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NEWS & LETTERS,
January-February 2002
Lead article
Bush-Ashcroft declare war on immigrant
communities
by Htun Lin "Workshops Talks"
columnist The ongoing fallout from the
September 11 terrorist attack continues to injure workers, especially immigrant
workers in the U.S. Security measures have choked the borders where labor and
goods cross, and smothered local economies, and countless immigrant workers have
lost jobs in the low-paying tourist travel, hotel and restaurant industry
already falling into recession when September 11 struck. Most pressing of all, Attorney
General John Ashcroft launched a dragnet plan to pick up and interview upwards
of 5,000 foreigners—all men ages 18 to 33, from mostly Middle Eastern
countries—who entered the U.S. on non-immigrant visas during the past two
years. The Bush administration refused any attempts by the American Civil
Liberties Union and others to identify some 1,000 detainees, many of whom were
reported to have been denied legal counsel. As part of the crackdown, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) will turn over 314,000 names to the
FBI of people it says have disappeared to avoid deportation. They will be
entered into a National Criminal Information Database. FBI questioning includes
queries about one's political views. This is consistent with their redefining
the term "terrorist" to include "leftwing groups, generally
professing a revolutionary socialist doctrine." Many people who live in
this country from various nations have escaped traumatic repressions and
crackdowns by dictators at home, who often have been useful allies to U.S.
military strategic interests. Those regimes often summarily define all those who
object to their iron-fisted rule as "leftists." All this has been perpetrated
in the name of fighting terrorism. However, even before September 11, the INS
got away with tarring anyone it pleased as undesirable. In one instance, a young
mother in Falls Church, Va., called the police on her husband who had brutally
beaten her. Because she had fought back, the police arrested her and she then
faced deportation and separation from her children (USA TODAY MAGAZINE, 8/00).
And Taiwanese scientist Wen Ho Lee was accused of espionage and jailed for nine
months for no other reason than his Chinese ancestry. Then on September 11, Osama Bin
Laden and his Al Qaeda network provided a golden opportunity for reactionary
right-wing forces to use the fear of terrorism as an excuse to attack all civil
liberties. What such measures have to do with combating terrorism is harder to
see than how they illuminate immigration policy that in turn gives a green light
to exploit immigrants at work and leave them hidden and vulnerable to xenophobic
attacks in local communities. Employers here know very well
that they need immigrant workers, but now Bush-Ashcroft may feel less interested
in the pre-September 11 initiatives for some kind of amnesty. Instead, there's
going to be more of a police state control over their movements and lives with
bosses following suit. LIVES UPENDED, WORK INTENSIFIED Many Latino workers I meet on
the job say they are very careful about what they say now, so as not to risk
losing their jobs or jeopardizing their status here in the U.S. One housekeeper
told me some of her friends have returned to Mexico, unable to deal with the
climate of fear and suspicion caused by heightened surveillance. She also said
others are hesitant to visit their families in Mexico because quagmires at the
border might keep them from returning to their jobs. Many who commute across the
border daily have faced interminable delays and lost their jobs. Many
immigrants, especially those judged by authorities to have an Arab or
Middle-Eastern appearance, have complained of co-workers or bosses harassing
them as if they were somehow responsible for the September 11 attacks. Assaults on immigrants are
occurring nationwide. The Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee in
Washington, D.C. was inundated with calls in the weeks after September 11. Arab
Americans, Muslims and Sikhs reported they had faced repercussions on the job.
"We're fighting a war in Afghanistan," said Kareem Shora, legal
adviser for the committee. "But we're also fighting a war here, fighting
for our way of life"—a way of life, which, contrary to Bush's
presumptions, is not being attacked merely by the terrorists, but by his own
attorney general's actions. Immigrants are currently the
"canaries in the mine" in a burgeoning setback to American civil
liberties. Ashcroft himself declared in front of a Congressional panel that
those who would criticize his methods of conducting racial dragnets and
"interviews" or support for military tribunals, are in effect,
"aiding and abetting" the terrorists. An immigrant legal advocate in
San Francisco told me there were already much tougher INS reviews triggered by
minor technical violations of new and complex immigration rules. She says, even
before September 11, the punitive immigration bill of 1996 erected many new
barriers to immigrants applying for naturalization or reunification with family
members. And the INS has put people in prison at a vastly faster rate than any
other agency. From 5,500 people in 1994, that population ballooned to 188,000 in
2001. Now, after September 11, a
police network constantly identifies immigrants and associates them with terror.
As a Mexican immigrant said, "Why are we being denied the right to be here
because of September 11? We're hard working people trying to raise our family.
We're not criminals." LEADING EDGE OF TREND Heeding xenophobic calls to
create a national identification card, state governments like California are
taking steps to use the driver licensing system to electronically store
information wholly unrelated to one's driving record. Digital technology
promises to elevate racial profiling, from the arena of illegal behavior by
rogue cops to a legally regularized, ubiquitous procedure. As many immigrants
are aware, there's no legal way around the requirement of having a driver's
license or state i.d. if one seeks employment or other benefits of civil
society. In California we thought we
were done with the hateful "wedge politics" of former Governor Pete
Wilson when his anti-immigrant Proposition 187 was ruled unconstitutional. Now
for reasons totally unrelated to terrorism, right-wing anti-immigrant groups
have seized this opportunity to push their agenda. One anti-immigration
spokesman openly admitted, "Now is our chance to get the laws
passed...because there's political will to reduce the number of
immigrants." Unfortunately even
"liberals" like Senator Feinstein echo the same sentiment. She's using
her position on the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration as a pulpit to rail
against any consideration of amnesty which she calls a "reward for illegal
behavior." What Feinstein calls "illegal behavior" refers to the
millions who cross the border and find their way to the farms and factories of
the U.S. where their "behavior" makes the U.S. way of life possible.
Capitalists and their spokespeople like Feinstein have no problem with
immigrants working here as long as they are kept outside of labor organizations,
any kind of regulatory protections, and most formal legal rights and social
support. But now, Feinstein's jingoist
rhetoric, the FBI's dragnet, and other measures sharpen the distinction between
citizens and immigrants, even those who are naturalized. Exacerbating that
distinction are nativism and racism that fuel exclusionary attitudes, even
toward those born in the U.S. and supposedly afforded constitutional rights,
impermanent as they are. PERSISTENT IN CAUSE OF FREEDOM To this day, an undocumented
immigrant, who has crossed the Rio Grande, the Atlantic, or the Pacific to work
and create value in the U.S. economy, is not seen as a full human being, with
similar rights and privileges accorded all other tax payers. Jeffersonian
bourgeois liberal democracy similarly asked whether the Black slave should be
counted as three-fifths of a person, while the products of his labor were sold
at full value in the open market. Upending such thinking,
immigrant workers have been a persistent force in the struggle for freedoms in
the U.S. In spite of today's climate of fear, Latino workers are striking
against Charles Krug, the last unionized winery in California's Napa Valley.
They are representative of lots of unheard of struggles. They have been locked
out since July for rejecting an outrageous contract proposal that takes away
health benefits, cuts wages, and allows outside contracting. Krug's chief
financial officer cynically justified even more outrageous takeaways because of
the "post-September 11 economy." Aurelio Hurtado, a veteran of
farmworker struggles, articulated the opposite idea. Calling for a boycott of
Charles Krug wines, Hurtado spoke at a Jan. 5 rally by the workers. "The
labor action witnessed today is an example of a continuing struggle to maintain
all the rights won through the long hard struggle since the days of Cesar
Chavez," he declared. "They are trying to crush this union to set an
example for the rest of the other shops, with these take-backs." Corners of concrete resistance
are appearing elsewhere. Immigrant coalitions like the National Network for
Immigrant Rights and Refugee Rights are finding allies and have not been afraid
to criticize the administration's detentions based on racial profiling. And a conference in February on
"Violence, Activism, Agency" sponsored by Asian Pacific American
Studies at Loyola Marymount University recalled that the jingoism-inspired
racist murder of Vincent Chin in 1982 and the Los Angeles uprising ("sa-i-gu")
in 1992 "galvanized Asian American civil rights groups and, as a result,
increased coalition building." It went on to warn that "the scope and
frequency of hate crimes in the post 9/11-terrorist-attacks continue
unabated" and asked "What is to be done?" Pundits continually speak now
of the new level of militarization and a new world order based on fear.
Immigrants are feeling the impact of this police state most concretely in their
everyday struggles. They are a dimension that is international and they embody a
human response to global capital's militarized inhumanity. |
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