BAJI Reader Spring 2009

Black Perspectives on
Race, Globalization
and Immigration
faith
.
labor
.
community
Volume 1
Number 1
Spring 2009
Table of Contents
Introduction
Black Perspectives on Race, Globalization and Immigration ......................................3
BAJI Steering Committee
Faith-based Perspectives
Immigrants Play Role in King Legacy .........................................................................5
Gerald Lenoir and Larisa Casillas
Bridging Communities.................................................................................................6
Rev. Nelson Johnson
BlackImmigrant Unity
Building Racism.........................................................................................................14
Lauren Smiley
Black and Brown Together .........................................................................................21
David Bacon
Blacks, Immigrants Are Allies More Than Adversaries .............................................28
Gerald Lenoir
History
Immigration Raids Echo History of African Americans ..............................................30
Jean Damu
Cinco de Mayo: Black and Brown Liberation Through Shared Oppression................32
Ron Wilkins
The Racist Roots of the Anti-Immigration Movement ...............................................34
Lee Cokorinos
Labor and Immigration
Unions Must Support the Immigrant Rights Movement............................................40
Karega Hart
Building Labor Power in the Context of the Immigrant Upsurge...............................42
Steven Pitts
NAFTA Devastates U.S. and Mexican Labor ..............................................................44
Bill Fletcher
Discrimination not Illegal Immigrants Fuels Black Job Crisis ...................................46
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
BAJI Reader 1
Promoting Social and Economic Justice for All
BAJI READER MAC FINAL3-26.qxp 3/26/09 1:56 PM Page 1
Alona Clifton
Black Women Organized for Political Action
Jean Damu
Member
National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America
Denise Gums
Community Activist
Amahra Hicks, Ph.D
Coordinator, Richmond Groundworks Trust
Phillip Hutchings*
BAJI Senior Organizer (Staff Member)
Nunu Kidane
Coordinator
Priority African Network
Rev. Phillip Lawson
Co-chair
Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights
Gerald Lenoir
Director, BAJI (Staff Member)
Leonard McNeil
Mayor
City of San Pablo
Steven Pitts, Ph.D
Labor Policy Specialist
Center for Labor Research and Education
University of California at Berkeley
Wilson Riles
Director
Oakland Community Action Network
Former Oakland City Council Member
Rev. Kelvin Sauls
Assistant,
General Secretary, Congregational Development and Ethnic
Ministries,General Boardof Global Ministries,
United Methodist Church
Nicole Valentino
Aide
Mayor of the City of Richmond, CA
Sharron Williams Gelobter
Immigration Attorney
BAJI Reader Editorial Board:
Amahra Hicks, Wilson Riles and Gerald Lenoir
Black Alliance for Just Immigration
c/o PAN PO Box 2528 Berkeley, CA
94702-2556
(510) 849-9940 BAJImail@yahoo.com
www.blackalliance.org
Design and Layout of BAJI Reader: B. Jesse Clarke
BAJI Logo Design: Jamana Lenoir
The collected work is 2009 BAJI.
Articles and photos 2008 authors and photographers or as indicated.
Black Alliance for Just Immigration
Steering Committee & Staff Members
2 blackalliance.org
Photo: Courtesy of BAJI
BAJI Reader 3
BAJI members are united on four points:
All people, regardless of immigration status, country of
origin, race, color, creed, gender, or sexual orienta-
tion deserve human rights as well as social and eco-
nomic justice.
Historically and currently, U.S. immigration policy has
been infused with racism, enforcing unequal and
punitive standards for immigrants of color.
Immigration to the United States is driven by an unjust in-
ternational economic order that deprives people of the
ability to earn a living and raise their families in their
home countries. Trough international trade, lending,
aid and investment policies, the United States govern-
ment and corporations are the main promoters and
benenciaries of this unjust economic order.
African Americans, with our history of being econom-
ically exploited, marginalized and discriminated
against, have much in common with people of color
who migrate to the United States, documented and
undocumented.
Based upon these principles, BAJI supports an im-
migration policy with the following features:
A fair path to legalization and citizenship for undocu-
mented immigrants;
No criminalization of undocumented workers immi-
grants or their families, friends and service providers;
Due process, access to the courts and meaningful judi-
cial review for immigrants;
No mass deportations, indennite detentions or expan-
sion of mandatory detentions of undocumented
immigrants;
Te strengthening and enforcement of labor law protec-
tions for all workers, native and foreign born;
No use of local or state government agencies in the en-
forcement of immigration laws
In solidarity,
e BAJI Steering Committee
Introduction
Black Perspectives on
Race, Globalization
and Immigration
Welcome to the nrst edition of the BAJI Reader: Black Perspectives on Race, Globalization and Immigration.
We have compiled articles written by and about African Americans and our relationship to immigrants in the hopes
of innuencing the debate and discussion in the African American community about immigration.
Te U.S. government response to Hurricane Katrina connrmed that racism is alive and well in U.S. society and
in the domestic policies of the U.S. government. Racism also permeates U.S. foreign policy and immigration laws.
Tis so-called Nation of Immigrants has always discriminated against immigrants, especially immigrants of color,
documented and undocumented.
BAJI, a group comprised of African Americans and black immigrants, was formed in 2006 in the wake of the
upsurge of public opposition to proposed repressive immigration reform in Congress. BAJIs mission is to engage
African Americans and other communities in a dialogue that leads to actions that challenge U.S. immigration policy
and the underlying issues of race, racism and economic inequity that frame it. We are also committed to bringing
the voice of the African Diaspora into the immigrant rights debate by facilitating discussions with Afro-Caribbean,
Afro-Latino, and African immigrants.
A movement centered in Latino communities across the United States has challenged the status quo in a pow-
erful way. BAJI believes that African Americans should support that movement and its aims. We believe that it is in
the interest of African Americans to actively support immigrant rights and to build coalitions with immigrant com-
munities to further the mutual cause of economic and social justice for all of us.
4 blackalliance.org
Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. 1964 Dick DeMarsico, World Telegram staff photographer.
Immigrants Play Role in King Legacy
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s vision for a better soci-
ety included not just African Americans but everyone,
every group. It is not hard for us to imagine Dr. King
encouraging us to Welcome the Strangersa teaching
from the Judeo Christian tradition to accept newcomers
into our communities.
He understood that justice is indivisible. His jour-
ney in the nght for civil rights took him from opposing
the oppression of African Americans in the South to op-
posing the poor conditions of humanity throughout the
nation and the world.
He saw that the opposite of slavery was not freedom
but community. And civil rights and freedom were es-
sential steps toward community.
In the past year, many African Americans have dis-
cussed and debated the tensions between Latino immi-
grants and African Americans. Some have concluded that
immigrants take jobs from African-American workers.
But immigration is not the root cause of the eco-
nomic problems facing African Americans. The pri-
mary challenges come from the combined forces of
racism and an unjust economic system, which puts the
interests of corporations and the super-rich over all
other people.
Whats more, the impoverishment facing African-
American communities is also a result of ongoing racial
discrimination, the de-investment in urban areas and
public schools, and corporate outsourcing of U.S. jobs.
Te injustice extends to the global economy. Under
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
for example, Mexico opened its markets to subsidized
food crops from the United States.
Te result, according the New York Times, is that
2.8 million farmers could not compete with cheap U.S.
commodities and lost their land and their livelihood.
Many of them have migrated to the U.S. looking for jobs.
Te pro-immigrant marches of 2006 and the mul-
tiracial support they have received demonstrate that an
opportunity to build community between African
Americans and immigrants exists.
African Americans have been at the forefront of
struggles for positive social transformation, and we
should all share an interest in creating a more just and
free society. Te enorts of such an alliance would strike
at the heart of U.S. economic inequality and force our
nations leaders to listen and create change.
Dr. King said, Te arc of the universe is long, but
it bends toward justice.
We have struggled in the past. And now it is time
to struggle again to overcome the nations continuing
shame of racism and exploitation. By welcoming and
working with the strangers, we will, all of us, go be-
yond the dinerences and nnd unity in our similarities.
We should renect upon the power of Kings Poor
Peoples Campaign of 1968 in Washington, D.C., which
brought together African Americans, Latinos, Asians,
Native Americans and poor whites who demanded an-
other Americaone more fair and just for all. I
BAJI Reader 5
By Gerald Lenoir and Larisa Casillas
Gerald Lenoir is the director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI). Larisa Casillas is former director
director of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition (BAIRC). Both organizations are based in Oakland, Calif. For
more information, go to www.blackalliance.org and www.immigrantrights.org. 2007 Te Oakland Tribune. All rights
reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Media NewsGroup, Inc. by NewsBank, Inc.
is speech was thekeynote address to the Low-Income Immigrant Rights Conference held by the National
Immigration Law Center (NILC) and its partners in Arlington, Virginia in December 2007.
Tank you for your kind words of introduction. Tanks
to the National Immigration Law Center and the many
partners and supporters for inviting us to come together
and for challenging us to discuss new and creative ways
to bridge our diverse communities. I also want to ac-
knowledge all the leaders who were announced here and
all who are gathered on this most important occasion.
Let me begin by saying it is good to be here. It is
good to be with all of you. It is good for all of us to be
together in Washington, DC on this beautiful, snowy
day. It is both humbling and challenging for me to say
some words of meaning to such a diverse and distin-
guished gathering.
It is my hope to provide a little context and a little
inspiration for this most important and critical discus-
sion on immigration. On the one hand, the issues re-
lated to immigration have great potential to confuse,
divide, embitter and pit us against each other. On the
other hand, the same issues have the potential to clarify
global trends, inspire us, unite us, and help us believe
that another world is possible. So as we gather today, we
will seek to actualize the latter potential.
Speaking of snowy days, we had a very powerful,
compassionate and meaningful Workers Rights Hear-
ing, sponsored by Jobs with Justice and others yesterday
at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. It was
snowing really hard (at least by North Carolina stan-
dards) when we got out about 5:00 PM. Several of us
shared a cab over to this conference. Te cab driver was
a very jovial and talkative person. He was going on and
on about the meaning of the nrst snow of the season and
how Washington drivers slip and slide all over the place
on the nrst snow.
Well, we nnally got over here to the hotel, and he
was still talking about how you have to navigate the slip-
pery roads. Just as we turned into the hotel driveway, the
cab started to skid right into the brick wall at the en-
trance of the driveway. Tis brother was in mid-sentence
talking about slippery roads and Washington drivers,
etc. as we slowly crashed right into the wall. Luckily, the
damage was minimal and no one was hurt. We made our
way safely into the hotel.
In a sense, the issues of immigration are a slippery
road. I am going to be doing a little talking over lunch
to keep us moving and focused on bridging diverse com-
munities. So, stay with me or as we say in some religious
circles pray with me that I dont slip on the icy immi-
gration road in this discussion.
Beloved, I come to you today as a child of the move-
ment, as do many of you. Te movement has its high
and glamorous moments. It also has something of a
checkered history of narrowness, rivalry, confusion, and
fragmentation. We all bring with us our deep convic-
tions, our analysis, our frustrations, and onen our dis-
guised confusion. For the next two days, I want to invite
you to open up a little extra space for listening, thinking,
feeling, sharing and seeking new ways to collaborate.
I am convinced that one of the great imperatives of
this hour in the movement is to build new bridges of
human relationships, understanding, analysis, and co-
ordination of work between diverse communities. Te
success of this gathering will be measured to a great de-
gree by how well we strengthen the foundation for col-
laboration, coordination, and joint work. Indeed, our
challenge is to continue to forge a powerful infrastruc-
ture for justice.
Let me share a little about my work. I work with
several organizations as I am sure most of you do. Some
6 blackalliance.org
Bridging Communities
Renewed Strength and Promise
By Rev. Nelson Johnson
On May Day, 2006 immigrants and their supporters filled the streets of Los Angeles twice in one day. 2006 David Bacon
of these include the Southern Faith, Labor and Com-
munity Alliance, Interfaith Worker Justice, the Word
and World, to name a few. Te anchoring institutions
for me, however, are the church and the organization we
founded in 1991 called the Beloved Community Center
of Greensboro.
Te beloved community is a concept we borrowed
from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beloved community
as Dr. King so onen emphasized is rooted in love. Dr.
King reminded us that love is not some sentimental,
mushy emotion. Love is the key that opens the door to
ultimate reality. At its core, beloved community is the
notion that all humanity is bound together in a single
fabric of mutuality. We belong to each other, and at our
best we enrich and help to complete each other. Tis is
the anchoring understanding that informs our mission.
Te logic of this position is that in order to stand for our
own dignity and worth, we have to stand for the dignity,
worth and indeed the enormous unrealized potential of
all of Gods children.
So, we have taken up our work at the Beloved Com-
munity Center primarily with those on the margins of
society including the homeless, the unemployed and des-
titute, the poor and working people and increasingly
with immigrants that is to say with our beloved broth-
ers and sisters who have journeyed from distant lands
seeking an economic foundation for life onen in hostile
environments and wretched working conditions.
I want to share a few of our experiences at the
Beloved Community Center that might be useful for
our time together. Let me say that I have set our work
at the Beloved Community Center in a moral/ethical
framework. I hesitate to say religious although I am a
pastor and many at the Beloved Community Center
have dennite religious amliations; I hesitate to say reli-
gious because religion can convey quite a narrow and
distorted picture of what we are about. Tere are some
at the Beloved Community Center who claim no reli-
gious amliation at all but are deeply committed to the
spiritual, moral and ethical principles on which our or-
ganization is founded. Te point here is to seek a fram-
ing that is most inclusive without compromising
essential principles.
A Community Story:
At one of our local high schools in Greensboro,
there is a large and growing Latino and Asian popula-
tion. A little over a year ago a nght broke out there be-
tween an African American and a Latino Student. Te
nght between the African American male and a Latino
male started over a young lady in whom they had mutual
interest. Te Principal of the high school, who was an
African American male, came down pretty hard on the
Latinos, at least it seemed that way to the Latino com-
munity and to some of us. Trough a relationship with
a Latino sister, who was also a community organizer, sev-
eral of us at the Beloved Community Center, who were
African American, attended a Latino parent meeting
and heard in some detail their concerns.
Te issues that arose in that meeting were broad and
had almost nothing to do with the nght over the young
lady. In fact, I could never quite get the details of that
nght straight. Te issues that surfaced in the meeting,
however, included:
Not being allowed to speak in their native tongue
while waiting to be picked up by the bus from school
aner classes were completed.
Tere was no handbook in Spanish, although the
promise for such a book had been made by high school
omcials.
Te Latino parents felt disrespected and ignored by
school omcials.
BAJI Reader 7
On May Day immigrants and their supporters filled the streets of Los Angeles twice in one daya huge march downtown, and another through the Wilshire dis-
trict's Miracle Mile. 2006 David Bacon
8 blackalliance.org
Great fear of retaliation was expressed for standing
up and speaking out by Latino parents.
Te principal did not speak Spanish, and there was
no one in the principals omce who spoke Spanish.
A teacher would have to be called from one of the
classrooms to interpret whenever a Spanish speaking
parent came for consultation. We organized a meeting
between the Latino parents, some African American
leaders, and the school Principal and his stan at the
Church. In fact, the Latino parents were unwilling to
meet at the school. Te issues I just mentioned were
shared through discussion with the Principal. It was a
challenging meeting with a lot of back and forth. Te
Principal was somewhat defensive, but black leaders
hung in there with him, encouraging and not condemn-
ing. Together, we got a plan to work through most of
the issues.
We had another meeting, a little more of a cele-
bration.
Te children came, and the Latino Parents prepared
a wonderful meal. Te principal, who earlier seemed not
the most sociable person, loosened up a little (what can
you do with pretty little children running around), and
we made more progress. Tis enort to build bridges was-
nt related to labor but it was about building commu-
nity. It was about standing with people when they are
isolated, misunderstood and mistreated. We sought to
stand with them in such a way that we stood for the best
interest of the whole community. As black folk in the
south, it should not have been hard for us to appreciate
the predicament of the Latino parents, for it was not
long ago- and even now-that we shared the same reality.
Two Labor Stories
While the example I have just given is about a local
education issue, most of us in this room would agreed
that the engine driving the current innux of immigrants
in relationship to this country and on a world scale is
globalization, that is, the economic interests of large
multi-national corporations. Te various free trade
agreements, as in the likes of NAFTA, have resulted in:
Undercutting and undermining sustainable economies
in country aner county.
People not having work to do and getting pushed
on the land in their native countries, which leads to mil-
lions of displaced people, people who migrate to other
nations in search of work and economic substance.
Resources in third world countries being depleted
and very little being reinvested in their local economies,
resulting in these nations becoming less and less able to
meet the needs of their people.
Tis is an over simplined but broader context in
which we must understand and engage the issues of im-
migration. You know and I know that this context is
sorely missing among the general population. Without
a relatively truthful anchoring context, only more con-
fusion, anger and division will be generated by our
much talking about immigration. Tere are thou-
sands, in fact, hundreds of thousands of discussions
every day in barber and beauty shops, in schools, homes,
churches and on the streets related to immigration
where there is mainly the Lou Dobbs context, i.e. the
government is not doing enough to protect us from this
massive problem causing invasion of immigrants. Such
a context is an invitation for more confusion, division,
and bitterness.
Lorenzo Reed, a worker at the Smithfield pork plant in Tarheel, North Carolina. 2006 David Bacon
BAJI Reader 9
About a year and a half ago I was in a meeting in
High Point, North Carolina, the furniture capital of the
country. High Point is about 15 minutes from Greens-
boro where I live. Folks from these two adjoining towns
in the same county onen discuss issues together. We
were talking about the high school suspension rate of
black students in the county school system when a
brother just blurted out in the meeting, on the way over
here every construction site I passed, I didnt see nothing
but Mexicans working.
Te people in the meeting were mainly African
Americans, progressive for the most part. Tey didnt
want to just come down on Latinos and I knew they did-
nt want to say much in public. In fact, they may not
have had much to say. So the meeting went on and again
the brother spoke up saying the same thing, On the way
over here every construction site I passed I didnt see
nothing but Mexicans working.
I realized that he intended to be heard. I asked,
What road did you take to High Point? He re-
sponded, I came right down Lee Street on Route 6. I
said, I came the same way. I saw the same thing you saw
on the way over here. You and I we are looking at the
same thing. I also know that the dropout rate of black
students and the fact that our jails and prisons are
bulging with young black men is directly related to the
fact that there are not enough good paying jobs for peo-
ple to do. So I hear you. Te issue for you and me is not
that we are seeing dinerent things. I saw the same thing
you saw. Te question is how we understand what we
are looking at.
I explained, I dont know the particular way the
Latino brothers or sisters working on those jobs got
there. You and I know they were not here 20 years ago.
I dont know exactly how they got there. I imagine that
some are there because they have some kind of legal
work arrangement to be in this country; some are no
doubt citizens. But Ive got a feeling that many of them
staggered through the hot southwest desert; some put
their lives at risk in the back of a hot truck. Some took
great risks and endured enormous hardships to work
and be underpaid in this country. I am convinced, how-
ever, that they came here because they are desperately
trying to make ends meet. Some are sending back
money to feed their children and family. Tey are trying
to survive. Should we get mad with another group of
poor people who have been forced into a desperate sit-
uation and are just trying to survive? Tats the ques-
tion! We had a fairly good discussion at that meeting,
but it was just a beginning.
Te truth is that we have been set-up to be in a big
nght with each other that will not ultimately help either
one of us. African American and Latinos are like two
long freight trains on the same track speeding straight
towards each other. Tere are great economic interests
that have turned us in the direction of this great clash be-
tween us, and those very same economic interests will
benent from our nghting with each other. Two groups
of poor people should not be each others main problem.
Together, however, we can become each others solution,
if we can refocus our energies. We have to build new
bridges between us. We have to forge new and powerful
coalitions. We have to evolve structures that allow us to
work together to the mutual benent of both groups.
10 blackalliance.org
Te track we are on now is a disaster; it is a down-
ward crash to the bottom. We must change our course.
To paraphrase the words of the Prophet Isaiah, we have
to nnd a way to exalt the valleys of hardship and despair
and to make the mountains of scandalous wealth low.
We have to nnd a way to lin up the bottom and bring
the top down. Our challenge is to work together so that
all might have a living wage as we build bridges to trans-
form our communities such that we all are treated with
the dignity and respect that all deserve.
Now, most of you know that the Smithneld meat
processing company has a massive hog producing plant
in rural North Carolina. North Carolina has chosen to
change its laws to make it legal for that company to have
a vertically integrated economic structure such that
Smithneld owns or controls the hogs from birth all the
way to the grocery store. Under this arrangement Smith-
neld has over eight million hogs under its control
crowded into Eastern North Carolina. Hog waste in the
form of huge lagoons is producing foul odors in huge
areas, mainly in poor and African American communi-
ties. Any of you who have ever been around a hog pen
know what I am talking about: choking streams and
rivers, killing on nsh; sucking up clean fresh water in
order to process over 32,000 hogs a day, increasingly
leaving a shortage of fresh usable water in the area. Inci-
dentally, Smithneld is seeking to raise the level of hogs
killed each day by seven thousand up to 39,000 per day.
Tose of us at the Jobs with Justice hearings yester-
day heard from the worker at Smithneld. Tey spoke of
how they are being treated with over 600 being nred in
the midst of a union drive campaign because of the So-
cial Security no-match letters. Well, the work of the
Beloved Community Center was expanded when we
played the leading role in founding the Southern Faith,
Labor and Community Alliance (SFLCA) as an organ-
ization to ngure out how to get the people in general,
but especially the African American Church, more fully
engaged in this struggle and related struggles. Without
going into the details of the Justice at Smithneld Cam-
paign in which we are fully involved, I want to share an
experience from that front of struggle that is directly re-
lated to the immigration question.
Te SFLCA co-sponsored with the Word and
World a three and a half day Prophetic Witness-Eco-
nomic Justice Seminary, or religious school, in Parkston,
NC, a few miles away from the giant Smithneld hog
killing and processing plant. Te idea was to bring to-
gether religious, labor and community leaders and
blacks, whites, and Latinos for three days of intense
study and renection to work through together what our
faith mandates and our own sense of justice requires us
to do in situations like Smithneld. Te school went very
well. We need more occasions like that. We reached ca-
pacity, which was 80 people, down at that Methodist
Camp in the woods near Fort Bragg Military Camp.
Te details of that school are another story for an-
other time. Te particular experience I want to share is
related to recruiting for the school. I went to an African
American ministers meeting in Raleigh. I shared exten-
sively about the larger context and how Blacks and Lati-
nos were being pitted against each other. We talked
about the tragedy of the no match letters. I did my best
in that discussion to paint a picture of the overall situa-
tion and how the Black clergy in particular are socially
positioned to play an invaluable role.
When I nnished, one of the senior ministers spoke
up and said, You know we hear all of what you have
said but there is one thing you dont seem to understand.
He continued, Black folk have been here longer than
all the dinerent groups of immigrants. We were brought
here in chains in the 1600s. We were here before all the
great immigrant waves. He said that every immigrant
group that comes to this country, it is not long before
they get in the line ahead of us and I dont think its
going to be any dinerent with the people you are talking
about, and that is a real problem.
Our challenge is to work
together so that all might have
a living wage as we build
bridges to transform our
communities...
BAJI Reader 11
I could not refute what this minister was saying be-
cause it is the history of racism in our nation. But, I
urged him to come to the School anyhow. We preachers
have a way of saying anyhow when we dont have much
else to say right at the moment. I shared with him that
the past is indeed a testimony of our inhumanity and
human failing. In the case of black folk, it is a cruel and
tragic past. Certainly slavery, lynching laws, Jim Crow-
ism and the deep continued role of racism in our story
cannot be denied. I stressed that while our past is never
irrelevant, we must maintain that our future is OPEN.
We cannot allow our past, whatever it has been, to to-
tally dictate our future, for then we have no future be-
cause our past becomes our future. If we believe our own
book of faith that the Spirit makes all things new, then
we are pulled by the new possibilities of tomorrow and
not immobilized by tragedies and disappointments of
yesterday. Tats what I was trying to say by urging him
to come anyhow.
So, the Raleigh ministers came. Together we en-
gaged in deep discussion and prayer. We went to the
Smithneld Plant gate and attempted to speak truth to
power. We visited together the overcrowded and sub-
standard immigrant farm work camps in the nelds of
eastern North Carolina. We amrmed afresh that all
things are possible when we as believers break the back
of cynicism and despair and call each other to our high-
est humanity. It is then that we can reach across the dis-
asters, divisions, and disappointments of our yesterdays
to forge new possibilities for our tomorrows. So, we
joined hands and linked hearts with our Latino brothers
and sisters struggling and walking together towards our
new humanity.
Yes, the giant Smithneld Company is still there on
that long, desolate stretch of rural North Carolina high-
way. Smithneld is still mistreating its workers. Tere is
still no union there. In fact, Smithneld has brought a
lawsuit charging the union (and by implication all of us)
with racketeering. But in spite of it all, we have begun
to build some new relationships. Born of a vision of new
possibilities, certined in the crucible of struggle in the
nelds and on the side of a rural North Carolina road
under a hot July sun, bridges are built!
I was overjoyed when we, a delegation of some of
these same African American clergy, respectfully made
the case to Reynolds American Tobacco Company just
last Tuesday that the Farm Workers Organizing Com-
mittee (FLOC) and our immigrant brothers and sisters
who labor in the tobacco nelds and all the other nelds
in this country are our brothers and sisters beloved. We
intend to stand with them in their struggle until Justice
comes!
I am happy to report that we are in the early stages
of planning some city wide black/brown conferences in
several key cities in North Carolina. Tese conferences
can be of enormous value in building bridges between
us. We must engage in a more profound way the mean-
ing of the immigration questions facing us, not only in
our city and state but indeed all over the nation and the
world. Racism and the declining state of black folk on
the bottom cannot be ignored or skimmed over. Yet, we
cannot and we must not allow black and brown people
to be pitted against each other in a painful spiral to the
bottom. Tats why we want to organize joint confer-
ences with Latinos, blacks, whites and others to work
out together the road forward. We must build these
bridges, for when people cannot work with each other
even though they share deep mutual interests, it opens
the door for a small privileged group to make decisions
that are not in our interest.
Brothers and Sisters, I am convinced that one of the
great challenges facing us today is the need for all of us
to build new, creative infrastructures for justice and
transformation. We need structures of collaboration, co-
operation, and coordination. Let the lawyers do their
work; let the labor unions do their work; let the students
"We must not
allow black and brown people
to be pitted against each
other in a painful
spiral to the bottom..."
do their work; let the community leaders and religious
leaders do their work. But, let us nnd a way that all of
our work is working together for good. Let us work in
such a way that everyones work is value added to every-
one elses work. Te structures I envision must bridge
the division and fragmentation in the movement and
between our various communities.
Tis infrastructure for justice and transformation
must expand the knowledge base so that we dont think
in terms of those selnsh, mean, or lesser people. In-
stead, we must help each other see with clarity that we
are dealing with huge global economic forces that have
displaced over 200 million people now migrating all
over the world. Tese giant economic forces insure that
some wallow in the obscenity of unearned and unnec-
essary wealth while others are len to scratch out a living
in ever declining circumstances or, worse yet, to be crim-
inalized and imprisoned when their main crime is strug-
gling to break the death grip of poverty.
Te infrastructure for justice I envision must pro-
vide new spaces and cultivate a milieu for quality inter-
action and relationship building. At the end of the day,
there is no adequate replacement for having some qual-
ity relationships with those denned as the other. Most
importantly, this infrastructure for justice must evolve
creative, grounded strategies on the local and state levels
that complement national and international strategies
all of which should move us towards more just soci-
eties in a more peaceful world.
Finally, let me emphasize that we must expose and
dismantle the massive scapegoating mechanism that is
being used to exploit immigrants, while blinding and
misleading millions of people into believing that the
problems in this country are caused primarily by immi-
grants. Too many in the media, in politics, and even in
religious institutions have joined in an unholy alliance
to blame the ills of this nation on immigrants, more
specincally on Latino people.
High taxes are blamed on immigrants instead of on
the billions of dollars spent every day on an unpopular
war that has no end and, seemingly, no purpose of en-
during meaning.
When the issue of crime arises we are urged to look
at the Latinos and immigrants as the culprits.
When population growth becomes an issue our
minds and eyes are trained towards immigrants as the
primary source.
Terrorism is being increasingly framed as an immi-
grant problem. We are told that we must build walls to
prevent terrorists hidden among immigrants from
entering our nation.
And so it goes, on and on, disguising real causes
while blaming the weak and vulnerable. Tis enectively
scapegoats a group of people who are already victims of
our international treaties and now increasingly the vic-
tims of our domestic policies of racism, denial, and
blaming.
Beloved, let the day be gone when we can draw a
line on Gods earth and on one side of that line people
have a few rights and are treated with some respect,
while on the other side people are treated as animals,
chased, hunted and imprisoned because they have be-
come commodities in a pront driven world-wide eco-
nomic system a system where they cannot nnd work
Edward Morrison lost his job at the Smithfield pork plant in Tarheel, North Carolina, when the company fired him for being absent due to injuries he incurred
while working on the kill floor of the meat packing plant.. 2006 David Bacon
in their native country and are forced to migrate to this
country where they are exploited and scapegoated
even as they work for lower wages in inferior conditions.
Tis is wrong.
If you will allow me to be a preacher for a few min-
utes, I must declare that I serve a God who is no re-
specter of persons. Everybody is an important
somebody. I serve a God who proclaims that the
whole earth is the lords, and the fullness thereof; the
world they that dwell therein. Truth and justice de-
mand that we expose and dismantle the immigrant
scapegoat system.
Yes, we face great challenges as it relates to the im-
migration question and the larger question of trans-
forming ourselves and our communities. But those
very challenges are also a great opportunity. So let us
recommit ourselves to the long, difficult, but beautiful
struggle to wrestle out of the jungles of this world, a
new world:
A world where all are paid adequately for their
work wherever they are and no matter where they
come from.
A world where all are treated with dignity and re-
spect at their workplace.
A world where all are protected equally by the laws
of this land no matter their citizenship status.
Ultimately, we seek a world in which all are ac-
knowledged as brothers and sisters and treated as part
of the universal beloved community.
With such a vision to focus us, let us work together
building bridges so that soon and very soon everyone
will be able to sit under our own ng tree and vine and
none will be afraid.
With such a vision we will be able to come back from
the far countries of isolation, fragmentation and bitter-
ness to gather around a welcome table of brotherhood and
sisterhood, celebrating the beauty of our diversity.
Nurtured by such a vision, I can hear the voices of
the ancestors saying PRESS ON because no matter how
dimcult the journey there is a BRIGHT SIDE SOME-
WHERE!
I can hear them saying press on until the walls of in-
justice come tumbling down! Press on until we receive
our birthright set forth in the founding document of
this republic that ALL men and women are created
equal and, therefore, have certain inalienable rights, in-
cluding the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right
to pursue happiness which certainly include the right
to work.
Press on until the wicked cease from troubling and
the righteous are at rest!
Press on until the dawning of a New Day!
Yes, trouble might endure for a night but joy comes
in the morning. So press on until joy washes over the
clouds of despair! Press on! Press on until victory comes!
To God be the glory! I
BAJI Reader 13
Rev. Nelson Johnson is the Pastor and Founder of Faith Community Church in Greensboro, NC. He is also the Exec-
utive Director of e Beloed Community Center of Greensboro, a social and economic justice organization. Beloed
Community Center, P.O. Box 875, Greensboro, NC 27402, info@beloedcommunitycenter.org.
An indigenous Oaxacan woman sweeps the area in front of her home in a
settlement under the trees near San Diego. 2006 David Bacon
A young Mixtec farmworker in the shelter he built in a camp on a hillside
outside Delmar near San Diego, California. 2006 David Bacon
Building Racism
Segregation and racism are used to pit black and Latino carpenters
against each other at a low-income-housing site
As the Aguilar brothers remember it, one anernoon
last August the management had some workers cook up
shrimp soup and fried nsh for the Latino construction
men who were picking up their checks. It was a strange
show of hospitality from the bosses whod otherwise
made work on Hunters Point Hill miserable from day
one.
Fausto, 39, and Gonzalo, 41, knew meetings were
supposed to be for all workers, not just the ones with
roots south of the Rio Grande. Having toiled in this
country for nearly 20 years, with a general knowledge
of labor laws and an encyclopedic recall of carpenters
union rules, the Aguilars had been keeping close track
of the growing tally of what they believed to be racist
incidents at the job site.
Te brothers say that the Latino and black crews
were kept separate, with Latinos heavily outnumbering
the blacks. Worse yet, many Latinos were forced to give
cash kickbacks from their checks, which were shared
among management.
And here was another example: We have two re-
ally big problems, said foreman Ernesto Cunningham
of San Rafael-based Bay Building Services, Inc. Cun-
ningham spoke in Spanish to the dozens of men gath-
ered in a warehouse, blocks away from the job site.
According to Gonzalo Aguilars testimony at a public
hearing last month, Cunningham said the nrst problem
was the fucking union, which he said onen stopped
their work because many workers didnt have union
cards. Cunningham said the second problem was the
pinches negros (which translates roughly to fucking
niggers). As he explained it, they want to work in the
place of you guys, and we (meaning Latinos) are at
war with them. (Te attorney representing the com-
pany Cunningham worked for said his clients will not
respond to questions due to pending litigation.)
Gonzalo Aguilar says in his testimony that Cun-
ningham had some solutions to these problems. Cun-
ningham allegedly said that when the union reps come
around, the workers should ignore them, tell them to
go to hell, and refuse to show their union cards. Better
yet, they could follow the example of one man whod
heckled the reps and thrown his identincation cards at
them.
Of the black workers, Cunningham is accused of
saying they were too slow and that he wanted to nre
them all.
If this was supposed to be a call for solidarity among
the Latinos, it was lost on the Aguilars. In fact, for the
Aguilars, who refer to black carpenters as our black
brothers, it just seemed plain wrong. So when Fausto
returned to his Hayward home, he wrote down Cun-
ninghams words.
Te racist rhetoric wasnt just reserved for on-site
meetings to which black workers were not invited. Gre-
gory Hall, an African-American carpenter, met with
company representatives on the job site to ask why black
workers were not being hired even though the site was
smack-dab in the Bayview, one of the citys few majority
black neighborhoods. Experienced black carpenters had
constantly inquired about jobs.
Te answer, according to court documents, was that
the sites bosses would give the community group, or
African Americans, and the core group, meaning the
Latinos, separate walls to work on. If the community
group could keep up with the core group, then more
black workers would be hired. Tis was 2007 in one of
the most progressive and ber-PC cities in America, but
management appeared to be talking straight Jim Crow.
Te racist allegations go on and on in the civil law-
By Lauren Smiley
suit nled in San Francisco
Superior Court and sent
out to be served last week on
Denver-based Apartment
Investment and Manage-
ment Company (AIMCO),
which calls itself the largest
apartment owner in the
country. AIMCO owns and
manages the 604 federally
subsidized units on the hill
overlooking the Hunters
Point shipyard. Te proper-
ties are currently under ex-
tensive renovation aner the city zapped the company
with a 2002 lawsuit for negligent upkeep to force it to
nx serious housing violations, including bad plumbing
and toxic mold that residents complained was making
them sick.
Having wrangled itself out of trouble by making
the renovations and paying millions to the city and to a
nearby Boys and Girls Club as required in the 2004 set-
tlement, AIMCO undertook the current project to up-
date units in La Salle, Shoreview, Bayview, and All
Hallows Gardens with new windows, doors, nooring,
bathrooms, kitchens, lighting, and paint.
Now the housing giant is being targeted again for
alleged collaboration in wrong-doing during the new
construction project, bankrolled in part by $73 million
in tax-exempt bonds and $42 million in federal low-in-
come-housing tax credits. Te suit also names Fortney
& Weygandt Inc., the Ohio-based general contractor
AIMCO hired to coordinate the construction and hire
of subcontractors, three of which are also being sued.
Te suit alleges that AIMCO, Fortney & Weygandt,
and the three subcontractors created a supermanage-
ment team that waged a campaign of racism and ex-
ploitation.
Te 27 black and Latino carpenters who brought
the suit decided they wouldnt tolerate what they say is
an extreme example of the construction industrys
best-kept nonsecret, as one Bayview activist puts it,
where black workers are passed over in favor of largely
undocumented Latino im-
migrants who are more eas-
ily exploited.
As Latinos have passed
blacks as the countrys
largest minority group,
much controversy has en-
sued over whether one
groups success means
pushing the other out of
jobs. A 2006 Pew Research
Center poll indicated that
blacks are more likely than
whites to see immigrants as
taking jobs away from Americans. Former Mexican
President Vicente Fox created a media circus in 2005
aner he commented that Mexicans take the U.S. jobs
even blacks dont want to do. In 2006, 28 percent of
construction workers in this country were born in an-
other country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statis-
tics.
But in San Francisco, even with the unemployment
rate of African-American men hovering at three times
that of Latino men, the alleged enorts at the AIMCO
site to divide the two races instead had the opposite ef-
fect. Te two groups have joined in a (perhaps uniquely
American) display of solidaritysuing their common
enemy, the employer, as one.
Te suit alleges a number of violations of state labor
code and antidiscrimination law, including:
Job-site supervisors and foremen, mostly Latinos
themselves, took $100 to $400 a week from Latino
workers, either by cashing paychecks and withhold-
ing the money or having workers cash their own
checks and give kickbacks.
Qualined black carpenters were repeatedly told there
was no work available, even while subcontractors
continued to hire Latinos.
Black and Latino workers worked on separate crews.
Black workers hardly ever worked a 40-hour week,
while Latinos onen worked overtime and some-
times weekends.
Management hid several nonunion workers in a ware-
BAJI Reader 15
2008 Paul Trapani / S.F. Weekly
house when the carpenters union reps came to visit.
Black workers were repeatedly told they were too slow
and inexperienced. At least once, instructions for a
job were given only in Spanish to a group of Latinos
and blacks, leaving the black workers without in-
structions.
Latino workers were pressured to do fast and shoddy
work; one job-site supervisor said it was because
only black people would live in those units.
For now, construction at the site has stopped for
what a spokesman says is a normal delay in building
phases, though the company vows it will restart work
in early April. Te carpenters and community activists
demand that the individuals named in the lawsuit do
not return. Meanwhile, AIMCO is passing the blame.
In a letter to city supervisors before a hearing on the
issue last month, senior vice president Patti Shwayder
said that the allegations focus on employees of the sub-
contractors hired by Fortney & Weygandt, and that
AIMCO would require that company to remove the
subcontractors from the job if the allegations were true.
Fortney & Weygandts general superintendent on
the site, Mike Cunningham (no relation to Ernesto),
who is named in the suit, says he was sorry to hear
theres just so much discontent, and was surprised by
the allegations of kickbacks: I wasnt aware of every lit-
tle detail that was going on, but so be it, he told SF
Weekly. All hiring and nring is up to the subcontrac-
tors, he added.
Attorney Paul Simpson represents the two subcon-
tractors accused of extorting wage kickbacks, Daly City-
based roonng company IMR Contractor Corporation,
and San Rafael-based Bay Building Services. Simpson
says his clients deny any discrimination or kickbacks,
and that they would take appropriate action if any
employee was proven to have done so. While the lawsuit
accuses IMR owner Moises Avila of sharing kickbacks
and echoing Ernesto Cunninghams racist rhetoric,
Simpson describes Avila as a roofer [who] worked his
way up. Hes an American success story, and these alle-
gations are very hurtful to him. (Avila referred all ques-
tions to Simpson, his attorney.)
Simpsons clients have reason to worry: Tis could
result in a costly settlement or jury-awarded damages, and
multiple city omcials and carpenters say that the district
attorney is investigating. (Te DAs omce will not con-
nrm or deny an investigation.) Te state criminal code al-
lows a two-to-four-year prison sentence for extortion,
possibly tacking on a year for each consecutive count up
to a total sentence of eight years. Tree Latino carpenters
say that managers were taking money from at least a
dozen workers every week for months on end, although
its unknown how many would testify to it in court.
For now, the allegations must be treated with skep-
ticism, but theres little denying that it would be an ex-
traordinary feat of coordination for 27 workers, half of
whom can barely communicate with the other half
without a translator, to come up with similar tales. As
Bob Salinas, the Oakland attorney who is representing
the workers in the suit, asks, Could my guys have been
making that up?
At a City Hall public hearing last month, supervi-
Gonzalo Aguilar says Latinos on the site were pressured to
do fast and shoddy work.
2008 R C Rivera / S.F. Weekly
sors were clearly concerned. Carmen Chu nodded in
solemn agreement as Jen West, a carpenter apprentice
who lives in one of the AIMCO properties and worked
on the site, explained that he wanted to be a role model
to men in the area by getting a job. But to come to
work and be a taxpayer and be called a nigger? I deserve
everything ... that another man deserves.
Salinas adds that the alleged statements from the
warehouse meetingthat the bosses wanted to nre all
the blacks and that the Latinos were at war with
themhark back to antidiscrimination cases of eras
past, before employers knew to hide their racist hand.
To prove this, the jury just has to believe this statement
is true, and its over, he says. Do you think it takes a
trained legal expert to see these things were based on
race? Other evidence is even more explicit. Salinas pro-
vided the SF Weekly with a photo he said West had
taken of gramti scrawled in a bathroom on the construc-
tion site in January, including the words fuck all nig-
gers, slave, monkeys, and AIDS.
Simpson, the attorney for two of the defendants,
called the testimonies at the hearing innammatory,
and said his clients werent informed of the hearing
until it was already in progress. Tey are people that
are hard-working, honest individuals that are being ac-
cused of wrongdoing, and nobody has come up with any
evidence substantiating the accusations, he said.
But the carpenters say theyve witnessed plenty.
Te hiring at the AIMCO site was problematic
from the start. According to the lawsuit, not one black
worker was hired for the nrst month of work in May.
Black carpenters who inquired were told contractors
werent hiring, or that they were waiting for materials.
But black workers noticed that more Latinos were
hired. Finally, some carpenters and community activists
stopped work at the site with a protest.
Aner the rally at the end of May, a dozen black car-
penters were hired, according to the lawsuit, including
61-year-old carpenter Bob Ivy. Having grown up in the
Bayview just blocks away, he considered it his duty to
rehabilitate the neighborhood. But once on the job site,
Ivy and the other black workers rarely got a full weeks
work, while the Latinos onen worked overtime and
weekends. One day, carpenter Roy Edwards com-
plained about always being the nrst to be sent home; ac-
cording to the lawsuit, Ernesto Cunningham called him
a motherfucker. Te two men got into a yelling
match, and it was announced that nobody would work
that day, according to Edwards and foreman Randy
Keys. But soon aner, Keys says he drove by the job site
and saw the Latinos still at work.
In his 35 years as a carpenter, Ivy says hes always
had to nght to get and keep jobs. But in recent years, he
says the color of the competition has shined. When a
black Vietnam vet like Ivy visits construction sites and
sees mostly Latinos, some of whom are willing to brush
aside a union mans safety nrst creed and dont speak
English, its hard for it not to sting. I feel bad for them,
but theyre taking money out of my hands and food out
of my mouth, he says. How do these other ethnic
groups come to America and succeed, and the black
people still stay stagnated?
BAJI Reader 17
Bob Ivy says getting and keeping jobs in his 35 years as a black
carpenter in the Bay Area has been a constant struggle.
2008 R C Rivera / S.F. Weekly
Ivy said at the public hearing that the crews for the
company he worked for, Livermore-based Bay Area
Construction Framers, were divided by racehis all-
black crew was assigned to tearout, while white workers
came in for the installation. Joe Powell, the companys
attorney, says the job assignments had nothing to do
with race. He says its normal for a company to assign a
crew it has worked with before and knows is trained in
a certain specialty to one type of work, and then the
local hires with whom it has never worked to another.
Other black carpenters in the suit report that the
various bosses onen told them they were slow, and
threatened to dock their pay for stopping work for just
a moment. When one carpenter complained about the
dangerous conditions the Latinos were working in, the
suit claims one foreman retorted, Scared or some-
thing?
Meanwhile, the Latinos faced their own woes.
Problems started for Hector Rodriguez on his nrst visit
to the job site. A union journeyman carpenter, Ro-
driguez was instructed by Bay Building Services fore-
men Ernesto Cunningham and Jesus Sandoval that he
would earn $24.25 an hour, $9 an hour less than union
wage, according to the lawsuit, though the work he did
for IMR and Bay Building Services was only what he
considers carpentry work siding, windows, sliding
doors, and walls. Aner a few weeks, Rodriguez began
getting paid carpenters wages, but had $100 deducted
from his paycheck each Monday by Bay Building Serv-
ices foreman Qaltemo Arellano, according to the law-
suit. Rodriguez, 28, says he has paid taxes for the 11
years hes lived in the United States, and thought what
his bosses were asking was illegal. Yet he had problems
nnding work, and had four children: I wasnt happy,
but I had to work. Aner he had worked there for sev-
eral weeks, one of his sons required emergency dental
surgery. Rodriguez Kaiser copay was $6,000. He
pleaded that his supervisors not take a cut of his pay
that week, but they still did, as Rodriguez explained at
the hearing.
Rodriguez complained to the carpenters union
along with the Aguilars and others, but things only got
worse. According to the lawsuit, Rodriguez said he was
threatened on the job site by Jesus Sandovals brother,
Elias, that if he kept complaining to the union, some-
thing might happen to him outside of work. One
night last fall, months aner hed been laid on, Ro-
driguez says he donned his cowboy boots and cowboy
hat to go to the Fiesta Nightclub in San Jose to see El
Potro de Sinaloa, a popular singer from his home state.
He later noticed other job-site supervisors were at the
club, and the scene that ensued seemed taken straight
from a mob movie, as described in the suit: Carlos Del-
gado, Cunninghams brother-in-law, grabbed Ro-
driguez by the neck and called him a fag, saying that
complaining to the union wasnt something a man
does. Tey could do something to me easy, Rodriguez
says. I was scared. I have family, and if something hap-
pened to me, I dont know what would happen. Del-
gado could not be reached for comment.
Te carpenters union nled three charges against
IMR and Bay Building Services with the National
Labor Relations Board. Te two companies settled
the charges for the alleged antiunion comments at the
warehouse meeting by accepting the slap on the wrist
of having to post a bilingual notice saying that federal
law grants them the right to union activity. Another
charge against Bay Building Services was withdrawn
when NLRB reps said there wasnt enough evidence
that the Aguilars and two other men had not been re-
called from a layon because of their union activity. Te
lawsuit alleges many black and Latino carpenters were
laid on in retaliation for complaining to the union or
signing a petition.
Rodriguez says the managers tried their best to
stop communication between the Latinos and blacks.
He speculates that was so they could get the Latinos to
work fast and in unsafe conditions, and steal their
money without anyone squawking. Rodriguez says he
was discouraged from talking to blacks, and that the
workers ate lunch separately, so communication was
onen limited to the black workers telling the Latinos
there was a work stoppage in protest. Black carpenter
Gregory Hall heard of the accusations regarding the
Latinos stolen wages and circulated a petition de-
nouncing it among all the workers. Hall says it was in-
tended to show solidarity; he didnt show it to the
management.
Last fall, the Aguilars and Rodriguez attended
one of the community meetings held by black workers
at a church near the work site. Ivy remembers every-
one whooping in disbelief as the details of the alleged
wage stealing were translated into English. The sepa-
ration tactics had failed. The two sides realized they
were both victims of the same alleged business model:
to employ the cheapest workers who wouldnt com-
plain.
Upon hearing the stories, Ivy says he was reminded
of black men hed worked with through the decades
who accepted bad working conditions out of fear of los-
ing their jobs. It was almost like slave labor, he says.
Last fall, some carpenters went to La Raza Centro
Legal in the Mission to inquire about their rights. La
Raza contacted Bob Salinas, who had just won a
$100,000 settlement for three workers who had not
been paid for all their hours worked at a Chinese bunet
in the East Bay. Aner listening to the carpenters stories,
and doing his own investigation, Salinas decided they
had grounds for a civil suit.
Although the carpenters statements and the photo
of hateful gramti may be the only records of the alleged
racism on the construction site, evidence that some of
the work was done haphazardly is built right into the
renovated units.
To the untrained eye, the neat row of the redone
yellow-and-tan three-story units of All Hallows Gar-
dens sloping down to the shipyard looks cheery and
inviting, especially compared with the brown barracks-
like Oakdale housing project across the street.
But Gonzalo and Fausto Aguilar pointed out the
shoddy work earlier this month. Te brothers say many
of the hires were undocumented family members or ac-
quaintances of the management who wouldnt protest
kickbacks. Te lawsuit says that Ernesto Cunningham
would hide several nonunion Latinos in a warehouse,
and told them to hide if the union steward came to the
site. Te union nned Cunningham and IMR, according
to the suit. (Te carpenters union refused to comment
for this story.)
Te Aguilars say inexperienced workers bring down
the level of safety for everyone. Its like this: If you go
to a job where theres blacks, whites, Latinos, safety is
nrst, right? Fausto says. But if you go to a job where
theres 70 percent Latinos, they dont care about safety.
Tey want fast work, Gonzalo says. It pains me
to say it, but the Latino foremen are the ones who treat
us the worst. Tis wasnt the nrst time. But here it was
more evident.
Te brothers point to the doorbell where Jesus San-
doval had told them not to leave a space for the wires
while they were putting siding on the wall. When asked
why, Sandoval told them, Fucking black people, they
dont deserve it, the lawsuit states.
Te Aguilars point out how at a corner of the
house, the siding doesnt align on the adjoining walls.
At another place, siding runs up the front of the house
at an angle.
Coming home from work, resident Patricia
Williams opens up her garage door to show how the
construction folks len it when she moved back in, aner
staying in another unit for a month during the renova-
tion. Sawdust coats the noor, which is littered with
nails, pallets, and an empty barrel. Uneven holes are cut
into the walls around exposed wiring. Te thick televi-
sion cable mysteriously snakes out of the apartments
second-noor wall and into her garage, the only one like
that on the block.
Its tacky, Williams says. Tey just did a bum job.
Such disappointment clouds what chief assistant
city attorney Jesse Smith called a fresh start between
AIMCO and the city, aner the company settled the
citys lawsuit in 2004. To encourage the company to
completely redo the units, the city promised to endorse
AIMCOs application to the state to receive tax-exempt
status on bonds to nnance the work. But the approval
came with stipulations that AIMCO must pay prevail-
ing wages, enact nondiscriminatory hiring, and abide by
the citys First Source Hiring program to prioritize San
Franciscans for entry-level jobs, especially residents of
the Bayview.
As a corporate entity, theyre not known for their
civic-mindedness, says Supervisor Sophie Maxwell,
whose district includes the Bayview. We had to sue
them to get things repaired properly. ... Tats why we
put the conditions in, and not say well just leave it to
their good graces.
But since no formal complaints were lodged with
city agencies about violations of the agreement, the city
did very little, although multiple omcials say the district
attorney is investigating. Te city was limited in its abil-
BAJI Reader 19
ity to pressure for jobs, since the nrst hiring legislation
applies only to entry-level workers, when much of the
work at the AIMCO site was for journeymen, says Chris
Iglesias. He was then the director of CityBuild, the citys
program to help construction companies implement
local hiring requirements. AIMCO says that by the end
of 2007, nearly 40 percent of all hours worked on the
construction site were by city residents.
While Maxwell says the agreement did what it
could, since in the end the pro-ject was not city-funded,
the carpenters and community activists say the city and
AIMCO let them down.
Im tired of people saying they need to put teeth
into these agreements, says Dorothy Peterson, a long-
time AIMCO opponent and activist for the buildings
residents. Cmon, just do the right thing.
Will the city be suing for breach of the agreement?
Te city attorney is waiting to see if AIMCO will make
good on its promise to force Fortney & Weygandt to in-
vestigate the allegations, Smith says. Ultimately it could
go to legal actions, but were all hoping if there is a prob-
lem, [AIMCO] will take quick action to solve it, he
says. Tats what everyone is hoping and expecting will
happen.
Teyre in trouble, says carpenter Terry Mackey,
sitting against the back wall of the City Hall meeting
room, referring to AIMCO and the other defendants.
Te carpenters turned the Government Operations
and Neighborhood Services Committee meeting into
something resembling a pep rally, including applauding
themselves and their supporters and heckling their villains.
Get up there and tell us a lie! One man yelled as
Bill Wong, a former senior neld representative of the
carpenters union, took the stand. Many carpenters say
that if their union had reacted more aggressively to their
complaints, or had better policed nonunion members
on the site, it would have headed on the lawsuit. But car-
penters union attorney Salinas says the union had been
looking into the wage grievances, but those cases were
dissolved because of the pending lawsuit.
While testifying, one carpenter declared: We love
each other. We just didnt know this, but we know this
now. And aner the Aguilars father testined of his sup-
port, placing his white cowboy hat on the podium, sev-
eral black carpenters embraced him in a bear hug. While
shooting a group photo outside on the steps, a few work-
ers held up peace signs.
Certainly, carpenters complaining of poor treat-
ment and expressing interracial brotherly love make
sympathetic characters. Te carpenters are adorable,
arent they? Salinas said.
AIMCOs pinstripe-suited attorney from the 2002
lawsuit, Jim Reuben, seemed to measure his words as he
stood up to speak, careful to say nothing that would get
him heckled, yet careful not to say anything that would
come back to haunt the company in a courtroom.
On the personal level, I found the testimony sur-
prising and troubling, he said. A sarcastic Psssh!
erupted from somewhere in the back. Every time I
heard the name AIMCO mentioned, it sounded to me
like [IMR Contractor Corporation] should be men-
tioned as well, but thats what our investigation will nnd
out.
Supervisor Maxwell dug in: Yes, but by and large,
AIMCO is who the people know. Its who we know, its
who we made the contracts with. So we have to take that
kind of responsibility.
Understood, Reuben defers.
Until the lawsuit goes to court, the carpenters are
waging private battles, many brought on by their time
at the job site. Bob Ivy is on disability for a herniated
disc aner he jammed a countertop into steps while car-
rying it unassisted, and now walks stimy, with constant
pain. Hector Rodriguez says he now checks his house
before he lets his family enter, since he thought he spot-
ted the man who took him to the job site and a foreman
driving by multiple times. Felix Cortes is worried the
defendants may try to exact vengeance back in Mexico,
given that the family of the man hes accusing in the law-
suit of taking $400 from his $800 weekly paycheck lives
near to his own familys village in Oaxaca.
Here, theres justice, Cortes says. If someone does
wrong, they punish him. Tere, the richest person wins.
Ivy says the case is not about the money. Im look-
ing for change, he says. Ive been doing this for 35
years, and Im still nghting for a job.
How can I call this a career? he continues. Its
been a struggle. I
Lauren Smiley originally wrote this article for the East Bay Express, March 2008.
BAJI Reader 21
Black and Brown Together
In Mississippi, African American leaders are the
foremost champions of the states growing Latino im-
migrant population. Some day soon, they hope, the new
alliance will transform the states politics.
In 1991, seeking to boost its never robust economy,
the state of Mississippi passed a law permitting casino
gambling. In short order, immigrant construction work-
ers arrived from Florida to build the casinos, and the
casinos themselves began using contractors to supply
immigrants to meet their growing labor needs. Guest
workers, eventually numbering in the thousands, were
brought under the H-2B program to nll many of the
jobs the developments created.
Troughout the 1990s more immigrants arrived
looking for work. Some guest workers overstayed their
visas, while husbands brought wives, cousins, and
friends from home. Mexicans and Central Americans
joined South and Southeast Asians and began traveling
north through the state, nnding jobs in rural poultry
plants. Tere they met African Americans, many of
whom had fought hard campaigns to organize unions
for chicken and catnsh workers over the preceding
decade.
It was not easy for newcomers to nt in. Teir union
representatives didnt speak their languages. When
workers got pulled over by state troopers they were not
only cited for lacking drivers licenses but also onen
handed over to the U.S. Border Patrol. Sometimes their
children werent even allowed to enroll in school.
We decided that the place to start was trying to get
a bill passed allowing everyone to get drivers licenses,
regardless of who they were or where they came from,
says Jim Evans, the AFL-CIOs state organizer and
leader of the black caucus in the state legislature. In the
fall of 2000, labor, church, and civil-rights activists
formed an impromptu coalition and went to the legis-
lature. At the core of the coalition were activists who
had organized Mississippis state workers and a growing
caucus of black legislators sympathetic to labor. Evans,
a former organizer for the National Football League
Players Association, headed the group on the House
side, while Sen. Alice Harden, who had led a state teach-
ers strike in 1986, organized the vote in the Senate.
Hardens enorts bore fruit when the drivers license
bill passed the Senate unanimously in 2001. But they
saw us coming in the House and killed it, says Bill
Chandler, at the time political director for the casino
union, UNITE HERE. Nevertheless, the close nght
convinced them that a coalition supporting immigrants
rights had a wide potential base of support and could
help change the states political landscape. In a meeting
that November, the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Al-
liance (MIRA) was born.
One day soon, that black-brown-labor coalition
might just be able to transform Mississippis politics.
In big U.S. cities African Americans and immi-
grants, especially Latinos, onen are divided by fears that
any gain in jobs or political clout by one group can only
come at the expense of the other. In Mississippi, African
American political leaders and immigrant organizers
favor a dinerent calculation: Blacks plus immigrants
plus unions equals power
Since 2000, all three have cooperated in organizing
one of the countrys most active immigrants rights coali-
tions, the MIRA. You will always nnd folks reluctant
to get involved, who say, its not part of our mission, that
immigrants are taking our jobs, Evans says. But we all
have the same rights and justice cause.
Evans, whose booming basso profundo comes
straight out of the pulpit, remembers his father riding
By David Bacon
shotgun for Medgar Evers, the NAACP leader slain by
racists in 1963. He believes organizing immigrants is a
direct continuation of Mississippi Freedom Summer
and the Poor Peoples March on Washington. To get
to peace and freedom, Evans says, you must come
through the door of truth and justice.
Both Evans, who chairs the MIRA, and Chandler,
who is now its executive director, believe social justice
and political practicality converge in the states changing
demographics. Long before World War II, Mississippi,
like most Southern states, began to lose its black popu-
lation. Out-migration reached its peak in the 1960s,
when 66,614 African Americans len between 1965 and
1970, while civil-rights activists were murdered, hosed,
and sent to jail. But in the following decades, as Mid-
western industrial jobs began to move overseas and the
cost of living in Northern cities skyrocketed, the now
began to reverse
From 1995 to 2000, the state capital, Jackson,
gained 3,600 black residents. In the 2000 census,
African Americans made up more than 36 percent of
Mississippis 2.8 million residents-a percentage that is
no doubt higher today. And while immigrants were sta-
tistically insignincant two decades ago, today they com-
prise more than 4.5 percent of Mississippis total popu-
lation, according to news reports. Immigrants are
always undercounted, but I think theyre now about
130,000, and theyll be 10 percent of the population 10
years from now, Chandler predicts.
Common Ground
Tats still less than in the four states (California,
Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas) and the District of Co-
lumbia where some combination of blacks, Latinos,
Asians, and Native Americans already make up the ma-
jority. But MIRA activists see one other big advantage in
Mississippi. We have the chance here to avoid the rivalry
that plagues Los Angeles and build real power, says
Chandler, who len East L.A. and the farm workers move-
ment decades ago to come to the South. But we have to
nght racism from the beginning and recognize the lead-
ership of the African American community. Eric Flem-
ing, an MIRA stan member and former state legislator
who recently nled for the Democratic nomination to re-
place Sen. Trent Lott, believes, We can stop Mississippi
from making the same mistakes others have made.
Te same calculus can also apply across the South,
which is now the entry point for a third of all new im-
migrants into the U.S. Four decades ago, President
Richard Nixon brought the Souths white power struc-
ture, threatened by civil rights, into the Republican
Party. President Ronald Reagan celebrated that achieve-
ment at the Confederate monument at Georgias Stone
Mountain. [Progressive] funders and the Democratic
Party have written on much of the South since then,
says Gerald Lenoir of Californias Black Alliance for Just
Immigration. But MIRA-type alliances could transform
the region, he hopes, and change the politics of this
country as a whole.
Te MIRA is the fruit of strategic thinking among
a diverse group that reaches from African American
workers on catnsh farms and immigrant union organiz-
ers in chicken plants to guest workers and contract la-
borers on the Gulf Coast and, ultimately, into the halls
of the state legislature in Jackson.
In an old building at the edge of Los Angeles' downtown garment district,
and under a freeway in West L.A., day labor centers are places where immi-
grant workers look for work, find shelter and friendship, and organize them-
selves to pursue better wages and their rights. David Bacon 2009
BAJI Reader 23
Chandler, who had been organizing state employees
for the Communication Workers, went to work for the
hotel union, UNITE HERE, and helped win union
recognition in three Mississippi casinos. In 2005 in Las
Vegas, the union was renegotiating its contract covering
Harrahs Las Vegas operations. Harrahs also owned two
Mississippi casinos in Tunica and one that was destroyed
and later rebuilt in Gulfport. With the threat of a Ne-
vada strike in the air, Harrahs agreed to a card-check
process for union recognition in Mississippi, and even-
tually signed contracts covering the three casinos there
at the end of that year, although temporary, contract,
and H-2B workers were not covered.
To build a grassroots base, MIRA volunteers also
went into chicken plants to help recruit newly arrived
immigrants into unions. Mississippi is a right-to-work
state, and union membership is not mandatory in work-
places with union contracts. Frank Curiel, a Laborers
International Union of North America (LIUNA) rep-
resentative who worked with the United Farm Workers
for many years, says, MIRA put the LIUNA business
manager and a UFCW [United Food and Commercial
Workers] rep on the board because we wanted them to
understand the role of the union in representing Lati-
nos-they had contracts in chicken and nsh plants. In
one plant, Curiel signed up 80 percent of the newly ar-
rived immigrants, while in two others, an MIRA stu-
dent volunteer from the University of Texas signed up
every Latino worker in two weeks
Te unions work wasnt connned to nghting griev-
ances or recruiting new members; immigrant workers
had much bigger problems. Tere was a pretty repres-
sive system in Laurel, Collins, and Hattiesburg, Curiel
recalls. Plants had contracts with temp agencies, and
all the workers were undocumented. It was very hard to
get a new contract because of the surplus of Latino labor
and low membership. But by building a combined
membership of immigrant and African American work-
ers, union negotiators in one plant forced the company
to get rid of the temp service and hire employees di-
rectly. Tat meant that African Americans gained ac-
cess to those jobs, too, Curiel emphasizes
In the casinos, MIRA volunteers worked with
UNITE HERE organizers. In Jackson, the coalition got
six bills passed the following year, stopping schools from
requiring Social Security numbers from immigrant par-
ents, and winning in-state tuition for any student who
had spent four years in a Mississippi high school.
Then Katrina hit the Gulf.
Vicky Cintra, a Cuban American with a son South-
ern accent, was the MIRAs nrst full-time organizer and
got her baptism of nre on the Gulf Coast. Aner the hur-
ricane blew through Biloxi and Gulfport, contractors
began pouring in to do reconstruction, bringing with
them crews of workers.
Cintra handed out 10,000 nyers with the MIRAs
phone number, and the calls nooded in. Tirty-nve
workers abandoned by their contractor in dilapidated
trailers received blankets and food. When two Red
Cross shelters evicted Latinos, even putting a man in a
wheelchair onto the street, the national news media re-
ported on Cintras enorts on behalf of the immigrants.
For the next year we were just reacting to emergencies,
she recalls. Te MIRA fought evictions and the cases of
workers cheated by employers.
When we threatened picket lines, the contractors
would sometimes oner to pay Latinos, but we said every-
one had to be treated equally, and got money for African
Americans and whites, too.
Te MIRA eventually recovered over a million dol-
lars. And this was while the federal government had
said it wouldnt enforce labor standards, OSHA, Davis
Bacon, or any other law protecting workers, Cintra says.
Really, it had been like this for years, but Katrina just
tore the veil away. Te key to the MIRAs success, she
believes, was that we engaged workers in direct action.
Eventually the contractors and companies settling in
Mississippi got the idea that workers have rights and
were getting organized.
MIRA volunteers also began to hear that guest
workers were being recruited in India, not for recon-
struction, but for the main industry on the Gulf-ship
building. Working in the shipyards has always been
dirty, dangerous, and segregated. Jaribu Hill, an MIRA
board member, accuses the yards of putting hundreds
of black women into the worst cleaner jobs in the bot-
tom of the ship. And when we get organized and out-
spoken, the boss starts looking for people who are more
grateful, and more vulnerable.
In late 2006, 300 guest workers arrived at the
Pascagoula yard of Signal International, which makes
huge noating oil rigs for the onshore nelds in the Gulf.
Teyd been hired in India by a labor recruiter and given
H-2B visas, good for 10 months. Signal charged the
workers $35 per day for the privilege of living in a labor
camp located within the shipyard. Twenty-four of us
live in a small room, 12 feet by 18 feet, sleeping on bunk
beds, Joseph Jacob, one of the worker leaders, says.
Tere are two toilets for all of us, and we have to get
up at 3:30 in the morning to have enough time to use
the bathroom before going to work.
Signal put the Indian guest workers to work in the
yard alongside U.S. workers doing the same job, and
claimed it paid them the same wages. Te guest workers
say they were promised $18 an hour, but many were
paid only half that aner the company said they were un-
qualined. Signal CEO Dick Marler admits the company
reclassined some workers aner they had arrived, from
nrst- to second-class welders, and then reduced their
wages. Signal deemed six of the workers incapable and
announced that it would send them back to India-a
move that portended nnancial ruin for the workers
Te MIRA asked a Hindi-speaking organizer from
the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice,
Sakhet Soni, to come to Pascagoula. Together they
helped workers organize Signal H-2B Workers United.
Jacob was nred because I attended the meetings, he
says. Tats what the company vice president told me.
Marler denies this.
On the day the six workers were discharged, com-
pany security guards locked them in what they call the
TV Room and wouldnt let them leave. Te MIRA went
to the Pascagoula Police Department, and the police went
out to the yard and eventually freed the workers. Outside
the yard, dozens of workers and activists denounced the
nrings and mistreatment. Te MIRA organized picket
lines, and its attorney, Patricia Ice, started a legal defense
campaign with the Southern Poverty Law Center
Te company said it had used the H-2B system be-
cause it couldnt nnd enough workers aner the hurri-
cane. Other contractors have used the same rationale.
Weve learned about case aner case of workers in Mis-
sissippi, Louisiana, and all along the Gulf in these con-
ditions, Chandler says. Tere are thousands of guest
workers who have been brought in since Katrina and
subjected to this same treatment. Mexican guest workers
in Amelia, Louisiana, were held in the same way. Tey
also got organized and came to Pascagoula to support
the workers here when they heard what happened.
Members of the Mississippi Workers Center for Human Rights march in Jackson, Miss. with members of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. Photo Courtesy
of Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance.
BAJI Reader 25
Organizing guest workers is part of an enort to
build an MIRA membership among immigrants them-
selves. MIRA members get an ID card and agree to
come to demonstrations and help others. When the na-
tional immigrant marches began in the spring of 2006,
MIRA members and volunteers mobilized thousands
of people for a rally in Jackson and even a march in Lau-
rel, a poultry town of 18,881 people with a progressive
black mayor. Teres still a lot of anti-immigrant senti-
ment here, Cintra says, but when people give the po-
lice their ID card they get treated with more respect,
because they know their rights and have some support.
Curiel says the same thing: In Kentucky, outside of
Louisville, Latinos are afraid to go out into the street.
In Mississippi its dinerent.
Not always that dinerent, however. In Laurel and
many other Mississippi towns, police still set up road-
blocks to trap immigrants without licenses. Tey take
us away in handcuns, and we have to pay over $1000 to
get out of jail and get our cars back, says chicken plant
worker Elisa Reyes. And the way the states Council of
Conservative Citizens demonizes immigrants is remi-
niscent of the language of its predecessor-the White Cit-
izens Councils. Its Web site urges, Te CofCC not
only nghts for European rights, but also for Confederate
Heritage, nghts against illegal immigration, nghts
against gun control, nghts against abortion, nghts
against gay rights etc. ... so join up!!! Te states chapter
of the Federation for Immigration Reform and Enforce-
ment brought the Minutemens Chris Simcox out from
California to recruit at anti-immigrant meetings.
During the 2007 Mississippi elections for governor
and state legislators, the Ku Klux Klan held a 500-per-
son rally in front of the Lee County Courthouse in Tu-
pelo. Tey wore the old white hoods and robes and
carried signs saying, Stop the Latino Invasion. Teir
presence was so intimidating that Ricky Cummings, a
generally progressive Democrat running for re-election
to the State House of Representatives, voted for some
of the anti-immigrant bills in the legislature. When
MIRA leaders challenged him, he told them that Klan-
generated calls had worn out his cell phone.
Te Klans Web site says, Its time to declare war on
these illegal Mexicans. ... Te racial war is among us, will
you nght with us for the future of our race and for our
children? Or will you sit on your ass and do nothing?
Our blissful ignorance is over. It is time to nght. Time
for Mexico and Mexicans to get the hell out!!! Te
Web site also has links to the site of the Mississippi Fed-
eration for Immigration Reform and Enforcement di-
rected by Mike Lott, who sits in the state legislature, and
the state amliate of the Federation for American Immi-
gration Reform
In 2007 Republicans introduced 21 anti-immigrant
bills into the Mississippi Legislature, including ones to
Robert Clark, Speaker Pro-tem of the Mississippi House of Representatives, speaks at an immigrant rights rally. Clark, first elected in 1968, was the first African
American elected to the Mississippi legislature since Reconstruction. Credit: Courtesy: Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance.
impose state penalties on employers who hire undocu-
mented workers, English-only requirements on state li-
cense and benent applicants, to prohibit undocumented
students at state universities, and to require local police
to check immigration status. Mike Lott sponsored
many of these bills.
Te MIRA, however, defeated all of the proposed
laws. Te black caucus stood behind us every time,
Evans says proudly. Tere are no immigrant or Latino
legislators. Without the caucus, all 21 bills would have
passed in 2007, as would have 19 similar bills in 2006.
Te caucus didnt just wage a vote no campaign.
It also proposed a series of pro-worker measures that
would have abolished at-will employment (the doctrine
that says employers dont need any justincation for ter-
minating workers), provided interpreters, and estab-
lished a state department of labor (Mississippi is the
only state without one). While these bills didnt pass,
either, the dinerence between the caucus and the Re-
publicans agendas are as clear as black and white, or per-
haps, black/brown and white
Although the political coalition in which the
MIRA participates is powerful enough to stop the worst
proposals, it isnt yet powerful enough to elect a legisla-
tive majority. Changing demographics is one element
of a strategy to change that political terrain, but num-
bers alone arent enough. Chandler describes three fac-
tions in the states Democratic party-the black caucus
at one end, white conservatives hanging on at the other,
and liberals who will do whatever they have to do to
get elected in the middle.
Aner some Democratic candidates campaigned in
2007 on an anti-immigrant platform, the MIRA wrote
a letter in protest to Howard Dean, national chair of
the Democratic Party. Tose tactics, it said, were under-
mining the only strategy capable of changing the states
politics. Te attacks on Latinos, initiated by Republi-
can Phil Bryant a year and a half ago, and joined by
other Republicans, are now being echoed by Democrats
like John Arthur Eaves [the partys gubernatorial can-
didate] and Jamie Franks [its candidate for lieutenant
governor], the letter said. State party leaders who
would go along to be accepted, rather than show the
courage necessary for positive change ... are peddling
racist lies against immigrants that violate the core of the
partys progressive agenda. We do not need politicians
whose only concern is getting elected. We need leaders
who will represent the best interests of all the working
people of Mississippi.
Despite their anti- immigrant rhetoric, both Eaves
and Franks campaigns were unsuccessful. Conservative
Republican Haley Barbour was returned to the gover-
nors mansion and Phil Bryant was elected lieutenant
governor. Democrat Jim Hood, however, was re-elected
attorney general, with a higher vote total than either
Eaves or Franks. He was the only Democratic statewide
candidate who did not mount an anti-immigrant cam-
paign and who had earlier been convinced by the AFL-
CIOs Jim Evans not to support anti-immigrant bills in
the legislature.
In December 2007, Trent Lott suddenly resigned
his U.S. Senate seat only a year aner being re-elected to
a fourth term. Barbour appointed conservative Repub-
lican Rep. Roger Wicker to nll the vacancy, and set the
vote to choose a permanent replacement for the No-
vember 2008 general election.
We cant rely just on the demographic shin to
win, says MIRAs Fleming, who plans to run for the
seat. He notes that a winning majority in Mississippi
would require about 80 percent of the African Ameri-
can vote, 20 percent to 25 percent of the white vote, and
We do not need politicians
whose only concern is
getting elected. We need
leaders who will represent
the best interests of all the
working people of
Mississippi.
BAJI Reader 27
all of the growing vote of immigrants and other people
of color. But demographics makes it a viable race. We
live in a conservative state where people dont accept
new ideas easily, so the challenge for progressives is that
we have to campaign and educate people at the same
time. If we want people to move out of their comfort
zone, we need a powerful message.
In Mississippi, that message focuses on jobs, health
care, anordable housing, and the basic economic issues
anecting working people in a state with one of the na-
tions lowest standards of living and lowest levels of so-
cial services. Immigration issues, Fleming says, are not
some toxic topic to be avoided at all costs. If we talk
about it in the context of protecting jobs, wages, and
rights for everyone, its something that can bring us to-
gether.
Finding common ground among immigrants,
African Americans, and labor is the pillar of the MIRAs
long-term strategy. Jaribu Hill of the MIRA and exec-
utive director of the Mississippis Workers Center, has
launched her own bid for election to the legislature as a
Democrat and argues that winning in the South re-
quires open discussion of race and civil rights, even if it
makes established institutions-including unions-un-
comfortable. Before she can start any campaign in the
nsh plants where the workers center is active, she says,
We have to talk about racism. Te union focuses on
the contract, but skin color issues are also on the table.
To organize a multiracial workforce, the divisions
between African Americans and immigrants need to be
recognized and discussed, Hill insists. Were coming
together like a marriage, working across our divides,
she says. Rhetoric calling the current immigrant-rights
movement the new civil-rights movement doesnt de-
scribe those relations accurately, however. Our condi-
tions as African Americans are the direct result of slav-
ery. Immigrants have come here looking for better
lives-we came in chains, Hill says. Today Frito Lay
wages in Mississippi are still much lower than [in] Illi-
nois-$8.75 to $13.75 an hour. Tis is the evolution of a
historical oppression.
Immigrants, when they, too, are paid that lower
wage, are entering an economic system that reproduces
discrimination and tiers of inequality originally estab-
lished to control and pront from black labor. Tey in-
herit a second-class status that developed before they
arrived
Jean Damu, a writer and member of the Black Al-
liance for Just Immigration, also warns that drawing a
parallel between the situations of blacks and immi-
grants has its limits. After all, who would want to
claim that deporting someone to Mexico is the same
as returning them to slavery? he asks. But the simi-
larities are powerful enough to convince many African
Americans that it is in their best self-interest to sup-
port those who struggle against black peoples historic
enemies.
For all the dinerences, Hill still sees a common
ground of experience. Were both victims of colonial-
ism, were both second-class citizens denied our rights.
If people could see how African American people live
here, theyd see its like Bolivia or Jamaica. On the other
hand, its important for African Americans to under-
stand why people come here-because of whats happen-
ing in the countries they come from. If people had a
choice, if they could live like human beings, they would-
nt have to risk their lives to get here. I dont believe any
human being can be illegal. I
David Bacon is a California writer and photographer. His new book is Illegal People: How Globalization Causes Mi-
gration and Criminalizes Immigrants, is published by Beacon Press. For more articles and images on immigration and
trade, see www/dbacon.igc.org/Imgrants.
Immigrants are entering
an economic system that
reproduces discrimination
and tiers of inequality
originally established to
control and profit from
black labor.
Te media love to show images of a few African
Americans demonstrating together with right-wing
groups, such as the Minutemen, against illegal immi-
gration. With classic, blame-the-victim logic, these mis-
guided individuals have ironically cast their lot with
modern-day Ku Klux Klansmen. Last April, however, a
group of African Americans and black immigrants came
together in this city in support of immigrants and to
present dinerent view of black-immigrant relations.
Black Alliance for Just Immigration was founded
to support the demands of the immigrant rights move-
ment and to engage African Americans in a dialogue
about the underlying issues of race and economic status
that frame U.S. immigration policy, says co-founder the
Rev. Phillip Lawson.
African Americans, with our history of being eco-
nomically exploited, marginalized and discriminated
against, have much in common with people of color
who migrate to the United States documented or un-
documented, Lawson adds, citing a long history of U.S.
prejudice against immigrants of color from Latin Amer-
ica, Africa, Haiti, China and other regions, in favor of
Western Europeans.
BAJI aims to organize a core group of African
Americans prepared to oppose racism in all of its forms
by actively forging coalitions with immigrant commu-
nities and organizations to build and sustain a new
human rights movement that incorporates all social jus-
tice issues, including immigrant rights and civil rights.
Tere is basis for such coalitions. A public opinion
poll conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts in April
2006 found that a large majority of African Americans
feel that immigrants are hard-working (79%) and have
strong family values (77%).
African Americans were more than twice as likely
as whites (43% vs. 20%) to support public benents for
undocumented immigrants. Two-thirds of whites and
79% of African Americans said that the children of un-
documented immigrants should be allowed to attend
public schools.
Yet, theres also basis for misunderstanding among
communities. More African Americans (22%) than
whites (14%) say that they, or a family member, have
lost a job, or not been hired, because an employer hired
an immigrant. In fact, 34% of African Americans, as
compared to 25% of whites, say immigrants take jobs
from U.S. citizens.
Despite the concerns of many African Americans,
the high unemployment rate endemic to their commu-
nities is not the result of immigration. Rather, its root
cause, like that of current mass migration trends, lies in
the worldwide phenomenon called globalization.
Since the 1970s, globalization has meant the de-in-
dustrialization of the United States, with union jobs in
manufacturing being moved to low-wage countries in
Latin America and Asia. More recently, it has meant the
corporate outsourcing of jobs in the high tech and serv-
ice industries.
Add to that the historical employer biases against
African Americans, the deterioration of the tax base due
to white night from inner cities, and the systematic pub-
lic and private disinvestment in urban areas, and you
have the formula for the devastation of black commu-
nities across the U.S.
A clear example of the bilateral and multilateral in-
ternational policies of the United States that force mi-
grants to risk their lives to come to the U.S. in search of
a better life is the North American Free Trade Agree-
ment (NAFTA). Ratined by the U.S. Congress in 1996,
NAFTA forced Mexico to open up its markets to subsi-
dized food crops from the United States.
As a result, 2.8 million Mexican farmers could not
Blacks, Immigrants Are Allies More
Than Adversaries
By Gerald Lenoir
BAJI Reader 29
Black, brown, young, old rally for justice and immigrant rights in L.A. Photo: 2007 courtesy of Community Coalition
compete with cheap U.S. commodities and lost their
land and their livelihood (according the New York
Times). Many of those farmers and their dependents
have migrated to the U.S., looking for employment.
Consequently, African Americans and immigrants
of color are pitted against each other for the proverbial
crumbs on the table. Tis competition is a result of the
normal operation of an unjust economic system.
The U.S. is now attempting to impose a Central
America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on coun-
tries in the region. Similar, so-called free trade agree-
ments are also being proposed or implemented in
many countries in Africa, Asia, South America and the
Caribbean.
Te Black Alliance for Just Immigration believes
that African Americans must join forces with immi-
grants to nght for economic and social justice for all.
Unite Here Local 11 has set an important prece-
dent for our mutual struggle. In its latest settlement with
the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, the 5,000-
member, predominantly Latino and immigrant union,
won a contract that obligates the hotel to increase wages,
maintain an employee health plan and hire more
African Americans. Tis victory is a model for the
unions negotiations with 25 other Los Angeles hotels.
Te tensions between African Americans and im-
migrants will not be lessened until you increase the
quantity and quality of jobs for African Americans, says
Steven Pitts, an economist at the University of Califor-
nia Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.
Its good that one industry is taking baby steps in that
direction.
Pitts maintains that African Americans would ben-
ent if undocumented immigrants were granted legal sta-
tus, citing recent studies, which show that legalization
would improve wages and working conditions for both,
immigrant and non-immigrant workers.
Te African American struggle for civil and eco-
nomic rights has never been waged without allies. Con-
versely, the struggle of immigrants for recognition of
their human rights cannot be won without friends and
supporters. If they join together, the two movements
can take giant strides toward victories now and for fu-
ture generations. I
Gerald Lenoir is the director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and a longtime antiracist activist.
Reprinted om New America Media, March 2007, Immigration Matters which regularly features the views of the
nations leading immigrant rights advocates.
History
By Jean Damu
In August local law enforcement and immigration
omcials in a small Pennsylvania town began receiving
reports that undocumented immigrants were being of-
fered sanctuary at a nearby residence. Furthermore, the
reports went on to say, during the daytime hours, the
immigrants were blending into portions of the local
population and working in one of the citys factories.
Aner several weeks of investigation, the authorities
determined that, in fact, the reports of the undocu-
mented immigrants activities were true.
In response to this perceived emergency, an intera-
gency task force of immigration and local police person-
nel was organized. It was decided that an early morning
raid would be the quickest and safest way to take the im-
migrants into custody and to prepare them for deporta-
tion.
Te raid was carried out in September. Aner a brief
struggle, the undocumented were overpowered, hand-
cuned and taken to jail, where they were told to prepare
themselves for hearings to determine their eligibility for
deportation.
Te above incident is not unusual. It has played out
countless times, in countless cities across the nation, as
the United States struggles to come to grips with a moral
question that is rooted in economics the issue of un-
documented workers.
Te unusual aspect of the story, however, is that it
did not take place in 2007 or 2006. It took place in the
town of Christiana, Pa. And it took place in 1850.
In 1850, it was not the omce of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) that conducted the early
morning raid, but rather an omce of the U.S. Marshal
and Deputy Marshal. And in 1850, the undocumented
that were being rounded up were not Latinos or Asians
but rather fugitive enslaved Africans who had crossed
into Pennsylvania from Delaware in an attempt to es-
cape slavery.
Te fugitives were given sanctuary by members of
the Black Self-Help Society, an armed organization that
was formed many decades before the African Blood
Brotherhood and the Black Panther Party. Te group
foreshadowed by only a few years the entry by massive
numbers of blacks into the Union armies to nght the
formerly omcially endorsed slavocracy.
Te right-wing political powers of the 21st century
that re-conngured the Immigration and Naturalization
Service into ICE the agency that is currently conduct-
ing raids against illegal immigrants as a response to the
so-called war on terrorism are direct descendants of
those who created the U.S. Marshals and Deputy Mar-
shals to enforce the fugitive slave legislations of the 18th
and 19th centuries.
In the case of the Federal Marshals, the enforcement
of immigration laws was fueled by politicians pandering
to the political forces that would deliver free labor to
the agrarian south and keep the United States a white
mans country. Tis objective was eloquently articulated
in Americas nrst immigration legislation adopted in
1789 as part of the establishment of the federal govern-
ment and the year the U.S. Marshals omce was brought
into being.
Tough the conditions of life are vastly more com-
plicated today than when the nrst immigration laws
were enacted, one can easily come to the conclusion that
one of ICEs unstated missions is to help maintain white
supremacy. If this is not true, then why does no one dis-
cuss the issue of undocumented white workers who
enter the country from Europe and Canada?
It is tempting to argue that the immigration move-
ment is completely analogous to the abolitionist move-
Immigration Raids Echo History of
African Americans
BAJI Reader 31
ment. Tat would be a mistake. Aner all, who would
want to claim that deporting someone to Mexico is the
same as returning them to slavery? But the similarities
are powerful enough to convince many African Ameri-
cans that it is in their best interest to support those who
struggle against black peoples historic enemies.
It took decades of abolitionist work and unprece-
dented armed struggle to wrest the practice of slavery
from the breast of America. Similar decades of educa-
tional work and political organizing were required to
convince the majority of Americans that legalized dis-
crimination in the form of the Jim Crow laws was also
wrong. Tat struggle continues to this day.
Today there is much misunderstanding and confu-
sion over immigration: some say the issue is too compli-
cated, that there are too many global economic forces at
work for the lay person to fully grasp. Tis is no dinerent
from earlier times when much confusion and misunder-
standing existed in regards to slavery. In both cases,
racism and unbridled white supremacy joined hands to
generate the confusion.
Tough the issue of immigration has been around
since the birth of this nation, the current immigration
movement is still in its early stages. If it is to achieve the
perceived successes of the civil rights movement, it must
do a better job of uniting with that sector of the U.S.
population that so clearly participated in and benented
to a signincant degree from the civil rights movement:
Black America. On the other hand, African Americans
should be sensitive to the current conditions in which
many immigrants nnd themselves. Tese conditions,
aner all, are not unfamiliar to us. I
Jean Damu is a member of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. is article was rst published by New America Media.
Community Coalition members in L.A. march for immigrant right on May Day, May 1, 2007. Photo courtesy of Community Coalition.
Te destiny of Africas scattered people has been de-
cided in more countries than popular history has ac-
knowledged. Mainstream history does not reveal how
Africans benented from Frances humiliating defeat at
Puebla, Mexico, on May 5, 1862.
Cinco de Mayo is a ntting and spirited annual cele-
bration that reminds us of Mexicos heroic though short-
lived victory over Napoleon IIIs larger and
better-armed forces.
Tere are two very good reasons why black people
should also celebrate the French defeat at the hands of
Mexican forces.
First, Napoleon supported the slave-holding Con-
federacy, and second, Benito Juarez, the president of
Mexico, had given land to anti-colonial black Seminoles.
Napoleon had hoped that the Confederacy would
quickly win the Civil War, retain slavery and supply
French textile mills with cotton. Napoleon had been en-
couraged by the major Confederate victory over Union
forces at Bull Run. He envisioned an alliance between
himself and slave-holding Southerners that would guar-
antee raw material for French industry.
Napoleon was well on his way to satisfying this am-
bition when the defenders at Puebla, though out-
manned and outgunned, interrupted his imperialist
ambitions.
Te defeat of Confederate ally Napoleon was a his-
toric event that descendants of enslaved Africans and all
others who uphold democracy should celebrate with en-
thusiasm.
Juarez had given land to a faction of the black Semi-
nole freedom nghters who had carried on a long and
courageous war of liberation against Spanish and Amer-
ican colonizers.
It was certainly in the interest of blacks on both
sides of the Rio Grande that the Juarez government,
which had befriended rebellious slaves and whose pred-
ecessor had outlawed slavery, survive Napoleons inva-
sion.
It is interesting to note that Napoleon was urged to
overthrow the Mexican government by the brother of
Archduke Maximilian of Austria.
Maximilians involvement gives Africans even more
cause to join with Latino neighbors in celebrating Cinco
de Mayo.
Six years before Napoleons ill-fated invasion of
Mexico, Maximilian married Carlotta, sister of King
Leopold II of Belgium, a despot who was responsible
for colonizing, mutilating and annihilating millions of
Congolese in his drive for pronts.
During this period Europes ruling elites were busy
plotting the conquest of non-Western people, onen co-
operating with one another and occasionally competing.
At the infamous 1884-85 Berlin West Africa Con-
Black and Brown Liberation Through
Shared Oppression
By Ron Wilkins, PhD
History
Mexicans and Blacks in This Hemisphere Are Linked
Historically. Cinco de Mayo Is a Perfect Time to Reflect on
the Continuing Resistance to Domination.
BAJI Reader 33
ference, the European powers resolved some of their dif-
ferences and divided Africa among themselves.
Trough shared misfortune-conquest and slavery-
the histories of Mexicans and blacks in this hemisphere
are linked. Few, if any, oppressed people have overcome
adversity without assistance from allies.
Indigenous and African people have been one an-
others primary ally in many instances, since the begin-
ning of the pillage, slavery and genocide initiated by
Columbus in the Americas 500 years ago.
Present-day black and brown connicts, whether at
high school assemblies, on the streets of Venice, in the
big yard at San Quentin or between equally disempow-
ered Latino and black laborers in South Los Angeles, re-
ward the same elites whose wealth and power are
dependent upon divided and unorganized people of
color.
Whether the nash point is Puebla or Chiapas,
Cinco de Mayo is a perfect time to renect upon and dis-
cuss the continuing resistance by Mexicos people to
domination. And, when appropriate, the complemen-
tary dynamics of the struggles for black and brown lib-
eration.
Cinco de Mayo is not to be commercialized by op-
portunists or trivialized as a one-day superncial and
lukewarm acknowledgment of Mexican culture.
When honest accounts of history are nnally written
into textbooks, African and Latino youth will be better
able to amrm, deepen and project their long-established
unity into the future. I
Ron Wilkins is a cross-cultural collaboration specialist and a professor in the Aicana Studies Department at California
State University, Dominguez Hills.is article rst appeared in the May 1, 1994 edition of the Los Angeles Times. (Copy-
right, e Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 1994 all Rights reserved
Ron Wilkins on a tour with BAJI at the U.S. Mexico border near Tuscon, Arizona. 2008 BAJI.
History
The Racist Roots of the
Anti-Immigration Movement
Prominent leaders of the anti-immigration movement
would have us believe that not a ounce of racism lies be-
hind their enorts. Te most media-visible ngures in this
camp, such as Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, Tom Tan-
credo and Victor Davis Hanson may argue the case for
restricting, deporting, rounding up and cutting on pub-
lic services to those illegals stigmatized as culturally
backward, unhealthy potential terrorists. But they
protest that their motives for doing so are as pure as the
driven snow.
In their writings and media appearances, the leaders
of the anti-immigration movement claim their politics
are based not on a hatred of the racial Other but on their
commitment to the rule of law, the integrity of our cul-
ture, the objective nndings of social science, or better
employment prospects for American workers. On page
aner page of In Mortal Danger, Tom Tancredos diatribe
against non-European immigrants and multicultural-
ism, the presidential candidate and congressman repeat-
edly complains that he and his colleagues have been
unfairly painted as racist or had their arguments mis-
construed as racist.
But alongside these complaints Tancredos book
drips with cultural condescension toward Mexican-
Americans, Muslims and African-Americans. While he
claims that illegality is the problem, Tancredo soon
moves past this and calls for revoking the legal citizen-
ship of what he terms Mexican-American anchor ba-
bies.
Conjuring up racist and sexist imagery, he declares
that gravid wombs should not guarantee free medical
care. One wonders whether Tancredo, both of whose
grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Italy, would
apply such terminology to his parents, and thus forfeit
his own citizenship.
Beset by a malignant multiculturalism, the vast
majority of Americans are, according to Tancredo,
forced to deal with its raging intolerance of traditional
America. Tis leads to such outrages, he tells us on the
following page, as Vanderbilt University renaming its
Confederate Memorial Hall dormitory to Memorial
Hall just because the word Confederate made some
people uncomfortable.
It apparently doesnt make him feel uncomfortable.
Tancredo addressed a meeting bedecked with Confed-
erate nags and promoted by the neo-Confederate
League of the South last year. Dr. Michael Hill, the
League of the Souths president, has warned that the U.S.
faces the prospect of being overrun by hordes of non-
white immigrants.
In his book, Tancredo also reaches back into history
to embrace the crudest forms of colonial racist rhetoric.
He points to what he calls a very poetic speech deliv-
ered in 1899 by Winston Churchill against Muslims
degraded sensualism, fearful fatalistic apathy, im-
provident habits, slovenly forms of agriculture, etc.
Tese, of course, are exactly the kinds of taunts that the
racial nativists of the American past directed at Tan-
credos Italian forebears when they reached the U.S.
Casting about for more current action heroes, Tancredo
settles on noted constitutional attorney Ann Coulter.
Coulter, a former staner with the Center for Individual
Rights, has defended Charles Murray and Richard Her-
rnsteins e Bell Curve, which links race and IQ, and
regularly heaps racist abuse on Muslims and others, as in
I believe our motto should be aner 9/11: Jihad monkey
talks tough; jihad monkey takes the consequences. Sorry,
I realize thats onensive. How about camel jockey?
What? Now whatd I say? Boy, you tent merchants sure
are touchy. Grow up, would you?
By Lee Cokorinos
BAJI Reader 35
Although Tancredo claims that individuals should
be judged on their actions and merits rather than their
group identity, he takes up Coulters proposal that
everyone from suspect countries should be immedi-
ately deported. Tancredo has also proposed wholesale
deportation of undocumented immigrants. If only our
political leaders possessed Coulters clarity of
thought, he writes.
The Suburban Plantation
Victor Davis Hanson, author of Mexifornia: A State
of Becoming and another prominent think tank/TV
talking head in the immigration debate, also argues for
a radical cutback in Mexican immigration and vigorous
enorts to root out multicultural thinking. At the core
of his approach is an imperious demand that immigrants
conform to his narrow, Anglicized view of American
culture. He also abuses his progressive critics for al-
legedly falsely charging the anti-immigration movement
with racism. To discuss the issue rationally, he claims,
is to expect charges of racist and nativist. He then
blithely condemns American schools for promoting the
nction of cultural equality.
Hanson, a senior fellow at the right wing Hoover
Institution, comes from a long line of California Central
Valley growers and occupies a special niche in the nrma-
ment of reaction, providing a philosophical bridge to
earlier forms of anti-immigrant ideology.
One of the more enduring mythical themes in the
cultural history of white supremacism in the United
States has been the idyllic nature of the Southern plan-
tation, where everyone knew his or her place in the
racial pecking order. In exchange for accepting this social
order, the laboring classes, according to this mythology,
would be rewarded with a stable existence, leading to a
natural harmony.
Tis thinking was championed by mid-20th cen-
tury adherents of the so-called Southern Agrarian
movement such as Richard M. Weaver, one of the
founding intellectual ngures of modern conservatism.
Skirting around the questions of slavery and Jim Crow
lynching, they romanticized the supposed gentility and
small is beautiful values of civilized southern life.
Hanson extends some these Agrarianist themes, such as
the dignity of manual labor, to the farms and ranches of
the southwest, worked largely by immigrant workers
from Mexico. While he does not embrace the philoso-
phy of antebellum plantation idealism, Hansons writ-
ings, particularly the early chapters of Mexifornia, are
nlled with misty Agrarian school images of the alleged
nobility and order of a fading rural California farm life
(e.g., his nostalgia for the good times of our agrarian
past).
In southern California the Agrarian mythological
tradition has played out in odd and sinister ways (a eu-
genics movement was part of it, as Matt Garcia re-
counts), combining misplaced nostalgia for social
relations on the small commercial farm and, in its more
recent incarnation, a celebration of the bucolic white
suburbs as the pinnacle of civilization.
For Brian Janiskee, Hansons Claremont Institute
colleague, the seemingly quiet and bland order of the
California suburb is, in enect, a metaphysical amrma-
tion of the revolutionary core of the American regime.
Needless to say, an intense and sometimes nasty
struggle for cultural hegemony and economic and po-
litical power is taking place in the California suburbs be-
tween a shrinking and resistant white population and a
growing Latino community. Journalist Roberto Lovato
reports that one participant at an Anaheim city council
meeting said California is becoming ground zero for
Americas second civil war.
I have a lot of sympathy for
those who want to recognize the
heroism of Confederate soldiers,
and even more for those who
have a reflexive and negative
reaction to the NAACPs
pronouncements these days.
Roger Clegg
Imperatives to be Honored
Tis rural/suburban reality sits rather incongru-
ously with Hansons shining claims that racism is either
no longer a big deal (it belongs largely to the past) or
is immutable (mankind by its very nature is prone to
be murderous, racist and sexist). Todays Big Lie, he
tells us, is that racism, discrimination [and] labor ex-
ploitation have been the burdens of the Mexican-
American experience.
Such arguments, of course, have long been directed
at African-Americans, and have a strong appeal for right
wing opponents of a strong and enective government
role in promoting racial justice. As they pour out of the
think tanks and media outlets of the right, they are feed-
ing increasingly coordinated populist assaults on
African-American and immigrant communities.
Veterans of the Prop 209 campaign in California,
such as Ward Connerly and Glynn Custred, and others
now backing Connerlys Super Tuesday multistate
campaign, have also jumped on the anti-immigration
bandwagon by linking it with their assault on amrmative
action. On the back cover of Mexifornia Linda Chavez
of the misnamed Center for Equal Opportunity, which
has been waging war for years against the gains of the
civil rights movement in law, education, employment
and fair housing, dutifully endorses Hansons view of
what she calls disturbing trends among Mexican immi-
grants.
Tis despite the fact that Chavez seems to have had
her own misgivings about anti-Mexican bias among her
right wing colleagues. She specincally calls out a fair
number of Republican members of Congress, almost all
innuential conservative talk radio hosts, some cable
news anchorsmost prominently, Lou Dobbsand a
handful of public policy experts at organizations such
as the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation
for American Immigration Reform, Numbers-, in addi-
tion to fringe groups like the Minuteman Project.
Tose who thought these words might signal a wel-
come move toward multiculturalist rationality among
the anti-diversity crowd were soon to be disappointed.
Chavez quickly retracted them. Praising Hansons book
in the Wall Street Journal for its highbrow, agrarian out-
look, Chavez sidekick Roger Clegg oners his own
racialized and imperious endorsement of the core val-
ues that denne American citizenship, such as dont de-
mand anything because of your race or ethnicity and
dont view working hard and studying hard as acting
white.
Tese are not a matter of choice for free individuals
in a democratic society, but, he sternly instructs us (act-
ing white?) habits to be inculcated and imperatives to
be honored.
Cleggs core values are an open book. I have a lot
of sympathy, he tells us, for those who want to recog-
nize the heroism of Confederate soldiers, and even more
for those who have a renexive and negative reaction to
the NAACPs pronouncements these days. My fathers
parents were from Mississippi, and my parents and I are
Texans, and in all my years growing up and playing army
I can never remember choosing to be a Yankee rather
than a Rebel.
Racial Nationalism and Immigration
Pat Buchanan, a veteran ngure in anti-immigration
politics, has a substantial following among the pitch-
fork brigade at the grassroots of the populist right, and
is also a regular presence on MSNBC. His sister Angela
Bay Buchanan served as chair of Tom Tancredos Vir-
ginia-based Team America PAC, which promotes anti-
immigration candidates, and has now joined his
presidential campaign team. Bay Buchanan and Tan-
BAJI Reader 37
credo attended the Tombstone, Arizona kick-on rally of
the Minuteman Project in April 2005. Although he pays
lip service to the legal changes brought about by the civil
rights movement from the mid-1950s onwards, in his
book State of Emergency: e ird World Inasion and
Conquest of America, Pat Buchanan deplores what he
calls Americas national guilt over racism.
Buchanan believes this guilt is leading toward na-
tional and racial suicide (demography is destiny), a
theme once championed by Teodore Roosevelt that
has a long history in the American nativist movement.
In attempting to explain this guilt phenomenon, he
points to the seminal work of Peter Brimelow, who ar-
gues that Americas alleged obsessive guilt about racism
was caused essentially by an overreaction to the genoci-
dal crimes of the Nazis.
By committing to cleanse itself from all taints of
racism and xenophobia, Buchanan quotes Brimelow,
the U.S. political elite eventually enacted the epochal
Immigration Act of 1965, which did away with a quota
system based on national origins that favored European
immigration, Brimelow, an English immigrant who runs
VDARE, a website nlled with white supremacist and
anti-Semitic material, has called the Pioneer Fund, a
foundation that has backed racial eugenics research, a
perfectly respectable institution. Buchanan writes a
regular column for VDARE, for which Tom Tancredo
has also written.
In the acknowledgments section of State of Emer-
gency, Buchanan singles out the late Sam Francis (who
edited the white supremacist Council of Conservative
Citizens paper, e Citizens Informer) and Brimelow as
the vanguard of the anti-immigration movement. And
while he praises the leaders of the anti-immigrant think
tank infrastructure, such as Roy Beck of Numbers-USA,
Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies
and Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immi-
gration Reform (FAIR), he cites a slew of VDARE
columnists in the book and thanks James Fulford of
VDARE for help with the manuscript. Te racist roots
of the anti-immigration movement run deep. In his im-
portant study of American immigration politics up to
the 1920s, Strangers in the Land, John Higham identi-
nes two broad strains of anti-immigrant racial suprema-
cism, one based on culture and the other, with the rise
of Social Darwinism, based on heredity and genetics.
Tese trends now seem to be converging, and are being
mainstreamed into the American media through
Buchanans high visibility.
Nativism Goes to Harvard
As Higham points out, anti-immigrant racial na-
tivism was not restricted to populist demagogues who di-
rected their appeals to poor and working class whites (e.g.,
an anti-immigrant Minute Men organization was formed
in 1886 in New York). Powerful strains of racially-
charged propaganda directed at immigrants have also em-
anated from the political elite and top universities.
Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., stood up in the Senate in
1896 and warned in a debate over imposing literacy tests
Powerful strains of racially-
charged propaganda
directed at immigrants have
also emanated from the
political elite and top
universities.
Haitians protest U.S. immigration policy, cc 2006 Danny Hammontree.
on immigrants that Americas national character was in
danger of being bred out. Francis A. Walker, the pres-
ident of MIT, developed a theory in the late 1890s that
beaten men from beaten races were, with their higher
birthrate, dooming white America.
Books such as Madison Grants 1916 e Passing of
the Great Race, proclaimed that democracy is fatal to
progress when two races of unequal value live side by
side. Te book helped spur a nativist movement, backed
by the Ku Klux Klan, that contributed to the passage of
draconian restrictions on immigration in 1924. Te new
nativist movement of today has also spurred a resur-
gence of the racist Klan. Grant, a lawyer and president
of the New York Zoological Society, was vice president
of the Immigration Restriction League, which was,
Higham tells us, born at a meeting of nve young blue
bloods in the law omce of Charles Warren, later a noted
constitutional historian. All nve had attended Harvard
together in the 1880s and had gone on to do graduate
work at Harvards Lawrence Scientinc School or its law
school. Te IRL, which eventually turned to eugenics
and brieny considered renaming itself the Eugenic Im-
migration League, quickly developed close ties with the
leading nativist factions and lobbyists in Congress and
went on to nght immigration under the direction of
prominent attorney Prescott Hall and Harvard profes-
sor Robert DeCourcy Ward.
Pat Buchanan with Footnotes
A century aner the formation of the IRL, the tra-
dition of highbrow panic about the perils of immigra-
tion still nnds a home at Harvard. In Who Are We? Te
Challenges to Americas National Identity, Samuel P.
Huntington, arguably the leading political scientist in
the U.S., strikes the very same themes that Buchanan,
Tancredo and Hanson do in their less footnoted (or in
the case of Hanson, non-footnoted) nativist diatribes:
white Protestant culture, which forms the core of Amer-
icas identity, is being marginalized by immigration, mul-
ticulturalism, and (Huntington adds) the
denationalization of American elites.
For good measure, he produces a lengthy section on
how amrmative action has contributed to the decon-
struction of America through its alleged abandonment
of the intent doctrine, starting with the labor depart-
ments enforcement of the anti-discrimination provi-
sions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and continuing
through the Supreme Court case Griggs v. Duke Power
(401 U.S. 424, 1971).
Huntingtons notion that the intent doctrine has
been abandoned would surely come as a surprise to
those who see it as a major legal impediment to chal-
lenging racial discrimination. Nevertheless, he writes
that amrmative action, along with the challenge to
English has contributed to the rise of subnational iden-
tities (African-Americans and Latinos) that are posing
a dire threat to the core culture.
Hispanization, he tells us, echoing the rhetoric of
the Minutemen, is threatening a demographic recon-
quista of the southwest U.S. Americas unity, which he
falsely sees as based on Anglo-Protestant culture, is
being undermined by largely Mexican innuences. But
Huntington, while steering clear of racist pseudo-sci-
ence, goes beyond the argument about culture to suggest
that white nativist movements are a possible and plau-
sible response to the prospect that whites may someday
become a minority in the U.SA. Boston University po-
litical scientist Alan Wolfe has remarked, the word
plausible catches the eye. To say that something is pos-
sible or probable is to make a prediction; to call it plau-
sible is to endorse it. Huntingtons argument, at times
bordering on hysteria, is Pat Buchanan with foot-
notes.
Huntingtons tacit nod to the white populist move-
ment has been reciprocated by Peter Brimelow, who de-
scribes him as a friend of VDARE.
Racial Nativism and the Conservative Infrastructure
Ideological advocacy has played an important role
in the resurgence of racial nativism in the anti-immigra-
tion movement. But the conservative think tank and
foundation infrastructure has played an important part
in this revival, both by mainstreaming its ideas through
books, op-eds and media appearances and by supporting
the organizations promoting the demographic and
other research that has fed it. Tis intellectual infrastruc-
ture feeds this movement at the base. Charles L.
Heatherly, one of the architects of the Heritage Foun-
dations model for furnishing right wing politicians with
actionable policy ideas as editor of several of its Mandate
for Leadership handbooks, provided a priceless contri-
bution to In Mortal Danger, Tom Tancredo writes. A
former staner for Tancredo, Heatherly now works as a
senior aide to the congressman (see his appearance on
Tancredos behalf on YouTube).
Victor Davis Hansons Mexifornia was written at
the suggestion of Peter Collier, the founding publisher
of Encounter Books, which has been backed by the
Koch, Bradley and Olin Foundations. It is an expanded
version of an article published by Hanson in City Jour-
BAJI Reader 39
Lee Cokorinos conducts political research on right-wing moements and organizations. He is the author of e Assault
on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice (Rowman & Littleeld), and Target San Diego:
e Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy and Smart Goernment, and can be reached at rightnotes@earthlink.net.
Reprinted om Equal Justice Society e-Newsletter - Issue 11 - Fall 2007 Equal Justice Society www.equaljusticesociety.org
nal, the Manhattan Institutes nagship publication.
Myron Magnet, the journals editor, helped edit the ar-
ticle and book.
According to Mediatransparency.org, the Olin
foundation provided $100,000 in funding for VDARE
through Sally Pipes Pacinc Research Institute. Olin also
funded the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies,
of which Samuel P. Huntington is the founding director.
Te Smith Richardson and Bradley foundations pro-
vided support for Huntingtons Who Are We?
Bradley also provided support for the Center for
Immigration Studies. A report advocating the mass de-
portation of illegal immigrants, Te Economics of Im-
migration Enforcement, has been published by Henry
Regnerys Georgia-based National Policy Institute. Te
Pioneer Fund lists the National Policy Institute as its
largest grant recipient on its 2005 federal tax return-
Fighting Wedge Politics
Te right wing political infrastructure has also fed
strategic initiatives designed to polarize the African-
American and Latino communities over immigration.
Te Minuteman movement, which has spread across the
country and experienced two major splits, has promi-
nently featured Ted Hayes, an African-American immi-
gration opponent at its rallies. Rosanna Pulido, a Latina,
heads the Illinois Minuteman Project, based in Skokie.
Te Federation for American Immigration Reform, co-
founded by John Tanton, the Michigan-based leader of
a dense network of anti-immigration organizations, at-
tempted to form a front called Choose Black America
in May 2006.
The good news is that efforts to counter the
wedge politics of the Minuteman movement and na-
tional groups such as FAIR are gaining ground. The
Equal Justice Society, Black Alliance for Just Immigra-
tion, Latino Issues Forum, Greenlining Institute and
Centro Legal de la Raza have begun the process of en-
couraging much-needed dialogue (available online) on
immigration issues.
In the South, with a growing Latino population,
critically important organizing and advocacy initiatives
to counter the wedge politics of the right are being led
by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee
Rights, Highlander Research and Education Centers
Institute for Immigrant Leadership Development (IN-
DELI), Black Alliance for Just Immigration and the
Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network. If ade-
quately funded and supported, this infrastructure can
engage the racial nativist movement where it counts
mostat the grassroots level and in the media. I
Haitians protest U.S. immigration policy, cc 2006 Danny Hammontree.
The essence of trade unionism is social uplift. The labor
movement has been the haven for the dispossessed, the
despised the neglected, the downtrodden, the poor.
A. Phillip Randolph
When A. Phillip Randolph spoke the above words
during the 20th century he was the leader of the Broth-
erhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters was a union mainly of African
American workers.Other unions refused to organize
African American workers and accused African Amer-
icans of taking jobs, lowering wages and strikebreaking.
Todays labor movement is faced with some of the
same challenges. Should we organize the dispossessed,
the neglected, downtrodden and the poor? Should we
organize undocumented immigrant workers? Should
we continue to organize African American workers?
Te U.S. Labor Movement can not survive unless we are
willing to organize undocumented immigrant workers,
African American workers, Latinos and women
throughout the South and the Southwest, everywhere.
Union density will continue to decline, unless organiz-
ing is escalated and combined with a broad new social
and economic justice vision and agenda.
In 1955 organized labor was 35% of the workforce;
today it is only 12.5% of the workforce. Technological
changes combined with the moving of work abroad and
other factors have contributed to the decimation of
union density. High wages and benents cannot be sus-
tained for any union as long as undocumented immi-
grant workers, African Americans, Latinos and the poor
remain outside the organized labor movement. Union
members should be tireless supporters of the immigrant
rights movement and advocate support for civil and
human rights struggles. Standing along side undocu-
mented workers, for civil and human rights should be
seen as a badge of honor in unions and not issues that
organized workers reluctantly support. But this will not
happen unless the level of discussion, debate and educa-
tion takes place at the deepest roots of the Labor Move-
ment. Avoiding discussions and debates on immigrant
rights, organizing the poor and workers of color, will
only lead the Labor Movement further and further into
self-centeredness and decline.
While expanding union -worker membership is im-
portant, we must stand nrmly on the side of those in the
nght for social and economic justice. Concretely this
means supporting the rights of undocumented immi-
grant workers, African American workers, Latinos,
women, and the poor. Te organized Labor Movement
must do more than nght for the rights of union mem-
bers. Masses of people, most are workers, many are
Why Unions Must Support the
Immigrant Rights Movement
By Karega Hart
BAJI Reader 41
women and workers of color, all are being forced into
poverty. Organized labor cannot win in a nght with
global corporations without allies from other exploited
and oppressed classes and communities.
Does the Organized Labor Movement
Have Enemies?
Many union members have been educated to be-
lieve that the system of global capitalism supports the
existence of trade unionism and will assist hard working
American workers. Workers have been taught that,
problems in the organized labor movement exist be-
cause we just have some bad employers.
Todays global capitalist and neo-liberals see union-
ism as their class enemy and are committed to putting
the nails in the comn of organized labor. Shallow dis-
cussions among union members about bad employers
will not raise the level of awareness of workers concern-
ing the true nature of the problems that workers and the
oppressed are facing.
Intense, deep and substantive discussions need to
be held at work sites, schools and communities about
immigration reform and rights. Avoiding the discussion
on immigration reform will only contribute to further
weakening of the organized labor movement, the attacks
on immigrants and the erosion of worker/civil and
human rights. Te real enemy of organized labor is not
immigrants, it is Global Capitalism. Global Capitalism
continually drives workers from poorer countries
abroad, displaces more workers and forces them into
deeper and deeper poverty.
Immigrant Rights Are Workers Rights
Immigrants are nghting for basic rights such as the
right to organize, equal wages and benents and a path
to citizenship without obstacles and more. Immigrant
bashing, violence, exclusion and discrimination is as
deadly as White Supremacy. Make no mistake, these at-
tacks are meant to crush the spirit and subjugate and
neutralize union and unorganized workers. Te Labor
Movement has an opportunity to rise up and play a lead-
ing role in the nght for the rights of immigrants. And,
the Labor Movement should never forget the unnn-
ished business of organizing and nghting for the rights
of the millions of African American workers and Latino
workers in the South and Southwest. I
Black and brown families rally for justice and immigrant rights in L.A. Photo: 2007 courtesy of Community Coalition.
Karega Hart is the education coordinator of SEIU Local 1021 in Oakland, California.
During the Spring of 2006, millions of immigrants
marched in streets of large cities and small towns alike af-
nrming their basic dignity and demanding a justice which
was not tied to citizenship. Repeated on May 1 2007,
these demonstrations herald the surfacing of a massive so-
cial movement which will extend participatory democ-
racy in much the same way as the huge organizing waves
of the mid 1930s and 1940s and the modern civil rights
movement of the late 1950s and 1960s.
However, if the movement for immigrant rights sig-
nal the next great leap forward in empowerment, what
still needs to be answered is how to address the incom-
plete revolution which took place during the modern
civil rights movement. Tis race question - or more
accurately, this Black question - must be answered if
social justice movements are to maximize the results
from the new opportunities which will arise during the
next period.
Tis issue is particularly vexing for the labor move-
ment as it tries to build its power. Immigrant workers have
been at the center of many of the most dynamic cam-
paigns for economic justice over the past twenty years. At
the same time, Black workers have been among the
strongest supporters of unions since World War II and
have shown the greatest propensity and inclination to join
unions of any racial/ethnic grouping. Te alienation of
just a portion of this support can defeat advances in pro-
gressive causes. Recently, the conservative movement has
assiduously cultivated Black public opinion to gain sup-
port for its anti-immigrant position. If they are successful
in splitting even a small segment of the Black community
from the movement for immigrant rights, the result could
be devastating. Tis note attempts to sketch out an ap-
proach to addressing these concerns.
Two generations have past since the victories of the
modern civil rights movement. Over this period many
working class families and communities have sunered
declining fortunes. Tis decline in economic outcomes
has hit Black communities particularly severe because it
occurs in the midst of signincant changes. Some key fea-
tures of the Jim Crow era were constraints on Blacks in
housing and labor markets resulting in Black neigh-
borhoods and Black jobs. Tese constraints formed
the basis of a vibrant community with dense social net-
works which sustained Blacks during the horrors of seg-
regation and shaped the movement which eventually
overthrew segregation. With the end of segregation,
constraints changed and the last thirty-nve years have
seen the development of new Black spaces. Some
Blacks have migrated outward from the central cities
creating new Black neighborhoods and providing the
opportunities for the transformation of old Black neigh-
borhoods. At the same time, the new constraints, in con-
junction with the new global economy, have provided
new job opportunities and transformed the old Black
jobs. Te transformation in Black neighborhoods and
Black jobs has resulted in new immigrants penetrating
these spaces.
Te constellation of these events - the severe eco-
nomic crisis in the Black community; the transforma-
tion of old Black spaces as a result of the victories of the
civil rights movement; and the rise of immigrants from
the global South - have provided the grist for tensions
between Blacks and immigrants. It is my strong belief
that these tensions will never be addressed adequately
until there is a dynamic movement to tackle the variety
of issues renecting anti-Black racism in the United
States.
Te birth of this movement would be assisted by
new framing on three fronts. First, there has to be recog-
The Race Question:
Building Labor Power in the
Context of the Immigrant Upsurge
By Steven Pitts
BAJI Reader 43
Steven Pitts at a Labor Center training. Photo courtesy of the Labor Center.
nition that not all Blacks are native-born and not all im-
migrants are non-Black. Te very positioning of Black
against immigrants ignores this reality. Tat position-
ing renders invisible disparate immigrant experiences of
Blacks from Haiti, Central and South America, the Eng-
lish-speaking and Spanish-speaking islands of the
Caribbean, and various countries in Africa. Such invis-
ibility is similar to the treatment of Blacks during Jim
Crow and generates feelings of animosity.
Second, what distinguishes social movements is the
dinerent social basis of each movement. Te core of the
modern civil rights movement was the Black commu-
nity which coalesced around issues of racial justice. In a
similar fashion, the core of recent immigrant upsurge
has been the Latino community. Attempts to frame
the immigrant rights movement as the new civil rights
movement denies the historical reality of the Black core
of the modern civil rights movement and the contem-
porary reality of the unique features of the Latino im-
migrant community - whose experiences and
demands for justice are valid on their own merit without
the need for the imprimatur of the modern civil rights
movement. By ignoring these realities, some Blacks feel
as if our movement is being appropriated by others.
Tird, the Black community faces a two dimen-
sional job crisis: a crisis of unemployment and a crisis of
low-wage work. A realistic explanation of the crisis
needs to be developed which centers the source of the
problem on historical and contemporary institutional
racism. Tis explanation must emphasize the agency of
employers - as the central players in the determination
of who gets hired - without the response to this em-
ployer agency being punitive measures against immi-
grant workers.
However, more important to the birth of this new
movement than issue reframing are concrete organizing
needs. Unions need to develop strategies which directly
deal with the low-wage job crisis in the Black commu-
nity by empowering Black workers in the workplace.
While there may not be many large Black job niches
where explicit Black unionizing drives take place, nnd-
ing creative mechanisms to preserve public sector jobs
and transform the burgeoning human services sector
(child care, home care, health care) would go far in ad-
dressing the job crisis in the Black community. In addi-
tion, unions can be in the forefront of developing
labor-community action projects which address the
needs of Black workers who are not in traditional union
targets. Finally, the realities of the unemployment crisis
must be addressed. Traditional responses focus on indi-
vidual skill development. Unions can be instrumental
in expanding these approaches to include strategies
which link individuals with organizations - union ap-
prenticeship programs; community-based job training
programs - which seek to build the power of workers
in the labor market that they are trained to enter. I
Steven Pitts works at the UC-Berkeley Labor Center. is article was published in the Fall 2007 issue of the Labor and
Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) Newsletter.
Its interesting that President Obamas nrst trip out
of the U.S. was to Canada, and that he has begun talking
about incorporating labor standard into the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Imple-
mented January 1, 1994, and by no coincidence sparking
the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, NAFTA was
a major step in the economic integration of the USA,
Canada and Mexico under the domination of the USA.
Sold to the US public as a means of addressing glob-
alization and improving our chances of competing in
the global market place, NAFTA was fervently opposed
by various social movements and constituencies, partic-
ularly organized labor and environmental groups. Both
groups, and others, were deeply suspicious of the mo-
tives and actuality of NAFTA. Teir concerns, as it
turns out, were largely justined.
Tough NAFTA did result in the introduction of
some new jobs, what is critical is the net enect of
NAFTA. If one factors in losses and gains, the net im-
pact has been the loss of approximately 900,000 jobs in
the USA.
Unfortunately, much of the NAFTA debate stops
here or within a few feet. NAFTA most certainly has
drained jobs as well as placed restrictions on the ability
of jurisdictions to direct their local economies. It has en-
couraged the growth of sweatshop and near-sweatshop
labor along the USA/Mexico border. Tis is the side of
NAFTA with which many of us are familiar. Many of
us remember Ross Perots famous comment concerning
NAFTA representing the giant sucking sound of jobs
being drained away from the USA and going to Mex-
ico.
Tis is not the entire story. And, while it is good
that President Obama has reopened the discussion con-
cerning NAFTA, he hasnt drawn much attention to the
impact that NAFTA has had on Mexico, and thereby
on us in the USA.
What is critical for us to grasp on this side of the
Rio Grande River is that NAFTA has had a devastating
impact on the Mexican economy. Trough forcing the
Mexican farmer to compete with USA farmers, rural
Mexicos economy has been turned upside down. Te
reality is that the Mexican farmer has been unable to
compete, and as a result there began - in the mid 1990s
- a migration of rural Mexicans into the larger Mexican
cities. Finding few job opportunities, the migration
moved north toward the USA. Tis was accompanied
by the impact of NAFTA on the Mexican public sector,
which also sunered severe body blows, thereby under-
mining what little social safety net the people of Mexico
had.
Tis side of the NAFTA equation is critical to dis-
cuss because it helps us understand why hundreds of
thousands of Mexicans chose to leave their homes and
head north. Contrary to the xenophobic, anti-immi-
grant rhetoric many of us have heard, it was not because
everyone wants to be in America but rather as a di-
rect result of policies initiated by the USA and their al-
lies in Ottawa and Mexico City.
I thought a great deal about this recently when I
was moderating a debate on immigration within a labor
union. Te vehemence of some of the anti-immigrant
speakers, including - and very unfortunately - an African
American woman, was not only deeply unsettling, but
equally lacking in any historical context. While the focus
of the anti-immigrant speakers was allegedly undocu-
mented immigrants in general, there was nothing in
their language that indicated that they were thinking
The North American Free Trade
Agreement Devastates
U.S. and Mexican Labor
By Bill Fletcher Jr.
BAJI Reader 45
Members of the Teamsters Union protest against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Nearly all trade unions in the United States opposed the
agreement, fearing that it would rob U.S. workers of jobs. Denis Poroy/AP/Wide World Photos
about Irish, Poles, Russians, or anyone other than
Latinos, and most particularly, Mexicans. When
confronted with this question of NAFTA they had
nothing to say. Interestingly, they could also not ex-
plain why they had nothing to say about any other
ethnic undocumented worker besides Latinos.
It is commonplace in the USA to think in terms
of what anects us, and particularly the notion that
whatever harms us in the USA must be among the
most catastrophic things to anect the planet. Rarely
do we stop and think about the actual consequences
of the actions of the USA on the rest of the world.
Rarer still has been our consideration of how the ac-
tions the USA initiates, whether treaties like
NAFTA or military actions such as the 1980s Cen-
tral American wars, end up boomeranging.
A real change in the White House would be for
the leaders to see beyond the Rio Grande and
thereby actually see what is happening here. I
Bill Fletcher, Jr. is Executive Editor of e Black Commentator. He is also a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy
Studies and the immediate past president of TransAica Forum. He is also co-author (with Fernando Gapasin) of the
book on the crisis of organized labor, Solidarity Divided, published by University of California Press. Bill Fletcher, Jr.
wishes to thank David Bacon for the recent discussion that inspired this commentary.
By forcing the Mexican farmer to
compete with U.S. farmers, rural
Mexicos economy has been
turned upside down...
As a result there began a
migration of rural Mexicans
into the larger Mexican
cities. Finding few job
opportunities, the
migration moved
north toward
the U.S.
Te battle continues to rage between economists,
politicians, immigrant rights activists and Black anti-im-
migration activists over whether illegal immigrants are
the major cause of double-digit joblessness among poor,
unskilled young Black males. Te battle lines are so tight
and impassioned that Black anti-immigration activists
plan a march for jobs for American-born Blacks on April
28 in Los Angeles. Tis is a direct counter to the
planned mass action three days later by some immigrant
rights groups.
According to Labor Department reports, nearly 40
percent of young Black males are unemployed. Despite
the Bush administrations boast that its tax cut and eco-
nomic policies have resulted in the creation of more
than 100,000 new jobs, Black unemployment still re-
mains the highest of any group in America.
Black male unemployment for the past decade has
been nearly double that of white males. Te picture is
grimmer for young Black males.
But several years before the immigration combat-
ants squared on, then University of Wisconsin graduate
researcher Devah Pager pointed the nnger in another
direction, a direction that makes most employers
squirm. And thats the persistent and deep racial dis-
crimination in the workplace.
Pager found that Black men without a criminal
record are less likely to nnd a job than white men with
criminal records. Pagers pointing to discrimination as
the main reason for the racial disparity in hiring set on
a howl of protest from employers, trade groups and even
a Nobel Prize winner.
Tey lambasted her for faulty research. Tey said
her sample was much too small and the questions too
vague. Tey pointed to the ocean of state and federal
laws that ban racial discrimination.
But in 2005, Pager, now a sociologist at Princeton,
duplicated her study. She surveyed nearly 1,500 private
employers in New York City.
She used teams of Black and white testers with stan-
dardized resumes, and she followed up their visits with
telephone interviews with employers. Tese are the stan-
dard methods researchers use to test racial discrimination.
Te results were exactly the same as in her earlier
study. Black men with no criminal records were no more
likely to nnd work than white men with criminal
records. Tats true despite the fact that New York has
some of the nations toughest laws against job discrimi-
nation.
Dumping the blame for the chronic job crisis of
young, poor Black men on illegal immigration stokes
the passions and hysteria of immigration reform oppo-
nents, but it also lets employers on the hook for discrim-
ination. And its easy to see how that could happen.
Te mountain of federal and state anti-discrimina-
tion laws, amrmative action programs and successful
employment discrimination lawsuits gives the public the
impression that job discrimination is a relic of a shame-
ful and bigoted racial past.
But that isnt the case, and Pagers study is hardly
isolated proof of that. Countless research studies, the
Urban Leagues annual State of Black America report, a
2005 Human Rights Watch report and the numerous
EEOC pattern and practice discrimination complaints
over the past decade reveal that employers have devised
endless dodges to evade anti-discrimination laws.
Tat includes rejecting applicants by their names
and the areas of the city they live in and claiming that
the advertising was mistaken or the jobs advertised were
nlled. In a seven-month comprehensive university study
of the hiring practices of hundreds of Chicago area em-
Discrimination not Illegal Immigrants
Fuels Black Job Crisis
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
BAJI Reader 47
ployers a few years before Pagers graduate study, many
top company omcials interviewed said they would not
hire Blacks.
When asked to assess the work ethic of white, Black
and Latino employees by race, nearly 40 percent of the
employers ranked Blacks dead last. Te employers rou-
tinely described Blacks as unskilled, uneducated, il-
literate, dishonest, lacked initiative,
unmotivated, involved with gangs and drugs, did
not understand work, unstable, lacked charm, had
no family values and poor role models. Te consensus
among these employers was that Blacks brought their
alleged pathologies to the work place and were to be
avoided at all costs.
White employers werent alone in expressing these
bigoted and ignorant views. Te researchers found that
some Black business owners shared many of the same
negative attitudes.
Other surveys have found that a substantial num-
ber of non-white business owners also refuse to hire
Blacks. Teir bias enectively closed out another area of
employment to thousands of Blacks, solely based on
their color.
Tis only tells part of the sorry job picture for many
poor Blacks. Te Congressional Black Caucus reports
that at least half of all unemployed Black workers have
been out of work nearly a year or more. Many more have
given up looking for work. Te Census does not count
them among the unemployed.
Te dreary job picture for the unskilled and mar-
ginally skilled urban poor, especially the Black poor, is
compounded by the racially skewed attitudes of small
and large employers. Even if there were not a single un-
documented immigrant in America, those attitudes in-
sure that Black job seekers would still be just as poor and
unemployed. I
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. Contact him at hutchinsonreport@aol.com.
Marchers in LA build black brown coalition on immigration. Photo courtesy of the Community Coaliton.
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Introducing the BAJI Reader
A publication of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration
www.blackalliance.org
The Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) was founded in April 2006 to engage
African Americans and other communities in dialogue that leads to challenges to
U.S. immigration policy and the underlying issues of race, racism and economic in-
equity that frame it.
BAJI is an education and advocacy group comprised of African Americans and black
immigrants from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. BAJI provides the African
American community with a progressive analysis and framework on immigration that
links the interests of African Americans with those of immigrants of color. BAJIs
analysis emphasizes the impact of racism and economic globalization on African
American and immigrant communities as a basis for forging alliances across these
communities.
The BAJI Reader contains articles that expose the powerful forces that are forcing
migrants across borders to find work and make a convincing case for African Ameri-
cans and immigrants to come together to fight for social and economic justice for all.
Support BAJIs work by ordering copies of the first edition of the BAJI Reader!
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Black Perspectives on Race,
Globalization and Immigration
BAJI Steering Committee
Immigrants Play Role in King
Legacy
Gerald Lenoir and Larisa Casillas
Bridging Communities
Rev. Nelson Johnson
Racism at a Low-Income
Housing Site
Lauren Smiley
Black and Brown Together
David Bacon
Blacks, Immigrants Are Allies
More Than Adversaries
Gerald Lenoir
History
Immigration Raids Echo
History of African Americans
Jean Damu
Cinco de Mayo: Black and
Brown Liberation Through
Shared Oppression
Ron Wilkins
The Racist Roots of the Anti-Im-
migration Movement
Lee Cokorinos
Unions Must Support the
Immigrant Rights Movement
Karega Hart
The Race Question: Building
Labor Power in the Context of
the Immigrant Upsurge
Steven Pitts
NAFTA Devastates U.S. and
Mexican Labor
Bill Fletcher
BAJI Reader
Volume 1 Number 1 Spring 2009
Black Perspectives on Race, Globalization and Immigration

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