Jim Hightower: Immigrants Come Here Because Globalization Took Their Jobs Back There

[marmar]

from Hightower Lowdown, via AlterNet:




Immigrants Come Here Because Globalization Took Their Jobs Back There

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown. Posted February 7, 2008.

Seal-the-border hysteria is everywhere. Instead of blaming immigrants for America's problems, let's look at executives on both sides of the border.



The wailing in our country about the "invasion of immigrants" has been long and loud. As one complainant put it, "Few of their children in the country learn English ...The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages ... Unless the stream of the importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious."

That's not some diatribe from one of today's Republican presidential candidates. It's the anxious cry of none other than Ben Franklin, deploring the wave of Germans pouring into the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Thus, anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the United States itself, and they've flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians, Chinese, and others. Even George W's current project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness -- around the time of the nation's founding, John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed "a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics."

Luckily for the development and enrichment of our country, these past public frenzies ultimately failed to exclude the teeming masses, and those uproars now appear through the telescope of time to have been some combination of ridiculous panic, political demagoguery and xenophobic ugliness. Still, this does not mean that the public's anxiety and simmering anger about today's massive influx of Mexicans coming illegally across our 2,000-mile shared border is illegitimate. However, most of what the politicians and pundits are saying about it is illegitimate.

Wedge issue

There is way too much xenophobia, racism and demagoguery at play around illegal immigration, but such crude sentiments are not what is bringing this problem to a national political boil. Polls show -- as do conversations at any Chat & Chew Cafe in the country -- that there is a deep and genuine alarm about the issue among the nonxenophobic, nonracist American majority. In particular, workaday families are fearful about what an endless flow of low-wage workers portends for their economic future, and they're not getting good answers from Republicans, Democrats, corporate leaders or the media.

For the GOP candidates in this year's presidential run, the contest is coming down to who can be the most nativist knucklehead. They accuse each other of not wanting to punish immigrant children enough, of not being absolutists on "English-only" proposals, of having coddled illegal entrants in the past with amnesty proposals and sanctuaries, and of not being hawkish enough on sealing off and militarizing the border. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/76076/

[Demeter]

1. Well, Yes, and No

[midnight]

2. Corporate greed has created instability on both sides of the

boarder. Their needs to be a trend towards equality, and not money to straighten this out.

[Captain Hilts]

3. We're all losing jobs to China, and Indonesia. Ideally, NAFTA should have slowed that down. nt

[gratuitous]

4. The GOP candidates are trying to out-nativist each other

Fortunately, their rhetoric is appealing to a smaller and smaller segment of their own constituency, and the issue barely registers outside the Republican party. This is, like so many issues, the loud caterwauling of a small minority of a minority party, given outsize attention by lazy media commentators.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't fight against this repulsive xenophobia, but maintain some perspective.

[ljm2002]

5. Thanks for posting this!

Jim Hightower is such a great voice.

If you read the whole thing, you find that there will be a 700-mile-long wall, three rows of 40-foot-tall fencing, along the US-Mexico border. It's horrible that we would build a wall like that before considering how to change the policies we've created that have helped fuel the immigration. Mexico's small corn farmers have been decimated, for example, after NAFTA.

The whole conversation is tilted towards the competing BIG business interests, towards nationalism, towards labeling people as "illegals" and thus criminalizing them, rather than discussing the realities that are created when certain policies, such as NAFTA, are implemented. Maybe we do want to have some sort of special agreement between the North American nations -- then why not renegotiate, but this time with a voice for labor and consumers and the truly SMALL businesses and farmers? What if we were able to devise a system that truly did enrich, rather than impoverish the populations in the countries who signed up? Wouldn't that be a great thing? If it raised all boats by design, and it worked?

Ah, but I let my daydreams take over there for a minute. (slap) There, okay, that's better.