“What’s at Stake in the 2024 Elections”
By Myrna Santiago
This piece is from a panel sponsored by the Center for Women and Gender Equity, Women’s and Gender Studies, Community Life, Counseling & Psychological Services, the Intercultural Center, Mission & Ministry, Politicals Department, Committee on Diversity, Belonging, and Liberation, Bridge USA
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Anti immigrant positions are low hanging fruit historically. Politicians, political candidates, newspaper or media moguls, have whipped up anti-immigrant sentiment in this country as part of right-wing populist tactics for a very long time, particularly during economic downturns. The consequences have been real: total exclusion and mass deportations. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first law the US government passed to exclude a whole group of people—after their labor power was no longer needed to build the railroad, for example. But the Japanese were excluded, too, through a “Gentleman’s Agreement” the US government imposed upon Japan in 1908, after the San Francisco Chronicle campaigned for it, in a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment that included the legal segregation of Japanese and Korean kids in schools away from white children.
The idea that the Republicans are marketing this election of mass deportations of immigrants also have precedents. During the Great Depression, the US government rounded up and deported almost 1 million Mexicans, plus almost another million of their children, who were born in the US and thus were US citizens. Imagine, just for a minute, the pain and anguish the deportation of nearly 2 million people caused to those families and those communities. Of course, as soon as the US entered WWII, American capitalists pressured the US government to bring back Mexican workers and the US government complied, inaugurating the Bracero Program which went to little Mexican villages to convince Mexicans to come back to the US to work temporarily because American men were at war in Europe (that’s when my grandfather first came to the US, by the way. Not because he was looking to immigrate, or chasing “the American dream,” but because the US government recruited him on behalf of American agribusiness). The Bracero program lasted from 1942 to 1964. Here we see again that capitalist need for immigrant labor trumped all other concerns.
Anti-immigrant sentiment, then, is a spigot that American capital and American governments turn on and off, depending on economic needs and political expediency at any given moment. It works because it is much easier for Republicans to blame immigrants for the lack of jobs, inflation, lack of housing, or crime than to explain neoliberal economics and the recessions and depressions that are part and parcel of capitalism. So there are no jobs because corporate America sent them all abroad since Reagan was elected because labor was cheaper elsewhere in the world, unions were banned in other countries, and foreign governments promised no environmental protections, no regulations, no labor protections, no taxes. All that as a prelude to then doing the same within the United States too. But that’s too complex for a sound bite, when you can just claim that immigrants are eating your pets.
Blaming immigrants is also easier than telling the truth about why immigrants or refugees come in the first place. There were no mass waves of Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, or Nicaraguans coming to the US until the US government promoted, financed, and sponsored wars against the left in all of those countries, destroying those economies and creating refugees in the hundreds of thousands. Blaming immigrants is also easier than telling the truth about how the US government has fueled, funded, and promoted massive violence in the 70-year old war on drugs, which has been a total failure in stopping drug trafficking, while it has meant millions and millions in profits for the American weapons industry, which provides all the weapons the drug cartels use to terrorize people. Thus, the US government and private industry, again, have created more refugees searching a safe place to live. Imagine for a second the desperation that is involved in walking from Central America to the US border.
These discourses, thus, have serious consequences. First, they can incite individuals to engage in violence against immigrants or refugees, like we saw with the guy who stabbed the little Palestinian boy 25 times. We’ve seen that happen in every single anti-immigrant wave in US history (I remember when the US invaded Iraq and my uncle immediately shaved his beard because he was afraid someone would mistake him for a Middle Easterner and beat him up, as some men were doing in Los Angeles). Second, these discourses announce to us that a Republican White House and Congress have no intention of addressing the real issues at stake: not only reforming the immigration apparatus (which is truly not broken as even the Democrats say; it is functioning perfectly as it was designed to do, to the detriment of immigrants and refugees, to keep them vulnerable and in fear, a docile workforce for American capital and small businesses alike), but also not dealing with any seriousness with a whole host of issues: drug consumption and thus drug trafficking, unconditional support for exclusionary governments abroad, unconditional support for rapacious American corporations abroad that leave US workers without work and exploit workers, resources, and ecologies in other countries, for example. In other words, anti-immigrant rhetoric that blames immigrants for a whole lot of the problems that US society faces today signals that a Republican administration will do nothing about the major problems facing the US and the world today: climate change, deepening extractivism on land and in the deep sea, unending resource wars. That is what is at stake.
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