Category: Uncategorized

By Greg Moses

OpEdNews / Hispanic Tips

The bus to Laredo is hushed and nearly full as I step aboard in Austin, taking a seat next to a thirtyish man who occasionally speaks across the aisle to a young woman who mostly sleeps.

In San Antonio, I connect with the El Paso bus, sitting next to a grandmother who clutches a purse with both hands. She glances occasionally across the aisle at a restless young boy who sometimes stands upon his seat, sometimes lays his head on his mother’s lap.

The drivers make announcements first in English then Spanish, but looking and listening from where I sit, it would be more practical to reverse that order of things. As these buses move, so moves history. "La Quinta. Spanish for ‘growth spurt’," says a smart little placard at a Kerrville, TX motel. Dots scatter across a map of the USA. Dots between Laredo and Chicago might as well mark the movement of la migra, Spanish for people seeking work.

There is so much human value on these buses. In terms of labor force alone: cement workers, roofers, landscapers, mechanics, cooks, janitors, clerks, musicians, and housekeepers. Foreign-born Hispanic men have a labor-force participation rate of 85 percent (says a 2002 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) making them the most active subgroup of workers in the USA.

Clusters of travelers speak also of families flung apart, hearts stretched across America. Along the highways of the Texas vastlands, we gaze out windows and think through our lives.

La Raza Cosmica is what Mexican philosopher Jose Vasconcelos imagined for the peoples of these vast and handsome lands. La Raza Cosmica, Spanish for the cosmic race or the cosmic peoples. Out of the intermingling histories of los Indios, European, African, and Asian peoples, Vasconcelos prophesied not a master race but a cosmic blend of talent and virtue. In the peace of the bus, with the skin colors all present, the landscape seems to ask why not?

But outside the bus, an hysterical politics is being watered and fed that would turn this landscape into a territorial imperative, culminating in the construction along the USA-Mexico border of something called an unclimbable wall. With my mind’s eye on the placard map, I trace the crooked line that starts at the boot-tip of Texas and runs west-north-westward along the borderlands of New Mexico and Arizona up to the left hip of California at the Pacific Coast. An unclimbable wall to separate Latin Americans from El Norte.

In the President’s radio address Saturday, the issue of immigration was framed in terms of homeland defense. "To defend this country, we have to enforce our borders," he said with a twist of grammar, as if a border is something inherently enforceable.

"When our borders are not secure, terrorists, drug dealers, and criminals find it easier to sneak into America," he warned, ignoring plain statistics that suggest the vast majority of immigrants come here to work and grow families. "My administration has a clear strategy for dealing with this problem: We want to stop people from crossing into America illegally, and to quickly return the illegal immigrants we catch back to their home countries."

Here the President’s anti-terror logic gets applied to Latin America. Some people crossing the border might be terrorists; therefore, in order to solve "this problem" we must make war on all people "crossing into" America. And the phrase "crossing into" says a mighty lot about how the President’s strategy draws us closer to an unclimbable wall. He didn’t say "crossing over".

At the turn of the 20th Century, 85 percent of immigrants to the USA were "crossing over" from Europe, but today those numbers are reversed. In addition to the 15 percent who still come from Europe today, 25 percent cross the Pacific from Asia, and eight percent from places "other" than Europe, Asia, or Latin America.

But these days, Latin America provides fifty one percent of the foreign born residents in the USA, and about half of those Latin Americans are not from Mexico. Or to put it another way, for every Mexican migrant "crossing into" the USA from the South, there is nearly another Latin American who is not from Mexico.

The President on Saturday made reference to this non-Mexican immigration when he announced that a new Homeland Security bill will allow him to "expand the holding capacity of our detention facilities by 10 percent."

"This will allow us to hold more non-Mexican illegal immigrants while we process them through a program we call ‘expedited removal,’" explained the President. "This will make the process faster and more efficient. Putting more non-Mexican illegal immigrants through expedited removal is crucial to sending back people who have come here illegally. As Secretary Chertoff told the Senate this week, our goal is to return every single illegal entrant, with no exceptions. And this bill puts us on the path to do that."

In this part of the President’s address, it is no longer a question of whether the border-crosser may be a terrorist, etc. One is simply an illegal non-Mexican who must be deported, each and every time. (Are there no prisons? asks Scrooge. But nowhere near enough for the non-Mexicans, sir, replies the First Gentleman.) And what about those who are Mexicans?

"For Mexicans who cross into America illegally, we have a different plan, but the same goal," sez the Prez. "Now, most of the 900,000 illegal immigrants from Mexico who are caught each year are immediately escorted back across the border. The problem is that these illegal immigrants are able to connect with another smuggler or coyote and come right back in. So one part of the solution is a program called ‘interior repatriation’ where we fly or bus these illegal immigrants all the way back to their hometowns in the interior of Mexico. By returning illegal Mexican immigrants to their homes, far away from desert crossings, we’re saving lives and making it more difficult for them to turn right around and cross back into America."

Actually, the option to catch a chartered ride home has been offered for two years. During the first year, about 14,000 people were taken south on about 150 airplane trips, at a cost of about $1,000 per person.

Although the program is supposed to be voluntary, two-thirds of the people caught have so far declined to risk consideration. Of those who do opt for the screening in Tucson, half decide against the free trip home. Yet, if among the caught crossers USA officials diagnose certain health risks such as blisters on the feet, Yanqui authorities may recommend ‘interior repatriation’ for health reasons. During the first year of operation, the USA made such "properly documented" recommendations to Mexican authorities. "In every single case," says a report on the matter, "the principle of willingness was expressed before the Mexican authorities." An astounding conversion rate.

"As we improve and expand our efforts to secure our borders," said the President, "we must also recognize that enforcement cannot work unless it’s part of a comprehensive immigration reform that includes a temporary worker program." Here the President’s logic narrows into the proverbial bushwhack canyon where there is only one way out. Since there is obviously no way to prevent Mexicans from finding work, we shall have to tell them where and when they shall be allowed to find work. At this point turn around and watch all the state minimalists in the room nod in rigorous agreement. That’s right. W

e need a GOVERNMENT PROGRAM to tell Mexicans where to find work and when to stop.

The idea of a guest-worker program is also popular in pro-wall talk. The only good Mexican is a working Mexican. And the only good working Mexican is one who takes his orders from Uncle Sam. Never mind that without any government assistance in this regard, Mexican-born men are already outworking everyone else. And never mind that the old guest-worker program known as the bracero system was long ago dismantled owing to eyewitness experiences of the human rights abuses that ensue whenever you reduce human beings to corporate labor.

Word by word, headline by headline, the issue of borderland security is being turned into a question of national defense. And the image of defense is bleeding into images of guns and high walls. Meanwhile, lurking in the mix of this prodigal mind is the idea that the only rightful existence for a human of Mexican origin is strict corporate servitude to Yanqui employers. At this rate, it won’t be too long from now, when those of us in the Southwest who have watched with horror how the war on terrorism has played out overseas will have things nearby to see.

Notes:

Abraham T. Mosisa. The role of foreign-born workers in the U. S. economy. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Monthly Labor Review. May 2002.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art1full.pdf

Julia Gelatt and Jennifer Yau, Migration Policy Institute. Free Flights and New Enforcement Proposals Address Unauthorized Migrants. Migration Information Source. Policy Beat. July 1, 2005.
http://www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?id=322

See also link to IRP Joint Report at Gelatt and Yau above.

The referendum to ban gay marriage passed 3-1 in November, but Equality
Texas says the election revealed a few legislative districts where
voters may be ready to trade up for equality-friendly leadership.

See the detailed analysis at Equality Texas.
It is encouraging to note that in districts with vocal
pro-equality legislators, the voters either defeated the
amendment, or opposed it by higher margins than the average in
their respective counties. 
This reinforces a lesson most of us know: elected
officials who take a leadership role in advancing equality for
all Texans can, and do, lead the communities they were elected
to represent.  Some
examples of these legislators and their district results are
below:

 

Excerpt from Equality Texas analysis of November election results.

In a stunning piece of reporting by Lise Olsen, the Houston Chronicle
reports that the August 24, 1993 execution of Ruben Cantu punished the
wrong man for the 1984 robbery-killing of a Mexican immigrant.

[Nov. 21, 2005, 9:13AM, CANTU CASE: DEATH AND DOUBT
Executed man’s co-defendant says years of guilt have led him to try to
clear his friend’s name Silence vow blamed for ultimate penalty]
For California’s effort to execute Tookie Williams, see Phil Gasper’s blog.

The death penalty is barbaric, period. Stop killing in cold blood.–gm

The Texas Civil Rights Review has signed a petition asking that prisoners no longer be denied their rights to vote.

Like many folks, your editor for decades held the position that the
violation of some ‘social contract’ could serve as moral grounds for
denying convicted felons their rights to participate in elections.

But what is a ‘social contract’? And does a felony conviction
fairly count as the sole criterion for judging that someone has broken
one?

To comment on this article please go to the comment blog.

To skim an easy example from Texas headlines these days, let’s consider
the elected representatives of the legislature, and the role they are
supposed to play in the ‘social contract’, if there is such a thing.

Because, if there is such a thing as a ‘social contract’, one would think that the
state legislature would be the most likely place to look for people who
honor it.

If there is a ‘social contract’, then, state legislators would be the
ones morally obliged to say things like: ‘look, we have a "social
contract" to keep with the children of Texas, etc.’ Then they would pass an income tax, and go home for the summer.

I skim the example, not to get back into all the cruddy history of the
Texas state legislature, especially when it comes to their stewardship of
education. I just use the example of the legislature’s track record in
education
to show how, if there is a ‘social contract’, and if breaking it were
sufficient grounds to deny someone the right to vote, then how would we
begin to apply the enforcement of such a rule, fairly, across
the board?

If breaking a ‘social contract’ is grounds to revoke a person’s right
to vote, then state legislators ought to lead by example, and revoke
their own voting rights next week. How’s that for a modest proposal?

So the argument that prisoners shouldn’t be allowed to vote, because
they broke their ‘social contract’, is an argument that runs into all
kinds of Civil Rights problems, if you take the equal protection clause
of the 14th amendment to be a central premise of civil rights logic.

***

But to be honest about it, the flaw of the ‘social contract’
justification was not what really prompted your humble editor to
re-think voting rights for prisoners. More persuasive has been
the trend over my adult lifetime for lawmakers across the USA to
replace
education with incarceration as the great hope of domestic tranquility.

The first time I heard Angela Davis make the argument, I was
startled. She said (I forget exactly which time) that if you
compare the political economy of the prison population today, with the
slave population of 1860, then you get a pattern that expresses some
deep, visceral structure of American power relations.

In fact, at no time in American history have we been able to produce a
sharable system of freedom and justice for all. Seen in this light,
the legislature’s failure this summer to provide
excellent education (let’s face it, for poor kids and brown kids and
black kids) is not simply to be chalked up to conflicting personalities
between three old white men. The failure is deeply structural.

Or put it this way: let’s suppose some court declared the Texas highway
speed limits unconstitutional, and then ordered the legislature to fix the
system, or face the closure of all highways. And suppose at the end of
two regular sessions, with half a dozen special sessions in between,
the result came out that nothing had yet been resolved, and Texans were
told that come October, the highway system would be shut down.

Hang with your humble editor, dear reader. The point is just about done. Now suppose we had some political analysis
that said, well, we have three ornery white guys who just can’t get
their egos (or whatever the folks at PinkDome call that thing) lined
up. Would we be just sitting back, reading that account, and
shaking our heads?

Or even worse–would we be expecting any of these guys to be remotely considering campaigns for re-election?

At times like this I think of my cat, Princess. She is such a
bearutiful and clever creature. Sometimes, if I get busy typing
or reading, and I forget to feed her promptly on time, she has this way
of slipping. She just walks across the table and her foot slides,
ever so accidentally of course, right down onto some fleshy surface,
and ouch! Oh my god, she is such an artist when it comes to
slipping up in just the right way at the right time.

***

No, to get back to the story, the ability of the legislature to
fumble this ball over and over again, with everybody watching, shaking
their heads, and wringing their hands, speaks to our collective
character as a state population, because goddammit, it’s who we deeply
are. We are not ashamed of these guys, because we have no shame when it comes to our own faith in education.

And part of this structure of our collective personality involves the
criminalization and incarceration of the very same people who we never
believed we should share anything with anyway.

And that’s why prisoners should not be denied their right to vote.

***

But there is still one argument more. It has to do with
consequences of social drift. When public policy drifts into
criminalization, and when the felons are at the same time deprived of
their rights to vote, then the politicians who are most reponsible for
the trend have no consequences to fear, because they are busy
disenfranchising their most likely critics.

The trend is reinforced when rural, white populations compete for
prison-related opportunities, importing populations into their counties
who will have no say whatsoever in local elections. Again, as
with politicians, thinly populated rural communities might think twice
about importing swing voters, and, when it comes to prison policy,
thinking twice is really what we need more of.

So, given the incoherence of the ‘social contract’ argument, given the
visceral traditions in America (and in Texas) that continue to
perpetuate ugly structures of power, and given the one-way direction in
which these consequences tend to be dumped–these reasons give us
sufficient warrant to sign a petition asking that prisoners be restored
their rights to vote.

[PS, sorry, I realize Sunday sermons should not use the GD word.
But if we really are the collective character that our legislature is
reflecting back on us, then too many Sunday sermons have needed improvement anyway.]

By Greg Moses

"Texas Civil Rights Review attacks Alex Jones, Defends Plan of San Diego," reads the headline
at InfoWars.Com. The story there is a fairly accurate review of a brief
Sept. 19 commentary posted by yours truly. I do think Alex Jones picked
a poor target for his energies and resources when he chose to protest a
Diez y Seis de Septiembre rally on Saturday. So it is fair to say that
I attacked Mr. Jones, although my attack is limited and carefully
qualified.

But nowhere in the article of Sept. 16 do I defend
the plan of San Diego. In fact, I say in the story, "I am a pacifist.
No killing please." To the extent that the plan of San Diego calls for
killing of any sort, it is not something that I support. This portion
of the article is misrepresented in the headline, and ignored in the
otherwise comprehensive quotations. It may be the only part NOT quoted
by InfoWars.

What I encourage Mr. Jones to consider is another
way of reading references to the Plan of San Diego as a fragment of
historical memory. In the Sept. 19 article I suggest that the language
of Malcolm X provides a suitable analogy for thinking about the meaning
of voices who advocate a right to violence, especially when, just like
Malcolm, the people who preserve that right in speech happen to serve
as poor examples of violence in action. If we notice that expressed references to the Plan of San Diego
accompany peaceful and inclusive public actions, then we might ask: is
this to be taken literally? Or might there be some message intended to
provoke deeper thinking about justice and deeper commitments to the
everyday challenge of justice in our streets.

This is not a new argument from the Texas Civil Rights Review. I have made the case before in two articles: "Are Civil Rights Groups Racist?" and in an editorial entitled, "Measuring Racism.
In those articles I show how Alex Jones proceeds from a libertarian
logic that does many things well (as the work of Alex Jones is valuable
in many ways) but which fails precisely on such occasions as last
Saturday, when Mr. Jones made the Diez y Seis march a venue for his
protest against Chicano nationalism and its language of La Raza.

When
I hear Malcolm talk about the "white devil", when I hear him threaten
the "bullet" if the ballot won’t work, or when I hear the thinly veiled
reference to the right to violence in the call to justice "by any means
necessary", I do not chime with the judgment that this is, as Mike
Wallace once put it, "the hate that hate produced." Yet this is about
as far as libertarian logic can take us, where all parties stand on equal
ground and where demands for civility are evenly spread.

To go
beyond libertarian logic one must first deal with the hard question:
does white supremacy still prevail? I think you will find by and large
that libertarians have no way to answer the question, because they
embrace a logic that cannot do the proper analysis. All the libertarian
sees are individuals, some white, some black, some brown, etc. From
this basis, the libertarian has a difficult time conceiving how racial
power is to be discerned or how collective relations of power enter the
analytical field.

At any rate, let’s not multiply our
disputes. Here at the TCRR I am clear about which logic is being used
and why. I respect many uses of libertarian logic, but I also reject
its limitations. The decisive question I answer this way: white
supremacy persists in theory and practice. And this is the conceptual
premise upon which I build my working theory of the value of Civil
Rights. Had there never been any white supremacy, there never would
have been a Civil Rights movement, etc.

So I welcome
wholeheartedly the attention that TCRR is receiving from InfoWars. And
I suspect that the InfoWars audience will have some members who agree
that white supremacy is still a problem. Others will not. To those who
agree that white supremacy is still a problem, I ask this question: do
people have a right to self defense?

As a pacifist, I do not
draw quick or easy conclusions from the right to self defense, but I do
think the right exists and the Plan of San Diego was drawn and
conceived during such a time when that right was perceived to have
special urgency as a right. And this is the lesson that the Plan of San
Diego can teach us if we are interested in peace. Because the better
response to those who would recall the Plan of San Diego during these
times of crisis is not to condemn outright their right to recall, but
to ask, what are we going to do about white supremacy today?

For
anyone interested in the people and programs of power that are
disrupting our democratic dreams all over the globe, the work of
InfoWars is a helpful resource. What is too sad is the inability of
Alex and InfoWars to see that what motivates MEChA and Chicano
Nationalism is the living experience of centuries of power that has
always operated in just the way InfoWars says it does. Which I suspect
is why InfoWars hangs onto the Second Amendment with unpried fingers.
And what is this commitment to the Second Amendment about if not the
right to violence?

As Alex Jones and InfoWars protect their
right to bear arms, so do some voices of a beleaguered community
protect the community’s right to self defense. As Alex Jones and
InfoWars demonstrate, where one goes with these rights to violence,
besides defending them, is a complex and auspicious responsibility that
nobody takes lightly, least of all the Texas Civil Rights Review, which
at once respects rights and encourages vigorous militant, nonviolent
activism, and peaceful assemblies such as the "beauty of it all" seen
Saturday in the streets of Austin during the Diez y Seis de Septiembre
celebration.