What We Don't Say About Illegal Immigration

With many of us facing financial hardship in this economic drought, scapegoats abound in American minds and there are plenty candidates to choose from: the president, the Treasury, the president, socialism. However, none is more pervasive than the illegal immigrant.

The debate over illegal immigration once again rises to a cacophony with the Tea Party making it a point of contention in healthcare reform. It was the cause célèbre in Sacramento as the budget crisis in California spiraled over the spring. With Californians facing a $26 Billion Dollar deficit and unemployment soaring into the double digits, services for one of the largest illegal immigrant populations in the country seemed the obvious choice for budget cuts to some and a mere distraction to others. At this point, no matter what your point of view on the issue, the debate must be waged amongst Americans, including Latino Americans, who are struggling in this economic downturn as badly as anyone and who as American citizens must actively participate in this democracy for a more secure future. Jobs have gone - millions have gone and many won't be coming back.

The debate over illegal immigration is ugly and complex. It's ugly because there is a human component attached to the immigration issue and the right wing has a shameful history of disregarding the human component as it relates to cultural diversity. What's worse, racism has been tolerated for so long in this country that we are forced to become a bit rabid to rid it from systematic use. The debate over illegal immigration is complex because liberals have limited our language to such an extent that a discussion of accountability in the context of a minority group is seen as a lack of compassion at best and more often a symptom of bigotry at worst. This sort of reactionary thinking frowns upon honest and constructive debates concerning minority groups, thereby reserving acceptable cultural critiques for white men, and ultimately denying minority groups a status of equality.

There are many statistics and figures of illegal immigration that have been bandied about between conservatives and liberals and many may very well be accurate but what is all too often missing from the debate is any reference to the root causes of illegal immigration including federal trade policies and rampant corruption of Latin American governments, but more specifically, the pernicious caste system that is abetted by much of Latin America and international business interests.

Consider the fact that the United States does not share a border with the poorest nation in the world, not even the poorest nation in Latin America. In fact, Mexico has the second highest GDP in Latin America according to the IMF-- Brazil, the highest. Both are members of the illustrious G20 and their leaders just last week joined leaders from wealthy nations of the world in Pittsburgh to discuss financial markets and the world's economy. One can only hope that jobs for the working poor and middle-class were addressed during the two-day summit.

Anyone who has traveled to Mexico's capital, Mexico City, and happened to have stayed in one of the more upscale hotels in the more exclusive areas knows that economic viability in Mexico is not as scarce as one might be led to believe from what the Center for Immigration Study estimates is its 70% share of the illegal immigrants in the United States, ten percent of Mexico's population. There is money in Mexico, albeit concentrated in the ruling class of the country.

On my last trip to Mexico in December of 2006, I took my mother to see the ruins of the Aztec and Mayan temples with a few days of leisure on the beaches of Cancun. My mother, who is from a farming family of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, constantly remarked how lovely a country Mexico was. She had not seen the rural towns and abject poverty that much of the Indian population of Mexico subsists in as I had many years ago backpacking through the country. To her, Mexico City was a bustling metropolis with clean streets and pristine neighborhoods, nice restaurants and great shopping. We arrived at night.

We stayed at the Camino Real Hotel in the upscale neighborhood and Jewish enclave of Polanco, which hosts some of the best restaurants, private homes and landscaped parks the city has to offer. Not far, in the heart of the financial district, masses of professionals went about business, in and out of prodigious skyscrapers and elegant old world municipal buildings. The streets were lined with fine sculptures displaying the roots of Mexican art, a convergence of vibrant native and exquisite European aesthetics. What was striking about Mexico City and Cancun as opposed to Latin American communities in the United States was, no doubt, the color line. The banks, hotels, municipal buildings, and upscale residences were operated and occupied by Mexicans who looked quite different from the Latinos you see tending garden or cleaning house in Los Angeles.

According to the Journal of Diversity Management 2008 Report on Mexico:

Individuals of mixed European and Indian background, the Mestizos, represent 60% of the population. The rest of the population is 30% Indian, 9% white and 1% other. Income and wealth are distributed very unequally among these racial groups. The oligarchy is exclusively white, and whites are the vast majority in the wealthy social class immediately below it. Next in the economic hierarchy are the Mestizos. Within the Mestizos, however, there is a discernable economic pecking order, with those of predominantly European features, especially light skin, the white/Mestizos, ahead of those with predominantly Indian traces, like dark skin. At the bottom are the Indians, who are the majority in the two poorest deciles. That is, there is a strong positive correlation between European appearance and income in Mexican society.

In Brazil, Afro Brazilians make up almost half of the total population -- but nearly two-thirds of the nation's poor. Nonwhites were nearly nonexistent in Brazilian universities until affirmative action was instituted in 2001 and as a consequence the middle-class and the elite of the country are almost entirely white. Similarly, in 2004 The United Nations Economic and Social Council sent a delegation to Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, where the majority of the population is Mestizo, and found that trends in all three countries reveal the existence of deeply rooted discrimination: (a) a troubling correlation between poverty-stricken areas and areas inhabited by communities of indigenous people and people of African descent; (b) the marginal involvement of representatives of those communities in power structures - the government, parliament and the judiciary - as well as their insignificant presence in decision-making positions in the media; and (c) their treatment in the media as objects of folklore. Ironically, what this study also found was while the Spanish language has come to prevalence in the United States on much of the west coast, Southwest, Florida and New York, the indigenous people of Central America fear they will eventually lose their language and identity because of the shortage of bilingual education and programs there. No doubt, Latin American society has relegated much of its population to abject poverty, without a hope of ever getting out, on the basis of skin color.

Color discrimination is undeniably widespread in Latin America, a belief and practice that is tacitly promoted and promulgated through the generations. The question that begs to be asked is how the caste system in Latin America has gone on for so long without much acknowledgment from the international media or the American government? We have seen revolution over racial inequality in India, the United States, and South Africa, yet all the while Latin America has been allowed to discriminate on the basis of skin color without much protest from within the region or the outside world. Perhaps it is because there is a grave misperception of race in Latin America from the international community. Perhaps to the outside world everyone in Latin America is one race, a new race: Hispanic/Latino. This misperception doesn't equate the color bias in Latin America to the apartheid of South Africa. For the injustice of South Africa was committed by whites against blacks, imperialists against natives. But the origins of the caste system in Latin America are fundamentally the same, founded on beliefs that are indistinguishable from those that created apartheid in South Africa, or Jim Crow in the United States and the Jātis in India--the belief that physical characteristics deem mental acuity, ability and moral character and therefore justify inequality.

The caste system in Latin America may be more surreptitious but it is most similar to the caste system in India in that it is commonly adhered to by those who suffer the most within its restrictions. In 1994 with the passing of Proposition 187 by nearly 60% of California's voters, some 70,000 people showed up on the streets of Los Angeles to protest the passing of an anti-immigration policy in California. Yet you'd be hard-pressed to find such activism in Mexico, or in the United States amongst Latinos for that matter, to combat color discrimination in Latin America. Perhaps it is because in the United States, it is easy for Latinos to forget the oppression they left behind because in the United States all Latinos are relatively the same, which ultimately is the right way of thinking. However, if we are ever going to address the real causes of illegal immigration, we must apply this new thinking in Latin America and call on governments and citizens to address the issue of ethnic and color discrimination there.

Now that we have a president and a Secretary of State in the United States that may be more empathetic to those suffering under discrimination, I wonder if more pressure will be placed on governments in Latin America to address economic accessibility to their disenfranchised minorities. It would seem that if we are ever going to have a constructive debate in this country about illegal immigration that rises above the vitriol of Lou Dobbs and the Conservative Right, if we intend to address the real causes and effects of illegal immigration beyond liberal posturing, it is high time we work the very unsettling reality of discrimination into the discussion. For it seems if Mexico is any litmus test, the only solution to poverty some Latin American governments endorse is indeed illegal immigration, the export of its poor--its brown people, to the United States.

Follow Vanessa Carmichael on Twitter: www.twitter.com/vcvenus

Comments

[dhinds]

Vanessa, your observations are interesting but not entirely accurate.

First of all, Mexico's GDP is in fact higher than than that of other Latin American countries (except Brazil), but that signifies nothing ANYWHERE in relation to the quality of the life lived by most of a country's citizens (see Redefining Progress www.rprogress.org and their GPI - Genuine Progress Indicator) and inequality in Mexico is much worse than in civilized, industrialized countries (the USA is an industrialized country).

But does that really relate to skin color?

As you mention, 90% of Mexicans are either mestizos or indigenous (may of whom are crossed), yet you attribute economic success to skin color. As you travel more around Mexico (where I'm writing from now), you'll notice that skin color changes with the region (it's still a big country) and at least 60 distinct indigenous ethnic groups are present.

The economic interests of the invaders and their descendants have prevented indigenous groups from achieving the representation their numbers merit in elected governmental positions but this is not directly related to skin color and Mexico (where I've lived over half my life) is a much less racist country than the USA.

There's a lot more to money and power in Mexico than skin color.

[Vanessa Carmichael - Huffpost Blogger]

Dhinds I think you have a problem with the report I reference, Racial Appearance And Income In Contemporary Mexico by Rutilio Martinez and Cris de la Torre, of University of Northern Colorado
http://www.cluteinstitute-onlinejournals.com/PDFs/1347.pdf

Also from their report(and I'm not making this up):

"Most Mexicans also adamantly deny that there is a preferred racial appearance in their society. This denial, however, does not agree with what can clearly be seen in printed ads, T.V. commercials and ads in the internet. In these publicity channels, the great majority of the models have European appearance, very few have Mestizo appearance and none have Indian appearance. Given the current and historical income distribution, the use of models of European appearance would be expected in the publicity of luxurious, sophisticated and very expensive
goods and services. However, the products and services advertised through these publicity channels include basic processed foods, cigarettes, beer, diapers, soft drinks, working class hotels in Mexican resorts and many other products and services whose main buyers are dark skinned consumers. Even in the publicity CDs of exclusive residential developments, like one called Lagos del Sol in the Riviera Maya, the models hired to represent the brick layers building the houses are of European appearance, despite the fact that brick layers in Mexico are Indians and Mestizos of dominant Indian appearance."

[Pleneras]

All true. Natives.. the Indians in Mexico are discriminated against by the minority. Few are not and those are the ones who managed to make it to the upper class. For the few money open doors. 5% of Europeans descendants in Mexico are those whose parents came from Europe are the ones in control of Mexican media and tv. In addition many are in denial of being Native and thus the popular term Latino is used instead of Hispanic because they do not identify or have a Spanish ethnic background not realizing Hispanic means born in the western hemisphere with a culture or ethnic background rooted in Spain.

[hooktender]

I agree with--Love­Americans-­-the first step in solving the illegal alien problem is to change the law that decrees all children born on American soil to be American citizens. I don't see anyway to go forward with a solution until you do that.

[turkeywrld]

We have had people crossing our soiuthern borders to gain seasonal; work for 10's of decades..and in the past, returning when the job was done...What never seems to get discussed is HOW people can come here from Mexico LEGALLY.be it for a temprary seasonal job.. . or to actually gain residency.­.emmigrate­..HOW can they actually do this ??
If you were in the position of having to wait 3-.5 years while applications get processed.. and often they DONT get processed... they just dissapear along with the 'fee' ...and survival was an issue,what would you do ??
people tend to take actions which will work for them and actually allow them to survive... when the only VIABLE route is" illegal"..thats the route people will take.. the real problem here is we are moving at break neck speed towards a police state.. it may be wise to look.not at the scapegoat, but the REAL causes of this problem..

[dhinds]

I've lived over half my life outside the USA working with problems related to development and there's a lot more to it than what you describe.

How can Mexicans cross the border?

It's a long border. And no other border has more commercial and human interchange in the world, both documented and undocumented.

An industry exists to help those desiring to enter the USA, do so. As it becomes more difficult, the prices rises.

The demand for farm workers exceeds the supply. Mexicans harvest the food you eat and using the current permit system for importing legal farm workers signifies crops that rot in the fields before the permits arrive.

When Mexicans cross borders, they find themselves in states that belonged to Mexico previously. (Over half of Mexico's territory became incorporated in what is now the USA. You may not care, but many others don't care if you sympathize or not).

You can't hold back the sea or blot out the sun with your thumb. They will keep coming, whether you like it or not.

The best that can be done is regulate the flow. Make it legal, within limits (i.e. agriculture and related industries). And make sure those that come have no criminal antecedents and are paid and treated fairly.

[Vanessa Carmichael - Huffpost Blogger]

You would probably feel differently if the flow of immigration was going the other way. Illegal immigration does indeed lead to wage depreciation. That's why Cesar Chavez himself did campaigns at the border to stem the flow of workers coming into the U.S. when the UFWA was negotiating for better wages. He and Dolores Huerta (UFWA) helped end the Barcero Program (guest worker) in 1964. Undocumented workers were considered strikebreakers to Chavez and the UFWA and have successfully kept wages for farm workers down to $10,000 per year. That's below the poverty level in the U.S.

Why does that not disgust you?

Also, you seem to overlook that Mexicans and Native American tribes were locked into a battle for the West. It's true sometimes Mexico won.

[LoveAmericans]

It is not about racism it is about responsibility. When a young girl (11+) runs across the border specifically to get pregnant and have a baby in an American hospital so she will become the mother of an "American citizen", America is doing something wrong. That "American citizen" then goes on to receive the next 18 years of welfare, food stamps, housing, etc. all paid to the illegal mother is the great draw to come to this country. The mother of course continues to have an "American citizen" every year. We have created a society that has no education or parenting skills .We have financed the gang members that ruin our cities. We also provide the financial base for the fathers of these children that solicit day labor on the corners. They of course, put all of the cash into their pockets. The American taxpayers are being sucked dry by these people that come here intending to take and not contribute. The 14th amendment was never meant to create this society. It was changed during the civil rights years, and now must be changed back. There must be a allegiance to the United States and a responsibility to the American citizens for anyone that wants to be in America. This one act alone would return our country to the great world leadership it once had. There would be no need for e-verify or a border fence, because we would all be working toward self-suffeciency.

[dhinds]

"When a young girl (11+) runs across the border specifically to get pregnant and have a baby in an American hospital so she will become the mother of an "American citizen", America is doing something wrong. That "American citizen" then goes on to receive the next 18 years of welfare, food stamps, housing, etc. all paid to the illegal mother is the great draw to come to this country."

You're inventing. What you describe is not a typical event. The vast majority come to work and work they do. Your falsification of the facts does nothing to resolved a situation that requires much more thought and attention than you seem prepared to provide.

[Ludovic Blain]

I appreciate your attempt to engage this important issue. but you spread as much disinformation as you dispel.

1st--illegal is a hateful word like other words that aren't allowed here. No one is illegal. They may be undocumented, what blacks outside townships were in south africa. a black american who repeats that hateful term probably doesn't know drapetoman­ia--that's when we were illegal without papers.

2--long history of afromexicans: http://bit.ly/fn0OM

3-"We have seen revolution over racial inequality in India, the United States, and South Africa, yet all the while Latin America has been allowed to discriminate on basis of skin color without much protest from within the region or the outside world." Where'd you get this misunderstanding? http://bit.ly/nd8em and http://www.afrocolombia.org/ google afro and any central/south american country to find protests here/there.

4-Statements like "Ironically, what this study also found was while the Spanish language has come to prevalence in the US.., indigenous people of Central America fear they will eventually lose their language and identity because of the shortage of bilingual education.." miss fact that there's both racism against African diasporic and indigenous people. it's not ironic knowing that Spanish is the conquerors' language smothering out native languages, as English has and is also doing.

HuffPo's predominately white readers need accurate info on these complicated issues.

[Vanessa Carmichael - Huffpost Blogger]

1. Last I checked it is illegal to enter a country and live/work without a visa or green card. Nothing personal. The same goes for every country. So undocumented workers are here illegally and therefore illegal immigrants. I don't see why that is offensive. Umm, blacks were the natives in Africa. They weren't the immigrants nor the imperialists. Mexicans and Native Americans are different.

2. I've been to Veracruz

3. I didn't say there are never any protests just there hasn't been much comparatively in Latin American countries as opposed to these other countries. What I'm talking about is a campaign to address racial discrimination in Latin America. I'm talking about 70,000 people protesting the Mexican and other Latin American embassies in the United States. I don't hear much of a campaign amongst the Latin American community here to address the issue. I hear far more about immigration. Imagine if Ghandi's campaign was let's just immigrate to the U.S.

4. You're misreading what I wrote. There is much debate in this country about use of Spanish in the U.S. to level the playing field. The Latino community has fought long and hard for ESL programs here. Meanwhile, in Latin America no such programs exist for indigenous people. To me that's ironic.

At the end of the day, sovereign nations should take care of their people, especially those belonging to the G20. It's just not progressive to let these governments off the hook.

Thanks for your comments.

[dhinds]

"The Latino community has fought long and hard for ESL programs here. Meanwhile, in Latin America no such programs exist for indigenous people. To me that's ironic".

Vanessa, it's not ironic - it's false.

www.cdi.gob.mx/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=317&Itemid=46

I can't tell you how many there are (and I'm sure there could be more) but I have indigenous friends working as bilingual instructors (i.e. Nahuatl / Spanish) in teachers colleges in indigenous regions.

"At the end of the day, sovereign nations should take care of their people, especially those belonging to the G20. It's just not progressive to let these governments off the hook."

Does that statement contribute to resolving the very real problems that have to be dealt with in countries like Mexico?

Do you think NAFTA helps Mexico's economy?

What don't you do something constructive?

[AdrianaCS]

The xenophobia exists amongst Latinos in the US as well. Many Latino's in the US, see being light-skinned, and having "colored eyes" as having GREAT genes. They've learned to have a disdain and even shame, for darker skin, or more "Indian" features. Probably because they themselves associate economic success with being white. However, unlike in Latin America, I tend to think Latinos aren't generally affected by their skin color when it comes to finding jobs, and moving into the middle class. I think it's their last name. Because as the article states, "in the United States all Latinos are relatively the same." And generally speaking, there's still a lot of stereotyping of Latinos being lazy, criminals, uneducated, generally painting them as an inferior people. And if that's the stereo type of Latinos, and Latinos aren't always brown, how are racists and xenophobes to discern them from other people? It would have to be by last name, and although I don't have the statistics to prove it, I'm pretty sure a good portion of Latinos are negatively affected when it comes to moving up in the work-place, by their last names.

[1849]

This argument has a history in the United States. Lest we forget, during the 1840s and 1850s there was the "Know-Noting" Movement which sought to keep Irish Catholics--the so-called illegals of the period--out of this country . When I hear that we should stop "illegals" from the mouths of so many, I wonder how many know that their ancestors would not have been here if the "Know-Nothing" movement had succeeded?It is just pure Nativism. I got mine and I ain't sharing with anyone who is different or the other. Some of us in this country are so selfish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know-Nothing_movement

[coco51]

The constant dribbing of Mexicans are the illegal aliens of America is only but a smoke screen because they are Spanish speakers and physically recognizable. The so-called "white" illegal Spaniard are generally percieved as tourists and are generally not counted. The greatest number of illegals in our country are still Irish and other Europeans, they are not obvious because they can assimilate into our society. I know and Irishman who has lived in America for 35 years, and only after marrying someone in 2008 did I learn that he's been an illegal alien.

Politicians go on about illegals only because the brown skin imagery comes to mind immediately.

[LeftRight]

And to make matters worse, there's a simple solution to illegal immigration that will ALSO help the government coffers!!

WHY do illegals come here? It's not for the health care, it's not for the social security, it's for the JOBS. The jobs that they can perform at half the rate of a US citizen and STILL be making more money for their families than they could EVER get at home! The solution, therefore, is not to make them uncomfortable, and not to deport them, but to GET RID OF THE JOBS! If you were to jail any executive who hires illegals, and shut down any company that hires illegals, and then confiscate 100% of the corporate assets, then there won't be a single illegal in this country within a couple years!

[g-rant]

put the sqeeze on rich white people? in america? never! i will not stand for it!
no, we'd better blame people who barely have anything in this world, lets be really cold to the people who need our help, thats a true american value.
not.
how dare these humans desire to live like me!
now we've got a problem, hypocrisy.

[Vanessa Carmichael - Huffpost Blogger]

Yes. Crackdown on corporations would be effective no doubt but what workers really need is a global workers' union. An international body, that could be in on the UN summits that would set standards for workers across the board. Wages would be set according to cost of living not corporate profit margins.

[TheRealMcCoy]

An excellent idea and exactly what is needed, the problem with that solution is trying to get working people across the globe to focus on the "Big Picture", in every country around the world working people are totally preoccupied with day to day survival.

When someone comes up with a way to pull the workers together it will literally transform the planet, unfortunately, I don't think I'll see that in my lifetime.

[LeftRight]

Yeah, but that one's even less likely than my solution to illegal immigration. You can't even get people across the USA to join a union when they work in different fields...

[dhinds]

Why not the UFW?

[lgervais]

"There is money in Mexico, albeit concentrated in the ruling class of the country."

Same in the US

[Mexitli]

Yep.

Actually, it's the same just about everywhere.