What Wisconsin Means for Immigrant Rights

by David L. Wilson

March 27, 2011
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/wilson270311.html

A few weeks can do a lot to sweep away old assumptions.

Last year U.S. leftists were wondering why the worst
economic crisis in 70 years hadn't inspired a stronger
response from its victims; now Arabs have toppled
neoliberal regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, and U.S.
workers have fought cutbacks and union-busting in
Wisconsin with massive rallies and threats of general
strikes.  The unexpected uprisings early this year may
well mark the start of a period of sudden and
surprising changes in political consciousness.

There hasn't been much talk about immigration so far in
2011, but this may be another area where the old
assumptions are about to give way.

Immigration reform is "the third rail of American
politics," Rahm Emanuel, then a Democratic Congress
member from Illinois, announced in 2007.  "[A]nyone who
doesn't realize that isn't with the American people." 
Racism, xenophobia, and relentless anti-immigrant
propaganda in the media had brought us to a point where
activists felt they couldn't touch the issue, much less
try to talk about it rationally with the U.S. public. 
The best we could hope for, we were told, was a
compromise with the politicians and the "business
community," a compromise in which undocumented
immigrants might win some sort of legalization, but
only in exchange for expanded guest worker programs and
harsher enforcement measures.

Now, four years later, we have to ask ourselves whether
politicians like Emanuel really understand the people
they claim to represent.

Walking Like an Egyptian

One thing the events in Wisconsin have made clear is
that many U.S. workers still have a sense of class,
even if they identify their class as "middle."

After decades of anti-union tirades in the media and a
well-organized campaign to turn private-sectors workers
against public employees, a majority of the population
still supports the right to collective bargaining and
still opposes wage cuts for government workers,
according to national polls.  This isn't just general
sympathy for teachers and sanitation workers, moreover;
the same polls indicate that the supportive people are
generally the ones at lower income levels, while the
bitterest enemies of the "greedy public employees" are
the people with an annual income over $100,000.

And the support isn't just passive: students, farmers,
and private-sector workers repeatedly turned out in
large numbers to back the public employees occupying
the Capitol in Madison.  On March 19, the eighth
anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, antiwar
veterans led one of the mass rallies outside the
Capitol.  "I'm here because I was a public worker,"
said Iraq war veteran Derek Giffin, who served in the
U.S. Army from 2000 to 2005.  "I got paid with public
funds just like the teachers, firefighters here, and
their plight is our plight."

This incipient class consciousness opens the way for
important changes in attitudes.

For one thing, people are starting to use some common
sense in thinking about economics.  The Great Recession
had already created a lot of cynicism about the
official economic line; it was getting hard to believe
that "free trade," "open markets," and "trickle-down
economics" were really leading us to prosperity.  But
there's an important shift when working people start to
understand that the failed economic policies are
policies that benefit the rich, that the rich pay the
salaries of the economists and columnists that promote
these policies, and that the "working class and the
employing class have nothing in common," as the
Wobblies put it so neatly a century ago.

The media go on and on about deficits, "fiscal
responsibility," and "equality of sacrifice," but down
below you hear more and more that we're just paying for
a disaster that Wall Street created.  "When will the
rich start to sacrifice?" asked a hand-lettered sign at
a Wisconsin solidarity rally in New York on February
26.

The growth of class consciousness also undermines
deep-seated prejudices.  Wisconsin workers rallying for
their rights quickly began identifying themselves with
the protesters in Egypt: years of "terrorism" hysteria
against Arabs and Muslims weren't enough to block an
instinctive admiration for fellow humans fighting
oppression, even if they were located in North Africa
and the Middle East.  "Walk like an Egyptian" became a
popular slogan among unionists in Wisconsin; an old
comedy routine has turned into a new way of saying:
"Stand up for your rights."

Confronting the Third Rail

These developments point to a real potential -- the
best in many years -- for changing people's thinking
about immigration.

If many private-sector workers can see through the
campaign to turn them against public employees, is it
really impossible for native-born workers to see
through the similar effort to pit them against
foreign-born workers?  If U.S. workers are beginning to
understand the real purpose of neoliberal economic
policies, are they incapable of understanding the real
purpose of guest worker programs and anti-immigrant
measures -- that these programs are in fact, as has
been demonstrated again and again, simply ways to drive
down wages for everyone?

And if U.S. unionists now want to walk like Egyptians,
can't they also start to overcome the racism and
xenophobia that have been so crucial to making
immigration reform the "third rail"?  What if U.S.
public employees, for instance, knew that the first
massive resistance to the current wave of cutbacks by
U.S. local governments wasn't the demonstrations by
English-speaking people in Madison -- that it was an
October 2009 general strike by workers and students in
Puerto Rico? The first militant resistance to Great
Recession layoffs was the December 2008 occupation of
the Republic Windows factory in Chicago. Suppose people
knew that what made this happen was united action by
African-American and immigrant workers?

But in fact most people don't know these things, and
this is the sort of ignorance that activists need to
focus on.  We can't wait for people to discover on
their own that "an injury to one is an injury to all";
we need to be out there talking to them and challenging
the anti-immigrant myths.  No, we need to say, the 1986
amnesty didn't lead to an increase in undocumented
immigration.  No, the E-Verify program, which pushes
companies to check employees' immigration status in a
government database, doesn't actually keep people from
coming here.  We need to tell people that E-Verify just
forces more immigrants into the underground economy --
and that the government's own projections show this.

Don't Lobby, Organize

We don't control the mainstream media, of course, and
it's hard work to reach out to people around
immigration, to confront the ignorance and prejudices
of many native-born workers.  It can be scary at times.
But activists overcame similar obstacles in Wisconsin,
and those obstacles are minor compared to what
activists face in North Africa and the Middle East.

There's no lack of opportunities for linking struggles
by immigrants to struggles by the native-born: for
workers' rights, against layoffs, for education
opportunities.

The Dignity Campaign, which brings together immigrant
rights activists and union organizers, has developed a
full program, already endorsed by a number of labor
groups, for an immigration reform in the interests of
workers, not the rich.

A coalition of workers' centers and other groups is
building for this year's May 1 demonstrations to focus
on resistance to "[s]tagnant and falling wages,
lingering unemployment, and escalating attacks on
immigrant workers and the right of all workers to
organize."

Activists are fighting layoffs at the Chipotle Mexican
restaurant chain, where management has been firing
undocumented workers in response to pressure from the
Obama administration.

Immigrant students have been "coming out of the
shadows" to defend their right to education while at
the same time confronting prejudices about "legal" and
"illegal."

The student activists describe themselves as
"undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic."  We'll all
need to show this type of spirit in the coming months.

[David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The
Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Monthly
Review Press, July 2007). Guskin and Wilson have
facilitated dozens of dialogues on immigration issues
over the past four years; if you are interested in
setting one up, write to
[log in to unmask]]

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