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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.
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