By Gonzalo Santos, May Day, 2022
Long forecast here, the Dems are showing, once again, lacking the will, fortitude (cojones), and determination to deliver on their campaign promises to immigrant-dense ethnic communities like Latinos and Asian Americans. This is not an isolated blotch on their otherwise effectiveness: the same is true for promises made - and not delivered - to the labor, climate change, women, and the Black Lives Matter movements. The time of reckoning this November is fast approaching.
The Dems lack a counter-narrative to the cynical exploitation, egregious callousness, and deliberate misrepresentation of all immigration issues, especially border matters. Their solution is to duck and hide from the issue –which will not go away either on the ground or in Washington.
This is how the road for the recapture of power by the Trumpist GOP is been paved by the mushy liberal Dems. The left as a whole - in Congress and outside - is practically M.I.A.
The chaos grows, the Gordian Knot of migration in North America gets tighter and more entangles. The contradictions for regional integration intensify. And the region as a whole will fall behind in the world, incapable of solving its social problems and economic demands, fragmented by asymmetrical relations, a bankrupt development model, and political polarization.
The systemwide problems of regional migration requires a systemwide solutions. It also requires being given political and budgetary priority. The former is by now clear has been utterly lacking; and the latter is way down the list. The feeble, tentative, indefensible, and insufficient assistance steps the current leaderships of the U.S. and neighboring countries to the south - will be displayed in the upcoming "Summit of the Americas" in June in Los Angeles WITHOUT the participation of key players. Biden had pledged a total package of $4billion over 4 years ($1 bill. per year) to help address the "root causes" or regional migration, while spending over $20 billion per year ($80 bill. over 4 years) on our broken "immigration enforcement" system.
There are other priorities: president Biden's new request, total aid to Ukraine (mostly to export that war-torn country U.S.-manufactured military hardware) will ascend to over $50 billion in just one year. And regarding the immigration component, the Biden administration instantly opened the country to receive 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Central American and Caribbean forcibly displaced refugees languish in abandon and neglect along the Mexican side of the border, bottled up in Mexico's southern border, or trapped in their countries (Northern Triangle countries, Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.).
Have you noticed how instantly the flows of emigrants leaving Ukraine were labelled and treated as a whole class of unquestionable, de facto refugees, while Central Americans, Haitians, and others in the region never are - at most insisting to treat each arriving asylum-seeker as an individual case, labelled "illegal immigrants", and made to wait months or years, and most denied entry or deported?
Something is very wrong with this picture, people! A clue to explaining this abysmal double-standard is that Ukrainians - which definitely ARE refugees deserving of our protection and asylum - are white Europeans, whereas the regional asylum-seekers arriving to the U.S. southern border - ALSO desperate refugees deserving our protection and asylum - are mostly brown and black.
The other clue, of course, is big power geopolitics, an old story in U.S. immigration history, especially duplicitous during the Cold War, where desperate, persecuted people fleeing the socialist world were deemed and granted instant refugee and asylum status, while desperate, persecuted people fleeing U.S.-allied oppressive, dictatorial regimes were deemed "illegal aliens." This happened in a particularly egregious way not just in the Caribbean (Cuban instant admissions vs. Haitian & Dominican instant deportations), but in Central America during the U.S.-sponsor wars of counterinsurgency. Mexican refugees, in particular, have never been granted rights of asylum - even after the 2009 U.S. law extended those rights to unaccompanied children showing up at the border, a gross exemption and violation of international law to its immediate neighbor to the south, which Mexico, to date, has never challenged.
So Biden came to power in 2021 after he made repeated campaign promises to Latinos that he would reverse all Trump policies and get a comprehensive immigration reform passed in his first year in office - one that would give a path to citizenship to all 11 million undocumented Americans-in-waiting. He even submitted such a proposal on his first day in office.
But it all was what astute analysts of American immigration politics call a "Kabuki Theater" - a lot of showy moves without any substance or intention to see through and implemented. First the bill was shelved by the Dems in both chambers and forgotten ever since, under the disingenuous argument it was D.O.A. at the split Senate, given the filibuster (having no intention whatsoever of abolishing that preferred tool of Republican callous obstructionism). Then began the next act: a series of partial immigration-relief measures placed in various mega bills to be passed using "reconciliation", which can be passed with 50 votes in the Senate (infrastructure and safety net), but which were increasingly weakened, until the whole tactic was derailed by solid Republican obstructionism, parliamentarian blocking, and Blue Dog Dems' cold-feet. Not only the immigration clauses were divided and purged, only the infrastructure bill passed - that Republicans ensured would bring huge contracts to their corporate donors - the entire Build Back Better social safety net/climate change bill was derailed.
Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) is right: the original Biden comprehensive immigration bill has ZERO chances of getting through Congress now, in an election year - another old story we have heard EVERY election year (every two years) going back to the 1990s. The only federal immigration bills that have made it over the past 30 years, despite the historic immigrant right marches of 2006, are harsher enforcement-only bills. More mixed progress (with advances in states like California and New York, and set-backs in Texas, Florida, and other Southern States) has been achieved at the state and municipal levels.
But at the federal level it has long been clear: the duopoly that rules Washington has been remiss, treacherous, duplicitous, and utterly complicit in maintaining the current enforcement-heavy immigration laws in the books and draconian measures at the border and in the interior - the American Gulag of immigrant jails that costs billions of dollars to tax payers every year. The reason the flows of regional migrants do not get recognized and treated as bona fide refugees, which they mostly are - is because it would wreck the "business model" of the for-profit Detention/Deportation Industrial Complex. This is quite similar as to why we do not pass climate change laws: it wrecks to monopoly profits of Big Oil, Gas, and Coal.
That leave us with what to do. The comprehensive approach is blocked, and the piecemeal approach as well, at the federal level - thanks to the long-performing Kabuki Theater show mounted every election cycle by Good Cop Democrats and Bad Cop Republicans. Sometimes, as during the Clinton and Obama administrations, the Dems even performed as Bad Cops to deport and persecute record numbers of immigrants, in the name of combating crime (Felons not Families, remember?), terrorism (the 1996 law that vastly extended the list of deportable infractions), etc.
And yet, the same show goes on, year in and year out, with the complicit support of the biggest advocacy Business and pro-immigrant NGOs legitimizing the Kabuki Theater in Washington, and also misdirecting and coopting the broader, more grass-roots, more militant, regional immigrant rights movements (IRM) in the process. Why would the Business-led immigrant advocacy coalitions do this should be no mystery to any one - they want their cake and eat it, too; they want immigrants without a new social contract, preferably spongeable, disposable, earmarked to their industries, and pliable and docile. But what about the others, the ones claiming their advocacy is for social justice and ethnic, labor, or interfaith solidarity? The top such NGOs in Washington have a well-dissimulated Achilles’ heal: they all depend on the top liberal foundations! And they call the shots on the levels of how radical or moderate the proposals get cobbled together, and the levels of militancy, resistance, and defiance to support.
The duopoly's Kabuki Theater - funded by and for the benefit of the American plutocracy - would not function for long is it did not rely on the legitimation and social control functions of the "advocacy" NGOs also under the pay of the more liberal wing of the plutocracy.
All of this is to say, by way of conclusion, that no progress can or will occur at the federal level on the festering chaos and appalling, inhumane state that is the North American regional migration broken system until and unless the IRM re-structures itself to build autonomy and capacity outside the grip of the duopoly (Democratic Party) and Big Funder-compromised NGOs misdirecting it over the last 20 years, in tight, deliberate alignment with the Democratic side of Washington's Kabuki Theater.
This is true of all other pressing issues of our times: labor, climate, women, LGBTQ, etc. Until and unless the social movements wean themselves from the Dem-controlled/funder-controlled Big Taming & Deceptive Machine running our movements for the ultimate benefit not of the working-class peoples but of the reining plutocracy, no advance will be possible.
What does that mean in this election year? Should we mobilize the vote? By all means YES! But around these demands insofar as the dead-in-the-water immigration issue is concerned:
(1) Raise the demand of an immediate, general presidential pardon for all 11 million undocumented Americans-in-waiting, not just to confront, expose, and defeat the Republican's obstructionism and cynical use of the immigration issue, but the confront and expose the Dem's own complicity in the Kabuki Theater! Let Biden "explain" why "he can't" to the Latino and Asian voters. And after the Dems lose in November for disappointing and unmotivating this crucial voting blocks, and Biden becomes a hamstrung lame duck for his last 2 years in office, and the Trumpist juggernaut regain momentum and heads back to power in 2024, for lack of anyone confronting their rabid xenophobia, have him "explain" why he will still not do it!
(2) Put the feet to the fire of all those Dem simulators, betrayers, and false allies, just like the climate change movement is doing today already: issue a Candidate Pledge that supports the call for the presidential pardon described above, and pledges the candidate to continue to call for that pardon if elected, on the road to 2024, as well as support the abolishment of the filibuster and work tirelessly to pass real, just, and comprehensive immigration reform for all current migrants in the country and future regional flows.
(3) Mobilize to get out the vote to all those candidates that sign the pledge above, denounce those that don't! Their Kabuki Theater is over!
(4) After the elections, regardless of the outcome, regroup and reorganize the IRM to adopt an autonomous program of militant, uncompromising struggle for the next two years.
Too hard, you say? Too unrealistic, too impractical, too daunting? Try the present status quo for the alternative: The Trumpists coast back to control of Congress in 2022 and the IRM continues to follow the lead of the defeated Dems for the next two years, scared like hell and asking us to do nothing to anger the Trumpist white base, and channel our energies to those moderate, ineffective campaigns put out by the big-funder-supported NGOs, who will continue to wring their hands in lamentation of getting nowhere with the American duopoly.
History moves in this fashion, between the staged Kabuki shadows of continuing deception and the unpredictable, infrequent volcanic eruptions of the deceived. Such eruptions reconfigure the field of what is now possible, and what is no longer viable to continue. This is how social change happens, this is the asymmetrical nature of the struggle of humanity for justice.
Let's see if we have learned something of our prolonged deceptions. How long can we remain gullible to the ways of the corrupt duopoly and their well-funded accessories in civil society? Hopefully, there will soon be strong trenches erected by the rebellious, disobedient people; trenches erected not just by one social movement for justice like the IRM, but ALL movements! It is, to say the least, long overdue. And if so, if an eruption of people power shakes the system again, as it has in the past, I will see you there, getting into "good trouble."
But if not, I will sadly but surely see you in Trumpian hell in 2024! And, by the looks of it, I'm sorry to bring it up, maybe the breakout of war and growing geopolitical tensions unfolding in Europe between the imperial powers (all equally aggressors, and willing to fight "to the last Ukrainian") will sink the world in a terrible nightmare before then! But that's the subject of another rant.
Today is May Day, the world festival of the working men and women that labor, migrate, live, and fight as refugees of the predatory and violent world-system we inhabit. Let's remember our past heroic battles – those won and those lost - and get ready for the next battles ahead. There's a whole world to be gained, and nothing to lose but our chains!
#AnotherWorldIsPossible #AnotherNorthAmericaIsNecessary #AnotherMovementIsRequired #MayDay #Resist
