As Congress and the Democratic Party were watering-down, stalling, militarizing, rejecting, watering-down some more, and rejecting the Dream Act and other pieces of comprehensive immigration reform, many of my clients — students at a community college — were suffering in the margins. These were young adults who came here as children, had lived highly respectable lives, went to college and tried to do the right thing by the standards of the unrealistic, hubristic standards of the American Dream. Many of them — born in but coming from Latin American but sometimes Middle Eastern, South Asian, and the African regions — were relieved when then-President Obama announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
The DACA program was a temporary stop-gap measure for young immigrants (Generation 1.5, and under 32 years of age, as of 2012) who come here as children, graduated from high school, know English, and have completely spotless records that allowed them to register every two years for the chance to obtain an official state identification, with which they can better obtain jobs, college, driving,. These are students who traversed the traps of a country and society that highly problematize and criminalize them. They are raised in an environment of fear and secrecy, not necessarily of their own communities or families (though like any other demographic, that can be the case as well) but of being ripped from their families, communities, homes, and often the only country they know.
This existential fear is not a result of their innate badness or goodness or anything else. For immigration is a necessary lifeblood to both industry and to global capitalism. Yes, often immigrants are used as pawns to drive down the cost of labor, but that is to say that capitalists will not pay living wages and will use others to wedge in those “costs” — and further drive their theft — any way they can. At first it was indentured servanthood, then chattel slavery, then Jim Crow, then the Bracero program. Initially, the program was to bring in seasonal laborers (aka guest workers) across the border, largely for agricultural work. When the Braceros began to settle permanently, have families, and organize their labor, then the corporations and their puppet state began striking back. In 1954, Eisenhower’s Immigration and Naturalization Services began the “Wetback Program” to round up immigrant workers who were not covered under the Bracero Program. Ten years later, when Mexican immigrants made up a full 15% of the farmhand labor force, the program ended as unions, churches, and competing demanded that both nationalized and guest workers’ wages be raised.
Immigrant rights were raised when Cesar Chavez’s joined together with the Filipino migrant workers to protest grape growers’ lowering wages on the Filipino’s to undercut Mexican wages. The groups recognized that they were being pit against each other and worked together to demand fair wages from the landowners. And it worked! For fifteen years, while their wages were never at-par with the median for non-farmhands, they rose considerably. Seasonal farm laborers enjoyed a massive uptick in material conditions as a result of cross-sector solidarity and heavy organizing.
I point this out not simply as a history lesson from merely one group of workers and only a couple of immigrant groups, though the past informs the present and the future. But in light of the fact that the political parties will only serve capitalism and in doing so will seek out to destroy communities that do not meet their needs and have outserved their purpose — this includes immigrant families. Because they seek cheap labor that they can easily exploit and thus this alternation between temporary, compromised rights under Democrats and permanent raids under the openly xenophobic and nativist Republicans (especially under Trump).
While DACA gave many young adults a fresh hope and materially benefited them with access to jobs, forms of valid ID, and college,[1] it only accounts for 10% of the most ‘exceptional’ immigrants (those who arrived by the age of 16, are younger than 32, have graduated high school and do not have a criminal record) and thus places all immigrants in an impossible situation of having to be super role models while under intense scrutiny in a highly criminalized climate in order to be accepted by the wider society, or to live and operate largely underground.
Additionally, the temporary fix that is DACA relied upon the idea that Obama would be followed by someone of a like mind. The fact that this like-minded person was 1) facing off against an explicitly racist nativist and 2) herself having just repeated an astoundingly horrid nativist sentiment regarding refugee children should have alerted us all to the fact that the work, even the work for that dream-like 10%, was not complete, would not be near complete. Additionally, the fact that all of this raw data and biometrics are now in the hands of Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the fascist ICE (probably more so than with the police or military — who at least do some civic services — everyone in ICE is a fascist) is an irresponsible and incomparably costly mistake on behalf of Obama that further threatens not only the DACAns but the entire immigration community. If the Democrats cared about the state of immigrants, they wouldn’t have laid such an elaborate trap but instead would have taken pains to dismantle the national security state. That even the most-left-leaning national politician, Bernie Sanders, repeated nativist rhetoric about immigrants as themselves actors in lowering wages means that we are going to have to look beyond an electoral strategy.
We are left with the brazen fact that our politicians are failing us, that we must rely on each other. That capitalists only care about profit margins means that whatever actions they are willing to take for immigrant rights will be just enough to maintain their machines and not disrupt them. It is up to us, workers, to band together to make sure that everyone, regardless of race, gender, where they were born, or immigration status, is treated fairly and justly, has enough to eat, adequate income, a decent place to live, freedom from oppression and constant surveillance, and sufficient security. This cannot happen if we allow Nativism, White Supremacy, and Patriarchy — the tools of capitalism — to organize us. It cannot happen if we are mobilized through Islamophobia[2] or the impetus of a police state.
Together, fighting for and with the marginalized amongst us, on their terms, we have nothing to lose but our chains.
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[1] Including many of my student clients, some of whom came out of hiding to go back to school
[2] For both one instance, how about when a bank tried to get an entire Arab American familyarrested because the father deposited a large check.
