His article can be found here: The Arrogance of the Legalization MovementSo I sent him an email ... From your column on arrogance:
One man in Los Angeles told television reporters that he demanded a "general amnesty without conditions just like in 1986.'' And forget that business about requiring people to leave the country and reapply to enter legally. No way was he going to do that, he said.
What a jerk. Here he is getting a gift and he wants it wrapped with a bow. Heaven forbid, he'd have to lift a finger.
Since when is the freedom to live where one chooses, or to work where one chooses, or to simply find work when there is no other choice a gift? You admit that immigrants are contributing to our nation yet at the same time you claim their simple act of living here without jumping through all the (often arbitrary) hoops a bunch of politicians in Washington create for them is a gift. You are the jerk and the arrogant one for utilizing your privileged status and great power as a columnist and commentator to call hard-working human beings, who have relatively little power, names for simply living and working.
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Carlos Villarreal
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Their May 1st and Ours: Why the Marches Mattered
By Justin Akers Chacón
Before hundreds of thousands of marchers and their supporters even set out for the downtowns, city centers, public parks and other rally gathering spots across the country, corporate scribes were already inking the obituary of the immigrant rights movement. The Associated Press headline “Immigration protests nationwide pale compared to last year” scrolled across newspaper mastheads, from the San Diego Union-Tribune to the New York Times.
There is neither art nor science in the American media when it comes to immigration reporting. Most pundits—liberal and conservative alike—are devoid of any creative analysis that challenges the “Washington consensus.” News reporting merely provides the punctuation marks at the end of carefully scripted and edited sound-bites written elsewhere. While there are few willing to give a voice to the migrant worker, there are throngs of commentators poised to knock them down at first chance.
The media’s conspicuously dismissive tenor of May 1st could scarcely conceal a collective sigh of relief from the gilded balconies of the American political establishment. It’s true. Several million workers, students and rights supporters did not shut down whole sections of the economy like they did last year, in defensive opposition to the hateful Sensenbrenner Bill. This time only several hundred thousand marched in cities, towns and villages across the country, clearly the swan song of a movement on the wane. Or was it something different altogether?
Looking out from the fortified “Green Zone” of American class politics, it is easy to overlook or ignore the significance of the marches on May 1st, 2007, especially at a reduced scale. While most reports focused on why the protests were smaller—as if to eulogize their irrelevance—they completely ignored the context in which this year’s marches took place and the political evolution that reveals a new stage (rather than the decline) of the immigrant rights movement. From the vantage point of the grass-roots, our May 1st looked much different from theirs.
It is indubitable that state violence in the form of arbitrary arrests, detentions and expulsions has taken a toll on people’s confidence to march. There is also a good chance that many of the nearly 200,000 people detained or deported over the last year marched or stayed home in the “Great American Boycott” of 2006. But what’s more significant, is that hundreds of thousands did march or stay home—in open defiance—during the most violent and horrific period for immigrants in the United States since the mass ethnic cleansing campaign of “Operation: Wetback” in 1954.
It is the resilience of working families—facing down the Department of Homeland Security (increasingly, the seventh branch of the US military)—that demonstrates the failure of the Federal Government’s strategy to use surgically orchestrated terror as a political weapon. Unfortunately, as we are reminded by the police riot against immigrant families in Los Angeles, while the strategy is a failure, the tactics continue.
Another noteworthy aspect of the May Day marches has less to do with who was there then who wasn’t. Absent were many of the unions, church groups and ancillary organizations loyal to the Democratic Party, who have either taken a principled position against the confrontational spirit of Mayday or have shifted resources to legislative lobbying rather than popular mobilization. Lacking the resources, funds, personnel and visibility of the mass organizations that have withdrawn from the front-lines, small groups of anonymous, grass-roots activists have tried to fill the vacuum. Considering this imbalance of forces in motion—the disproportion of small organization in relation to the hundreds of thousands that did turn out—should confirm both the broad, fighting spirit that remains in the working class and the consolidation of a new (if still small) organizational bodies composed of a more politically sophisticated and experienced leadership. Furthermore, the fact that the second largest Mayday march in US history took place after the Democrats regained control of Congress demonstrates the hairline fractures that are emerging between the party and its base on the issue.
While the marches continue to broaden and democratize the debate, the strategy of lobbying has bore only bitter fruit. After the Democratic sweep of Congress in November, pro-immigrant forces have been left at the alter by a “pragmatic” party leadership; one more eager to mend fences with the Sensenbrenner Right than to use an electoral mandate to advance progressive legislation backed by majority sentiment. Where Bush refuses to compromise on the Iraq War with a 28% approval rating—and gets away with it—the Democrats beseech unity at all costs with the far right while 78% of the population stands categorically for legislation that offers citizenship.
So rather than progress, demobilization and lobbying have only encouraged party leaders like Luis Gutierrez and Edward Kennedy to waltz to the right, using their increased leverage within congress to make concessions to the discredited nativist wing of the Republican Party. The Gutierrez-Flake Bill (STRIVE Act) is the first offspring of this dysfunctional union, bearing a Latino surname, but inheriting the internal organs of the maligned Sensenbrenner side of the family. What’s more, the Congressional leadership of Pelosi and Reid has largely abandoned the field in the immigration debate, which has become a non-issue in their post-election crusade. This has allowed Bush to seize the initiative in shaping the date (with his plan to create a disposable-worker program) and made king-makers out of Republican Senators like John Kyl, who would otherwise retreat into the margins with the rest of the reactionaries left behind by popular sentiment.
The most effective means of pushing the debate forward in a progressive direction will not be to unilaterally forfeit our power in the streets, schools and workplaces. On the contrary, we are better served to organize it into a potent expression capable of guaranteeing our place in the “debate.” As the unofficial third party in US politics, only independent working class participation has ensured the extension of full and equal rights in the past, from the rise of labor unionism to the overthrow of the last legal forms of segregation.
It is perhaps this element of the struggle that the most significant lesson of May 1st, 2007: the conscious entry of the working people into the theater of national politics. Rather than march in defensive reaction to a proposed piece of legislation, marchers were in the streets calling for full legalization and end to the raids and deportations independent of policy proposals, a qualitative shift reflecting the political evolution of a class in struggle and becoming self-conscious as such. This is what should make this Mayday so momentous for some, and what does make it worrisome for others.
San Diego Union-Tribune columnist (and alleged immigrant rights supporter) Ruben Navarette couldn’t conceal his contempt for the fact that immigrant marchers were “demanding” anything. “Most of the comments I heard and read last week from the participants were arrogant, outrageous, presumptuous and reflected badly on the entire legalization movement…[f]or many of the marchers, that path should be a carefree stroll in the park. If I had my way, it would be more like boot camp. Look, these people made a choice. They broke the rules and came to the United States illegally. Now they have to pay for it by making restitution and making an effort to become part of the American fabric.”
Navarette (whom I did not see at the San Diego march) feels more comfortable speaking for immigrant workers than he does listening to them. If he sounds like a Minuteman—with his newfound religious devotion to the “rule of law” and the zeal to “punish” immigrants for the crime of working—it is because he, like so many other side-line commentators, are adherents to the corporate calculus of immigration reform. It is also because he has appointed himself the liaison between “Latinos” and the corporate power structure, and because he wants to maintain the best face possible for “respectable, middle-class Latinos” negotiating higher stations into the media industrial complex.
For the likes of Navarette, the active participation of migrant workers in the debate to determine their own fate is little more than an annoyance, a distraction, and will negatively impact the “goodwill” of corporate cabals now negotiating "immigration reform" in seclusion behind Senate walls. For the rest of us, the mass marches of May 1st, 2007 should be a sign that a new civil rights movement for workers continues, one where the workers are leading, and hopefully their leaders will follow.
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