether through war or the threat of war, through multinational peacekeeping interventions or the threat of such interventions, through punitive sanctions or the fear of such sanctions—and of course, through the wielding of IMF, World Bank, WTO, and other such global governance institutions’ power—the end result is compliance. Compliance, that is, to the rule of global capital and to the rules of the global market in which this capital is reproduced.

This is not to say that the entire planet Earth is subject to America’s state power. Nor does it imply that US power is indirectly as well as directly truly planetary in effectiveness or even scope. Compliance to the rule of global capital is enforced by the politics of state power compliant itself to the exigencies of global capitalism; and global capitalism overlaps but does not necessarily equate with American capitalism. The American state’s power is preponderant, to be sure; its indirect reach may well exceed any previous empire’s influence.

But the rule of global capital itself is not undisputedly coincidental either with US national interests or with US economic interests. After all, that is precisely the issue over which neo-cons and neo-liberals bicker with each other as sell as with other political factions of the seemingly diverse but essentially unitary US mainstream ideology. Such debates, we well know, always leave aside the interests of the vast majority of the US people, much as political discourse elsewhere leaves out the interests of the bulk of the people of the world.

Put simply, in the era of economic globalization state power is accountable to the global economy, not vice versa. We live in a world where economics is truly in command.

Reviving A Subaltern Perspective

Today more than ever, big capital’s control of the mass-communication media set the context and tone of political debate, especially in this country. Had Gramsci lived to see 21st century America, he would no doubt redouble his emphasis on the need for “subaltern” class perspectives to contest ruling class hegemonic political discourse. And so, before we acquiesce to discussing “the problem on hand” as defined by the media (e.g., cultural and fiscal strains on US society, the intensified marginalization of “old” minorities and the poor, etc.), we must take care not to miss the opportunity to consider a truly progressive American response to the challenge of globalization.

Should the people of the periphery be seen as different from those in the core? Asking such a question seems to be shifting the argument from political economy to morality: Does the golden rule of according to others the same degree of humanity (and concomitant rights) apply globally in the era of globalization, or not? The question nowadays seems to be debated (albeit less and less audibly) in religious rather than political discourse. And yet this question is at the heart of politics in the 21st century —at the heart of the class struggle of our era.

For indeed, it is the class struggle that is covered up by debating the merits of “English only” education (or, for that matter, by the Europeans’ debate over head-scarves for les étudiantes) and so many other “hot” issues of the day. And it is the very same class struggle that is obscured and disoriented by the ethnic-religious polarization that so devastatingly ravages more and more of the poorer nations of our world.

Terminology of course can be damning: Whoever talks of “the class struggle” nowadays? It is a discredited term—“quaint,” as the US Attorney General would put it—whose currency faded with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the socialist movements around the globe.

Ironically, just about the only context in which this antique term may “legitimately” be used nowadays, is when neo-liberal politicians decry the use of “class warfare” by old-line liberals. Outside this usage, we are told that the problem on hand is “cultural” or that the economic and social issues involved are instances of “the North-South divide” or that America’s (meaning, the USA’s) national integrity is concerned.

All of these may be true as descriptions of what people experience in their particular situation—much like the particular symptoms of a disease are experienced as the illness per se; yet they neither explain why the illness is there or how to fight it and cure it: By choosing to dwell on some characterizations of “the problem” as an alternative to investigating its etiology, the prevailing (hegemonic) political discourse enables the ruling class to contain and perhaps defeat resistance to both its domestic and foreign policies.

That the class struggle can be co-opted and thrown off its track is nothing new; that such diversion can be as effective as it is nowadays needs some explanation. In the era of the global economy, it seems, humanity has rediscovered the particularities of socio-cultural insularity with a vengeance. Ironically, this is happening just as the traditional separation between international economics and national economics is becoming eclipsed by the global economy.

It is as if the cultural frontiers and the religious and racial frontiers are being mustered in order to fence in what the collapse of economic frontiers (and military and security frontiers, too) has seemingly left “unprotected.” And so our world seems to be retrogressing to pre-Cold War national chauvinisms and to pre-World War II race consciousness and to pre-Enlightenment religious divides—all of which offer functional, and indeed, efficient ways of organizing popular consciousness and acquiescence to the political practice of 21st century “Empire.”

Defining the Politics of Contestation

What is the alternative? At the risk of sounding quainter and quainter, one should expect a genuine working class leadership to wrestle the grounds of political discourse away from the hegemony of the ruling class. For example, instead of debating measures to counteract Japanese or Korean “dumping” and the “undervaluing” of Chinese currency—debates which tend to focus on rising Asian economies as the source of the problem—American labor ought to envision and advocate a workers-first (to coin a term less grating to one’s ears than “America-first”) domestic US industrial policy. Such policy would efficiently and humanely shift employment from the production of endangered import-competing commodities to the production of exportable goods (such as foodstuff and high-tech capital goods), non-foot loose services (including childcare, healthcare, education, and eldercare), and the building of sorely needed infrastructure.

This suggests a related example of worker-first—or better still, people-first—strategy: Massive public investment in renewable energy sources, renewable-resource-dependent mass transportation, and urban-suburban residential/workplace redeployment; fiscal and moral encouragement of less wasteful energy consumption patterns, including green housing, reduced garbage-generating packaging, and recycling; and aggressive reductions in the duration of the wage-work week in favor of longer involvement (tithing!) in community services and other volunteer action—including environmental healing and artistic or other culturally enriching experiences.

It is not accidental that all of the above examples entail more—not fewer—job opportunities and better—not worse—working conditions. Nor should it be surprising that, other things remaining the same (as economists love to postulate), these worker-first, people-first strategies for America would coincide with a rising—not falling—standard of living for Americans as a whole, with very few exceptions. And it is essential that such a progressive American agenda clearly identifies the exceptions: Those who derive the bulk of their windfalls from the despoiling of America’s human and natural environment; those who profiteer from massive public spending on the so-called “goods” of our unproductive, so-called “defense” sector; those whose fortunes are made abroad, in the hotbeds of the global economy’s human exploitation and environmental degradation, especially as these are made possible thanks to US overt and clandestine government and corporate intervention. One could add more categories to these; but the real objective of drawing such distinctions ought to be the shortening of the list—a true healing of America away from “destructive class warfare.”

Destructive class warfare is precisely what the ruling class of this nation have been pursuing over the one-third century since the end of the New Deal. To the demise of Jim Crow Apartheid laws of race discrimination they have countered with the “white backlash” and crocodilian tears over a “culture of poverty” which their media at once glorify and vilify. Against mid-20th century expectations of a rising social wage (the combined standard of wider employment, higher pay, shorter work hours, and improved security against workplace hazards, lay-offs, disability, and post-retirement poverty) and a tighter social safety net (especially with respect to children born in poverty and the permanently unemployable), they have wrought de-industrialization and the fiscal crisis of the state, the latest manifestation of which is the “predicted” (“planned” would be more apt) bankruptcy of the Social Security System.

Deindustrialization itself offers a trove of examples as to what it means that this nation’s working class lacks control of the political stage. When the “rustbelt” lost industrial production to the “sunbelt,” only the jobs migrated—not the income and workplace standards that had been fought for over one entire century prior. On the contrary, to the export of jobs corresponded the importation back North of the living standards that made the South so “attractive” to capital to begin with.

And who was to blame for this unequal exchange? The ostensibly high costs of “government regulation” and labor unions, and also, the skillfully insinuated competitive threat by recently desegregated minorities and likewise emancipated women. Indeed, it is not at all accidental that the newfound concern for the “unborn children” (as distinct from the lack of concern for children after they’re born) and the anti-feminist backlash it has fueled have resonated (along with the “white backlash”) with so many in the social strata that have most been affected by deindustrialization.

And so it goes. When globalization took jobs abroad what was imported back from the Third World was more than commodities: we also imported “union-free” workplaces, with the absence of occupational health, safety, and harassment protections—along with a strengthened dose of post-Vietnam Asia-bashing and post-Cold War terrorism-mongering. And when the jobs did manage to stay at home, we imported the millions of super-exploited, “human rights-free” labor whose ranks now comprise the latest object of politically orchestrated panic and hatred. So, after all, “other things are not remaining the same.”

The class struggle rages in the United States today—and the nation’s working class is caught in a life and death struggle against itself, divided as artfully as the Muslim population of Iraq is divided, sect by sect. In the face of a falling social-wage (i.e., declining real-wages, longer average work-weeks, increased unemployment insecurity, diminishing protection from on-the-job hazards and health, age, or accident-related disability, non-materializing benefits for working parents and for the long-term unemployable—and also growing decay in community living-standards, in the quality of healthcare, education, and family life for large segments of our people) we Americans are reduced to bickering with one another over who came in on the last banana boat and whose boat should be sunk first.

A People-First Stance on Immigration

Had a truly progressive US political party existed—or at the very least, had our political discourse permitted a truly democratic challenge to capitalist hegemony—we would not be debating now how high and thick “The Wall” should be. Nor would we be arguing the merits of criminalizing cut-rate labor through the expedient of persecuting the laborers—any more than we should be arguing in favor of the persecution of prostitutes (as opposed to our culture’s reification of women as sex and to the pimps who rake in profits in every twist and turn of the peddling of reified sex in our “market economy”); or any more than we should be rooting for more prisons and tougher police raids on street-level drug dealers, as opposed to promoting policies to address addiction and contain it through decriminalization, medicalization, and public education.

In other words, a progressive stance on excessive immigration would concentrate on the market structures that make such immigration a problem and not on those among the “excess” immigrants who are the weakest and more easily vilified by the insinuation of race, language and culture in the political discourse. The labor-market structure that produces today’s “illegal immigration” into the United States is of course that of global capitalism.

Within our national-territorial space, globalization is usually presented in a context that favors placing the blame on the workers, not their employers. Foreign workers are blamed for intruding in the American labor market, while native-born workers are blamed for exiting this same market by virtue of their exorbitant social-wage expectations. Either way, our present-day hegemonic ideology incites us to blame the decline in the US social wage on the workers’ behavior.

A progressive countering of this ideology would show that such imputed behavior is neither always true nor at all events responsible for the decline in the social wage. On the contrary, workers-first economic analysis should expose the erosion of the social wage as the main cause—not outcome—of both the mass influx of “illegal immigrants” and the marginalization of low-skill level native workers.

A progressive workers-first strategy would target the capitalist state-corporate complex as responsible for failing to enforce a tougher regime not on undocumented laborers but rather on employers who preferentially hire any laborers—native or foreign born, Anglophone or other-tongued—so as to debase their labor value and thus reap superprofits. We should insist on enforcing—and improving—all labor laws in all labor contracts within the United States, while also working to oppose US foreign policy, which consistently undermines similar rights abroad. In the long run, the success of this strategy would tend to stabilize the rate of immigration into this country, in accordance with both objective needs and the subjective desires of the overwhelming majority of its people, as opposed to the interests of the few who now determine the direction of this country’s economy and politics.

A progressive people-first strategy would embrace the communities that presently “harbor” minority populations in the “haven” of no safety, no adequate services, and no access to any genuine due process of law in the course of their multi-faceted interaction with each other and the rest of US society. Far from treating these ghettos as if they were cancers on the republic, it would seek to extend to them democratic rights that all other residents in the republic are supposed to have—including electoral participation in the running of school boards, local police, and municipal government.

Such a strategy is far from utopian; it is entirely consistent with the rational interests of native-born Americans—and working-class Americans in particular. In the past quarter century, similar rights have been sought and, in several instances, have been secured for non-citizen residents in the nations comprising the West European core. If anything, it is the failure to implement such policies on a wider scale that explains the explosive divisiveness between old-stock Europeans and their new, Asian or African-origin compatriots. The United States too is no doubt headed in the same direction of renewed civil strife, as it moves away, in the direction of bigoted confrontation that today’s politicians and media frenzy are bent on inculcating among Americans.

Lastly, a progressive America-first strategy would mobilize support for deploying this country’s human and material resources not in endless imperialist wars but at home, on the real warfront for America’s future. Rather than offering to the youth of our marginalized working class bonuses for enlisting in the armed forces as the sole alternative for “making a decent living” (how much irony in applying to this instance each of these three words!) our taxes ought to be funding the deployment of our youth to a bee-hive America, where everybody who is good enough to work here is good enough to share in the rights, obligations, and privileges of being (and becoming) an American.

Baltimore, May 2006