BAJI Reader Spring 2009

Black Perspectives on Race, Globalization

and Immigration

faith . labor . communityVolume 1Number 1Spring 2009

Table of Contents

IntroductionBlack Perspectives on Race, Globalization and Immigration ......................................3

BAJI Steering Committee

Faith-based PerspectivesImmigrants Play Role in King Legacy .........................................................................5

Gerald Lenoir and Larisa Casillas

Bridging Communities .................................................................................................6Rev. Nelson Johnson

Black—Immigrant UnityBuilding Racism .........................................................................................................14

Lauren Smiley

Black and Brown Together .........................................................................................21David Bacon

Blacks, Immigrants Are Allies More Than Adversaries .............................................28Gerald Lenoir

HistoryImmigration Raids Echo History of African Americans ..............................................30

Jean Damu

Cinco de Mayo: Black and Brown Liberation Through Shared Oppression................32Ron Wilkins

The Racist Roots of the Anti-Immigration Movement ...............................................34Lee Cokorinos

Labor and ImmigrationUnions Must Support the Immigrant Rights Movement............................................40

Karega Hart

Building Labor Power in the Context of the Immigrant Upsurge ...............................42Steven Pitts

NAFTA Devastates U.S. and Mexican Labor ..............................................................44Bill Fletcher

Discrimination not Illegal Immigrants Fuels Black Job Crisis ...................................46By 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 CliftonBlack Women Organized for Political Action

Jean DamuMemberNational Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America

Denise GumsCommunity Activist

Amahra Hicks, Ph.DCoordinator, Richmond Groundworks Trust

Phillip Hutchings*BAJI Senior Organizer (Staff Member)

Nunu KidaneCoordinatorPriority African Network

Rev. Phillip LawsonCo-chairInterfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights

Gerald LenoirDirector, BAJI (Staff Member)

Leonard McNeilMayorCity of San Pablo

Steven Pitts, Ph.DLabor Policy SpecialistCenter for Labor Research and EducationUniversity of California at Berkeley

Wilson RilesDirectorOakland Community Action NetworkFormer Oakland City Council Member

Rev. Kelvin SaulsAssistant, General Secretary, Congregational Development and EthnicMinistries,General Boardof Global Ministries, United Methodist Church

Nicole ValentinoAideMayor 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 Immigrationc/o PAN • PO Box 2528 • Berkeley, CA 94702-2556

(510) 849-9940 • [email protected]

Design and Layout of BAJI Reader: B. Jesse ClarkeBAJI Logo Design: Jamana LenoirThe 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 hasbeen infused with racism, enforcing unequal andpunitive standards for immigrants of color.

Immigration to the United States is driven by an unjust in-ternational economic order that deprives people of theability to earn a living and raise their families in theirhome countries. !rough international trade, lending,aid and investment policies, the United States govern-ment and corporations are the main promoters andbene"ciaries of this unjust economic order.

African Americans, with our history of being econom-ically exploited, marginalized and discriminatedagainst, have much in common with people of colorwho migrate to the United States, documented andundocumented.

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, inde"nite detentions or expan-

sion of mandatory detentions of undocumentedimmigrants;

!e 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 "rst 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 hopesof in#uencing the debate and discussion in the African American community about immigration.

!e U.S. government response to Hurricane Katrina con"rmed that racism is alive and well in U.S. society andin the domestic policies of the U.S. government. Racism also permeates U.S. foreign policy and immigration laws.!is 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 theupsurge of public opposition to proposed repressive immigration reform in Congress. BAJI’s mission is to engageAfrican Americans and other communities in a dialogue that leads to actions that challenge U.S. immigration policyand the underlying issues of race, racism and economic inequity that frame it. We are also committed to bringingthe 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 inthe 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.


Faith-based Perspectives

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. Kingencouraging us to Welcome the Strangers—a teachingfrom the Judeo Christian tradition to accept newcomersinto our communities.

He understood that justice is indivisible. His jour-ney in the "ght for civil rights took him from opposingthe oppression of African Americans in the South to op-posing the poor conditions of humanity throughout thenation and the world.

He saw that the opposite of slavery was not freedombut 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 thatimmigrants 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 ofracism and an unjust economic system, which puts theinterests of corporations and the super-rich over allother people.

What’s more, the impoverishment facing African-American communities is also a result of ongoing racialdiscrimination, the de-investment in urban areas andpublic schools, and corporate outsourcing of U.S. jobs.

!e injustice extends to the global economy. Under

the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),for example, Mexico opened its markets to subsidizedfood crops from the United States.

!e result, according the New York Times, is that2.8 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.

!e pro-immigrant marches of 2006 and the mul-tiracial support they have received demonstrate that anopportunity to build community between AfricanAmericans and immigrants exists.

African Americans have been at the forefront ofstruggles for positive social transformation, and weshould all share an interest in creating a more just andfree society. !e e$orts of such an alliance would strikeat the heart of U.S. economic inequality and force ournation’s leaders to listen and create change.

Dr. King said, “!e arc of the universe is long, butit bends toward justice.”

We have struggled in the past. And now it is timeto struggle again to overcome the nation’s continuingshame of racism and exploitation. By welcoming andworking with “the strangers,” we will, all of us, go be-yond the di$erences and "nd unity in our similarities.

We should re#ect upon the power of King’s PoorPeople’s Campaign of 1968 in Washington, D.C., whichbrought together African Americans, Latinos, Asians,Native Americans and poor whites who demanded “an-other America”—one more fair and just for all. !

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 directordirector of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition (BAIRC). Both organizations are based in Oakland, Calif. Formore information, go to www.blackalliance.org and www.immigrantrights.org. © 2007 !e Oakland Tribune. All rightsreserved. Reproduced with the permission of Media NewsGroup, Inc. by NewsBank, Inc.


!is speech was the"keynote 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.

Faith-based Perspectives

!ank you for your kind words of introduction. !anksto the National Immigration Law Center and the manypartners and supporters for inviting us to come togetherand for challenging us to discuss new and creative waysto bridge our diverse communities. I also want to ac-knowledge all the leaders who were announced here andall who are gathered on this most important occasion.

Let me begin by saying it is good to be here. It isgood to be with all of you. It is good for all of us to betogether in Washington, DC on this beautiful, snowyday. It is both humbling and challenging for me to saysome words of meaning to such a diverse and distin-guished gathering.

It is my hope to provide a little context and a littleinspiration 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 theother hand, the same issues have the potential to clarifyglobal trends, inspire us, unite us, and help us believethat another world is possible. So as we gather today, wewill 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 yesterdayat the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. It wassnowing really hard (at least by North Carolina stan-dards) when we got out about 5:00 PM. Several of usshared a cab over to this conference. !e cab driver wasa very jovial and talkative person. He was going on andon about the meaning of the "rst snow of the season andhow Washington drivers slip and slide all over the placeon the "rst snow.

Well, we "nally 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, thecab started to skid right into the brick wall at the en-trance of the driveway. !is brother was in mid-sentencetalking about slippery roads and Washington drivers,etc. as we slowly crashed right into the wall. Luckily, thedamage was minimal and no one was hurt. We made ourway safely into the hotel.

In a sense, the issues of immigration are a slipperyroad. I am going to be doing a little talking over lunchto keep us moving and focused on bridging diverse com-munities. So, stay with me or as we say in some religiouscircles “pray with me” that I don’t slip o$ 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. !e movement has its highand glamorous moments. It also has something of acheckered history of narrowness, rivalry, confusion, andfragmentation. We all bring with us our deep convic-tions, our analysis, our frustrations, and o%en our dis-guised confusion. For the next two days, I want to inviteyou 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 ofthis hour in the movement is to build new bridges ofhuman relationships, understanding, analysis, and co-ordination of work between diverse communities. !esuccess 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, ourchallenge is to continue to forge a powerful infrastruc-ture for justice.

Let me share a little about my work. I work withseveral organizations as I am sure most of you do. Some

6 blackalliance.org

Bridging CommunitiesRenewed 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 Wordand World, to name a few. !e anchoring institutionsfor me, however, are the church and the organization wefounded in 1991 called the Beloved Community Centerof Greensboro.

!e beloved community is a concept we borrowedfrom Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beloved communityas Dr. King so o%en 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 toultimate reality. At its core, beloved community is thenotion that all humanity is bound together in a singlefabric of mutuality. We belong to each other, and at ourbest we enrich and help to complete each other. !is isthe anchoring understanding that informs our mission.!e logic of this position is that in order to stand for ourown dignity and worth, we have to stand for the dignity,worth and indeed the enormous unrealized potential ofall of God’s children.

So, we have taken up our work at the Beloved Com-munity Center primarily with those on the margins ofsociety including the homeless, the unemployed and des-titute, the poor and working people and increasinglywith immigrants— that is to say with our beloved broth-ers and sisters who have journeyed from distant landsseeking an economic foundation for life o%en in hostileenvironments and wretched working conditions.

I want to share a few of our experiences at theBeloved Community Center that might be useful forour time together. Let me say that I have set our workat the Beloved Community Center in a moral/ethicalframework. I hesitate to say religious although I am apastor and many at the Beloved Community Centerhave de"nite religious a&liations; I hesitate to say reli-gious because religion can convey quite a narrow and

distorted picture of what we are about. !ere are someat the Beloved Community Center who claim no reli-gious a&liation at all but are deeply committed to thespiritual, moral and ethical principles on which our or-ganization is founded. !e point here is to seek a fram-ing that is most inclusive without compromisingessential 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 "ght broke out there be-tween an African American and a Latino Student. !e"ght between the African American male and a Latinomale started over a young lady in whom they had mutualinterest. !e Principal of the high school, who was anAfrican American male, came down pretty hard on theLatinos, at least it seemed that way to the Latino com-munity and to some of us. !rough a relationship witha Latino sister, who was also a community organizer, sev-eral of us at the Beloved Community Center, who wereAfrican American, attended a Latino parent meetingand heard in some detail their concerns.

!e issues that arose in that meeting were broad andhad almost nothing to do with the "ght over the younglady. In fact, I could never quite get the details of that"ght straight. !e issues that surfaced in the meeting,however, included:

Not being allowed to speak in their native tonguewhile waiting to be picked up by the bus from schoola%er classes were completed.

!ere was no handbook in Spanish, although thepromise for such a book had been made by high schoolo&cials.

!e Latino parents felt disrespected and ignored byschool o&cials.

BAJI Reader 7


On May Day immigrants and their supporters filled the streets of Los Angeles twice in one day—a 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 standingup and speaking out by Latino parents.

!e principal did not speak Spanish, and there wasno one in the principal’s o&ce who spoke Spanish.

A teacher would have to be called from one of theclassrooms to interpret whenever a Spanish speakingparent came for consultation. We organized a meetingbetween the Latino parents, some African Americanleaders, and the school Principal and his sta$ at theChurch. In fact, the Latino parents were unwilling tomeet at the school. !e issues I just mentioned wereshared through discussion with the Principal. It was achallenging meeting with a lot of back and forth. !ePrincipal was somewhat defensive, but black leadershung in there with him, encouraging and not condemn-ing. Together, we got a plan to work through most ofthe issues.

We had another meeting, a little more of a cele-bration.

!e children came, and the Latino Parents prepareda wonderful meal. !e principal, who earlier seemed notthe most sociable person, loosened up a little (what canyou do with pretty little children running around), andwe made more progress. !is e$ort to build bridges was-n’t related to labor but it was about building commu-nity. It was about standing with people when they areisolated, misunderstood and mistreated. We sought tostand with them in such a way that we stood for the bestinterest of the whole community. As black folk in thesouth, it should not have been hard for us to appreciatethe predicament of the Latino parents, for it was notlong ago- and even now-that we shared the same reality.

Two Labor StoriesWhile the example I have just given is about a local

education issue, most of us in this room would agreedthat the engine driving the current in#ux of immigrantsin relationship to this country and on a world scale isglobalization, that is, the economic interests of largemulti-national corporations. !e various free tradeagreements, as in the likes of NAFTA, have resulted in:Undercutting and undermining sustainable economiesin country a%er county.

People not having work to do and getting pushedo$ the land in their native countries, which leads to mil-lions of displaced people, people who migrate to othernations in search of work and economic substance.

Resources in third world countries being depletedand very little being reinvested in their local economies,resulting in these nations becoming less and less able tomeet the needs of their people.

!is is an over simpli"ed but broader context inwhich we must understand and engage the issues of im-migration. You know and I know that this context issorely missing among the general population. Withouta relatively truthful anchoring context, only more con-fusion, anger and division will be generated by our“much talking” about immigration. !ere are thou-sands, in fact, hundreds of thousands of discussionsevery day in barber and beauty shops, in schools, homes,churches and on the streets related to immigrationwhere there is mainly the “Lou Dobbs” context, i.e. thegovernment is not doing enough to protect us from thismassive “problem causing” invasion of immigrants. Sucha 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 inHigh Point, North Carolina, the furniture capital of thecountry. High Point is about 15 minutes from Greens-boro where I live. Folks from these two adjoining townsin the same county o%en discuss issues together. Wewere talking about the high school suspension rate ofblack students in the county school system when abrother just blurted out in the meeting, “on the way overhere every construction site I passed, I didn’t see nothingbut Mexicans working.”

!e people in the meeting were mainly AfricanAmericans, progressive for the most part. !ey didn’twant to just come down on Latinos and I knew they did-n’t want to say much in public. In fact, they may nothave had much to say. So the meeting went on and againthe brother spoke up saying the same thing, “On the wayover here every construction site I passed I didn’t seenothing 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.” Isaid, “I came the same way. I saw the same thing you sawon the way over here. You and I we are looking at thesame thing. I also know that the dropout rate of blackstudents and the fact that our jails and prisons arebulging with young black men is directly related to thefact that there are not enough good paying jobs for peo-ple to do. So I hear you. !e issue for you and me is notthat we are seeing di$erent things. I saw the same thingyou saw. !e question is how we understand what weare looking at.”

I explained, “I don’t know the particular way the

Latino brothers or sisters working on those jobs gotthere. You and I know they were not here 20 years ago.I don’t know exactly how they got there. I imagine thatsome are there because they have some kind of legalwork arrangement to be in this country; some are nodoubt citizens. But I’ve got a feeling that many of themstaggered through the hot southwest desert; some puttheir lives at risk in the back of a hot truck. Some tookgreat risks and endured enormous hardships to workand be underpaid in this country. I am convinced, how-ever, that they came here because they are desperatelytrying to make ends meet. Some are sending backmoney to feed their children and family. !ey are tryingto survive. Should we get mad with another group ofpoor people who have been forced into a desperate sit-uation and are just trying to survive? !at’s the ques-tion!” We had a fairly good discussion at that meeting,but it was just a beginning.

!e truth is that we have been set-up to be in a big"ght with each other that will not ultimately help eitherone of us. African American and Latinos are like twolong freight trains on the same track speeding straighttowards each other. !ere are great economic intereststhat have turned us in the direction of this great clash be-tween us, and those very same economic interests willbene"t from our "ghting with each other. Two groupsof poor people should not be each other’s main problem.Together, however, we can become each other’s solution,if we can refocus our energies. We have to build newbridges between us. We have to forge new and powerfulcoalitions. We have to evolve structures that allow us towork together to the mutual bene"t of both groups.


10 blackalliance.org

!e 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 haveto "nd a way to exalt the valleys of hardship and despairand to make the mountains of scandalous wealth low.We have to "nd a way to li% up the bottom and bringthe top down. Our challenge is to work together so thatall might have a living wage as we build bridges to trans-form our communities such that we all are treated withthe dignity and respect that all deserve.

Now, most of you know that the Smith"eld meatprocessing company has a massive hog producing plantin rural North Carolina. North Carolina has chosen tochange its laws to make it legal for that company to havea vertically integrated economic structure such thatSmith"eld owns or controls the hogs from birth all theway to the grocery store. Under this arrangement Smith-"eld has over eight million hogs under its controlcrowded into Eastern North Carolina. Hog waste in theform of huge lagoons is producing foul odors in hugeareas, mainly in poor and African American communi-ties. Any of you who have ever been around a hog penknow what I am talking about: choking streams andrivers, killing o$ "sh; sucking up clean fresh water inorder to process over 32,000 hogs a day, increasinglyleaving a shortage of fresh usable water in the area. Inci-dentally, Smith"eld is seeking to raise the level of hogskilled each day by seven thousand up to 39,000 per day.

!ose of us at the Jobs with Justice hearings yester-day heard from the worker at Smith"eld. !ey spoke ofhow they are being treated with over 600 being "red inthe midst of a union drive campaign because of the “So-cial Security no-match letters.” Well, the work of theBeloved Community Center was expanded when weplayed the leading role in founding the Southern Faith,Labor and Community Alliance (SFLCA) as an organ-ization to "gure out how to get the people in general,but especially the African American Church, more fully

engaged in this struggle and related struggles. Withoutgoing into the details of the Justice at Smith"eld Cam-paign in which we are fully involved, I want to share anexperience from that front of struggle that is directly re-lated to the immigration question.

!e SFLCA co-sponsored with the Word andWorld 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 Smith"eld hogkilling and processing plant. !e idea was to bring to-gether religious, labor and community leaders andblacks, whites, and Latinos for three days of intensestudy and re#ection to work through together what ourfaith mandates and our own sense of justice requires usto do in situations like Smith"eld. !e school went verywell. We need more occasions like that. We reached ca-pacity, which was 80 people, down at that MethodistCamp in the woods near Fort Bragg Military Camp.

!e details of that school are another story for an-other time. !e particular experience I want to share isrelated to recruiting for the school. I went to an AfricanAmerican 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 talkedabout the tragedy of the “no match letters.” I did my bestin that discussion to paint a picture of the overall situa-tion and how the Black clergy in particular are sociallypositioned to play an invaluable role.

When I "nished, one of the senior ministers spokeup and said, “You know we hear all of what you havesaid but there is one thing you don’t seem to understand.“ He continued, “Black folk have been here longer thanall the di$erent groups of immigrants. We were broughthere in chains in the 1600s. We were here before all thegreat immigrant waves. He said that “every immigrantgroup that comes to this country, it is not long beforethey get in the line ahead of us and I don’t think it’sgoing to be any di$erent with the people you are talkingabout, and that is a real problem.”

“Our challenge is to worktogether so that all might havea living wage as we buildbridges to transform ourcommunities...”


BAJI Reader 11

I could not refute what this minister was saying be-cause it is the history of racism in our nation. But, Iurged him to come to the School anyhow. We preachershave a way of saying “anyhow” when we don’t have muchelse to say right at the moment. I shared with him thatthe past is indeed a testimony of our inhumanity andhuman failing. In the case of black folk, it is a cruel andtragic past. Certainly slavery, lynching laws, Jim Crow-ism and the deep continued role of racism in our storycannot be denied. I stressed that while our past is neverirrelevant, 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 ownbook of faith that the “Spirit makes all things new,” thenwe are pulled by the new possibilities of tomorrow andnot immobilized by tragedies and disappointments ofyesterday. !at’s what I was trying to say by urging himto come “anyhow.”

So, the Raleigh ministers came. Together we en-gaged in deep discussion and prayer. We went to theSmith"eld Plant gate and attempted to speak truth topower. We visited together the overcrowded and sub-standard immigrant farm work camps in the "elds ofeastern North Carolina. We a&rmed afresh that “allthings are possible” when we as believers break the backof 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 yesterdaysto forge new possibilities for our tomorrows. So, wejoined hands and linked hearts with our Latino brothersand sisters struggling and walking together towards ournew humanity.

Yes, the giant Smith"eld Company is still there onthat long, desolate stretch of rural North Carolina high-way. Smith"eld is still mistreating its workers. !ere isstill no union there. In fact, Smith"eld has brought alawsuit charging the union (and by implication all of us)

with racketeering. But in spite of it all, we have begunto build some new relationships. Born of a vision of newpossibilities, certi"ed in the crucible of struggle in the"elds and on the side of a rural North Carolina roadunder a hot July sun, bridges are built!

I was overjoyed when we, a delegation of some ofthese same African American clergy, respectfully madethe case to Reynolds American Tobacco Company justlast Tuesday that the Farm Workers Organizing Com-mittee (FLOC) and our immigrant brothers and sisterswho labor in the tobacco "elds and all the other "eldsin this country are our brothers and sisters beloved. Weintend to stand with them in their struggle until Justicecomes!

I am happy to report that we are in the early stagesof planning some city wide black/brown conferences inseveral key cities in North Carolina. !ese conferencescan be of enormous value in building bridges betweenus. We must engage in a more profound way the mean-ing of the immigration questions facing us, not only inour city and state but indeed all over the nation and theworld. Racism and the declining state of black folk onthe bottom cannot be ignored or skimmed over. Yet, wecannot and we must not allow black and brown peopleto be pitted against each other in a painful spiral to thebottom. !at’s why we want to organize joint confer-ences with Latinos, blacks, whites and others to workout together the road forward. We must build thesebridges, for when people cannot work with each othereven though they share deep mutual interests, it opensthe door for a small privileged group to make decisionsthat are not in our interest.

Brothers and Sisters, I am convinced that one of thegreat challenges facing us today is the need for all of usto build new, creative infrastructures for justice andtransformation. We need structures of collaboration, co-operation, and coordination. Let the lawyers do theirwork; let the labor unions do their work; let the students

"We must notallow black and brown people

to be pitted against eachother in a painful

spiral to the bottom..."


do their work; let the community leaders and religiousleaders do their work. But, let us "nd a way that all ofour work is “working together for good.” Let us work insuch a way that everyone’s work is value added to every-one else’s work. !e structures I envision must bridgethe division and fragmentation in the movement andbetween our various communities.

!is infrastructure for justice and transformationmust expand the knowledge base so that we don’t thinkin terms of those “sel"sh,” “mean,” or “lesser people.” In-stead, we must help each other see with clarity that weare dealing with huge global economic forces that havedisplaced over 200 million people now migrating allover the world. !ese giant economic forces insure thatsome wallow in the obscenity of unearned and unnec-essary wealth while others are le% to scratch out a livingin 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.

!e 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 de"ned as the “other.” Mostimportantly, this infrastructure for justice must evolvecreative, grounded strategies on the local and state levelsthat 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 anddismantle the massive scapegoating mechanism that isbeing used to exploit immigrants, while blinding and

misleading millions of people into believing that theproblems in this country are caused primarily by immi-grants. Too many in the media, in politics, and even inreligious institutions have joined in an unholy allianceto blame the ills of this nation on immigrants, morespeci"cally on Latino people.

High taxes are blamed on immigrants instead of onthe billions of dollars spent every day on an unpopularwar that has no end and, seemingly, no purpose of en-during meaning.

When the issue of crime arises we are urged to lookat the Latinos and immigrants as the culprits.

When population growth becomes an issue ourminds and eyes are trained towards immigrants as theprimary source.

Terrorism is being increasingly framed as an immi-grant problem. We are told that we must build walls toprevent terrorists – hidden among immigrants – fromentering our nation.

And so it goes, on and on, disguising real causeswhile blaming the weak and vulnerable. !is e$ectivelyscapegoats a group of people who are already victims ofour international treaties and now increasingly the vic-tims of our domestic policies of racism, denial, andblaming.

Beloved, let the day be gone when we can draw aline on God’s earth and on one side of that line peoplehave 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 pro"t driven world-wide eco-nomic system – a system where they cannot "nd 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 incurredwhile working on the kill floor of the meat packing plant.. © 2006 David Bacon


in their native country and are forced to migrate to thiscountry where they are exploited and scapegoated –even as they work for lower wages in inferior conditions.!is 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 importantsomebody. I serve a God who proclaims that “thewhole earth is the lord’s, and the fullness thereof; theworld they that dwell therein.” Truth and justice de-mand that we expose and dismantle the immigrantscapegoat 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 thosevery challenges are also a great opportunity. So let usrecommit ourselves to the long, difficult, but beautifulstruggle to wrestle out of the jungles of this world, anew world:''

A world where all are paid adequately for theirwork wherever they are and no matter where theycome from.

A world where all are treated with dignity and re-spect at their workplace.

A world where all are protected equally by the lawsof 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 everyonewill be able to “sit under our own "g tree and vine andnone will be afraid.”

With such a vision we will be able to come back fromthe “far countries” of isolation, fragmentation and bitter-ness to gather around a welcome table of brotherhood andsisterhood,'celebrating the beauty of our diversity.

Nurtured by such a vision, I can hear the voices ofthe ancestors saying PRESS ON because no matter howdi&cult 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 receiveour birthright set forth in the founding document ofthis republic that ALL men and women are createdequal and, therefore, have certain inalienable rights, in-cluding the right to life, the right to liberty, and the rightto pursue happiness – which certainly include the rightto work.

Press on until “the wicked cease from troubling andthe 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 theclouds of despair! Press on! Press on until victory comes!To God be the glory! !

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 Belo#ed Community Center of Greensboro, a social and economic justice organization. Belo#edCommunity Center, P.O. Box 875, Greensboro, NC 27402, info@belo#edcommunitycenter.org.

An indigenous Oaxacan woman sweeps the area in front of her home in asettlement under the trees near San Diego.© 2006 David Bacon

A young Mixtec farmworker in the shelter he built in a camp on a hillsideoutside Delmar near San Diego, California. © 2006 David Bacon


Building RacismSegregation 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 a%ernoonlast August the management had some workers cook upshrimp soup and fried "sh for the Latino constructionmen who were picking up their checks. It was a strangeshow of hospitality from the bosses who’d otherwisemade work on Hunters Point Hill miserable from dayone.

Fausto, 39, and Gonzalo, 41, knew meetings weresupposed to be for all workers, not just the ones withroots south of the Rio Grande. Having toiled in thiscountry for nearly 20 years, with a general knowledgeof labor laws and an encyclopedic recall of carpenters’union rules, the Aguilars had been keeping close trackof the growing tally of what they believed to be racistincidents at the job site.

!e brothers say that the Latino and black crewswere kept separate, with Latinos heavily outnumberingthe blacks. Worse yet, many Latinos were forced to givecash kickbacks from their checks, which were sharedamong management.

And here was another example: “We have two re-ally big problems,” said foreman Ernesto Cunninghamof 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 Aguilar’s testimony at a publichearing last month, Cunningham said the "rst problemwas the “fucking union,” which he said o%en stoppedtheir work because many workers didn’t have unioncards. Cunningham said the second problem was the“pinches negros” (which translates roughly to “fuckingniggers”). As he explained it, they want to work in theplace of “you guys,” and we (meaning Latinos) are at“war” with them. (!e 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 comearound, the workers should ignore them, tell them “togo to hell,” and refuse to show their union cards. Betteryet, they could follow the example of one man who’dheckled the reps and thrown his identi"cation cards atthem.

Of the black workers, Cunningham is accused ofsaying they were “too slow” and that he wanted to "rethem all.

If this was supposed to be a call for solidarity amongthe Latinos, it was lost on the Aguilars. In fact, for theAguilars, who refer to black carpenters as “our blackbrothers,” it just seemed plain wrong. So when Faustoreturned to his Hayward home, he wrote down Cun-ningham’s words.

!e racist rhetoric wasn’t just reserved for o$-sitemeetings to which black workers were not invited. Gre-gory Hall, an African-American carpenter, met withcompany representatives on the job site to ask why blackworkers were not being hired even though the site wassmack-dab in the Bayview, one of the city’s few majorityblack neighborhoods. Experienced black carpenters hadconstantly inquired about jobs.

!e answer, according to court documents, was thatthe site’s bosses would give the “community” group, orAfrican Americans, and the “core” group, meaning theLatinos, separate walls to work on. If the communitygroup could “keep up” with the core group, then moreblack workers would be hired. !is was 2007 in one ofthe most progressive and über-PC cities in America, butmanagement appeared to be talking straight Jim Crow.

!e racist allegations go on and on in the civil law-

By Lauren Smiley


Black—Immigrant Unity


suit "led in San FranciscoSuperior Court and sentout to be served last week onDenver-based ApartmentInvestment and Manage-ment Company (AIMCO),which calls itself the largestapartment owner in thecountry. AIMCO owns andmanages the 604 federallysubsidized units on the hilloverlooking the HuntersPoint shipyard. !e proper-ties are currently under ex-tensive renovation a%er the city zapped the companywith a 2002 lawsuit for negligent upkeep to force it to"x serious housing violations, including bad plumbingand toxic mold that residents complained was makingthem sick.

Having wrangled itself out of trouble by makingthe renovations and paying millions to the city and to anearby 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 AllHallows Gardens with new windows, doors, #ooring,bathrooms, kitchens, lighting, and paint.

Now the housing giant is being targeted again foralleged collaboration in wrong-doing during the newconstruction project, bankrolled in part by $73 millionin tax-exempt bonds and $42 million in federal low-in-come-housing tax credits. !e suit also names Fortney& Weygandt Inc., the Ohio-based general contractorAIMCO hired to coordinate the construction and hireof subcontractors, three of which are also being sued.!e suit alleges that AIMCO, Fortney & Weygandt,and the three subcontractors created a “supermanage-ment team” that waged a campaign of racism and ex-ploitation.

!e 27 black and Latino carpenters who broughtthe suit decided they wouldn’t tolerate what they say isan extreme example of the construction industry’s“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 passedblacks as the country’slargest minority group,much controversy has en-sued over whether onegroup’s success meanspushing the other out ofjobs. A 2006 Pew ResearchCenter poll indicated thatblacks are more likely thanwhites to see immigrants as

taking jobs away from Americans. Former MexicanPresident Vicente Fox created a media circus in 2005a%er he commented that Mexicans take the U.S. jobs“even blacks don’t want to do.” In 2006, 28 percent ofconstruction 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 unemploymentrate of African-American men hovering at three timesthat of Latino men, the alleged e$orts at the AIMCOsite to divide the two races instead had the opposite ef-fect. !e two groups have joined in a (perhaps uniquelyAmerican) display of solidarity—suing their commonenemy, the employer, as one.

!e suit alleges a number of violations of state laborcode and antidiscrimination law, including: • Job-site supervisors and foremen, mostly Latinos

themselves, took $100 to $400 a week from Latinoworkers, either by cashing paychecks and withhold-ing the money or having workers cash their ownchecks and give kickbacks.

• (uali"ed black carpenters were repeatedly told therewas no work available, even while subcontractorscontinued to hire Latinos.

• Black and Latino workers worked on separate crews. • Black workers hardly ever worked a 40-hour week,

while Latinos o%en 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 ajob were given only in Spanish to a group of Latinosand blacks, leaving the black workers without in-structions.

• Latino workers were pressured to do fast and shoddywork; one job-site supervisor said it was becauseonly 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 buildingphases, though the company vows it will restart workin early April. !e carpenters and community activistsdemand that the individuals named in the lawsuit donot return. Meanwhile, AIMCO is passing the blame.In a letter to city supervisors before a hearing on theissue last month, senior vice president Patti Shwaydersaid that the allegations focus on employees of the sub-contractors hired by Fortney & Weygandt, and thatAIMCO would require that company to remove thesubcontractors from the job if the allegations were true.

Fortney & Weygandt’s general superintendent onthe site, Mike Cunningham (no relation to Ernesto),who is named in the suit, says he was sorry to hear“there’s just so much discontent,” and was surprised bythe allegations of kickbacks: “I wasn’t aware of every lit-tle detail that was going on, but so be it,” he told SFWeekly. All hiring and "ring is up to the subcontrac-tors, he added.

Attorney Paul Simpson represents the two subcon-tractors accused of extorting wage kickbacks, Daly City-

based roo"ng company IMR Contractor Corporation,and San Rafael-based Bay Building Services. Simpsonsays his clients deny any discrimination or kickbacks,and that they would take “appropriate action” if anyemployee was proven to have done so. While the lawsuitaccuses IMR owner Moises Avila of sharing kickbacksand echoing Ernesto Cunningham’s racist rhetoric,Simpson describes Avila as “a roofer [who] worked hisway up. He’s an American success story, and these alle-gations are very hurtful to him.” (Avila referred all ques-tions to Simpson, his attorney.)

Simpson’s clients have reason to worry: !is couldresult in a costly settlement or jury-awarded damages, andmultiple city o&cials and carpenters say that the districtattorney is investigating. (!e DA’s o&ce will not con-"rm or deny an investigation.) !e state criminal code al-lows a two-to-four-year prison sentence for extortion,possibly tacking on a year for each consecutive count upto a total sentence of eight years. !ree Latino carpenterssay that managers were taking money from at least adozen workers every week for months on end, althoughit’s unknown how many would testify to it in court.

For now, the allegations must be treated with skep-ticism, but there’s little denying that it would be an ex-traordinary feat of coordination for 27 workers, half ofwhom can barely communicate with the other halfwithout a translator, to come up with similar tales. AsBob Salinas, the Oakland attorney who is representingthe workers in the suit, asks, “Could my guys have beenmaking that up?”

At a City Hall public hearing last month, supervi-


Gonzalo Aguilar says Latinos on the site were pressured todo fast and shoddy work.© 2008 R C Rivera / S.F. Weekly


sors were clearly concerned. Carmen Chu nodded insolemn agreement as Je$ West, a carpenter apprenticewho lives in one of the AIMCO properties and workedon the site, explained that he wanted to be a role modelto men in the area by getting a job. “But to come towork and be a taxpayer and be called a nigger? I deserveeverything ... that another man deserves.”

Salinas adds that the alleged statements from thewarehouse meeting—that the bosses wanted to "re allthe blacks and that the Latinos were “at war” withthem—hark back to antidiscrimination cases of eraspast, before employers knew to hide their racist hand.“To prove this, the jury just has to believe this statementis true, and it’s over,” he says. “Do you think it takes atrained legal expert to see these things were based onrace?” Other evidence is even more explicit. Salinas pro-vided the SF Weekly with a photo he said West hadtaken of gra&ti scrawled in a bathroom on the construc-tion site in January, including the words “fuck all nig-ger’s,” “slave,” “monkey’s,” and “AID’S.”

Simpson, the attorney for two of the defendants,called the testimonies at the hearing “in#ammatory,”and said his clients weren’t informed of the hearinguntil it was already in progress. “!ey are people thatare hard-working, honest individuals that are being ac-cused of wrongdoing, and nobody has come up with anyevidence substantiating the accusations,” he said.

But the carpenters say they’ve witnessed plenty. !e hiring at the AIMCO site was problematic

from the start. According to the lawsuit, not one blackworker was hired for the "rst month of work in May.

Black carpenters who inquired were told contractorsweren’t hiring, or that they were waiting for materials.But black workers noticed that more Latinos werehired. Finally, some carpenters and community activistsstopped work at the site with a protest.

A%er the rally at the end of May, a dozen black car-penters were hired, according to the lawsuit, including61-year-old carpenter Bob Ivy. Having grown up in theBayview just blocks away, he considered it his duty torehabilitate the neighborhood. But once on the job site,Ivy and the other black workers rarely got a full week’swork, while the Latinos o%en worked overtime andweekends. One day, carpenter Roy Edwards com-plained about always being the "rst to be sent home; ac-cording to the lawsuit, Ernesto Cunningham called hima “motherfucker.” !e two men got into a yellingmatch, and it was announced that nobody would workthat day, according to Edwards and foreman RandyKeys. But soon a%er, Keys says he drove by the job siteand saw the Latinos still at work.

In his 35 years as a carpenter, Ivy says he’s alwayshad to "ght to get and keep jobs. But in recent years, hesays the color of the competition has shi%ed. When ablack Vietnam vet like Ivy visits construction sites andsees mostly Latinos, some of whom are willing to brushaside a union man’s “safety "rst” creed and don’t speakEnglish, it’s hard for it not to sting. “I feel bad for them,but they’re taking money out of my hands and food outof my mouth,” he says. “How do these other ethnicgroups come to America and succeed, and the blackpeople still stay stagnated?”

BAJI Reader 17

Bob Ivy says getting and keeping jobs in his 35 years as a blackcarpenter 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 thecompany he worked for, Livermore-based Bay AreaConstruction Framers, were divided by race—his all-black crew was assigned to tearout, while white workerscame in for the installation. Joe Powell, the company’sattorney, says the job assignments had nothing to dowith race. He says it’s normal for a company to assign acrew it has worked with before and knows is trained ina certain specialty to one type of work, and then thelocal hires with whom it has never worked to another.

Other black carpenters in the suit report that thevarious bosses o%en told them they were slow, andthreatened to dock their pay for stopping work for justa moment. When one carpenter complained about thedangerous conditions the Latinos were working in, thesuit claims one foreman retorted, “Scared or some-thing?”

Meanwhile, the Latinos faced their own woes.Problems started for Hector Rodriguez on his "rst visitto the job site. A union journeyman carpenter, Ro-driguez was instructed by Bay Building Services fore-men Ernesto Cunningham and Jesus Sandoval that hewould earn $24.25 an hour, $9 an hour less than unionwage, according to the lawsuit, though the work he didfor IMR and Bay Building Services was only what heconsiders carpentry work – siding, windows, slidingdoors, and walls. A%er a few weeks, Rodriguez begangetting paid carpenters’ wages, but had $100 deductedfrom 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 11years he’s lived in the United States, and thought whathis bosses were asking was illegal. Yet he had problems"nding work, and had four children: “I wasn’t happy,but I had to work.” A%er he had worked there for sev-eral weeks, one of his sons required emergency dentalsurgery. Rodriguez’ Kaiser copay was $6,000. Hepleaded that his supervisors not take a cut of his paythat week, but they still did, as Rodriguez explained atthe hearing.

Rodriguez complained to the carpenters’ unionalong with the Aguilars and others, but things only gotworse. According to the lawsuit, Rodriguez said he wasthreatened on the job site by Jesus Sandoval’s brother,Elias, that if he kept complaining to the union, some-

thing “might happen to him outside of work.” Onenight last fall, months a%er he’d been laid o$, Ro-driguez says he donned his cowboy boots and cowboyhat to go to the Fiesta Nightclub in San Jose to see ElPotro de Sinaloa, a popular singer from his home state.He later noticed other job-site supervisors were at theclub, and the scene that ensued seemed taken straightfrom a mob movie, as described in the suit: Carlos Del-gado, Cunningham’s brother-in-law, grabbed Ro-driguez by the neck and called him a “fag,” saying thatcomplaining to the union wasn’t something a “man”does. “!ey could do something to me easy,” Rodriguezsays. “I was scared. I have family, and if something hap-pened to me, I don’t know what would happen.” Del-gado could not be reached for comment.

!e carpenters’ union "led three charges againstIMR and Bay Building Services with the NationalLabor Relations Board. !e two companies “settled”the charges for the alleged antiunion comments at thewarehouse meeting by accepting the slap on the wristof having to post a bilingual notice saying that federallaw grants them the right to union activity. Anothercharge against Bay Building Services was withdrawnwhen NLRB reps said there wasn’t enough evidencethat the Aguilars and two other men had not been re-called from a layo$ because of their union activity. !elawsuit alleges many black and Latino carpenters werelaid o$ in retaliation for complaining to the union orsigning a petition.

Rodriguez says the managers tried their best tostop communication between the Latinos and blacks.He speculates that was so they could get the Latinos towork fast and in unsafe conditions, and steal theirmoney without anyone squawking. Rodriguez says hewas discouraged from talking to blacks, and that theworkers ate lunch separately, so communication waso%en limited to the black workers telling the Latinosthere was a work stoppage in protest. Black carpenterGregory Hall heard of the accusations regarding theLatinos’ stolen wages and circulated a petition de-nouncing it among all the workers. Hall says it was in-tended to show solidarity; he didn’t show it to themanagement.

Last fall, the Aguilars and Rodriguez attendedone 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 allegedwage stealing were translated into English. The sepa-ration tactics had failed. The two sides realized theywere both victims of the same alleged business model:to employ the cheapest workers who wouldn’t com-plain.

Upon hearing the stories, Ivy says he was remindedof black men he’d worked with through the decadeswho 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 CentroLegal in the Mission to inquire about their rights. LaRaza contacted Bob Salinas, who had just won a$100,000 settlement for three workers who had notbeen paid for all their hours worked at a Chinese bu$etin the East Bay. A%er listening to the carpenters’ stories,and doing his own investigation, Salinas decided theyhad grounds for a civil suit.

Although the carpenters’ statements and the photoof hateful gra&ti may be the only records of the allegedracism on the construction site, evidence that some ofthe work was done haphazardly is built right into therenovated units.

To the untrained eye, the neat row of the redoneyellow-and-tan three-story units of All Hallows Gar-dens sloping down to the shipyard looks cheery andinviting, especially compared with the brown barracks-like Oakdale housing project across the street.

But Gonzalo and Fausto Aguilar pointed out theshoddy work earlier this month. !e brothers say manyof the hires were undocumented family members or ac-quaintances of the management who wouldn’t protestkickbacks. !e lawsuit says that Ernesto Cunninghamwould hide several nonunion Latinos in a warehouse,and told them to hide if the union steward came to thesite. !e union "ned Cunningham and IMR, accordingto the suit. (!e carpenters’ union refused to commentfor this story.)

!e Aguilars say inexperienced workers bring downthe level of safety for everyone. “It’s like this: If you goto a job where there’s blacks, whites, Latinos, safety is"rst, right?” Fausto says. “But if you go to a job wherethere’s 70 percent Latinos, they don’t care about safety.”

“!ey want fast work,” Gonzalo says. “It pains me

to say it, but the Latino foremen are the ones who treatus the worst. !is wasn’t the "rst time. But here it wasmore evident.”

!e brothers point to the doorbell where Jesus San-doval had told them not to leave a space for the wireswhile they were putting siding on the wall. When askedwhy, Sandoval told them, “Fucking black people, theydon’t deserve it,” the lawsuit states.

!e Aguilars point out how at a corner of thehouse, the siding doesn’t align on the adjoining walls.At another place, siding runs up the front of the houseat an angle.

Coming home from work, resident PatriciaWilliams opens up her garage door to show how theconstruction folks le% it when she moved back in, a%erstaying in another unit for a month during the renova-tion. Sawdust coats the #oor, which is littered withnails, pallets, and an empty barrel. Uneven holes are cutinto the walls around exposed wiring. !e thick televi-sion cable mysteriously snakes out of the apartment’ssecond-#oor wall and into her garage, the only one likethat on the block.

“It’s tacky,” Williams says. “!ey just did a bum job.” Such disappointment clouds what chief assistant

city attorney Jesse Smith called a “fresh start” betweenAIMCO and the city, a%er the company settled thecity’s lawsuit in 2004. To encourage the company tocompletely redo the units, the city promised to endorseAIMCO’s application to the state to receive tax-exemptstatus on bonds to "nance the work. But the approvalcame with stipulations that AIMCO must pay prevail-ing wages, enact nondiscriminatory hiring, and abide bythe city’s First Source Hiring program to prioritize SanFranciscans for entry-level jobs, especially residents ofthe Bayview.

“As a corporate entity, they’re not known for theircivic-mindedness,” says Supervisor Sophie Maxwell,whose district includes the Bayview. “We had to suethem to get things repaired properly. ... !at’s why weput the conditions in, and not say we’ll just leave it totheir good graces.”

But since no formal complaints were lodged withcity agencies about violations of the agreement, the citydid very little, although multiple o&cials say the districtattorney is investigating. !e city was limited in its abil-

BAJI Reader 19


ity to pressure for jobs, since the "rst hiring legislationapplies only to entry-level workers, when much of thework at the AIMCO site was for journeymen, says ChrisIglesias. He was then the director of CityBuild, the city’sprogram to help construction companies implementlocal hiring requirements. AIMCO says that by the endof 2007, nearly 40 percent of all hours worked on theconstruction site were by city residents.

While Maxwell says “the agreement did what itcould,” since in the end the pro-ject was not city-funded,the carpenters and community activists say the city andAIMCO let them down.

“I’m tired of people saying they need to put teethinto these agreements,” says Dorothy Peterson, a long-time AIMCO opponent and activist for the building’sresidents. “C’mon, just do the right thing.”

Will the city be suing for breach of the agreement?!e city attorney is waiting to see if AIMCO will makegood on its promise to force Fortney & Weygandt to in-vestigate the allegations, Smith says. “Ultimately it couldgo to legal actions, but we’re all hoping if there is a prob-lem, [AIMCO] will take quick action to solve it,” hesays. “!at’s what everyone is hoping and expecting willhappen.”

“!ey’re in trouble,” says carpenter Terry Mackey,sitting against the back wall of the City Hall meetingroom, referring to AIMCO and the other defendants.

!e carpenters turned the Government Operationsand Neighborhood Services Committee meeting intosomething resembling a pep rally, including applaudingthemselves and their supporters and heckling their villains.

“Get up there and tell us a lie!” One man yelled asBill Wong, a former senior "eld representative of thecarpenters’ union, took the stand. Many carpenters saythat if their union had reacted more aggressively to theircomplaints, or had better policed nonunion memberson the site, it would have headed o$ the lawsuit. But car-penters’ union attorney Salinas says the union had beenlooking into the wage grievances, but those cases weredissolved because of the pending lawsuit.

While testifying, one carpenter declared: “We loveeach other. We just didn’t know this, but we know thisnow.” And a%er the Aguilars’ father testi"ed of his sup-port, placing his white cowboy hat on the podium, sev-

eral black carpenters embraced him in a bear hug. Whileshooting 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 makesympathetic characters. “!e carpenters are adorable,aren’t they?” Salinas said.

AIMCO’s pinstripe-suited attorney from the 2002lawsuit, Jim Reuben, seemed to measure his words as hestood up to speak, careful to say nothing that would gethim heckled, yet careful not to say anything that wouldcome 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 Iheard the name AIMCO mentioned, it sounded to melike [IMR Contractor Corporation] should be men-tioned as well, but that’s what our investigation will "ndout.”

Supervisor Maxwell dug in: “Yes, but by and large,AIMCO is who the people know. It’s who we know, it’swho we made the contracts with. So we have to take thatkind of responsibility.”

“Understood,” Reuben defers. Until the lawsuit goes to court, the carpenters are

waging private battles, many brought on by their timeat the job site. Bob Ivy is on disability for a herniateddisc a%er he jammed a countertop into steps while car-rying it unassisted, and now walks sti)y, with constantpain. Hector Rodriguez says he now checks his housebefore he lets his family enter, since he thought he spot-ted the man who took him to the job site and a foremandriving by multiple times. Felix Cortes is worried thedefendants may try to exact vengeance back in Mexico,given that the family of the man he’s accusing in the law-suit of taking $400 from his $800 weekly paycheck livesnear to his own family’s village in Oaxaca.

“Here, there’s justice,” Cortes says. “If someone doeswrong, they punish him. !ere, the richest person wins.”

Ivy says the case is not about the money. “I’m look-ing for change,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for 35years, and I’m still "ghting for a job.

“How can I call this a career?” he continues. “It’sbeen a struggle.” !


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 theforemost champions of the state’s growing Latino im-migrant population. Some day soon, they hope, the newalliance will transform the state’s politics.

In 1991, seeking to boost its never robust economy,the state of Mississippi passed a law permitting casinogambling. In short order, immigrant construction work-ers arrived from Florida to build the casinos, and thecasinos themselves began using contractors to supplyimmigrants to meet their growing labor needs. Guestworkers, eventually numbering in the thousands, werebrought under the H-2B program to "ll many of thejobs the developments created.

!roughout the 1990s more immigrants arrivedlooking for work. Some guest workers overstayed theirvisas, while husbands brought wives, cousins, andfriends from home. Mexicans and Central Americansjoined South and Southeast Asians and began travelingnorth through the state, "nding jobs in rural poultryplants. !ere they met African Americans, many ofwhom had fought hard campaigns to organize unionsfor chicken and cat"sh workers over the precedingdecade.

It was not easy for newcomers to "t in. !eir unionrepresentatives didn’t speak their languages. Whenworkers got pulled over by state troopers they were notonly cited for lacking driver’s licenses but also o%enhanded over to the U.S. Border Patrol. Sometimes theirchildren weren’t even allowed to enroll in school.

“We decided that the place to start was trying to geta bill passed allowing everyone to get driver’s licenses,regardless of who they were or where they came from,”says Jim Evans, the AFL-CIO’s state organizer andleader of the black caucus in the state legislature. In thefall 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 whohad organized Mississippi’s state workers and a growingcaucus of black legislators sympathetic to labor. Evans,a former organizer for the National Football LeaguePlayers Association, headed the group on the Houseside, while Sen. Alice Harden, who had led a state teach-ers’ strike in 1986, organized the vote in the Senate.

Harden’s e$orts bore fruit when the driver’s licensebill passed the Senate unanimously in 2001. “But theysaw us coming in the House and killed it,” says BillChandler, at the time political director for the casinounion, UNITE HERE. Nevertheless, the close "ghtconvinced them that a coalition supporting immigrants’rights had a wide potential base of support and couldhelp change the state’s political landscape. In a meetingthat November, the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Al-liance (MIRA) was born.

One day soon, that black-brown-labor coalitionmight just be able to transform Mississippi’s politics.

In big U.S. cities African Americans and immi-grants, especially Latinos, o%en are divided by fears thatany gain in jobs or political clout by one group can onlycome at the expense of the other. In Mississippi, AfricanAmerican political leaders and immigrant organizersfavor a di$erent calculation: Blacks plus immigrantsplus unions equals power

Since 2000, all three have cooperated in organizingone of the country’s most active immigrants’ rights coali-tions, the MIRA. “You will always "nd folks reluctantto get involved, who say, it’s not part of our mission, thatimmigrants are taking our jobs,“ Evans says. “But we allhave the same rights and justice cause.”

Evans, whose booming basso profundo comesstraight out of the pulpit, remembers his father riding

By David Bacon




shotgun for Medgar Evers, the NAACP leader slain byracists in 1963. He believes organizing immigrants is adirect continuation of Mississippi Freedom Summerand the Poor People’s March on Washington. “To getto peace and freedom,” Evans says, “you must comethrough the door of truth and justice.”

Both Evans, who chairs the MIRA, and Chandler,who is now its executive director, believe social justiceand political practicality converge in the state’s changingdemographics. 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 le% between 1965 and1970, 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 thecost of living in Northern cities skyrocketed, the #owbegan 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 ofMississippi’s 2.8 million residents-a percentage that isno doubt higher today. And while immigrants were sta-

tistically insigni"cant two decades ago, today they com-prise more than 4.5 percent of Mississippi’s total popu-lation, according to news reports. “Immigrants arealways undercounted, but I think they’re now about130,000, and they’ll be 10 percent of the population 10years from now,” Chandler predicts.

Common Ground!at’s 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 inMississippi. “We have the chance here to avoid the rivalrythat plagues Los Angeles and build real power,” saysChandler, who le% East L.A. and the farm workers’ move-ment decades ago to come to the South. “But we have to"ght racism from the beginning and recognize the lead-ership of the African American community.” Eric Flem-ing, an MIRA sta$ member and former state legislatorwho recently "led for the Democratic nomination to re-place Sen. Trent Lott, believes, “We can stop Mississippifrom making the same mistakes others have made.”

!e 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, PresidentRichard Nixon brought the South’s white power struc-ture, threatened by civil rights, into the RepublicanParty. President Ronald Reagan celebrated that achieve-ment at the Confederate monument at Georgia’s StoneMountain. “[Progressive] funders and the DemocraticParty have written o$ much of the South since then,”says Gerald Lenoir of California’s Black Alliance for JustImmigration. But MIRA-type alliances could transformthe region, he hopes, “and change the politics of thiscountry as a whole.”

!e MIRA is the fruit of strategic thinking amonga diverse group that reaches from African Americanworkers on cat"sh farms and immigrant union organiz-ers in chicken plants to guest workers and contract la-borers on the Gulf Coast and, ultimately, into the hallsof 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 employeesfor the Communication Workers, went to work for thehotel union, UNITE HERE, and helped win unionrecognition in three Mississippi casinos. In 2005 in LasVegas, the union was renegotiating its contract coveringHarrah’s Las Vegas operations. Harrah’s also owned twoMississippi casinos in Tunica and one that was destroyedand later rebuilt in Gulfport. With the threat of a Ne-vada strike in the air, Harrah’s agreed to a card-checkprocess for union recognition in Mississippi, and even-tually signed contracts covering the three casinos thereat the end of that year, although temporary, contract,and H-2B workers were not covered.

To build a grassroots base, MIRA volunteers alsowent into chicken plants to help recruit newly arrivedimmigrants into unions. Mississippi is a right-to-workstate, 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 Workersfor many years, says, “MIRA put the LIUNA businessmanager and a UFCW [United Food and CommercialWorkers] rep on the board because we wanted them tounderstand the role of the union in representing Lati-nos-they had contracts in chicken and "sh plants.” Inone 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 upevery Latino worker in two weeks

!e unions’ work wasn’t con"ned to "ghting griev-ances or recruiting new members; immigrant workershad much bigger problems. “!ere was a pretty repres-sive system in Laurel, Collins, and Hattiesburg,” Curielrecalls. “Plants had contracts with temp agencies, andall the workers were undocumented. It was very hard toget a new contract because of the surplus of Latino laborand low membership.” But by building a combinedmembership of immigrant and African American work-ers, union negotiators in one plant forced the companyto get rid of the temp service and hire employees di-rectly. “!at meant that African Americans gained ac-cess to those jobs, too,” Curiel emphasizes

In the casinos, MIRA volunteers worked withUNITE HERE organizers. In Jackson, the coalition gotsix bills passed the following year, stopping schools fromrequiring Social Security numbers from immigrant par-ents, and winning in-state tuition for any student whohad spent four years in a Mississippi high school.

Then Katrina hit the Gulf. Vicky Cintra, a Cuban American with a so% South-

ern accent, was the MIRA’s "rst full-time organizer andgot her baptism of "re on the Gulf Coast. A%er the hur-ricane blew through Biloxi and Gulfport, contractorsbegan pouring in to do reconstruction, bringing withthem crews of workers.

Cintra handed out 10,000 #yers with the MIRA’sphone number, and the calls #ooded in. !irty-"veworkers abandoned by their contractor in dilapidatedtrailers received blankets and food. When two RedCross shelters evicted Latinos, even putting a man in awheelchair onto the street, the national news media re-ported on Cintra’s e$orts on behalf of the immigrants.“For the next year we were just reacting to emergencies,”she recalls. !e MIRA fought evictions and the cases ofworkers cheated by employers.

“When we threatened picket lines, the contractorswould sometimes o$er to pay Latinos, but we said every-one had to be treated equally, and got money for AfricanAmericans and whites, too.”

!e MIRA eventually recovered over a million dol-lars. “And this was while the federal government hadsaid it wouldn’t enforce labor standards, OSHA, DavisBacon, or any other law protecting workers,” Cintra says.“Really, it had been like this for years, but Katrina justtore the veil away.” !e key to the MIRA’s success, shebelieves, was that “we engaged workers in direct action.Eventually the contractors and companies settling inMississippi got the idea that workers have rights andwere getting organized.”

MIRA volunteers also began to hear that guestworkers were being recruited in India, not for recon-struction, but for the main industry on the Gulf-shipbuilding. Working in the shipyards has always been



dirty, dangerous, and segregated. Jaribu Hill, an MIRAboard member, accuses the yards of putting “hundredsof 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 moregrateful, and more vulnerable.”

In late 2006, 300 guest workers arrived at thePascagoula yard of Signal International, which makeshuge #oating oil rigs for the o$shore "elds in the Gulf.!ey’d been hired in India by a labor recruiter and givenH-2B visas, good for 10 months. Signal charged theworkers $35 per day for the privilege of living in a laborcamp located within the shipyard. “Twenty-four of uslive in a small room, 12 feet by 18 feet, sleeping on bunkbeds,” Joseph Jacob, one of the worker leaders, says.“!ere are two toilets for all of us, and we have to getup at 3:30 in the morning to have enough time to usethe bathroom before going to work.”

Signal put the Indian guest workers to work in theyard alongside U.S. workers doing the same job, andclaimed it paid them the same wages. !e guest workerssay they were promised $18 an hour, but many werepaid only half that a%er the company said they were un-quali"ed. Signal CEO Dick Marler admits the companyreclassi"ed some workers a%er they had arrived, from"rst- to second-class welders, and then reduced theirwages. Signal deemed six of the workers incapable andannounced that it would send them back to India-a

move that portended "nancial ruin for the workers!e MIRA asked a Hindi-speaking organizer from

the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice,Sakhet Soni, to come to Pascagoula. Together theyhelped workers organize Signal H-2B Workers United.Jacob was "red “because I attended the meetings,” hesays. “!at’s 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 theTV Room and wouldn’t let them leave. !e MIRA wentto the Pascagoula Police Department, and the police wentout to the yard and eventually freed the workers. Outsidethe yard, dozens of workers and activists denounced the"rings and mistreatment. !e MIRA organized picketlines, and its attorney, Patricia Ice, started a legal defensecampaign with the Southern Poverty Law Center

!e company said it had used the H-2B system be-cause it couldn’t "nd enough workers a%er the hurri-cane. Other contractors have used the same rationale.“We’ve learned about case a%er case of workers in Mis-sissippi, Louisiana, and all along the Gulf in these con-ditions,” Chandler says. “!ere are thousands of guestworkers who have been brought in since Katrina andsubjected to this same treatment. Mexican guest workersin Amelia, Louisiana, were held in the same way. !eyalso got organized and came to Pascagoula to supportthe 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 Courtesyof Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance.


BAJI Reader 25

Organizing guest workers is part of an e$ort tobuild an MIRA membership among immigrants them-selves. MIRA members get an ID card and agree tocome to demonstrations and help others. When the na-tional immigrant marches began in the spring of 2006,MIRA members and volunteers mobilized thousandsof people for a rally in Jackson and even a march in Lau-rel, a poultry town of 18,881 people with a progressiveblack mayor. “!ere’s still a lot of anti-immigrant senti-ment here,” Cintra says, “but when people give the po-lice their ID card they get treated with more respect,because they know their rights and have some support.”Curiel says the same thing: “In Kentucky, outside ofLouisville, Latinos are afraid to go out into the street.In Mississippi it’s di$erent.”

Not always that di$erent, however. In Laurel andmany other Mississippi towns, police still set up road-blocks to trap immigrants without licenses. “!ey takeus away in handcu$s, and we have to pay over $1000 toget out of jail and get our cars back,” says chicken plantworker Elisa Reyes. And the way the state’s Council ofConservative Citizens demonizes immigrants is remi-niscent of the language of its predecessor-the White Cit-izens’ Councils. Its Web site urges, “!e CofCC notonly "ghts for European rights, but also for ConfederateHeritage, "ghts against illegal immigration, "ghtsagainst gun control, "ghts against abortion, "ghtsagainst gay rights etc. ... so join up!!!” !e state’s chapter

of the Federation for Immigration Reform and Enforce-ment brought the Minutemen’s Chris Simcox out fromCalifornia to recruit at anti-immigrant meetings.

During the 2007 Mississippi elections for governorand state legislators, the Ku Klux Klan held a 500-per-son rally in front of the Lee County Courthouse in Tu-pelo. !ey wore the old white hoods and robes andcarried signs saying, “Stop the Latino Invasion.” !eirpresence was so intimidating that Ricky Cummings, agenerally progressive Democrat running for re-electionto the State House of Representatives, voted for someof the anti-immigrant bills in the legislature. WhenMIRA leaders challenged him, he told them that Klan-generated calls had “worn out his cell phone.”

!e Klan’s Web site says, “It’s time to declare war onthese illegal Mexican’s. ... !e racial war is among us, willyou "ght with us for the future of our race and for ourchildren? Or will you sit on your ass and do nothing?Our blissful ignorance is over. It is time to "ght. Timefor Mexico and Mexicans to get the hell out!!!” !eWeb 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, andthe state a&liate of the Federation for American Immi-gration Reform

In 2007 Republicans introduced 21 anti-immigrantbills 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 AfricanAmerican 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 bene"t applicants, to prohibit undocumentedstudents at state universities, and to require local policeto check immigration status. Mike Lott sponsoredmany of these bills.

!e MIRA, however, defeated all of the proposedlaws. “!e black caucus stood behind us every time,”Evans says proudly. !ere are no immigrant or Latinolegislators. Without the caucus, all 21 bills would havepassed in 2007, as would have 19 similar bills in 2006.

!e caucus didn’t just wage a “vote no” campaign.It also proposed a series of pro-worker measures thatwould have abolished at-will employment (the doctrinethat says employers don’t need any justi"cation for ter-minating workers), provided interpreters, and estab-lished a state department of labor (Mississippi is theonly state without one). While these bills didn’t pass,either, the di$erence 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 theMIRA participates is powerful enough to stop the worstproposals, it isn’t yet powerful enough to elect a legisla-tive majority. Changing demographics is one elementof a strategy to change that political terrain, but num-bers alone aren’t enough. Chandler describes three fac-tions in the state’s Democratic party-the black caucusat one end, white conservatives hanging on at the other,and “liberals who will do whatever they have to do toget elected” in the middle.

A%er some Democratic candidates campaigned in2007 on an anti-immigrant platform, the MIRA wrotea letter in protest to Howard Dean, national chair ofthe Democratic Party. !ose tactics, it said, were under-mining the only strategy capable of changing the state’s

politics. “!e attacks on Latinos, initiated by Republi-can Phil Bryant a year and a half ago, and joined byother Republicans, are now being echoed by Democratslike John Arthur Eaves [the party’s gubernatorial can-didate] and Jamie Franks [its candidate for lieutenantgovernor],” the letter said. State party leaders who“would go along to be accepted, rather than show thecourage necessary for positive change ... are peddlingracist lies against immigrants that violate the core of theparty’s progressive agenda. We do not need politicianswhose only concern is getting elected. We need leaderswho will represent the best interests of all the workingpeople of Mississippi.”

Despite their anti- immigrant rhetoric, both Eaves’and Franks’ campaigns were unsuccessful. ConservativeRepublican Haley Barbour was returned to the gover-nor’s mansion and Phil Bryant was elected lieutenantgovernor. Democrat Jim Hood, however, was re-electedattorney general, with a higher vote total than eitherEaves or Franks. He was the only Democratic statewidecandidate who did not mount an anti-immigrant cam-paign and who had earlier been convinced by the AFL-CIO’s 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 a%er being re-elected toa fourth term. Barbour appointed conservative Repub-lican Rep. Roger Wicker to "ll the vacancy, and set thevote to choose a permanent replacement for the No-vember 2008 general election.

“We can’t rely just on the demographic shi% towin,” says MIRA’s Fleming, who plans to run for theseat. He notes that a winning majority in Mississippiwould require about 80 percent of the African Ameri-can vote, 20 percent to 25 percent of the white vote, and

“We do not need politicianswhose only concern isgetting elected. We needleaders who will representthe best interests of all theworking people ofMississippi.”


BAJI Reader 27

all of the growing vote of immigrants and other peopleof color. “But demographics makes it a viable race. Welive in a conservative state where people don’t acceptnew ideas easily, so the challenge for progressives is thatwe have to campaign and educate people at the sametime. If we want people to move out of their comfortzone, we need a powerful message.”

In Mississippi, that message focuses on jobs, healthcare, a$ordable housing, and the basic economic issuesa$ecting working people in a state with one of the na-tion’s lowest standards of living and lowest levels of so-cial services. Immigration issues, Fleming says, are notsome toxic topic to be avoided at all costs. “If we talkabout it in the context of protecting jobs, wages, andrights for everyone, it’s something that can bring us to-gether.”

Finding common ground among immigrants,African Americans, and labor is the pillar of the MIRA’slong-term strategy. Jaribu Hill of the MIRA and exec-utive director of the Mississippi’s Workers’ Center, haslaunched her own bid for election to the legislature as aDemocrat and argues that winning in the South re-quires open discussion of race and civil rights, even if itmakes established institutions-including unions-un-comfortable. Before she can start any campaign in the"sh plants where the workers’ center is active, she says,“We have to talk about racism. !e union focuses onthe contract, but skin color issues are also on the table.”

To organize a multiracial workforce, the divisionsbetween African Americans and immigrants need to berecognized and discussed, Hill insists. “We’re comingtogether like a marriage, working across our divides,”she says. Rhetoric calling the current immigrant-rightsmovement the “new civil-rights movement” doesn’t 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 betterlives-we came in chains,” Hill says. “Today Frito Laywages in Mississippi are still much lower than [in] Illi-nois-$8.75 to $13.75 an hour. !is is the evolution of ahistorical oppression.”

Immigrants, when they, too, are paid that lowerwage, are entering an economic system that reproducesdiscrimination and tiers of inequality originally estab-lished to control and pro"t from black labor. !ey in-herit a second-class status that developed before theyarrived

Jean Damu, a writer and member of the Black Al-liance for Just Immigration, also warns that drawing aparallel between the situations of blacks and immi-grants has its limits. “After all, who would want toclaim that deporting someone to Mexico is the sameas returning them to slavery?” he asks. “But the simi-larities are powerful enough to convince many AfricanAmericans that it is in their best self-interest to sup-port those who struggle against black people’s historicenemies.”

For all the di$erences, Hill still sees a commonground of experience. “We’re both victims of colonial-ism, we’re both second-class citizens denied our rights.If people could see how African American people livehere, they’d see it’s like Bolivia or Jamaica. On the otherhand, it’s important for African Americans to under-stand why people come here-because of what’s happen-ing in the countries they come from. If people had achoice, if they could live like human beings, they would-n’t have to risk their lives to get here. I don’t believe anyhuman being can be illegal.” !

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 andtrade, see www/dbacon.igc.org/Imgrants.

“Immigrants are enteringan economic system that

reproduces discriminationand tiers of inequality

originally established tocontrol and profit from

black labor.”



!e media love to show images of a few AfricanAmericans demonstrating together with right-winggroups, such as the Minutemen, against “illegal immi-gration.” With classic, blame-the-victim logic, these mis-guided individuals have ironically cast their lot withmodern-day Ku Klux Klansmen. Last April, however, agroup of African Americans and black immigrants cametogether in this city in support of immigrants and topresent di$erent view of black-immigrant relations.

“Black Alliance for Just Immigration was foundedto support the demands of the immigrant rights move-ment and to engage African Americans in a dialogueabout the underlying issues of race and economic statusthat frame U.S. immigration policy,” says co-founder theRev. Phillip Lawson.

“African Americans, with our history of being eco-nomically exploited, marginalized and discriminatedagainst, have much in common with people of colorwho 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 ofWestern Europeans.

BAJI aims to organize a core group of AfricanAmericans prepared to oppose racism in all of its formsby actively forging coalitions with immigrant commu-nities and organizations to build and sustain a newhuman rights movement that incorporates all social jus-tice issues, including immigrant rights and civil rights.

!ere is basis for such coalitions. A public opinionpoll conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts in April2006 found that a large majority of African Americansfeel that immigrants are hard-working (79%) and havestrong family values (77%).

African Americans were more than twice as likelyas whites (43% vs. 20%) to support public bene"ts for

undocumented immigrants. Two-thirds of whites and79% of African Americans said that the children of un-documented immigrants should be allowed to attendpublic schools.

Yet, there’s also basis for misunderstanding amongcommunities. More African Americans (22%) thanwhites (14%) say that they, or a family member, havelost a job, or not been hired, because an employer hiredan immigrant. In fact, 34% of African Americans, ascompared to 25% of whites, say immigrants take jobsfrom 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 rootcause, like that of current mass migration trends, lies inthe worldwide phenomenon called globalization.

Since the 1970s, globalization has meant the de-in-dustrialization of the United States, with union jobs inmanufacturing being moved to low-wage countries inLatin America and Asia. More recently, it has meant thecorporate outsourcing of jobs in the high tech and serv-ice industries.

Add to that the historical employer biases againstAfrican Americans, the deterioration of the tax base dueto white #ight from inner cities, and the systematic pub-lic and private disinvestment in urban areas, and youhave 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 ofa better life is the North American Free Trade Agree-ment (NAFTA). Rati"ed 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 MoreThan 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 theirland and their livelihood (according the New YorkTimes). Many of those farmers and their dependentshave migrated to the U.S., looking for employment.

Consequently, African Americans and immigrantsof color are pitted against each other for the proverbialcrumbs on the table. !is competition is a result of thenormal operation of an unjust economic system.

The U.S. is now attempting to impose a CentralAmerica Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on coun-tries in the region. Similar, so-called free trade agree-ments are also being proposed or implemented inmany countries in Africa, Asia, South America and theCaribbean.

!e Black Alliance for Just Immigration believesthat African Americans must join forces with immi-grants to "ght 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 withthe 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 moreAfrican Americans. !is victory is a model for theunion’s negotiations with 25 other Los Angeles hotels.

“!e tensions between African Americans and im-migrants will not be lessened until you increase thequantity and quality of jobs for African Americans,” saysSteven Pitts, an economist at the University of Califor-nia Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.“It’s good that one industry is taking baby steps in thatdirection.”

Pitts maintains that African Americans would ben-e"t if undocumented immigrants were granted legal sta-tus, citing recent studies, which show that legalizationwould improve wages and working conditions for both,immigrant and non-immigrant workers.

!e African American struggle for civil and eco-nomic rights has never been waged without allies. Con-versely, the struggle of immigrants for recognition oftheir human rights cannot be won without friends andsupporters. If they join together, the two movementscan take giant strides toward victories now and for fu-ture generations. !

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

nation’s leading immigrant rights advocates.



History

By Jean Damu

In August local law enforcement and immigrationo&cials in a small Pennsylvania town began receivingreports that undocumented immigrants were being of-fered sanctuary at a nearby residence. Furthermore, thereports went on to say, during the daytime hours, theimmigrants were blending into portions of the localpopulation and working in one of the city’s factories.

A%er several weeks of investigation, the authoritiesdetermined 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 morningraid would be the quickest and safest way to take the im-migrants into custody and to prepare them for deporta-tion.

!e raid was carried out in September. A%er a briefstruggle, the undocumented were overpowered, hand-cu$ed and taken to jail, where they were told to preparethemselves for hearings to determine their eligibility fordeportation.

!e above incident is not unusual. It has played outcountless times, in countless cities across the nation, asthe United States struggles to come to grips with a moralquestion that is rooted in economics – the issue of un-documented workers.

!e unusual aspect of the story, however, is that itdid not take place in 2007 or 2006. It took place in thetown of Christiana, Pa. And it took place in 1850.

In 1850, it was not the o&ce of Immigration andCustoms Enforcement (ICE) that conducted the earlymorning raid, but rather an o&ce of the U.S. Marshaland Deputy Marshal. And in 1850, the undocumentedthat were being rounded up were not Latinos or Asiansbut rather fugitive enslaved Africans who had crossed

into Pennsylvania from Delaware in an attempt to es-cape slavery.

!e fugitives were given sanctuary by members ofthe Black Self-Help Society, an armed organization thatwas formed many decades before the African BloodBrotherhood and the Black Panther Party. !e groupforeshadowed by only a few years the entry by massivenumbers of blacks into the Union armies to "ght theformerly o&cially endorsed “slavocracy.”

!e right-wing political powers of the 21st centurythat re-con"gured the Immigration and NaturalizationService into ICE – the agency that is currently conduct-ing raids against “illegal immigrants” as a response to theso-called “war on terrorism” – are direct descendants ofthose who created the U.S. Marshals and Deputy Mar-shals to enforce the fugitive slave legislations of the 18thand 19th centuries.

In the case of the Federal Marshals, the enforcementof immigration laws was fueled by politicians’ panderingto the political forces that would deliver free labor tothe agrarian south and keep the United States a whiteman’s country. !is objective was eloquently articulatedin America’s "rst immigration legislation adopted in1789 as part of the establishment of the federal govern-ment and the year the U.S. Marshal’s o&ce was broughtinto being.

!ough the conditions of life are vastly more com-plicated today than when the "rst immigration lawswere enacted, one can easily come to the conclusion thatone of ICE’s unstated missions is to help maintain whitesupremacy. If this is not true, then why does no one dis-cuss the issue of undocumented white workers whoenter 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 ofAfrican Americans


BAJI Reader 31

ment. !at would be a mistake. A%er all, who wouldwant to claim that deporting someone to Mexico is thesame as returning them to slavery? But the similaritiesare powerful enough to convince many African Ameri-cans that it is in their best interest to support those whostruggle against black people’s historic enemies.

It took decades of abolitionist work and unprece-dented armed struggle to wrest the practice of slaveryfrom the breast of America. Similar decades of educa-tional work and political organizing were required toconvince the majority of Americans that legalized dis-crimination in the form of the Jim Crow laws was alsowrong. !at 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. !is is no di$erentfrom earlier times when much confusion and misunder-standing existed in regards to slavery. In both cases,racism and unbridled white supremacy joined hands togenerate the confusion.

!ough the issue of immigration has been aroundsince the birth of this nation, the current immigrationmovement is still in its early stages. If it is to achieve theperceived successes of the civil rights movement, it mustdo a better job of uniting with that sector of the U.S.population that so clearly participated in and bene"tedto a signi"cant degree from the civil rights movement:Black America. On the other hand, African Americansshould be sensitive to the current conditions in whichmany immigrants "nd themselves. !ese conditions,a%er all, are not unfamiliar to us. !

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.



!e destiny of Africa’s scattered people has been de-cided in more countries than popular history has ac-knowledged. Mainstream history does not reveal howAfricans bene"ted from France’s humiliating defeat atPuebla, Mexico, on May 5, 1862.

Cinco de Mayo is a "tting and spirited annual cele-bration that reminds us of Mexico’s heroic though short-lived victory over Napoleon III’s larger andbetter-armed forces.

!ere are two very good reasons why black peopleshould also celebrate the French defeat at the hands ofMexican forces.

First, Napoleon supported the slave-holding Con-federacy, and second, Benito Juarez, the president ofMexico, had given land to anti-colonial black Seminoles.

Napoleon had hoped that the Confederacy wouldquickly win the Civil War, retain slavery and supplyFrench textile mills with cotton. Napoleon had been en-couraged by the major Confederate victory over Unionforces at Bull Run. He envisioned an alliance betweenhimself 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 imperialistambitions.

!e defeat of Confederate ally Napoleon was a his-

toric event that descendants of enslaved Africans and allothers who uphold democracy should celebrate with en-thusiasm.

Juarez had given land to a faction of the black Semi-nole freedom "ghters who had carried on a long andcourageous war of liberation against Spanish and Amer-ican colonizers.

It was certainly in the interest of blacks on bothsides of the Rio Grande that the Juarez government,which had befriended rebellious slaves and whose pred-ecessor had outlawed slavery, survive Napoleon’s inva-sion.

It is interesting to note that Napoleon was urged tooverthrow the Mexican government by the brother ofArchduke Maximilian of Austria.

Maximilian’s involvement gives Africans even morecause to join with Latino neighbors in celebrating Cincode Mayo.

Six years before Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion ofMexico, Maximilian married Carlotta, sister of KingLeopold II of Belgium, a despot who was responsiblefor colonizing, mutilating and annihilating millions ofCongolese in his drive for pro"ts.

During this period Europe’s ruling elites were busyplotting the conquest of non-Western people, o%en co-operating with one another and occasionally competing.

At the infamous 1884-85 Berlin West Africa Con-

Black and Brown Liberation ThroughShared Oppression

By Ron Wilkins, PhD

History

Mexicans and Blacks in This Hemisphere Are LinkedHistorically. 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.

!rough shared misfortune-conquest and slavery-the histories of Mexicans and blacks in this hemisphereare linked. Few, if any, oppressed people have overcomeadversity without assistance from allies.

Indigenous and African people have been one an-other’s primary ally in many instances, since the begin-ning of the pillage, slavery and genocide initiated byColumbus in the Americas 500 years ago.

Present-day black and brown con#icts, whether athigh school assemblies, on the streets of Venice, in thebig yard at San (uentin 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 ofcolor.

Whether the #ash point is Puebla or Chiapas,Cinco de Mayo is a perfect time to re#ect upon and dis-cuss the continuing resistance by Mexico’s people todomination. 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 super"cial andlukewarm acknowledgment of Mexican culture.

When honest accounts of history are "nally writteninto textbooks, African and Latino youth will be betterable to a&rm, deepen and project their long-establishedunity into the future. !

Ron Wilkins is a cross-cultural collaboration specialist and a professor in the A$icana Studies Department at CaliforniaState 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 movementwould have us believe that not a ounce of racism lies be-hind their e$orts. !e most media-visible "gures in thiscamp, such as Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, Tom Tan-credo and Victor Davis Hanson may argue the case forrestricting, deporting, rounding up and cutting o$ pub-lic services to those “illegals” stigmatized as culturallybackward, unhealthy potential terrorists. But theyprotest that their motives for doing so are as pure as thedriven snow.

In their writings and media appearances, the leadersof the anti-immigration movement claim their politicsare based not on a hatred of the racial Other but on theircommitment to the rule of law, the integrity of “our cul-ture,” the objective "ndings of social science, or betteremployment prospects for American workers. On pagea%er page of In Mortal Danger, Tom Tancredo’s diatribeagainst non-European immigrants and multicultural-ism, the presidential candidate and congressman repeat-edly complains that he and his colleagues have beenunfairly painted as racist or had their arguments mis-construed as racist.

But alongside these complaints Tancredo’s bookdrips with cultural condescension toward Mexican-Americans, Muslims and African-Americans. While heclaims that illegality is the problem, Tancredo soonmoves 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 declaresthat “gravid wombs should not guarantee free medicalcare.” One wonders whether Tancredo, both of whosegrandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Italy, wouldapply such terminology to his parents, and thus forfeithis own citizenship.

Beset by a “malignant multiculturalism,” the “vastmajority of Americans” are, according to Tancredo,forced to deal with its “raging intolerance of traditionalAmerica.” !is leads to such outrages, he tells us on thefollowing page, as Vanderbilt University renaming itsConfederate Memorial Hall dormitory to MemorialHall just “because the word ‘Confederate’ made somepeople uncomfortable.”

It apparently doesn’t make him feel uncomfortable.Tancredo addressed a meeting bedecked with Confed-erate #ags and promoted by the neo-ConfederateLeague of the South last year. Dr. Michael Hill, theLeague of the South’s 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 historyto 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.!ese, of course, are exactly the kinds of taunts that theracial nativists of the American past directed at Tan-credo’s Italian forebears when they reached the U.S.Casting about for more current action heroes, Tancredosettles on “noted constitutional attorney” Ann Coulter.Coulter, a former sta$er with the Center for IndividualRights, has defended Charles Murray and Richard Her-rnstein’s !e Bell Curve, which links race and IQ, andregularly heaps racist abuse on Muslims and others, as in“I believe our motto should be a%er 9/11: Jihad monkeytalks tough; jihad monkey takes the consequences. Sorry,I realize that’s o$ensive. How about ‘camel jockey’?What? Now what’d I say? Boy, you tent merchants sureare touchy. Grow up, would you?”

By Lee Cokorinos


BAJI Reader 35

Although Tancredo claims that individuals shouldbe judged on their actions and merits rather than theirgroup identity, he takes up Coulter’s proposal thateveryone from “suspect countries” should be immedi-ately deported. Tancredo has also proposed wholesaledeportation of undocumented immigrants. “If only ourpolitical leaders possessed” Coulter’s “clarity ofthought,” he writes.

The Suburban PlantationVictor Davis Hanson, author of Mexifornia: A State

of Becoming and another prominent think tank/TVtalking head in the immigration debate, also argues fora radical cutback in Mexican immigration and vigorouse$orts to root out multicultural thinking. At the coreof his approach is an imperious demand that immigrantsconform to his narrow, Anglicized view of Americanculture. He also abuses his progressive critics for al-legedly falsely charging the anti-immigration movementwith racism. “To discuss the issue rationally,” he claims,“is to expect charges of racist and nativist.” He thenblithely condemns American schools for promoting “the"ction of cultural equality.”

Hanson, a senior fellow at the right wing HooverInstitution, comes from a long line of California CentralValley growers and occupies a special niche in the "rma-ment of reaction, providing a philosophical bridge toearlier forms of anti-immigrant ideology.

One of the more enduring mythical themes in thecultural history of white supremacism in the UnitedStates has been the idyllic nature of the Southern plan-tation, where everyone knew his or her place in theracial pecking order. In exchange for accepting this socialorder, the laboring classes, according to this mythology,would be rewarded with a stable existence, leading to a“natural” harmony.

!is thinking was championed by mid-20th cen-tury adherents of the so-called “Southern Agrarian”movement such as Richard M. Weaver, one of thefounding intellectual "gures of modern conservatism.Skirting around the questions of slavery and Jim Crowlynching, they romanticized the supposed gentility and“small is beautiful” values of “civilized” southern life.Hanson extends some these Agrarianist themes, such asthe dignity of manual labor, to the farms and ranches ofthe southwest, worked largely by immigrant workers

from Mexico. While he does not embrace the philoso-phy of antebellum plantation idealism, Hanson’s writ-ings, particularly the early chapters of Mexifornia, are"lled with misty Agrarian school images of the allegednobility and order of a fading rural California farm life(e.g., his nostalgia for “the good times of our agrarianpast”).

In southern California the Agrarian mythologicaltradition 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 socialrelations on the small commercial farm and, in its morerecent incarnation, a celebration of the bucolic whitesuburbs as the pinnacle of civilization.

For Brian Janiskee, Hanson’s Claremont Institutecolleague, “the seemingly quiet and bland order of theCalifornia suburb is, in e$ect, a metaphysical a&rma-tion of the revolutionary core of the American regime.”

Needless to say, an intense and sometimes nastystruggle 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 agrowing Latino community. Journalist Roberto Lovatoreports that one participant at an Anaheim city councilmeeting said California is becoming “ground zero forAmerica’s second civil war.”


“I have a lot of sympathy forthose who want to recognize theheroism of Confederate soldiers,and even more for those whohave a reflexive and negativereaction to the NAACP’spronouncements these days. “Roger Clegg


“Imperatives to be Honored”!is rural/suburban reality sits rather incongru-

ously with Hanson’s shi%ing claims that racism is eitherno longer a big deal (it “belongs largely to the past”) oris immutable (“mankind by its very nature is prone tobe murderous, racist and sexist”). “Today’s Big Lie,” hetells 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 directedat African-Americans, and have a strong appeal for rightwing opponents of a strong and e$ective governmentrole in promoting racial justice. As they pour out of thethink tanks and media outlets of the right, they are feed-ing increasingly coordinated populist assaults onAfrican-American and immigrant communities.

Veterans of the Prop 209 campaign in California,such as Ward Connerly and Glynn Custred, and othersnow backing Connerly’s “Super Tuesday” multistatecampaign, have also jumped on the anti-immigrationbandwagon by linking it with their assault on a&rmativeaction. On the back cover of Mexifornia Linda Chavezof the misnamed Center for Equal Opportunity, whichhas been waging war for years against the gains of thecivil rights movement in law, education, employmentand fair housing, dutifully endorses Hanson’s view ofwhat she calls “disturbing trends among Mexican immi-grants.”

!is despite the fact that Chavez seems to have hadher own misgivings about anti-Mexican bias among herright wing colleagues. She speci"cally calls out “a fairnumber of Republican members of Congress, almost allin#uential conservative talk radio hosts, some cablenews anchors—most prominently, Lou Dobbs—and ahandful of public policy ‘experts’ at organizations suchas the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation

for American Immigration Reform, Numbers-, in addi-tion to fringe groups like the Minuteman Project.”

!ose who thought these words might signal a wel-come move toward multiculturalist rationality amongthe anti-diversity crowd were soon to be disappointed.Chavez quickly retracted them. Praising Hanson’s bookin the Wall Street Journal for its “highbrow, agrarian out-look,” Chavez’ sidekick Roger Clegg o$ers his ownracialized and imperious endorsement of “the core val-ues that de"ne American citizenship,” such as “don’t de-mand anything because of your race or ethnicity” and“don’t view working hard and studying hard as ‘actingwhite.’”

!ese are not a matter of choice for free individualsin a democratic society, but, he sternly instructs us (act-ing white?) “habits to be inculcated and imperatives tobe honored.”

Clegg’s “core values” are an open book. “I have a lotof sympathy,” he tells us, “for those who want to recog-nize the heroism of Confederate soldiers, and even morefor those who have a re#exive and negative reaction tothe NAACP’s pronouncements these days. My father’sparents were from Mississippi, and my parents and I areTexans, and in all my years growing up and playing armyI can never remember choosing to be a Yankee ratherthan a Rebel.”

Racial Nationalism and ImmigrationPat Buchanan, a veteran "gure in anti-immigration

politics, has a substantial following among the “pitch-fork brigade” at the grassroots of the populist right, andis also a regular presence on MSNBC. His sister Angela“Bay” Buchanan served as chair of Tom Tancredo’s Vir-ginia-based Team America PAC, which promotes anti-immigration candidates, and has now joined hispresidential campaign team. Bay Buchanan and Tan-


BAJI Reader 37

credo attended the Tombstone, Arizona kick-o$ rally ofthe Minuteman Project in April 2005. Although he payslip service to the legal changes brought about by the civilrights movement from the mid-1950s onwards, in hisbook State of Emergency: !e !ird World In#asion andConquest of America, Pat Buchanan deplores what hecalls America’s “national guilt over racism.”

Buchanan believes this guilt is leading toward na-tional and racial suicide (“demography is destiny”), atheme once championed by !eodore Roosevelt thathas a long history in the American nativist movement.In attempting to explain this guilt phenomenon, hepoints to the “seminal” work of Peter Brimelow, who ar-gues that America’s alleged obsessive guilt about racismwas caused essentially by an overreaction to the genoci-dal crimes of the Nazis.

By committing to “cleanse itself from all taints ofracism and xenophobia,” Buchanan quotes Brimelow,the “U.S. political elite” eventually “enacted the epochalImmigration Act of 1965,” which did away with a quotasystem based on national origins that favored Europeanimmigration, Brimelow, an English immigrant who runsVDARE, a website "lled with white supremacist andanti-Semitic material, has called the Pioneer Fund, afoundation that has backed racial eugenics research, a“perfectly respectable institution.” Buchanan writes aregular column for VDARE, for which Tom Tancredohas also written.

In the acknowledgments section of State of Emer-gency, Buchanan singles out the late Sam Francis (whoedited the white supremacist Council of ConservativeCitizens’ paper, !e Citizens Informer) and Brimelow asthe vanguard of the anti-immigration movement. Andwhile he praises the leaders of the anti-immigrant thinktank 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 VDAREcolumnists in the book and thanks James Fulford ofVDARE for help with the manuscript. !e racist rootsof the anti-immigration movement run deep. In his im-portant study of American immigration politics up tothe 1920’s, Strangers in the Land, John Higham identi-"es two broad strains of anti-immigrant racial suprema-cism, one based on culture and the other, with the riseof Social Darwinism, based on heredity and genetics.!ese trends now seem to be converging, and are beingmainstreamed into the American media throughBuchanan’s high visibility.

Nativism Goes to HarvardAs 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 formedin 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 in1896 and warned in a debate over imposing literacy tests

“Powerful strains of racially-charged propaganda

directed at immigrants havealso emanated from the

political elite and topuniversities.”

Haitians protest U.S. immigration policy, cc 2006 Danny Hammontree.



on immigrants that America’s national character was indanger 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 higherbirthrate, dooming white America.

Books such as Madison Grant’s 1916 !e Passing ofthe Great Race, proclaimed that “democracy is fatal toprogress when two races of unequal value live side byside.” !e book helped spur a nativist movement, backedby the Ku Klux Klan, that contributed to the passage ofdraconian restrictions on immigration in 1924. !e newnativist movement of today has also spurred a resur-gence of the racist Klan. Grant, a lawyer and presidentof the New York Zoological Society, was vice presidentof the Immigration Restriction League, which was,Higham tells us, “born at a meeting of "ve young bluebloods in the law o&ce of Charles Warren, later a notedconstitutional historian.” All "ve had attended Harvardtogether in the 1880’s and had gone on to do graduatework at Harvard’s Lawrence Scienti"c School or its lawschool. !e IRL, which eventually turned to eugenicsand brie#y considered renaming itself the Eugenic Im-migration League, quickly developed close ties with theleading nativist factions and lobbyists in Congress andwent on to "ght immigration under the direction ofprominent attorney Prescott Hall and Harvard profes-sor Robert DeCourcy Ward.

“Pat Buchanan with Footnotes”A century a%er the formation of the IRL, the tra-

dition of highbrow panic about the perils of immigra-tion still "nds a home at Harvard. In Who Are We? !eChallenges to America’s National Identity, Samuel P.Huntington, arguably the leading political scientist inthe U.S., strikes the very same themes that Buchanan,Tancredo and Hanson do in their less footnoted (or inthe case of Hanson, non-footnoted) nativist diatribes:white Protestant culture, which forms the core of Amer-ica’s identity, is being marginalized by immigration, mul-ticulturalism, and (Huntington adds) the“denationalization” of American elites.

For good measure, he produces a lengthy section onhow a&rmative action has contributed to the “decon-struction of America” through its alleged abandonmentof the intent doctrine, starting with the labor depart-ment’s enforcement of the anti-discrimination provi-sions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and continuingthrough the Supreme Court case Griggs v. Duke Power(401 U.S. 424, 1971).

Huntington’s notion that the intent doctrine has

been abandoned would surely come as a surprise tothose who see it as a major legal impediment to chal-lenging racial discrimination. Nevertheless, he writesthat a&rmative action, along with “the challenge toEnglish” has contributed to the rise of “subnational iden-tities” (African-Americans and Latinos) that are posinga dire threat to “the core culture.”

“Hispanization,” he tells us, echoing the rhetoric ofthe Minutemen, is threatening a “demographic recon-quista” of the southwest U.S. America’s unity, which hefalsely sees as based on “Anglo-Protestant” culture, isbeing undermined by largely Mexican in#uences. ButHuntington, while steering clear of racist pseudo-sci-ence, goes beyond the argument about culture to suggestthat “white nativist movements are a possible and plau-sible response” to the prospect that whites may somedaybecome 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.” Huntington’s argument, “at timesbordering on hysteria,” is “Pat Buchanan with foot-notes.”

Huntington’s 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 InfrastructureIdeological advocacy has played an important role

in the resurgence of racial nativism in the anti-immigra-tion movement. But the conservative think tank andfoundation infrastructure has played an important partin this revival, both by mainstreaming its ideas throughbooks, op-eds and media appearances and by supportingthe organizations promoting the demographic andother research that has fed it. !is intellectual infrastruc-ture feeds this movement at the base. Charles L.Heatherly, one of the architects of the Heritage Foun-dation’s model for furnishing right wing politicians withactionable policy ideas as editor of several of its Mandatefor Leadership handbooks, provided a “priceless contri-bution” to In Mortal Danger, Tom Tancredo writes. Aformer sta$er for Tancredo, Heatherly now works as asenior aide to the congressman (see his appearance onTancredo’s behalf on YouTube).

Victor Davis Hanson’s Mexifornia was written atthe suggestion of Peter Collier, the founding publisherof Encounter Books, which has been backed by theKoch, Bradley and Olin Foundations. It is an expandedversion of an article published by Hanson in City Jour-


BAJI Reader 39

Lee Cokorinos conducts political research on right-wing mo#ements and organizations. He is the author of !e Assaulton Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice (Rowman & Little%eld), and Target San Diego:!e Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy and Smart Go#ernment, and can be reached at [email protected]. Reprinted $om Equal Justice Society e-Newsletter - Issue 11 - Fall 2007 Equal Justice Society www.equaljusticesociety.org

nal, the Manhattan Institute’s #agship publication.Myron Magnet, the journal’s editor, helped edit the ar-ticle and book.

According to Mediatransparency.org, the Olinfoundation provided $100,000 in funding for VDAREthrough Sally Pipes’ Paci"c Research Institute. Olin alsofunded the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies,of which Samuel P. Huntington is the founding director.!e Smith Richardson and Bradley foundations pro-vided support for Huntington’s Who Are We?

Bradley also provided support for the Center forImmigration Studies. A report advocating the mass de-portation of illegal immigrants, “!e Economics of Im-migration Enforcement,” has been published by HenryRegnery’s Georgia-based National Policy Institute. !ePioneer Fund lists the National Policy Institute as itslargest grant recipient on its 2005 federal tax return-Fighting Wedge Politics

!e right wing political infrastructure has also fedstrategic initiatives designed to polarize the African-American and Latino communities over immigration.!e Minuteman movement, which has spread across thecountry 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.!e Federation for American Immigration Reform, co-founded by John Tanton, the Michigan-based leader ofa dense network of anti-immigration organizations, at-tempted to form a front called Choose Black Americain May 2006.

The good news is that efforts to counter thewedge politics of the Minuteman movement and na-tional groups such as FAIR are gaining ground. TheEqual Justice Society, Black Alliance for Just Immigra-tion, Latino Issues Forum, Greenlining Institute andCentro Legal de la Raza have begun the process of en-couraging much-needed dialogue (available online) onimmigration issues.

In the South, with a growing Latino population,critically important organizing and advocacy initiativesto counter the wedge politics of the right are being ledby the National Network for Immigrant and RefugeeRights, Highlander Research and Education Center’sInstitute for Immigrant Leadership Development (IN-DELI), Black Alliance for Just Immigration and theSoutheast Regional Economic Justice Network. If ade-quately funded and supported, this infrastructure canengage the racial nativist movement where it countsmost—at the grassroots level and in the media. !

Haitians protest U.S. immigration policy, cc 2006 Danny Hammontree.



“The essence of trade unionism is social uplift. The labormovement 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 wordsduring the 20th century he was the leader of the Broth-erhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The Brotherhood ofSleeping Car Porters was a union mainly of AfricanAmerican workers.Other unions refused to organizeAfrican American workers and accused African Amer-icans of taking jobs, lowering wages and strikebreaking.

Today’s labor movement is faced with some of thesame challenges. Should we organize the dispossessed,the neglected, downtrodden and the poor? Should weorganize undocumented immigrant workers? Shouldwe continue to organize African American workers?!e U.S. Labor Movement can not survive unless we arewilling to organize undocumented immigrant workers,African American workers, Latinos and womenthroughout the South and the Southwest, everywhere.Union density will continue to decline, unless organiz-ing is escalated and combined with a broad new socialand economic justice vision and agenda.

In 1955 organized labor was 35% of the workforce;today it is only 12.5% of the workforce. Technologicalchanges combined with the moving of work abroad andother factors have contributed to the decimation of

union density. High wages and bene"ts cannot be sus-tained for any union as long as undocumented immi-grant workers, African Americans, Latinos and the poorremain outside the organized labor movement. Unionmembers should be tireless supporters of the immigrantrights movement and advocate support for civil andhuman rights struggles. Standing along side undocu-mented workers, for civil and human rights should beseen as a badge of honor in unions and not issues thatorganized workers reluctantly support. But this will nothappen 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 immigrantrights, organizing the poor and workers of color, willonly lead the Labor Movement further and further intoself-centeredness and decline.

While expanding union -worker membership is im-portant, we must stand "rmly on the side of those in the"ght for social and economic justice. Concretely thismeans supporting the rights of undocumented immi-grant workers, African American workers, Latinos,women, and the poor. !e organized Labor Movementmust do more than "ght 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

Labor and Immigration


BAJI Reader 41

women and workers of color, all are being forced intopoverty. Organized labor cannot win in a "ght withglobal corporations without allies from other exploitedand 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 theexistence of trade unionism and will assist hard workingAmerican workers. Workers have been taught that,problems in the organized labor movement exist be-cause we just have some bad employers.

Today’s global capitalist and neo-liberals see union-ism as their class enemy and are committed to puttingthe nails in the co&n of organized labor. Shallow dis-cussions among union members about bad employerswill not raise the level of awareness of workers concern-ing the true nature of the problems that workers and theoppressed are facing.

Intense, deep and substantive discussions need tobe held at work sites, schools and communities aboutimmigration reform and rights. Avoiding the discussion

on immigration reform will only contribute to furtherweakening of the organized labor movement, the attackson immigrants and the erosion of worker/civil andhuman rights. !e real enemy of organized labor is notimmigrants, it is Global Capitalism. Global Capitalismcontinually drives workers from poorer countriesabroad, displaces more workers and forces them intodeeper and deeper poverty.

Immigrant Rights Are Workers Rights Immigrants are "ghting for basic rights such as the

right to organize, equal wages and bene"ts and a pathto citizenship without obstacles and more. Immigrantbashing, violence, exclusion and discrimination is asdeadly as White Supremacy. Make no mistake, these at-tacks are meant to crush the spirit and subjugate andneutralize union and unorganized workers. !e LaborMovement has an opportunity to rise up and play a lead-ing role in the "ght for the rights of immigrants. And,the Labor Movement should never forget the un"n-ished business of organizing and "ghting for the rightsof the millions of African American workers and Latinoworkers in the South and Southwest. !

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 immigrantsmarched in streets of large cities and small towns alike af-"rming their basic dignity and demanding a justice whichwas 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 wavesof the mid 1930s and 1940s and the modern civil rightsmovement of the late 1950s and 1960s.

However, if the movement for immigrant rights sig-nal the next great leap forward in empowerment, whatstill needs to be answered is how to address the incom-plete revolution which took place during the moderncivil rights movement. !is race question —- or moreaccurately, this Black question —- must be answered ifsocial justice movements are to maximize the resultsfrom the new opportunities which will arise during thenext period.

!is issue is particularly vexing for the labor move-ment as it tries to build its power. Immigrant workers havebeen at the center of many of the most dynamic cam-paigns for economic justice over the past twenty years. Atthe same time, Black workers have been among thestrongest supporters of unions since World War II andhave shown the greatest propensity and inclination to joinunions of any racial/ethnic grouping. !e alienation ofjust a portion of this support can defeat advances in pro-gressive causes. Recently, the conservative movement hasassiduously cultivated Black public opinion to gain sup-port for its anti-immigrant position. If they are successfulin splitting even a small segment of the Black communityfrom the movement for immigrant rights, the result couldbe devastating. !is 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 manyworking class families and communities have su$ereddeclining fortunes. !is decline in economic outcomeshas hit Black communities particularly severe because itoccurs in the midst of signi"cant changes. Some key fea-tures of the Jim Crow era were constraints on Blacks inhousing and labor markets resulting in “Black” neigh-borhoods and “Black” jobs. !ese constraints formedthe basis of a vibrant community with dense social net-works which sustained Blacks during the horrors of seg-regation and shaped the movement which eventuallyoverthrew segregation. With the end of segregation,constraints changed and the last thirty-"ve years haveseen the development of new “Black” spaces. SomeBlacks have migrated outward from the central citiescreating new Black neighborhoods and providing theopportunities for the transformation of old Black neigh-borhoods. At the same time, the new constraints, in con-junction with the new global economy, have providednew job opportunities and transformed the old Blackjobs. !e transformation in Black neighborhoods andBlack jobs has resulted in new immigrants penetratingthese spaces.

!e 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 thecivil rights movement; and the rise of immigrants fromthe global South —- have provided the grist for tensionsbetween Blacks and immigrants. It is my strong beliefthat these tensions will never be addressed adequatelyuntil there is a dynamic movement to tackle the varietyof issues re#ecting anti-Black racism in the UnitedStates.

!e birth of this movement would be assisted bynew 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. !e very positioning of Black“against” immigrants ignores this reality. !at position-ing renders invisible disparate immigrant experiences ofBlacks from Haiti, Central and South America, the Eng-lish-speaking and Spanish-speaking islands of theCaribbean, and various countries in Africa. Such “invis-ibility” is similar to the treatment of Blacks during JimCrow and generates feelings of animosity.

Second, what distinguishes social movements is thedi$erent social basis of each movement. !e core of themodern civil rights movement was the Black commu-nity which coalesced around issues of racial justice. In asimilar fashion, the core of recent immigrant upsurgehas been the Latino community. Attempts to “frame”the immigrant rights movement as the “new civil rightsmovement” denies the historical reality of the Black coreof the modern civil rights movement and the contem-porary reality of the unique features of the Latino im-migrant community —- whose experiences anddemands for justice are valid on their own merit withoutthe need for the imprimatur of the modern civil rightsmovement. By ignoring these realities, some Blacks feelas if “our” movement is being appropriated by others.

!ird, the Black community faces a two dimen-sional job crisis: a crisis of unemployment and a crisis oflow-wage work. A realistic explanation of the crisisneeds to be developed which centers the source of the

problem on historical and contemporary institutionalracism. !is explanation must emphasize the agency ofemployers —- as the central players in the determinationof 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 newmovement than issue reframing are concrete organizingneeds. Unions need to develop strategies which directlydeal 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 nicheswhere explicit “Black” unionizing drives take place, "nd-ing creative mechanisms to preserve public sector jobsand 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 developinglabor-community action projects which address theneeds of Black workers who are not in traditional uniontargets. Finally, the realities of the unemployment crisismust be addressed. Traditional responses focus on indi-vidual skill development. Unions can be instrumentalin expanding these approaches to include strategieswhich link individuals with organizations —- union ap-prenticeship programs; community-based job trainingprograms —- which seek to build the power of workersin the labor market that they are trained to enter. !

Steven Pitts works at the UC-Berkeley Labor Center. !is article was published in the Fall 2007 issue of the Labor andWorking-Class History Association (LAWCHA) Newsletter.




It’s interesting that President Obama’s "rst trip outof the U.S. was to Canada, and that he has begun talkingabout incorporating labor standard into the NorthAmerican Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Imple-mented January 1, 1994, and by no coincidence sparkingthe Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, NAFTA wasa 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 inthe global market place, NAFTA was fervently opposedby various social movements and constituencies, partic-ularly organized labor and environmental groups. Bothgroups, and others, were deeply suspicious of the mo-tives and actuality of NAFTA. !eir concerns, as itturns out, were largely justi"ed.

!ough NAFTA did result in the introduction ofsome new jobs, what is critical is the net e$ect ofNAFTA. If one factors in losses and gains, the net im-pact has been the loss of approximately 900,000 jobs inthe USA.

Unfortunately, much of the NAFTA debate stopshere or within a few feet. NAFTA most certainly hasdrained jobs as well as placed restrictions on the abilityof jurisdictions to direct their local economies. It has en-couraged the growth of sweatshop and near-sweatshoplabor along the USA/Mexico border. !is is the side ofNAFTA with which many of us are familiar. Many ofus remember Ross Perot’s famous comment concerningNAFTA representing the giant sucking sound of jobsbeing drained away from the USA and going to Mex-ico.

!is is not the entire story. And, while it is goodthat President Obama has reopened the discussion con-

cerning NAFTA, he hasn’t drawn much attention to theimpact that NAFTA has had on Mexico, and therebyon us in the USA.

What is critical for us to grasp on this side of theRio Grande River is that NAFTA has had a devastatingimpact on the Mexican economy. !rough forcing theMexican farmer to compete with USA farmers, ruralMexico’s economy has been turned upside down. !ereality is that the Mexican farmer has been unable tocompete, and as a result there began - in the mid 1990s- a migration of rural Mexicans into the larger Mexicancities. Finding few job opportunities, the migrationmoved north toward the USA. !is was accompaniedby the impact of NAFTA on the Mexican public sector,which also su$ered severe body blows, thereby under-mining what little social safety net the people of Mexicohad.

!is side of the NAFTA equation is critical to dis-cuss because it helps us understand why hundreds ofthousands of Mexicans chose to leave their homes andhead 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 Iwas moderating a debate on immigration within a laborunion. !e vehemence of some of the anti-immigrantspeakers, including - and very unfortunately - an AfricanAmerican woman, was not only deeply unsettling, butequally lacking in any historical context. While the focusof the anti-immigrant speakers was allegedly undocu-mented immigrants in general, there was nothing intheir 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 theagreement, fearing that it would rob U.S. workers of jobs. Denis Poroy/AP/Wide World Photos

about Irish, Poles, Russians, or anyone other thanLatinos, and most particularly, Mexicans. Whenconfronted with this question of NAFTA they hadnothing to say. Interestingly, they could also not ex-plain why they had nothing to say about any otherethnic undocumented worker besides Latinos.

It is commonplace in the USA to think in termsof what a$ects us, and particularly the notion thatwhatever harms us in the USA must be among themost catastrophic things to a$ect the planet. Rarelydo we stop and think about the actual consequencesof 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 likeNAFTA or military actions such as the 1980s Cen-tral American wars, end up boomeranging.

A real change in the White House would be forthe leaders to see beyond the Rio Grande andthereby actually see what is happening here. !

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is Executive Editor of !e Black Commentator. He is also a Senior Scholar with the Institute for PolicyStudies and the immediate past president of TransA$ica Forum. He is also co-author (with Fernando Gapasin) of thebook 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 tocompete with U.S. farmers, rural

Mexico’s economy has beenturned upside down...

As a result there began amigration of rural Mexicans

into the larger Mexican cities. Finding few job

opportunities, the migration moved

north toward the U.S.”




!e battle continues to rage between economists,politicians, immigrant rights activists and Black anti-im-migration activists over whether illegal immigrants arethe major cause of double-digit joblessness among poor,unskilled young Black males. !e battle lines are so tightand impassioned that Black anti-immigration activistsplan a march for jobs for American-born Blacks on April28 in Los Angeles. !is is a direct counter to theplanned mass action three days later by some immigrantrights groups.

According to Labor Department reports, nearly 40percent of young Black males are unemployed. Despitethe Bush administration’s boast that its tax cut and eco-nomic policies have resulted in the creation of morethan 100,000 new jobs, Black unemployment still re-mains the highest of any group in America.

Black male unemployment for the past decade hasbeen nearly double that of white males. !e picture isgrimmer for young Black males.

But several years before the immigration combat-ants squared o$, then University of Wisconsin graduateresearcher Devah Pager pointed the "nger in anotherdirection, a direction that makes most employerssquirm. And that’s the persistent and deep racial dis-crimination in the workplace.

Pager found that Black men without a criminalrecord are less likely to "nd a job than white men withcriminal records. Pager’s pointing to discrimination asthe main reason for the racial disparity in hiring set o$a howl of protest from employers, trade groups and evena Nobel Prize winner.

!ey lambasted her for faulty research. !ey saidher sample was much too small and the questions toovague. !ey pointed to the ocean of state and federallaws that ban racial discrimination.

But in 2005, Pager, now a sociologist at Princeton,duplicated her study. She surveyed nearly 1,500 privateemployers in New York City.

She used teams of Black and white testers with stan-dardized resumes, and she followed up their visits withtelephone interviews with employers. !ese are the stan-dard methods researchers use to test racial discrimination.

!e results were exactly the same as in her earlierstudy. Black men with no criminal records were no morelikely to "nd work than white men with criminalrecords. !at’s true despite the fact that New York hassome of the nation’s toughest laws against job discrimi-nation.

Dumping the blame for the chronic job crisis ofyoung, poor Black men on illegal immigration stokesthe passions and hysteria of immigration reform oppo-nents, but it also lets employers o$ the hook for discrim-ination. And it’s easy to see how that could happen.

!e mountain of federal and state anti-discrimina-tion laws, a&rmative action programs and successfulemployment discrimination lawsuits gives the public theimpression that job discrimination is a relic of a shame-ful and bigoted racial past.

But that isn’t the case, and Pager’s study is hardlyisolated proof of that. Countless research studies, theUrban League’s annual State of Black America report, a2005 Human Rights Watch report and the numerousEEOC pattern and practice discrimination complaintsover the past decade reveal that employers have devisedendless dodges to evade anti-discrimination laws.

!at includes rejecting applicants by their namesand the areas of the city they live in and claiming thatthe advertising was mistaken or the jobs advertised were"lled. In a seven-month comprehensive university studyof the hiring practices of hundreds of Chicago area em-

Discrimination not Illegal ImmigrantsFuels Black Job Crisis

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson


BAJI Reader 47

ployers a few years before Pager’s graduate study, manytop company o&cials interviewed said they would nothire Blacks.

When asked to assess the work ethic of white, Blackand Latino employees by race, nearly 40 percent of theemployers ranked Blacks dead last. !e employers rou-tinely described Blacks as “unskilled,” “uneducated,” “il-literate,” “dishonest,” “lacked initiative,”“unmotivated,” “involved with gangs and drugs,” “didnot understand work,” “unstable,” “lacked charm,” “hadno family values” and “poor role models.” !e consensusamong these employers was that Blacks brought theiralleged pathologies to the work place and were to beavoided at all costs.

White employers weren’t alone in expressing thesebigoted and ignorant views. !e researchers found thatsome Black business owners shared many of the samenegative attitudes.

Other surveys have found that a substantial num-ber of non-white business owners also refuse to hireBlacks. !eir bias e$ectively closed out another area ofemployment to thousands of Blacks, solely based ontheir color.

!is only tells part of the sorry job picture for manypoor Blacks. !e Congressional Black Caucus reportsthat at least half of all unemployed Black workers havebeen out of work nearly a year or more. Many more havegiven up looking for work. !e Census does not countthem among the unemployed.

!e dreary job picture for the unskilled and mar-ginally skilled urban poor, especially the Black poor, iscompounded by the racially skewed attitudes of smalland 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 andunemployed. !

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. Contact him at [email protected].

Marchers in LA build black brown coalition on immigration. Photo courtesy of the Community Coaliton.


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Introducing the BAJI ReaderA publication of the Black Alliance for Just Immigrationwww.blackalliance.org

The Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) was founded in April 2006 to engageAfrican Americans and other communities in dialogue that leads to challenges toU.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 blackimmigrants from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. BAJI provides the AfricanAmerican community with a progressive analysis and framework on immigration thatlinks the interests of African Americans with those of immigrants of color. BAJI’sanalysis emphasizes the impact of racism and economic globalization on AfricanAmerican and immigrant communities as a basis for forging alliances across thesecommunities.

The BAJI Reader contains articles that expose the powerful forces that are forcingmigrants 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 BAJI’s work by ordering copies of the first edition of the BAJI Reader!

Table of Contents: IntroductionBlack Perspectives on Race, Globalization and ImmigrationBAJI Steering Committee

Faith-based PerspectivesImmigrants Play Role in KingLegacy Gerald Lenoir and Larisa Casillas

Bridging CommunitiesRev. Nelson Johnson

Black—Immigrant UnityRacism at a Low-Income Housing SiteLauren Smiley

Black and Brown TogetherDavid Bacon

Blacks, Immigrants Are AlliesMore Than AdversariesGerald Lenoir

HistoryImmigration Raids Echo History of African AmericansJean Damu

Cinco de Mayo: Black andBrown Liberation ThroughShared OppressionRon Wilkins

The Racist Roots of the Anti-Im-migration MovementLee Cokorinos

Labor and ImmigrationUnions Must Support the Immigrant Rights MovementKarega Hart

The Race Question: BuildingLabor Power in the Context ofthe Immigrant Upsurge Steven Pitts

NAFTA Devastates U.S. andMexican LaborBill Fletcher

BAJI Reader Volume 1 Number 1 Spring 2009

Black Perspectives on Race, Globalization and Immigration


BAJI Reader Spring 2009

Documents