Fred Allebach
2/19/08
Nativism and
Immigration
Current US Nativism and
xenophobia concerning immigration from Mexico is reminiscent of similar waves
of sentiment in the past towards German immigrants, Irish Catholics, southern
and eastern Europeans, Asians, people from India, Arabs etcetera. Especially in
hard times, anyone who is not northern European white Anglo Saxon protestant is
seen as an alien threat to a mythical “native” way of life. This reoccurring
prejudice is at once representative of parochial in-group/out-group dynamics,
the result of shifting world economic and climate conditions and also of US
labor supply and demand. In this paper I will contrast past and present
episodes of Nativism. I will examine some of the push-pull factors that rural
Mexicans feel as they immigrate to the US.
The vitriol we see now aimed at
Mexican immigrants was once aimed at Chinese, Japanese and southern plains
whites. (1) As the US economy changed, waxed and waned, modernized
industrially, immigrants and immigrant labor have become scapegoats for forces
beyond their control. The personal, familial and social dislocation felt
through processes of rapid urbanization and industrialization left all
underclasses, in the US and world-wide, vulnerable and uncertain. Thus we see
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Asians banned altogether in the 1920s.
Southern plains whites, known as “Okies”, were also the recipients of prejudice
and blame during the Dust Bowl years, see John Steinbeck’s famous book The Grapes of Wrath. These people and
other past immigrants migrated in search of work because US and world
population and resource dynamics created pressures that were relieved through
movement to areas of potential opportunity. The vagaries of weather can also
create pressures for migration, as perhaps we are about to see in a big way
with global warming and as was seen during the Dustbowl.
The Second Industrial Revolution
occurred generally during the last quarter of the 19th century to
just before WW2. During this time the US means of agricultural production
changed from local and family oriented to one of mass scale. This fundamental
change in the means of production and concomitant labor relations displaced a
lot of people who had lived in rural areas. Small scale, labor-intensive
farmers could not co-exist and compete price-wise with mass produced farm goods
and methods and so they had to move. There was no livelihood to make anymore.
These rural people migrated to urban areas for employment. Necessary
agricultural tasks were now performed by machines on a mass scale and/or by
hired, seasonal labor with no local ties.
This same sort of process and
shift in means of production is happening today in Mexico. An example: I have
been able to get to know people in a rural village, La Mesa de Abajo, in the
Sierra Madre Mountains in Chihuahua, Mexico. (2) These people have been largely
self-sufficient for generations, raising beans, corn, vegetables and cattle
ranching. They are classic Jeffersonian free men; they make their own shoes,
saddles, furniture, homes and produce and sell their own agricultural goods;
they do most everything necessary to sustain themselves. They are at the point
now where the available land cannot be further subdivided; the land can only
carry so many families with the ability to be self-sufficient. Children not
inheriting land have pressure to move away. In modern Mexico changing means of
agricultural production and population pressure has resulted in migration to
urban areas and people taking up trades and wage, cash economy occupations.
This is known, noticeable and happening all over the north where people are
coming out of the mountains to the cities. My friends mainly go to Ciudad
Obregon, Sonora where migration chains are established. It is the younger
generation that has to move out to find new livelihood; the older folks stay
put and continue to work as they have.
From La Mesa de Abajo the older
generation sells blacksmith and leather products, beans, calves, cows, meat,
preserved fruits and vegetables. The younger people who stay in Mexico and
moved to urban areas have gone for carpentry careers, construction trades,
computer sales and networking, street vending of food or moved farther a field
to work in maquiladora factories on the border. Work can be had for skilled
labor but it does not pay well compared to the US and Mexican consumer prices
for everything except rent and housing are equal to or more than the US. The
elder generations have an economic system going that is sustainable and works;
the younger age-sets are being forced into a more modern, cash economy of which
Mexico is home but not near as potentially lucrative as the US, where migration
networks (for La Mesa) are established in Chicago and Arizona.
In Obregon and Mexico in general,
wages for unskilled labor average a dollar a day or less. So what is a kid to
do who will not inherit land, who cannot use their self-sufficient rural and
agricultural expertise and who has access to TV and sees the US level of
consumer hype yet is making a dollar a day? They go to the US to look for a
higher wage, where the US minimum is living like a King. What keeps people in
Mexico is family, kin and culture; you may be poor but you are not a stranger.
On the other hand, when you have population pressure, a poor economy,
agriculture shifting from family style to industrial production and low earning
potential there is the call to migrate to something better. One friend’s son
and nephews have illegally come to the US.
You really can’t blame people for
desiring a better life. Are folks just supposed to sit there and starve? And it
is well known that immigrants work very hard; they are desirable workers; they
work much harder than US workers who don’t want to literally stoop to the
conditions and wages offered. Immigrants take work others don’t want yet get
blamed for stealing jobs. These migrants are hungry for opportunity and so they
hustle, demonstrate their desire and drive down wages in the fields where they
work. US citizens at the bottom of the ladder see their earning power eroded
and other resulting civic inequities like non-payment of income and property
taxes and so you get the hate, prejudice and Nativism. But there is always
someone coming to drive down labor costs (3, 1), youth, immigrants, women; it
will always be somebody, so to blame immigrants is to really miss the point
that the value of labor is under constant erosive pressure anyway.
One core issue is that US
companies want cheap labor, in the fields where Mexican immigrants can work,
i.e. construction, landscape, agriculture and factory work. Yet the government
has in place policies, out of public Nativist pressure, to make these
immigrants illegal. Business, government and public opinion are out of step. As
we see further modernization, a global economy and competition for markets and
lower prices there is major pressure to keep labor costs down. Business itself
starts to migrate when low immigrant labor costs cannot be provided on the home
turf. But labor is how the bulk of the world makes their living and the large
structural pressures of modernization, industrialization make it so individual
laborers are like ants, disposable, and Nativism is nothing more than ants fighting
among themselves for the scraps. (4) You don’t see the owners of large
construction firms or agricultural enterprises whining about Mexican labor;
they keep their mouths shut as they want it. If they can’t get it, they move to
Mexico, Indonesia or China and then no North American labor wins anything.
It is hard for anyone to be free
when the work available offers such a pittance and lack of opportunity to
advance. As long as the whole object is to reduce labor costs to the minimum
while maximizing profit at the top then we will continue to see things like
Nativism, the Ku Klux Klan, and facile prejudice against immigrants. This whole
method of production doesn’t seem to be based on any plan for the over-all
betterment of society but is more at what Jared Diamond calls a kleptocracy, a
system based on fleecing others as much as possible. Population pressures,
accidents of climate and pressure for competitive low prices of goods then will
continue to be exploited to drive down labor costs.
The upshot is that migrants
looking for the most basic sorts of work are not villains to blame all of our
problems on. These people are nothing more than victims of modernization of the
means of production, a global economy and victims of the weather and population
dynamics. To reduce these large structural forces and changes to blaming
individual Mexicans as law-breakers and criminals is absurd and simplistic. If
people knew a little history and understood how the world is working maybe they
wouldn’t be so quick to blame others for what is really a common
misfortune.
Bibliography
(1) Davidson, James West., Lytle, Mark Hamilton. After the Fact: The Art of Historical
Detection, Vol. 2 Fifth Edition, New York, McGraw Hill, 2005
chapter 12 Dustbowl Odyssey, chapter 11 Sacco Vanzetti
(2) American Friends Service Committee- Intermountain Yearly
Meeting Joint Service Project
I have spent near 2 years total on these projects and
individual time living in the villages of Trigo Moreno, Sonora, La Mesa de
Abajo, Chihuahua. I also attended the University of Sonora in Hermosillo,
Sonora for two semesters and lived in Ciudad Obregon, where I was able to
develop the information and perspectives offered here.
Interestingly, the families of La Mesa de Abajo are
descendents of Civil War immigrants from North Carolina with the surnames of
Clark, Moore and DeMoss.
Ciudad Obregon has a municipal population of around 500,000
people, the second largest city in Sonora. In the surrounding Yaqui River
valley, agriculture has become industrialized similar to California’s central
valley. Indians from southern Mexico have migrated and/or been recruited to
northern Mexico for agricultural work. These people work for a pittance and
undercut any decent wage others might command. Interestingly, in Mexico
seasonal farm labor is largely Indian. The people from the Sierra do not work as farm labor for Mexican
industrial agriculture, there is no money there worth pursuing.
In America, the top 1% earn more than $380,000
per year. We are, however, among the richest nations on Earth. How much do you
need to earn to be among the top 1% of the world? $34,000.
That was the finding World Bank economist Branko Milanovic presented in his 2010 book The
Haves and the Have-Nots. Going down the distribution ladder may be just as
surprising. To be in the top half of the globe, you need to earn just $1,225 a
year. For the top 20%, it's $5,000 per year. Enter the top 10% with $12,000 a
year. To be included in the top 0.1% requires an annual income of $70,000.
(3) Marx, Karl., Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto, 1848
A reserve population of unemployed always threatens workers
with jobs and provides impetus to work more and harder for less wages. Workers
are replaced from the force of the unemployed when they demand too much wage
relative to what the force of unemployed will settle for.
This is why agricultural owners and corporations could
exploit Okies to work for less, as they were desperate for any work. This is
analogous to why Mexican immigrants settle for less and keep over-all wages
down in agricultural and construction fields. This is why the union movement
has been so important for workers, only by gaining a collective stance can any
bargaining power be gained with management.
According to Marx, capitalism exploits workers anyway by not
paying wages in accordance with a product’s generated value. Capitalists
accumulate a surplus value by not
paying workers commensurate with the value they produce. This basic unfairness, which contributes to
widening gaps of rich capitalists and poor laborers, was a factor that spawned
philosophies of anarchism at the turn of the 20th century. Anarchism
proposed that the state and business worked in conjunction to exploit labor and
as such it was unfair and unjust; this relates to the Sacco Vanzetti chapter of
After The Fact.
(4) Scott, Sir Walter. Tales
of My Landlord, vol. The Black Dwarf, 1st Series, 1816,
Edinbugh, William Blackwood publisher
“And why should other worms complain to me when they are
trodden on, since I am myself lying crushed and writhing under the chariot
wheel.”
You get the phenomena, at the bottom of the ladder in labor
relations, of playing one off against the other even when interests are
fundamentally the same. Yet labor frequently finds it impossible to cooperate
as all are fighting for the same scraps.
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