Aviva Chomsky - They take our jobs!: and 20 other myths about immigration

And 20 Other Myths about Immigration

AVIVA CHOMSKY

BEACON PRESS

BOSTON

Migration/immigration. Migration refers to any movement of humans (or animals) from one area to another. Immigration refers to such movements by humans when they involve crossing established state boundaries and are regulated by the governments of the territories they involve. So immigration really exists only under the modern state system.

First World/Third World. The term third world was coined in the 1950s as part of an anticolonial analysis that explained the poverty of many of the worlds regions as a legacy of their colonial past. It contrasted the situation of the former colonies to that of the first world industrialized powers, and the second world, or socialist bloc, countries.

Modernization theorists compared underdeveloped or less developed countries to developed countries, implying that development was a discrete process that all countries would go through at their own pace. Scholars from the dependency school responded that underdevelopment and development were two sides of the same coin: underdevelopment was not a starting state but rather a result of colonial exploitation. Walter Rodneys How Europe Underdeveloped Africa critiques the term and the theory behind it.

Other economists offered industrialized and nonindustrialized, and later added newly industrialized or NICS (newly industrialized countries, referring usually to Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). But the deindustrialization of the first world, and the very different nature of the industrialization now going on in the third, makes these terms problematic.

Despite the radical changes in the global economic and social order since the 1950s, the concepts of First World and Third World still offer considerable power for understanding the roots and nature of global inequality.

Latino/Hispanic. Although the terms are often used interchangeably today, they have very different histories. Most people of Latin American origin in the United States have historically identified themselves ethnically by the country they come from (i.e., as Mexican, Dominican, Colombian, etc.). During the 1960s, in the context of anticolonial revolutions abroad and African American and Native American organizing at home, a Chicano movement and a Puerto Rican or Boricua movement also emerged in the United States. These movements identified with the indigenous peoples of their homelands. Chicano referred to Mexican Americans ancestry among the Mexica indigenous people; Boricua referred to the Tano name for the island of Puerto Rico. They used the concept of internal colonialism and analyzed their historical situation in the United States as that of colonized minorities, rather than immigrants.

It was in this context that the U.S. government began to utilize the term Hispanic. To some, especially in the Southwest, it was a term that tried to depoliticize their identity, and in particular to erase the indigenous and African origins of many Latin Americans. In the Mexican North (now the U.S. Southwest), Hispanic tended to be used by Spanish-origin elites to distinguish themselves from Mexicans of African and indigenous origin, and many Chicano activists found the term offensive. On the East Coast, where Puerto Rican migrants saw their countrys resistance to Anglicization as an important part of their identity and ethnic pride, the term Hispanic tended to be taken on more readily as an acknowledgment of the importance of the Spanish language to Puerto Ricans.

Latino came into common usage in the 1980s, as an alternative to Hispanic. More Latin Americans from different parts of the continent were entering the United States, and people of Mexican and Puerto Rican origin were becoming more and more geographically dispersed throughout the country. The term Latino grew out of the same political consciousness as Chicano and Boricua, but expanded it to all Latin Americans, acknowledging the common historical experience of colonization and oppression of people of Latin American origin in the United States.

By the year 2000, though, the term Latino had lost much of its radical edge. Mainstream newspapers began to adopt it, and the 2000 census offered Hispanic or Latino as a category.

Some scholars and activists point out a further awkwardness built into the term Hispanic: because it encompasses all things (or people) related to Spain or the Spanish language, it creates a category of people that includes those from a European countrySpainand Spanish-speaking Latin America, but not people from Brazil or Haiti. It might be a logical category for studying literature (Hispanic literature), but it is not one that makes a lot of sense in looking at immigrants or ethnicity in the United States.

Todays immigration debate is rife with myths, stereotypes, and unquestioned assumptions. Iand we allhear remarks such as: Immigrants take our jobs and drive down wages. Why dont they learn English? or Im not against immigration, only illegal immigration. After twenty years of teaching, writing, and organizing about immigration, its clear to me that many of the arguments currently being circulated are based on serious misconceptions not only about how our society and economy function, but also about the history of immigration, the law, and the reasons for immigration.

All you have to do is read the papers or listen to the radio to notice that people seem to be extremely distraught and angry about immigration. Immigrants are blamed for a host of social ills and compared unfavorably to previous generations of immigrants. Since they are legally deprived of many of the rights that U.S. citizens enjoy, including the right to vote, elected officials and the general public can marginalize, blame, punish, and discriminate against them with little repercussion. Noncitizens make easy targets and convenient scapegoats.

A lot of our assumptions and opinions about immigration today are based on a set of beliefs about this countrys past. These beliefs are formed by our social studies and history classes, by our textbooks, by our politicians, and by our mediaindeed they are so pervasive that they almost permeate the air we breathe. Yet they are also fundamentally distorted. They represent a sanitized version of history that can undermine our ability to analyze the world we live in today. In analyzing the issues surrounding immigration today, this book will often turn to the past to revise some of the fallacies that have shaped the way we view our society.

Most U.S. citizens believe that this country is founded on principles of equal rights. They acknowledge that throughout history many groups were excluded from access to rightsNative Americans, people of African origin, women. But the story of U.S. history is generally told as one of gradual expansion of rights to new groups of people, until finally, with the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the last remnants of discrimination and exclusion were presumably removed.

To those included in the circle of rights, the exclusion of others has always seemed justified, so much so as to be virtually beyond the bounds of discussion. When the founding fathers wrote that all men are created equal it was quite obvious to them that women were not created equal to men, and that all men meant white men.

When Patrick Henry reportedly declared, Give me liberty, or give me death! he assumed that liberty was something reserved for whites. A slaveholder himself, Henry admitted that slavery was morally problematic, but Henrys understanding of the discrepancy between his words and his