For a Diverse and Plural Millenium
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USA: A wall between North and South¹

Irene León

A few months after the State of California (USA) approved Bill 187 that denies illegal immigrants access to social services, xenophobic initiatives were gaining ground, because the States of Florida, Texas, and Arizona, started the necessary arrangements to adopt similar procedures.

Meanwhile, illegal immigrants, restricted to a clandestine existence, faced a decrease of their basic human rights for the crime of being poor and living in irregular administrative conditions.

War against illegal immigrants

The new acceptance of immigration as delinquency has facilitated the militarization of immigration services. Thousands of illegal immigrant families live in an increasing insecurity; asylum applicants are concentrated in strictly guarded camps; illegal refugees are expelled to their countries of origin, even when their lives are in danger.

To stop so-called unwanted people from entering the United States, Bill Clinton’s government was determined to build a wall that would cover its border with Mexico, from east to west; it multiplied budgets to reinforce immigration police; it created jails for illegal immigrants, and it invested in various mechanisms, not all that legal, in order to detect underground immigration networks.

In addition, it developed methods to eradicate illegal immigration from its origin. Obtaining a visa to travel to the United States has become an impossible enterprise, imposed restrictions and conditions are diverse, and unpleasant treatment prevails over diplomatic and international law considerations.

Dissuasion begins by treating everyone as suspects, and the minimal bureaucratic irregularity leads to the rejection with no right to appeal. Thus, those who intend to become illegal workers, do not even have the chance to get to the embassies, and choose, more and more often, to look for illegal immigration networks, and undertake voyages whose ups and downs would overshadow the most dramatic Hollywood films.

Denunciation: a civic duty

For those who eventually enter the country, life becomes so unbearable that sooner or later, they will consider the possibility of returning home. Police and administrative officers are actively in charge of the organization of manhunts of underground workers that increasingly involves members of civil society.

Denunciation has become a civic duty; personnel of airline companies have become aides to the immigration police; public services worker are called upon to verify, even with no need, documents and to denounce to the police any suspicion of illegality.

At work places, there is a re-emergence of all kinds of visceral struggles based, primarily, on ethnic and xenophobic reasons. This context of penalization of illegal immigration leads to the increasing exploitation of underground workers, because employers, using as a pretext that immigration police are on the lookout, maintain a permanent state of fear, increasing work hours, and reducing salaries.

In California, for instance, the emergence of organizations for the defense of “white peoples' rights”, such as Stop-it and FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform), creates a social situation where racism shows itself increasingly more openly. An argument is the danger of disappearance of white ethnicity threatened by the invasion of Southern ethnicities. However, in 1990 the number of people born abroad was of 7 million people, that is, approximately one fifth of the Californian population, twice that of 1980, but much below the figures during the First World War, when 60% of the workers were foreigners.

However, the Republican governor, Pete Wilson, dedicated himself over the entire year of 1994 to encourage xenophobia among wide sectors of the white population, establishing a connection between immigration and crisis, illegality, and delinquency.

The aggravation of the anti-immigrant feeling and the proposals directed to stop illegal immigration have become an omnipresent advertising product in order to gain electoral followers.

They give more than they get

Many politicians directly blame immigration for the existence of the economic crisis. However, the relation between illegal immigration and the economic crisis is full of contradictions because illegal immigrants not only contribute to the economy of that country offering a cheap labor force, but also the taxes that they pay are higher than the value of the services they receive.

Thus, for example, it is estimated that the United States federal administration benefits from the contribution of retirement and unemployment contributions of approximately 4 million immigrants, which are automatically subtracted from workers' salaries, amount that annually reaches 15,000 to 20,000 dollars per person, who will not be able to enjoy this right because in most cases their parents do not live in this country. This “donation” is a contribution made by immigrants to the retirement of the increasing population of aged white adults.

Only in Los Angeles, underground workers had contributed 3 million dollars in taxes during 1991-92, mostly endorsed by the federal budget, which has reduced the funds destined for its refugee aid program by 90%.

Californian democratic Senator, Art Torres, estimates in 5 thousand million dollars the benefits contributed by the 2 million immigrant workers living in this State. However, only in 1993 a dozen of Bills were filed in the State parliament, most of which were unconstitutional, such as the one intended to suppress employers' duties towards underground workers, or the one intended to deny American citizenship to underground immigrant descendants born in the country.

Rights are gradually restricted, as the right to family reunification, and the access to basic services (education, health, etc.) becomes more limited. Illegal migrants are forced to develop informal networks to alleviate these lacks, even to pick up a registered letter.

Xenophobia is globalized

There is a close link between the consolidation of neoliberal globalization of the economy and the polarization of inequalities and the processes of social exclusion. In Latin America and the Caribbean the majority of the population is affected by the increase of unemployment, impoverishment, social atomization, urban and rural crises, and the exhaustion of survival strategies in their own locations, that forces them to move towards wealthier countries, especially Northern countries.

However, while liberal globalization imposes free transit of goods, at the same time, it restricts the free transit of people and labor force, especially when these are poor and/or from discriminated ethnic groups.

Likewise, in North America and Europe, ideology based on the principle of equality and internationalist perspectives have lost credibility and are even on their way to disappearance. This facilitates the emergence of organizations that promote xenophobia and racism, based on the persistence of the economic crisis.

In this context of unprecedented proportions, the entrenchment in the past and the recovery of particularisms are back in fashion. Culture, ethnicity, and religion are in the process of becoming the pretexts to unleash historical acts of vengeance with impunity.

“Dangers” of the melting pot

Between the 60’s and the 80’s the affirmation of ethnic, cultural and identity claims, improved conditions for discriminated ethnic groups, minorities, and immigrants. In the United States the melting pot was integrated, as well as a sort of cosmopolitan mentality as a principle of collective identity.

However, in reality the American multi-culturalism has been characterized as a sum of cultures folded in themselves, an overlapping of diverse identities with a strong reference to the culture of origin. Multi-culturalism was conceived as a relative “tolerance”, while dominant values were always considered as superior to those of the newcomers, and therefore universal.

The multicultural view has waned over the years. The danger of cultural ghettos is stressed more and more often, and bio or multi-linguism is presented as dangerous. The racist culture moves forward as mechanisms of social inequality and exclusion are strengthened.

Latin American multi- culturality

The “Hispanic” unifying approach, resulting from a common front created against Proposition 187, has no precedents and will probably become an innovative collective space, because it has emerged not only as a reaction to a new reality, massive displacements of Southern populations towards the North, but also because it faces the challenge of formulating proposals of cosmopolitan and heterogeneous forms of social organization.

The Latin American culture in North America is a sum of diversities where multiple ethnic and national origins, diverse religious practices and worldviews, and unequal socioeconomic relationships are expressed. Individual and collective adaptation efforts to the dominant US American culture are complex and the adhesion to it has multiple patterns that are related to a diversity of values and cultural references, that are maintained from generation to generation.

Patterns of “Hispanic” insertion and integration in the United States are based, primarily, in the irreversibility of immigration tinted by linguistic and cultural affirmation, the consolidation of certain community bases, and the promotion of the right to diversity.

Undoubtedly, the close link among the aggravation of inequalities and the exclusions brought by ideological neoliberalism and the affirmation of identity claims, open a field for public debate and the reformulation of concepts such as assimilation, insertion, and integration, in view of a new reality which is the massive migration of Southern populations towards the North, within a context of diverse polarizations.

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