This past Saturday, we had a great march for immigration rights in New York City--on May 1st, thankfully, and sponsored by the labor movement to boot. Without a doubt, the Arizona racist legislation gave a boost to the turnout on a sun-drenched day. But, here is the point I have made in the past, and made at the rally to my sister and brothers: if we do not deal with the economic policies that our country promotes that drives immigration to the U.S., we can never truly address the immigration question.
The U.N. estimates that 191 million people are international migrants. Very few people on this earth want to leave their homes, their communities, their loved ones – and start all over in a strange land.
But for many reasons, millions of people have no choice. Natural disasters shatter lives and devastate economies. Countries are torn apart by war.Repressive regimes persecute people based on ethnicity or religion.
But the biggest single reason for migration all over the world is extreme poverty that results from inequality of wealth and power. That inequality has been made possible by the enslavement of billions of people--they are poor and exploited because the economic system that breeds great wealth for a few DEPENDS on poverty and exploitation of the many.
And the U.S. has set the underpinnings of this system through a whole set of decisions--supported by both parties--that bows down to the market and so-called "free trade".
Trade agreements open up markets and protect property, but not people.
We don’t like to think about it.
We don’t like to talk about it--or make connections to the obvious.
So, if you want to address immigration, you cannot do so without clearly linking the economic policies that force people off their land. The number one reason for the great flow of people from Mexico is NAFTA--which destroyed the ability of millions of farmers to make a living off their land and pushed people to border towns to be slaved in the maquiladora system.
To wit: the Democratic proposal, advanced by key leaders in the Congress and drawing support from the president, will fail and must be opposed. It will fail because it does not suggest revoking NAFTA or making deep changes in a global wage system that ultimately forces people from their homes. Instead, the proposal follows the tried-and-true model of blaming the victims and, then, throwing them a few bones:
Under the outline of immigration changes drawn up by Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Senate Democrat, the federal government would enhance border security and create a new fraud-resistant Social Security card.
Illegal immigrants who wish to remain in this country would have to admit they had broken the law, pay back taxes and fees, and pass a criminal background check to qualify for legal residency after eight years.
"Our immigration system is broken," the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, said late Thursday afternoon at a packed news conference. "We’re offering this framework as an invitation, an invitation to our Republican colleagues to work with us to solve this problem that has plagued our country for too long."
Even as the Democratic senators were still speaking, President Obama issued a statement praising the proposal as "an important step," and he warned that lack of federal action would "leave the door open to a patchwork of actions at the state and local level that are inconsistent and, as we have seen recently, often misguided."
This feels, says the life-long Yankees fan, like deja vu all over again. The debate over health was a center vs. right debate--and, thus, the insurance industry just got a massive windfall and we will not control health care costs nor cover all Americans. We've been robbed for 30 years of the great wealth of the country by a tiny elite--yet, those of us who were robbed will now pay to patch up bankrupt governments in the name of "deficit reduction"
And the immigration debate will follow the same script: move "right" to appease the "law-and-order" crowd, spend billions of "security" (which will ultimately fail and, yet, avoid having a serious debate about why immigration happens.
Here's a short video where I explain this point: