By Profe. Gonzalo Santos | DEC. 10, 2022
The latest report out of Washington is that the business interests that clamor for an expanded pool of guest workers are "optimistic." They are desperate for an expansion of temporary workers at the high skills & low skill tiers of the segmented labor markets in the United States, and see a narrow window for accomplishing that now. So there's a "push" to get something passed bringing "relief" to THEM before the year ends and Congress adjourns. They know that come January the entrenched xenophobic Republican Party will take control of the House and block any and all proposals that expands immigration for the next two to four years. So, they have launched a last-ditch lobbying effort. In response, the usual Kabuki Theater put on by both parties is on. We have been here before.
What is most interesting this time around in the mainstream media's coverage is how there's not even a pretense of concern for immigrants themselves - just the business that want to squeeze them "temporarily." Here’s the latest, typical article about the lame duck effort to pass immigration measures. It fails to mention or reference a single pro-immigrant advocacy group or immigrant representative organization. It merely lists the businesses involved in the push and focuses on their unmet needs. No Latino or immigrant advocate or political champion is mentioned. The need to balance the needs of labor and capital or provide equity and justice for immigrants and asylum-seekers are not acknowledged. The whole push is driven by business interests in this last-ditch effort, and the immigrant rights movement is nowhere to be found or taken into account.
That should tell you what any bill that would surface for a bicameral, bipartisan vote in the next days, assuming one does, would contain: 45% harsher "enforcement" (at the border and in the interior, expanding the America Gulag, closing down asylum, etc.), 45% "bracero programs" (low skilled and high skilled), and the remaining 10% narrowly-conceived immigrant relief (in the form of some lengthy and costly legalization process for some Dreamers, period).
Watch how the business optimism evaporates as the month ends with nothing to show. Watch how the Republicans will turn down everything that contains "amnesty" of any kind; watch how the Dems and their well-funded NGO allies will lament and wring their hands and give up (heaven forbid they try something with real teeth). Watch how the White House caves in to "reality" and announces its disposition to "work with the new Republican leadership" to try again to come up with something bipartisan ahead. Watch the M.I.A. Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Progressive Caucus, and other caucuses move on to other "urgent" issues at warp speed. "Oh well," they will all sigh, "at least we tried." And we'll be back to zero movement forward for the next two to four years of the political calendar. "Maybe if we win back the House," the Dems and their allies will say. And here we go again.
Either the immigrants - and their true allies outside the reach of the Washington duopoly - themselves organize, mobilize, and deploy people power - in solidarity and coordination with similar deployments of people power by their true allies - or the next two years will lead to either a complete paralysis on the urgent issues of immigration, labor rights and social well-being, Black Lives Matter, combating Climate Change, upholding women's reproductive and social rights, and other issues, or we will experience a severe regression and further setbacks and defeats on these issues - courtesy of the deals made by duopoly, the lame duck president, and the ultra-right wing Supreme Court.
Perhaps folks should stop dreaming anything good will come out of the broken, corrupt duopoly in Washington and its endless machinations. Perhaps the time has come to reassess strategy. Perhaps we should understand that social change never originates from the top down, but from militant and autonomous social movements from the bottom up. Perhaps activists should abandon their reliance on the electoral and government processes and instead put their energies to organize collective actions of rebellion and resistance. Perhaps they should conclude that either all social sectors affected - including the immigrants themselves - resist in the streets or we shall all continue to lose ground, as we have over the course of the past three or four decades. Perhaps activists should mobilize the people to fight the good fight uncompromisingly and resolutely and quit falling for the perennial Kabuki theaters put on by the duopoly in Washington. The duopoly and its allies want to demobilize the people, to coopt and control their social movements, to let it define what and when can be done. And to under no circumstance pressure it!
Pero we can't continue to operate under their leadership, defined by their aims, resign to their failures! No hay peor lucha que la que no se lucha. ¡Desapendéjense y muévanse!
BTW, for the immigrant rights movement is to rally around a single militant demand to apply maximum pressure for the next two years on the lame duck president Biden: Pardon All 11 million Undocumented Immigrants! And *once* that demand is met, and the Damocles Sword is no longer hanging over our interior immigrant communities, we can come up with OUR next demand of executive action to bring relief, according to the international laws for refugees and asylum-seekers, to the tens of thousands of refugees in North America and asylum-seekers reaching our border.
But these militant demands cannot and must not be raised by the IRM in isolation with the other central demands of any other activated allied social movement. Divided we – all progressive social forces - lose, united we can do it!
¡Nos vemos en las trincheras!
#AnotherWorldIsPossible #AnotherNorthAmericaIsNecessary #AnotherMovementIsRequired #RebelAndResist #Arise #DesapendéjenseYMuévanse
