In 1984 I came back to El Paso from Israel, but the tension did not go away. I brought the war home with me. Or maybe there had always been a war here and I just hadn’t seen it before. The concrete barricades at the Santa Fe Street bridge. The barbed wire. The Border Patrol checkpoints. The surveillance cameras and sensors along the river levee. The hovering helicopters. The floating bodies in the Rio Grande. Before, it had all seemed so normal to me that I hardly noticed. But I had come back with new eyes and now understood how abnormal everything was.

— David Romo, A River Runs Through It: Texas Monthly June 2010 [via]

I ask you, ‘What does reasonable suspicion mean?” Letona said through a megaphone. “It means not looking white. It means not sounding white. It means those who do not conform to a certain idea of what Americans should look like.

— Boston: Activists denounce Arizona immigration law [via]  

We also recognized that at the heart of the conservative reactionary wing of even the anti-immigrant front is a pretension to libertarian, constitutionalist values. Values that are almost never lived up to when they come in conflict with whiteness. So, we said to libertarians: will you defend your rhetoric or your whiteness? Will you stand up against fascism or find yourself in the camp of the NSM? If you stand today against fascism we will stand along side you. It’s important to note here that such calls were not disingenuous. We meant it.

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High Noon is Too Late for Tea: Seeking Ways to Engage and Oppose the Tea Party Movement

I’m still pretty enamored with the Phoenix Class War Council/Fires Never Extinguished. Makes me wish I could have engaged with them when I was in AZ. Increases my interest in going back to the desert.

Since businesses often rely on being able to exploit migrants as a permanent underclass produced by criminalization, what happens if there is no criminalization based on migration status (or very little, since there will still be some “illegal” people)? Would migrant workers still be cleaning the toilets in office buildings like so many insist the rich should be appreciative of? What I’m getting at here is, if reform legalized most or all of the migrants in the country, would the migrants’ wages and conditions improve since they are not subject to the lack of stability caused by criminalization? Or would precarity be created (or does it already manifest) in some other way? Why would businesses/capitalists allow for a more equal work force? Which leads us to ask if there will still be exploited workers, and the answer is yes, as we know that plenty of “legal” people are currently exploited. I would argue that business just wouldn’t allow something like mass legalization to occur in the first place- at least not without other benefits to the businesses themselves (as an example, over 2 million undocumented migrants were granted amnesty in 1986, but there were also stipulations that while employment of “illegal” migrants was outlawed, businesses didn’t have to verify the documents that they received and they could also participate in temporary worker programs. There was also an increase in the use of sub-contractors). But in the unlikely scenario, we must imagine that something else will be used to divide people so as to continue exploiting labor through low wages, long hours, the lack of safety protections, and that may take the shape of new ways to criminalize people, or encouraging further racial division, or something to that effect.

— The Best Immigration Law is No Law at All

Migration is a natural thing, while the necessity of obstructions such as border walls are rationalized by those in power to deal with threats to security against a fortress built on the backs of other people. This fortress is the US, taken and secured by force, built up by slavery and attacks on liberation movements throughout its history. The border is therefore illegitimate and we need not and must not regard migrants as helpless victims to justify their crossing. Shouldn’t’ everyone have the right to freedom of movement?

— The Best Immigration Law is No Law at All

How did it come about that a country with a growing underclass of unemployed workers has 12 million illegal immigrants?

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John C commenting on The Growing Underclass: Jobs Gone Forever

If only capitalism was that simple, John C!

What this suggests is that the key to understanding today’s anti-immigration movement—as well as anti-Obama organizing such as the “tea parties”—is to see it as a “virtuous middle” movement. In other words, these are movements whose members see themselves as a virtuous middle—religious, moral, hardworking, patriotic and truly American—who face the threat of losing their relatively privileged social status. They fear that they are under attack by a bewildering global economy and unscrupulous corporations that are moving their jobs overseas. Even more, they feel they are being attacked by cultural elites—Harvard and Hollywood, the universities and pop culture—who undermine the moral values of this virtuous middle with moral relativism and sexual permissiveness. They also fear that they are under attack by the rabble below them—lazy people who live off public benefits paid for by the virtuous middle’s tax dollars (these folks are often secretly coded as black) and illegal aliens who are flooding the country, stealing jobs and degrading American culture (these folks are often coded as brown). The virtuous middle fears that cultural elites from above and the black and brown rabble from below are conspiring —now with the help of a black president!—to undermine their social status and by extension the moral, political, and economic foundations of America. The fall into Sodom is right behind.

— Minutemen and Klansmen [via]

The desperation is ever present in Maricopa County. Local activists devoted to challenging the racism oozing from the local state legislature and county sheriff are exhausted. The years of symbolic protest and moral appeals to the white citizen majority have failed. Even when Arpaio’s numbers slipped in the polls (he currently is seeing some of his highest poll numbers state wide), support for anti-immigrant ballot initiatives remained at 80%. Other activists and lawyers have sought the intervention of the federal government, and while the Department of Justice has sent a handful of observers to the county to little affect during their 20 month stay. The situation has only grown worse, more families are broken up by MCSO workplace raids, more immigrant workers have been deported, and even more have “self-deported,” fleeing the state that was their home.
Was it just four years ago that we saw the “huelga general,” a real general strike happened here in Maricopa County? In downtown Phoenix hundreds of thousands of workers marched and rallied for protection from the coming onslaught of anti-immigrant legislation and popular white hysteria that was reaching a fever pitch. Now we’re lucky to see a few thousand marching for immigrants and calling for the end of the era of racialized policing. The dwindling numbers are of no surprise to many of us, for years organizers have stonewalled and marginalized radical voices and tactics, preferring symbolic and moral appeals to power, especially as the demands of the movement are in retreat. Gone are the “somos America, we are America” slogans, now the signs read “We are human,” a plea to the white citizenry to recognize, at the very least, that immigrants are also human beings.

— Arizona: A State of Emergency

One of the problems with the immigrant movement, as I see it, is the failure to develop an understanding of why white people act politically the way they do. After all, why don’t white working class people find common cause with folks of color from their same class? This question is the eternal demand made of revolutionary actors and theoreticians in the US. Answering it is important.
We here at PCWC subscribe to an analysis of American society that says that whiteness is a political identity rather than a racial one — an alliance — in which what we call ‘white people’ create a cross-class bargain, poor and rich, to defend collectively a privileged position for some people over others in exchange for not overturning the apple cart of capitalism. This undermines class unity and pits whites against people of color and, in the bigger scheme, defends capitalism and the exploitation of everyone — including white workers, ironically. After all, in the end, even white working class people are exploited by capitalism.

— Rusty Childress and the False Class Consciousness of the Minutemen — Revisited.