Like the man says, when their screaming, we're winning.
Let'em scream.

Racism and other fears

BY NIDIA DIAZ — Granma International staff writer —

INCLUDED among its aggressions, genocidal wars, unilateral impositions and the threats that it tends to use in the international arena, the Republican administration of George W. Bush accumulated another historic demerit in the year that just concluded: brutality, contempt and racism in dealing with the immigration issue.

An immigration that, by the way, it has not stopped encouraging via the masquerade of the “American Way of Life” and which it has used, in the overwhelming majority of cases, to obtain cheap labor for jobs that U.S. citizens don’t want. It has also been utilized for justifying, in Cuba’s case, its hostility toward the Cuban Revolution, now extended to Venezuela and Bolivia.

The extreme right wing in the United States, which the Bush family comes from, has returned with strength to old, but never dead, concepts of the white, capitalist and Christian superiority that was once used to justify the lynching and burning of Black people.

These are concepts being used today against Latin American immigrants who — dangerously, according to this racist elite — are the largest minority in the United States after the Black population. According to the Latin American and Caribbean Center for Democracy Latinos and their U.S.-born descendants represent 14% of the country’s total population; that is the equivalent of 42.5 million people, and not all of them work in unskilled jobs.

The report says that the number of Latin American professionals and technicians who emigrated to the United States rose from 300,000 in 1990 to almost one million in 2000, a tendency that has been growing and indicates a greater assimilation of these individuals into the social and political life of the receiving country.

The extreme right does not want nor can it allow this to happen, because it might endanger white supremacy.

It was no coincidence that in 2006, U.S. territory has become a battleground for the immense majority of Latin American immigrants, in this case undocumented ones, and Congress has become the general staff of that war, issuing laws that criminalize immigrants and authorize the expansion — with deadly consequences, of the border wall that would prevent them from entering the country via its border with Mexico.

In addition, there is a campaign entrenched by the media demonizing immigrants and blaming them for taking away jobs that should go to citizens, who, for that reason, believe that their living standards have dropped in recent years.

This is a campaign that has been repeated so often that it is now accepted, and some groups have done so, in the minds of U.S. citizens who do not realize that their new situation is not due to the immigration phenomenon but to government policy that has been reducing the benefits that characterized that society in favor of an increasingly richer minority.

In May, like never before, however, immigrants took to the streets to demand that the Bush government grant legal status to the 12 million of them who do not have it, even though, for years, they have constituted the majority workforce in agricultural production, domestic services and textile and meatpacking factories, among others, contributing to the creation of wealth that Wall Street and the White House boast about so much.

As one person said during those days, Puerto Rican René Ochart, who works as a doorman at the elegant Hotel Pierre on Manhattan’s Upper East Side: “Everybody here is an immigrant. The only authentic American is the Indian (Native American).”

“A day without immigrants” was the slogan of the Latino community as part of its common demand: respect for those who are contributing to the development of the United States. They were weeks of tough battle, in which they demonstrated their strength, and above all refuted the fallacy that they are responsible for the economic deterioration of U.S. workers.

A year’s end report by the National Council of La Raza revealed that 21.8% of Hispanics in the United States live in poverty. Twelve million of them do not have documents giving them legal residency, depriving them of social security benefits and fair wages, and their children barely attend school, for fear of deportation.

A study by the UN University produced the dramatic revelation that just 2% of the world’s population possesses more than half the world’s wealth, and that the United States, where 6% of the world’s adult population lives, possesses 34% of the wealth.

These are circumstances that, together with the imposition of the neoliberal model on a excluded and marginalized region, are causing the systematic and perennial flight of Latin Americans and Caribbeans seeking the “American dream,” and in order to reach it, they risk being victims of trafficking in persons, or entering what some experts call “legal limbo,” because by emigrating from their native land, they end up in no man’s land, and subject to the violation of their human rights.

Many examples exist to illustrate these affirmations. These include the deaths – in 2006 alone – of almost 500 Mexicans along the U.S.-Mexican border, some at the hands of the immigration police and xenophobic paramilitary groups, the “immigrant-hunters” who are bringing back the image of the white-hooded Ku Klux Klan.

What happened in Cactus, a town on the border of the states of Texas and Colorado, on December 13 is another example of the double standards applied by the Bush administration on the immigration issue.

In that isolated community of 2,538, according to the Census, three of every four residence are undocumented immigrants, but they all work for the local plant of Swift & Co., the second-largest beef processor and largest pork processor in the world, with annual sales of more than $9 billion.

There, after a ferocious raid, “la migra” arrested 1,282 people, a good part of them married couples whose children, minors under 10 years old, were left unprotected despite having U.S. citizenship, given that their parents were arrested or deported. Those who were not arrested fled in their mobile homes to begin again in a new location – with the same anguish they experienced in Cactus.

The owners of Swift & Co. have not been troubled, much less fined for employing undocumented immigrants. That is the injustice of the U.S. justice system.

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2007/enero0 ... smo-i.html