Immigration and Reparations: a Black-Latino intersection
National Council of Black Political Scientists, San Francisco, March 24, 2007.
The first time people in the US registered open concern with an immigration problem was in the 1800s, in Pennsylvania. Before the Civil War, there were few restrictions on immigration by whites. The anti-immigrant movement that expressed these concerns used a rhetoric of job competition, illegal aliens, and unwanted people very similar to the anti-immigrant movement today. It proposed the establishment of border guards, not at the main port in Phila., but along Pennsylvania's southern border. European immigrants weren't the target of the complaint; runaway slaves from the southern states seeking freedom were. In the succeeding decades, white Pennsylvanians managed to violently prevent Black people from voting, and they included black disenfranchisement in a new constitution adopted in 1836. The arguments a judge used to disqualify Black votes in an election in 1834 were the precursor to Justice Taney's reasoning in the Dred Scott decision in 1854. [Litwack, Turner, McManus]
While its political rhetoric spoke of job competition and fear of an "outside" political force, this "anti-immigrant" movement in Pennsylvania in reality forcused on its fear of a corruption of the purity of white "American" society. It was the character and sanctity of the nation that was being defended. And it acted in alliance with the slaveholders of the south who exerted political influence through the Democratic Party to make conditions in the north as repressive and austere as possible for Black people, in order to discourage runaways. But northern denizens acted out of their own feelings of white nationalism, and supported slavery as a way of maintaining the color line that guarded their nation.
Pennsylvania was not monolithic in this; many white people supported the runaways, opposed slavery as immoral or criminal, and assisted the underground railway. But the political class was in general imbued with white nationalism.
Today's new vigilante movements and the recent anti-immigrant legislation in California and the southwest against Latino and not European immigration has a similar ideological foundation, the white supremacist ethos. And as in Pennsylvania, there are movements today of people who value human beings more than property or racialization and support human rights for Latino immigrants. But the current wave of Latino immigration is driven by different motives than were the fugitives from slavery. Most do not come to the US seeking freedom. Most are aware of the hardship and dangers of dealing with anti-Latino bias, and the machinery of immigration police, whose impunity, brutality, indefinite detentions and callous deportations are well-known. They come for the most part for economic reasons. To understand these reasons, we must briefly outline the political economy of US-Latin American relations over the last century.
Traditionally US investment in Latin America has enjoyed a profit rate of some 20% (a turn-over rate of 5 years), from the Spanish-American War until the era of national liberation revolutions after WWII. [Arevalo, Gerassi] The reason is the low wage rates in a non-union labor environment. The earnings on this investment (both value-added and profit), the products of production (as industrial raw materials), and the marketing proceeds of manufactured goods re-exported to host country, all flowed to the US. In other words, direct US investment in Latin America constituted a funnel, vast impoverishment machine vacuuming up the wealth of the land, the labor of the people, and the liquidity of the markets into the foreign economy, leaving the Latin America economically devastated. [Jalle]
This is different from the impoverishment imposed on Black communities in the wake of the uprisings of the 60s. That was a political impoverishment designed to destroy the base of community autonomy and black power. Though economic assistance was promised, little was produced. White political economy abandoned whole areas to decay, leaving high unemployment, stagnant economy, a reduction of survival to crimality, and a prison industry that fed on this.
The main modes of survival for Latin Americans was through local economies, cooperatives, and other indigenous relations of production, much of which was not market-oriented. It is this "alternate" economy that formed a significant base for the guerrilla national liberation movements that developed throughout Latin America. And it was these alternate economies that were the first targets of neo-liberalism.
Neo-liberalism is an economic program of, by, and for the multi-national corporations. It imposes upon third world nations and communities untrammeled corporate investment, and a privatization of social or community assets for capital exploitation. It also means the opening of all land and assets to corporate purchase, investment, and marketability. Its purpose was to deprive local economies, both private and cooperative, of their ability to survive. All protection barriers to foreign investment, such as tariffs, ecological concerns, labor rights, etc. were to be removed, as well as any regulations obstructing foreign corporate profitability. The neo-liberal program placed third world economies under the full control of multinational corporations through control of land, and unfair competition to locally produced goods. It essentially put the impoverishment machine into overdrive.
One interest the US has in curtailing and controlling Latin America immigration is keeping latin americans in Latin America, so that they continue to work on US investment production. If too many come north into the US, the shortage of labor in Latin America will serve to raise wage levels. It is not surprising that a vast number of factories (maquiladoras) are located along the US border in Mexico. These factories produce for export, pay little or no taxes, and employ non-union labor. Those who come north, and get stopped at the border, provide a ready and often desparate labor force for these factories. A balance is sought between the need for immigrant labor in the US, and the need to keep cheap labor in Latin America for the benefit of foreign (US) investment.
The neo-liberal program is imposed through debt. The IMF proposes development loans tied to "structural adjustment programs" (SAP), which required local political and economic "reforms" -- the removal of subsidies for farmers, for instance, or cnacelling subsidies for gas and oil; the privatizing of social services such as unemployment insurance or social security or state activities such as road maintenance or prison administration, etc. These SAPs transform third world national economies to the point where internal alternate economies could not longer survive. The overall effect diminishes local economic activity, and makes debt repayment more difficult. Further loans are needed to meet debt obligations, and the local economy finds itself subservient to debt survice, requiring austerity programs and further SAPs.
This form of debt servitude is quite similar to that imposed on Black farmers in the south in the wake of Reconstruction. Those southern tenant farmers or small land owners would have to mortgage their crop or their land in advance to obtain the seeds, equipment and food stuffs to get through the planting and growing season. After the crop had been taken by the mortgaging agent (usually a local commercial establishment), the farmer would be billed with interest for the goods previously recieved, and often find himself owing more than when he started, and even losing his land if he had any. He would end up tied to the land through debt. Debt servitude was simply slavery with a money economy thrown in. (cf. DuBois)
The mode of imposition of the SAPs by the IMF had three levels. The World Bank and the IMF had, by the 1980s, centralized most sources of international finance for development. Third world nations had nowhere else to turn to fund trade or internal economic activity. [Greider] If a nation refused the servitude to international finance that the debt implied, the country was embargoed until it changed its mind. Most often, the threat of such an embargo was sufficient to gain compliance (e.g. Mozambique and Zimbabwe in the 1980s). If it still abjured, the embargo was imposed, and military assault became the threat (examples are Serbia, Libya, Niger, Cuba, Nicaragua, and many others).
A classic example of the devastation imposed by an SAP is Ruanda. The local economy in the 1980s centered on truck farming, including livestock, with some international trade and economic surplus facilitated by fishing in Lake Kiva and Lake Tanganyika. The fisherman were small entrepreneurs, whose labor intensive activity supported much of Ruanda's employment profile. Gasoline was subsidized to support the truck farms and markets. The nation was poor, but the economy sustainable. The SAP opened the lakes to corporate fishing, removed subsidies for gasoline, and permitted imports competing with food stuffs that local farmers had depended on selling. Farmers could no longer afford to take their produce to market, and were unable to undersell the imported food. Corporate fishing pushed local fisherman aside, fished out the lakes, and left. The result was mass starvation, a generalized unemployment situation, and the desparation that led to the calamities of the early 1990s. [Stiglitz]
In Mexico, neo-liberal policy led to the repeal of article 27 of the constitution that prohibited the sale of indigenous communal land (the ejido system), as a condition for the signing of NAFTA, which required that all land be marketable. This condition would have eventually undermined all local indigenous economies in Mexico if the Zapatistas had not intervened. Nevertheless, it destroyed enough of the Mexican economy that Mexicans have had to go elsewhere to make a living. They come to the US.
What they are doing is following the money. They come to the US, since that is where their wealth has been taken. And they remit much of what they earn back to their families and hometowns. Total remittance to Latin America from the US amounts to roughly $100 billion per year. It is responsible for 20% of investment in micro-enterprises, and accounts for over 50% of the income of over 4% of all households in 2000. These are households of the lowest income levels. On average, Mexican immigrants remit $450 a month; 64% of them return after 3 years in the US, with about $3000 saved. In 2005, Mexico received $18 billion total, which is 2.5% of GDP. Remittances are the second largest source of foreign income after oil exports, and equalled foreign direct investment. Throughout Latin America, remittances are fast becoming the major source of foreign currency income.
The many Latino immigrant communities that have formed constitute an organized political movement in the US whose (spoken or unspoken) purpose is, among others, to return wealth to their home economies. Though some decide to stay, and seek social assimilation, all come to find work. And as a community, all form a broad infrastructure for the process of sending moneys back home. They also form a base for new arrivals, and give important aid in out-maneuvering legal obstacles -- hiding people, finding jobs, obtaining documents (false or otherwise), and facilitating border crossings.
If there is such a thing as a material metaphor, remittances, and the communities that facilitate them, constitute a material metaphor for reparations for the damage done to home economies by US investment and neo-liberalism. It is reparations taken through labor, but taken directly from the entity that would owe them by those who would be their rightful recipient -- those from whom that value had been stolen. Though it is doubtful many come to the US with that purpose even metaphorically in mind, nevertheless, existentially, this has become the nature of the immigration project. And the communities that constitute a base for this operation give that project a serious cultural foundation (as had the alternate rural economies for guerrilla movements before the 1980s).
How can we relate this to the African American claims on reparations.
The great movement of Black people from the south to the northern cities after the turn of the century was not a process of regaining what had been taken. It transformed Black communities, and extended Black economic participation at all class levels, even to the point of creating a Black political class with its own political machines. It would be more properly understood as a movement toward anti-colonialist autonomy within the colonizing borders of the US than a resolution of past debt. Yet that autonomy is an implicit precondition for the demand for reparations in the first place.
Beyond the recognition of a wage debt that stretches from 1619 through to 1965, the first thing to recognize is that the entire mass of capital values that germinated in the pre-US colonies was based in great part on the profitability of the slave trade and the plantation system. Second, the post-independence international trade position of the US continued to be based on cotton and tobacco, both of which depended on forced labor and which together provided much of the profitability and capital surplus to begin industrialization. The claim for withheld wages by the labor force from which they were withheld is not only a debt, but a claim on the capital stock values for which they were used as investment. Those capital stock values should be properly categorized as a form of property inheritance, even under the laws of white supremacist society, through the debt (in Robinson's sense). The claim (by the entire Black population) is thus a collective claim on a percentage of the totality of capital values in the US. This claim sits on top of the demand for real monetary compensation for actual withheld wages, forced imprisonment at hard labor on plantations, and the destruction and alienation from cultural roots and loved ones throughout the life of slavery and Jim Crow.
Is this collective claim linked in any way to the guerrilla communities of Latinos making remittances? Remittances are very different from claims for compensation and inherited (though withheld) capital stock values. Black claims are both cultural as well as economic. Yet the culture they are to be made on is the same as the claims of Latin Americans. And both are existentially ethical phenomena. Let us look at their existential structure.
Latino immigration moves across borders. These borders are essential to the definition of the white nation, and its white national consciousness. The anti-immigrant political response of white society, from all classes, to Latino immigration, entails a refusal to recognize the role of US corporate domination in driving this immigration. In buttressing its border, it confirms that border's role in maintaining white identity. Yet this was the essence of the earlier anti-immigrant movement of the 1800s, the defense of that other border called the "color line." In this sense, the border is the same in both cases, a political line essential to white national (cultural) identity. It is the border of racialization behind which white society and white consciousness define themselves through their racialization of others -- Black and Latino people in this case.
This border (both national and white nationalist) give the labor of those who cross it a double character: 1) exploited directly as labor by a white economy, and 2) connected to a cultural community external to that white economy. However, that exteriority is inverted between Black people and Latinos. The Latino immigrant is forced (for survival) to leave an existing cultural milieu that is both autonomous of and dominated by the US, in order to struggle to integrate him/herself into an alien (USian) economy. A Black person is already integrated into the alien (USian) economy, even as economically and politically segregated or disparaged as a minority; his/her struggle is to develop an autonomous cultural community milieu (the "Black community") not outside but "internally" beyond white US culture. Past efforts to constitute autonomy for such communities have taken the form of black power, black nationalism, black islamism, and black liberation struggles, among others. Movement across their respective borders, between cultural home and labor in the white nation, directs Black and Latino people in opposite directions. Yet both movements are forms of cultural self-reappropriation.
Where white nationalism responds to Latinos claim (i.e. their presence) by militarizing its national border, it responds to the black struggle to form autonomous community (to transform their claim into its communal presence) with a comparable internal militarization composed of police profiling and impunity, racially biased arrests and sentencing, and a prison-industrial complex. The arbitrary extremity of its measures testifies to the desparation evinced by white society in both cases. It is the desparate arbitrarity of white militarism that reveals the ethical nature of the Black and Latino struggle against white social exclusionism. The real issue in question is sovereignty, not wealth, insofar as sovereignty is the concretization of autonomy. It is across the contradiction of sovereignty, with respect to which the US holds a double standard, and by which it defines its impunity, that the claim for reparations is articulated.
The rhetoric about illegal aliens, in the context of this double standard, confirms that "legality" and "illegality" are not juridical concepts but political decisions signifying separation and segregation. Where declaring Latinos illegal legitimizes throwing them back to their original communities, the analogue for Black people is the inverse process of being pulled out of their communities into imprisonment. The prison iconizes a criminalization comparable to being declared "illegal," a deportation into an interior exile rather than an exterior one.
In terms of this homology, in the face of a border of racialization and its depersonalizations, the struggle among Black people comparable to that of immigrant rights
is for community autonomy. Human rights and community autonomy are the two elements that are foundational for promulgating a communal claim to reparations from white supremacist society for both peoples. In effect, the political center of the reparations project is not simply a political populism or community support for such a demand, but the question of real community autonomy -- for both Black and Latino communities, though in different ways.
The centrality of communal autonomy to facilitating a reparations claim confirms that the claim can only be a collective claim, whose economic force takes the individual as its focus, but whose ethical focus is a communal force exerted on the totality of corporate industrial wealth. That claim cannot be made in a desocialized or atomized manner, as it would be through a populist movement. Insofar as populist movements are short on internal organization, focused on parties and leadership bodies rather than the alternate political structures that autonomous community makes possible, they would not provide sufficient foundation. Production cooperatives, on the other hand, which "belong" to all those who work or live in them, exemplify a form of alternate political as well as economic structure, as does the idea of autonomous munipalities with community self-policing. Autonomy is the name of the ability of a community to exercise sovereign communal control over resources that cannot be acquired indiviudally.
Works Cited
Airola, Jim. "Use of Remittance Income in Mexico," Defense Resources Management Institute Working Papers Series, 2005. www.nps.navy.mil
Amuedo-Dorantes, Catalina, Cynthia Banzak, and Susan Pozo. "On Remitting Patterns of Immigrants." Fed Reserve Bank of Atlanta, www.frbatlanta.org/filelegacydocs/BANSAK%20article-final.pdf
Arévalo, Juan Jose. The Shark and the Sardines. New York: L.Stuart, 1961.
DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Gerassi, John. The Great Fear in Latin America. New York: Collier Books, 1963.
Jalée, Pierre. The Pillage of the Third World. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968.
Litwack, Leon. North of Slavery. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961.
McManus, Edgar. Black Bondage in the North. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1973.
Robinson, Randall. The Debt: what America owes to Blacks. New York: Dutton, 2000.
Stiglitz, Joseph. Globalization and its Discontents. New York: Norton, 2002.
Turner, Edward R. The Negro in Pennsylvania. Washington: American Historical Society, 1911.