AmeriKKKa

[Seabass]

Column: How the Border Patrol helped cause the ‘browning’ of America

Pedro Loza, now 74, recalls the exact moment he realized he would have to settle in the United States, despite his dream of returning to reside once again in his beloved Mexico.

He was working in construction in Chicago in the 1990s, watching Spanish-language TV news reporting on California’s spate of anti-immigrant policies, including the notorious Proposition 187, which targeted people without papers. President Clinton had begun construction of a steel border fence in San Diego and invested in helicopters, sensors, night scopes and all-terrain vehicles for the U.S. Border Patrol.

Loza and millions of others who previously zigzagged across the border — working seasonally in the U.S, while investing in a dream house or small business in Mexico — were trapped. Having come without papers, many feared if they returned home, they might not be able to reenter the U.S. to earn the wages they needed to see their dreams through.

“We realized that if we wanted to work in the U.S., we had to immigrate,” Loza told me. “We had to live here.”

That decade, Loza applied for citizenship, and for the first time, he began to accept the U.S. as home.

The average profile of arrivals at the Southwest border has changed dramatically since then, from single adult Mexican laborers to Central American families seeking asylum. Yet a new uptick in single adult economic migrants from Mexico is driving a familiar wave of anti-immigrant hysteria.

A recent Breitbart article — “Report: ‘Mostly’ Single Male Border Crossers Bussed to Louisiana Cities” — inspired comments such as “Their job is to vote communist democrat and rape women” and “They are REPLACING YOU, Louisiana.”

Now for the irony: The people who are so concerned about brown men entering this country are arguably the most responsible for the recent demographic shifts.

Most Mexicans who came before border militarization never planned to stay — only to work. The U.S. offered great pay but it felt foreign, with its English language and colder culture. Loza, for example, wanted to save to buy a tractor in Guanajuato, where he sent money to family and even purchased a cattle ranch. “My dream was always to return to Mexico,” he told me.

His daughter, Mireya Loza, is an associate professor of history at Georgetown University and author of “Defiant Braceros,” about the 1942-1964 “bracero” program for temporary migrant workers to fill wartime labor shortages. After employer abuses came to light and the program was abolished by Congress, many continued to cross the border for the same seasonal work. But now, they crossed illegally, stepping over trampled, paltry barbed wire in San Diego and elsewhere.

In the 1990s, California politicians cast those workers as criminals to pander to white racial anxiety. The resulting hysteria and enforcement closed off reverse migration.

Is it time for a new bracero program? Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador proposed one. Currently, visas for temporary agricultural laborers, known as H-2As, are uncapped. López Obrador’s plan would increase the legal pipeline of nonagricultural guest laborers to the U.S. But Mireya Loza isn’t sold. Guest worker visas, she maintains, often mean deplorable working conditions and low wages. She argues for greater green card access instead, enabling people to “exercise their labor and civil rights.”

This year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered more than 441,000 single adult Mexicans at the Southwest border, up 72% from last year. These people are coming to harvest our food, build our homes and heal our post-pandemic economy. Whining about them displacing white people will cut off this labor and trap those who are here, just as U.S. policies did in the ’90s.

For many Mexicans, the dream was never about living in the U.S. Rather, the sueño is about returning to live large in Mexico with hard-earned U.S. dollars. The popular misconception that all migrants want to stay here is rooted in the myth of U.S. exceptionalism.

continued:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2 ... nt-returns

[Sean Hayden]

A Marxist critique of the theory of ‘white privilege’

Institutional racism; strategy

The privilege model locates much of the cause of oppression in competition between workers and individuals. It holds, for example, that Black applicants, regardless of qualifications, don’t get hired because white ones do. Marxism rejects the idea that Black workers are refused at the door because fellow white workers exercise “the privilege” of earning a living. Marxism instead maintains that the capitalists organise production and the labour market. They bosses pick and divide workers, both as a function of their own racism, and as a strategy to divide Black, white, Latino, Asian and other workers against each other. When a white applicant gets a job over Black applicants, it’s not because s/he exercised a privilege, but because discrimination is built into capitalist employment practices. (Note that the practice known as “job trusts”, in which white workers controlled admission to some skilled trades jobs, restricting them to family members and friends, discriminating against Blacks and other whites, was a relatively small exception to the general rule that the capitalists control hiring and firing.)

In holding white workers co-responsible for systemic racism, the privilege model attributed a power to white workers they manifestly do not have: control over the institutions of American capitalism – schools, jobs, housing, factories, banks, police, courts, prisons, legislatures, media, elections, universities, armed services, hospitals, sports, political parties – all of which function in a racist manner. These institutions are owned and controlled by the capitalist class. They engineer, manage and enforce the social, economic and political racism that serves the social relations of American capitalism. It is these institutions that make racism such a powerful and inescapable part of American daily life.

https://redflag.org.au/node/7254

[Seabass]

A Marxist critique of the theory of ‘white privilege’

...
In holding white workers co-responsible for systemic racism, the privilege model attributed a power to white workers they manifestly do not have: control over the institutions of American capitalism – schools, jobs, housing, factories, banks, police, courts, prisons, legislatures, media, elections, universities, armed services, hospitals, sports, political parties – all of which function in a racist manner. ...

https://redflag.org.au/node/7254

Who holds white workers co-responsible for systemic racism? Sounds like strawman to me.

White workers aren't responsible for systemic racism simply by virtue of being white workers. It depends on who they vote for. If they vote for the conservative party and conservative candidates, then yes, they are absolutely partly responsible.

Problem is, the white working class in America as a voting bloc has been with the Republican party since passage of the Civil Rights Act. That's not a coincidence; it's racism. The white working class turned against government when, as Heather McGee put it, "the civil rights movement turned government from enforcer of the racial hierarchy to upender of it."

[Seabass]

Here the author clearly conflates two different issues.

The term “privileges” was used to describe measures, such as relatively decent schools and medical care, to which whites received greater access. The problem with this conception is that these measures, rather than representing undeserved “privileges”, were in fact reforms won by the working class through bitter struggle. These class gains represented the return of a small part of the great wealth held by capitalists that workers had produced. Privilege theory – on the basis of unequal access to these gains under racist American capitalism – converted hard-won class victories, reforms and rights into “undeserved” workers’ “privileges”.

If white GIs get to take advantage of the GI Bill, and black GIs don't, the white ones have privilege. Doesn't matter who fought for what and when.

[Sean Hayden]

It depends on who they vote for

[Sean Hayden]

The problem with this conception is that these measures, rather than representing undeserved “privileges”, were in fact reforms won by the working class through bitter struggle.

--//--

Doesn't matter who fought for what and when.

[Seabass]

The problem with this conception is that these measures, rather than representing undeserved “privileges”, were in fact reforms won by the working class through bitter struggle.

--//--

Doesn't matter who fought for what and when.

If the entire working class fights for reforms, and black people don't benefit, are you telling me there's no white privilege there? Would it make you feel better if people call it "black lack of privilege"?

[Sean Hayden]

It's not a privilege when your working conditions improve because of unionization, and as the author notes these efforts were supported across races.

Furthermore, the privilege theory of causation – Black workers get less because white workers get more, and its corollary – flies in the face of American reality. Historically, wages, benefits and working conditions have always been significantly lower for working-class whites in the non-unionised South than for Black (and white) workers in unionised areas of the North. The higher union standard of living results not from racial privilege, but from the unity and solidarity of both Black and white workers in class struggle.

--efforts that have seemingly been eroded to nothing in part by your insistence on "white privilege"...

[Seabass]

It's not a privilege when your working conditions improve because of unionization, and as the author notes these efforts were supported across races. --efforts that have seemingly been eroded to nothing in part by your insistence on "white privilege"...

When white people benefit from social reforms and black people don't, what do you want people to call it?

[Sean Hayden]

Uh, racism?

[Sean Hayden]

And if you're a Marxist: maybe capitalism which is apparently necessarily racist(?)

[Sean Hayden]

It's not a privilege when your working conditions improve because of unionization, and as the author notes these efforts were supported across races. --efforts that have seemingly been eroded to nothing in part by your insistence on "white privilege"...

When white people benefit from social reforms and black people don't, what do you want people to call it?

Also black workers did benefit as noted above.

[Seabass]

Uh, racism?

This is racism:

In 1918, Mary Turner, who was 21 and eight months pregnant, was lynched by a white mob in Southern Georgia after she protested the lynching of her husband the day before, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Walter White, who led the NAACP from 1929 to 1955, was sent to investigate. Between 1880 and 1968, there were at least 637 lynchings recorded in the state, according to a Tuskegee Institute study.

“Abusive plantation owner, Hampton Smith, was shot and killed,” according to the NAACP. “A week-long manhunt resulted in the killing of the husband of Mary Turner, Hayes Turner. Mary Turner denied that her husband had been involved in Smith’s killing, publicly opposed her husband’s murder, and threatened to have members of the mob arrested.”

The next day, a mob came after Mary Turner. “The mob tied her ankles, hung her upside down from a tree, doused her in gasoline and motor oil and set her on fire,” the NAACP reported. “Turner was still alive when a member of the mob split her abdomen open with a knife and her unborn child fell on the ground. The baby was stomped and crushed as it fell to the ground. Turner’s body was riddled with hundreds of bullets.”

Many of the black people lynched were never formally accused of crimes. Some were lynched simply for addressing a white person in a way the white person deemed inappropriate. Others were killed after being accused of bumping into a white woman, looking a white person directly in the eye or drinking from a white family’s well.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/hist ... can-legacy

[Seabass]

Uh, racism?

I didn't make up the term "white privilege". In fact, I don't use it much. If you search the forum you'll find that I've used it a total of maybe 3 or 4 times in response to 42 claiming it doesn't exist.

But it exists for a reason. It describes a benefit that white people in racist countries like the US have, even if they don't know they have it or are even racist. I don't know why you're so bothered by the phrase. Have you ever tried to understand its meaning?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_privilege

[Seabass]

And if you're a Marxist: maybe capitalism which is apparently necessarily racist(?)

I'm not a Marxist nor do I believe that capitalism is necessarily racist.