How
Neo-Liberalism Has Created
The World's Immigration Crisis
By Jerry D. Rose
12 February,
2008
Countercurrents.org
Nothing is more maddening in
the arena of public opinion and policy today than our totally insane
approach to the "crisis" of immigration in America; and
it's not that much better in some European countries. In an election
season, opinion and policy (at least promises of policy) get entertwined
in the public discourse and it becomes hard to tell the difference
between a blow-hard hot stove ranter and a vote-pandering politician.
The "thought" level is equally mind-numbing in either case.
Public speakers give us gum-ball demonstrations of how the country
is about to get inundated by immigrants, recalling the late 19th century
panic about an impending tide of eastern European Catholic immigration
or the "yellow peril" of newcomers from Asia. Political
candidates of all persuasions take it for granted that we have to
"seal our borders" against illegal intruders; and Congress
votes funding for a wall separating the U.S. and Mexico, re-inforced
by high-tech surveillance equipment and the "assistance"
of Minute Man-type vigilantes. Immigration agents invade meat-packing
and other factories to haul off "illegals" for swift deportation.
States and cities rush to fill in any federal gaps in immigrant-suppression,
and Congress gets itself tied in knots about what some call a "path
to citizenship" (however rocky) while others scream about amnesty
for the "crime" of crossing the border without permission.
Republican presidential candidates compete with one another over who
would be "tougher" on immigration and Democrats, as usual,
practice a "softer" form of suppression in which you're
not exactly sure how in the hell they would handle this situation.
What to do? What to do?
Well, how about we start with recognizing what may be the crux of
the matter: that the U.S. and the rest of the world is caught in a
trap of "neo-liberal" globalization which has made corporate
profit the be and end-all of public policy. Under the inspiration
of this philosophy, the world economy is re-made as a global playground
of profit-seeking for its corporate entrepreneurs, with "privatized"
societies which render each individual an atom of existence to be
manipulated for corporate profit at the expense of the pleasures and
supports of the social commons. These "atoms," cut loose
from the bonds of family and community, are not only free but compelled
for their own survival to move from their ancestral homelands to other
places where they have a chance of survival. Given that the more "developed"
countries offer employment opportunities that are marginally better
than those available to people in the "under-developed"
ones, the immigration flow is predominantly from under-developed to
developed ones, as from Latin Americans to the U.S. and Canada, Africans
and Asians to "old" countries of western Europe.
The clash we now seeing playing out in these "developed"
countries is based on what has been happening to working people in
those countries as well. "Neo-liberal" policies have certainly
not spared them either. Under the influence of Ronald Reagan in the
U.S., to mention one bellwether in this movement (like Margaret Thatcher
in Britain) , the security of workers has been severely challenged
by anti-labor policies that have reduced the organized labor movement
to a shadow of its former self; while one after another political
administration (especially Republican but also Clinton Democratic)
has hammered away against the social compact of public concern for
the welfare of individuals. It became relatively easy to "starve
the beast" of educational, health and other services for citizens,
since these years of retrenchment of government services corresponded
with the growth of a (truly) voracious beast of expenditures for (often)
needless military purposes that sapped budgets and created huge deficits
that helped to undermine Social Security and any chance of a truly
national health system.
So there you have it. Workers from under-developed countries deprived
of opportunities to make a living at home "flood" into countries
like the United States, The Netherlands or France and the socially
insecure native workers of these countries see the immigrant workers
as the source of their problems. As Jim Hightower says in an article
just published in Alter Net, American workers look down on the immigrant
as a competitor for work and for scarce public services, when they
should be looking up to the people on Wall Street and in Washington
who are the really responsible parties for their insecurities.http://www.alternet.org/workplace/76076/
In exactly the same way, it has been noted that the people who hunted
and executed witches in Salem in 1692 were traditionally agrarian-oriented
people made to feel insecure by the new class of capitalist merchants
coming to prevail in that community. However they did not attack the
power-wielders in the town and village precisely because they were
powerful but instead looked (way) down to some of the outcastes who
could serve as appropriate scapegoats on which to express their insecurity.
Perhaps immigrants in industrialized countries today are the witches
of the 21st century.
We like to think, of course, that we are more "enlightened"
than the religious fanatics who carried out the Salem witch trials.
That remains to be seen, as he have yet to see whether an "enlightened"
path can be found from witch-persecution to the recognition of the
common humanity of the earth's peoples. And that path remains to be
explored in a later essay that I'm calling "Toward a Just-Plain-Liberal
Approach to the Immigration Crisis."
Jerry D. Rose, a retired sociology professor from
State University of New York, lives in Gainesville Florida. He edits
and publishes The Sun State Activist at http://www.sunstateactivist.org.
He can be contacted at [email protected].
