How
The pro-Migrant Movement Stopped Fascism In The U.S.
And How To Finish The Job
By Juan Santos
25 January, 2007
Countercurrents.org
2006 marked a sea change in US
politics, but the decisive moment was not election day, it was March
25th, the day that over a million Mexican and Central America migrants
and their Chicana/o allies marched in the streets of Los Angeles, following
a march of similar magnitude in Chicago.
The movement was on –
someone – millions of someones - sent a shocking message to the
ruling elites of the most powerful empire in world history: The Republican
juggernaut toward Fascism would stop at our door, and it would not take
a single step further. Brown people throughout the US were on red alert:
the racists behind the rise of the shock troops called the Cazamigrantes
(the Minutemen) were moving in Congress to make every migrant in the
nation – everyone without papers, and everyone who “assisted”
them – a felon.
They would have unleashed
a new wave of mass repression in the nation’s barrios, repression
like the Zoot Suit Riots and Operation Wetback, making everyone with
Brown skin an automatic target, a suspect in a felony, vulnerable to
mass roundups and detention camps. Brown skin would become the new yellow
star, one worn by every person of native decent in the country. The
“Americans” – who are not “Americans”
at all, but the descendants of foreign colonizers and conquerors, meant
to declare this land off limits to the descendants of its original inhabitants,
who knew no borders.
We knew this much: Fascism
always targets the Other; the dominant group, the “Aryans”
or “Good Germans” would remain oblivious; for them, everything
would seem normal.
Police state conditions in
the ghetto, the barrio and on the reservations had already become “normal.”
The system had crushed the rebellions of the 60s and replaced Jim Crow
segregation with 25 years of mass incarceration for Red, Black and Brown
people. The white response was silence. Even after the mass rebellion
in Los Angeles that spread across the nation, the silence surrounding
our deepening oppression was thick as death.
Here in the “land of
the ‘free’” with its “free press,” almost
no one could have told you that our rates of incarceration are the highest
in the world. No one even knew; they weren’t supposed to know
that, just like no one was supposed to know – or care - about
the concentration camps in Germany. The “War on Drugs” was
the first giant step toward a police state in the US. Hardly anyone
breathed a word. White people were not the target, after all. The target
was the old, comfortable target: us. Millions were felonized and incarcerated.
Sensenbrenner’s bill
targeting migrants was round two of a massive effort to felonize peoples
of color in the US. This time the target was the most vulnerable of
the vulnerable – people who had carried the slur “illegal”
on their backs for decades, people without papers, whose most fundamental
rights could be violated with impunity, who, according to the colonizer,
had no “legal” right to even be here. The Nazi state had
done just the same thing; their first targets were not Jews or Gypsies
or Slavs, they were so-called “stateless people.” They wore
the blue triangle in the German camps.
In 2006 it was up to us to
act, to defend ourselves, and we knew it. No one was coming to our rescue.
And no one, not even the mainstream Spanish language media, had any
illusions about it.
And act we did, in city after
city across the nation, in our millions, tens and hundreds of thousands
– everywhere. The “Sleeping Giant,” it was said, had
awakened, and had sent an unmistakable message, one that even redneck
liberals like talk show host Ed Schultz could understand. “They
can make trouble,” he said.
The struggle of the Chicana/o
people against the Minutemen proved the point.
We proved it in Los Angeles,
in showdowns like the Battle of Baldwin Park, where Chicana/o protestors
drove the Minutemen from the street, outnumbering them six to one; in
the violent standoff in Garden Grove, where a Minuteman supporter ran
down several Chicana/os with his car, to be met by a hail of stones,
and in the desert outside Campo, California, where scores of resistors
walked boldly and empty handed into a Minutemen encampment, facing down
an armed throng of racists and disrupting their efforts to hunt down
migrants on the border - all showed clearly what the system might face
if Chicana/os and migrants forged a united front of resistance in the
face of escalating mass repression.
Plans were afoot to organize
migrant defense committees, and to get ready for mass civil disobedience.
These early fighters set
the stage for the mass marches to come, and the tone of resistance they
set is what the ruling elites most feared – not the promise that
we would organize ourselves to ”vote.”
Many called it a “New
Civil Rights Movement” – and they were both right and wrong
about that. They were right, because of the massive outpourings and
the spirit of determination to be free. Wrong, because our history is
different from that of the Black nation in the US, and most of all,
because the conditions we faced, and are still facing, are very different
indeed.
The fifties and sixties were
a time of worldwide anti-colonial rebellion and rising expectations
around the globe; people expected to be free. The US and other colonial
and neo-colonial powers were on the defensive around the world. Today,
the US has its hands on the throat of the world, and with the Sensenbrenner
bill they put their hands at our throats, too. War and repression abroad
were mirrored by a growing mass repression at home: the nation was heading
rapidly toward fascism. No one had a dream. The dreams had all been
crushed, and the extreme Right was looking to make a decisive breakthrough
in establishing a new kind of fascism here in the US.
We stopped them cold. This
is very important to get. No one else had stood up, and once we were
down, no one else would have or even could have stood up: the drive
toward fascism would have all been downhill from there.
But the fascist juggernaut
slammed into a Brown wall of resistance. Republican unity shattered,
and the silence shattered with it. The Christian fascists had gone too
far, and the nation turned on them, the way that school kids will turn
on a bully when someone – finally – gives him a bloody nose.
Now, the Democrats –
the Republicans silent partners in the “War on Drugs” and
in fascistic legislation like the Patriot Act - have turned their gaze
back our way, promising “comprehensive immigration reform.”
Their first priorities are
a border sealed with guns, more raids like the recent attacks on Swift
packing plants, and a “guest worker” program much like the
infamous guest worker program in racist South Africa under Apartheid.
No matter what the Democrats
say, no matter what they “promise,” this is no time to play
by the rules. The whole premise of playing by the rules is drenched
in racism and can lead nowhere but to a deepening oppression. Let’s
look at the covert racism, and the openly imperialist perspective, in
these remarks by liberal icon Ted Kenney:
“Mr. Kennedy, a Democrat
of Massachusetts, said opponents ‘misleadingly categorize our
efforts as an 'amnesty.' Legal status, he continued, "must be earned
by proving past work contributions, making a substantial future work
commitment, and paying monetary penalties. It is not a guarantee of
citizenship, but an opportunity to continue working hard, start playing
by the rules, and earn permanent residency."
Kennedy, here, would have
us believe that migrants must “earn” the right to be here
– he implies that migrants are freeloaders without a substantial
commitment to work, that migrants are people who don’t “play
by the rules,” and that they should be fined for failing to play
by the rules.
But the rules are made by
and for the ruler’s benefit, not ours. Kennedy is clearly in a
position to know that millions of people in Mexico have been driven
from the land in the vast capitalist conspiracy called NAFTA; he surely
knows that the main beneficiaries of their dispossession have been the
capitalist elites of the US, he surely knows that these people have
been and continue to be driven here so that Kennedy’s own class
might profit. He knows that the whole set up of the Mexican economy
is rigged to maximize foreign profit and to minimize the ability of
the Mexican people to accumulate capital within the borders of Mexico
itself.
Kennedy cannot be ignorant
of the recent history of his own government in sponsoring death squad
regimes in El Salvador, or the US backed genocide in Guatemala, both
of which produced waves of refugees heading North.
But Kennedy’s logic
is to blame the migrants themselves for the causes and the effects of
capitalist globalization and for mass state terror sponsored by the
USA.
From Mexico to Panama to
Venezuela to Guatemala to Nicaragua, Iraq and Iran, US capital and power
routinely crosses third world borders to steal resources, gut economies,
undermine or overthrow governments, and sponsor death squads and regimes
of torture. Those responsible have the audacity to call someone crossing
their border in search of something so innocent as a job “illegals”
and “criminals” who must pay a price for their “crimes”
and “rule breaking.”
This is where the scapegoating
of migrants starts. It is meant to paper over the real crimes of the
real criminals, while further persecuting their victims.
Kennedy’s logic is
the same fundamental logic of racism and empire that permeates the arguments
of extreme right wing elements like Congressmen Tom Tancredo, Jim Sensenbrenner,
and their shock troops in the Minutemen and other racist vigilante groups
like Southern California’s “Save Our State.” The problem
isn’t – it “can’t be” - oppression –
it’s Mexican and Central American “rule breakers,”
an image that ultimately rests in the stereotype of the lawless, “savage,”
brutal and drunken Mexican “bandito” and the “savage
Indian.”
To acquiesce at any level
to this base line logic is to surrender the battlefield to our enemies,
and to turn ourselves into beggars, begging a heartless system –
one that recognizes no “rules” or limits at all in the pursuit
of profit - for our most basic human rights.
No: we are not in a situation
analogous to the Civil Rights movement; our situation would be better
compared to the onset of Jim Crow than to the period of its formal demise.
It is better compared to the period of the Weimar Republic in pre-Nazi
Germany than to the situation of the US in the 1960s.
In today’s atmosphere
we cannot allow the system free reign to reinforce racist stereotypes
against our people at any level, much less to enforce them against us
at the point of the gun called law, however “comprehensive”
their aim.
In the wake of our victory
in 2006, the terrain has changed, new balances are being struck, and
powerful elements are seeking to gain as much ground as they can in
an effort to keep the door open for more measures like the Sensenbrenner
bill in the future. Our strategic imperative is to slam that door on
them, once and for all.
The Christian Right has regrouped
in an anti-migrant coalition that is “bigger and broader than
the Secure Border Coalition that dominated the debate on the right in
the last go round” and they are now proposing their own “grand
compromise” on migrants. Right Wing Watch notes that a coalition
of 150 Christian Right groups “will support legalization of those
already in this country – but only in exchange for doing away
with the guarantee of birthright citizenship granted under the 14th
Amendment.”
The Washington Times writes
"Out of concern for keeping families together [sic], the religious
leaders propose granting citizenship to any illegal aliens in the country
who are related to U.S. citizens. This would include anyone who has
had a child born here, often referred to as an 'anchor baby,'"
the Washington Times reported. "In return, the federal government
would end birthright citizenship, which automatically grants U.S. citizenship
to anyone born here, regardless of his parents' legal status. The 14th
Amendment says 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States
. . . are citizens of the United States."
The 14th amendment also overturned
the infamous Dred Scott decision, which had held that people of African
descent could never be citizens of the US. Chief “Justice”
Roger B. Taney wrote in the decision that Black people are "beings
of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white
race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that
they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
The 14th Amendment also includes
the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. The Amendment is so fundamental
to the rights of peoples of color in the US that Supreme Court Justice
David Souter called it "the most significant structural provision
adopted since the original framing" of the Constitution. It was
the foundation on which Brown vs. Board of Education was determined,
the decision that ended formal segregation in the US.
And now they want to uproot
it, and use us – to use any spirit of “compromise”
with racism on our part – advance their cause. There is at best
a fine line between “sub-citizen” and sub-human. But however
fine the line, it cuts just as deep, even deeper, than Sensenbrenner’s
effort to declare us all “felons.”
Ostensibly, without the 14th
amendment and the birthright of citizenship – the much-ignored
provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo aside – there would
be no such thing as a Chicana/ o in the US: that’s how deep this
could cut.
Our enemies will, of necessity,
take advantage of anything that advances developments in the direction
of an openly fascist state that targets and scapegoats the Other.
Nothing sets that tone like
mass incarceration of peoples of color in the US, and the cutting edge
of such potentials today is the continued militarization of the border,
the mass detention camps being built for migrants by Dick Cheney’s
Halliburton, and open, public roundups like the recent Swift raids.
Democrats and Republicans alike promise more of the same. Even the so-called
“guest worker” programs create a race- based subclass of
workers without rights, workers held utterly hostage to their employers.
The “guest worker”
program is being coupled with stiffening workplace repression and raids.
Tonight President Bush bragged that workplace arrests are up 700% over
their number in 2002. Even as Bush prepared to deliver his speech tonight,
mass raids in Santa Ana California rounded up over 700 people from their
homes and places of business. This is a clear cut example of what Bush
really meant when he spoke this evening of targeting migrants “without
animosity and without amnesty.”
Every one of us is needed
now to stand strong. We are not sub-humans and must utterly refuse any
scheme that might tend, however “benignly,” in that direction.
We should cut no deals now
with powerful racists of any stripe. Each of us should support the calls
for another Gran Boicot in May – and no matter what the mainstream
Spanish speaking media does or fails to do to back us, we should march
under four banners this Spring, banners that shatter the terms of the
debate, that unfurl the truth of the matter and put that truth square
in the sights of our oppressors, that reclaim our humanity in the face
of all the ugly and vicious stereotypes:
“We came to Work”!
“We fled the Death Squads!”
“We fled Starvation!”
“No Human Being is “Illegal!”
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