EDUCATION GAP: WWJN (What Would Janelle Need )

January 15 2008

Janelle (not her real name) is a bright African American teenager, two years behind in school and currently failing in her course work. She is clearly a child not performing at her academic potential. What if we made policy as if the needs of Janelle, a public school student I tutor, were our primary concern?

What Would Janelle Need to succeed?

Janelle would need a warm safe home that is securely hers. She and her mother and siblings have been shuffling from one shelter to another for at least two years. Whenever she moves she misses school for days, even weeks. Sometimes when I meet with her issues of security, lack of sleep and fear are too great to focus on reading.

Janelle’s family would need a steady form of income. With a preschool child at home, this means her mother must either earn income to stay home with her child or earn enough at a job to pay for high-quality day care. Economic needs are so overwhelming in Janelle’s home that academic needs must be secondary.

Janelle and her family would need comprehensive health care like all families do so they proceed with the rest of their lives without fear of illness or disability. In Janelle’s young life she has dealt with more than her share of death and disease, exacerbated by lack of access to health care.

Janelle would need a future. She would need to see people like herself who succeed- not fantastic rags to riches stories that she can only dream about but real possible paths to a future that provides a diverse array of positive choices.

Janelle would need a school system that allows her to make real progress. Now when she goes to school she is faced with overwhelming task of running to catch up to a moving train. Her progress is not measured, only the growing distance between her and her class mates. Testing kids to death, closing schools, reducing teachers’ benefits, don’t benefit Janelle. Only fully funding our schools to provide the teachers and materials needed to fulfill the needs of all students, will help Janelle succeed.

As a reading tutor I dream of the day that there is no shortage of books to chose from written to address cultural, academic, social and emotional needs of African American children, and other children of color. We treasure every new book because of its rarity, and the cost of procuring it. Janelle would need books and curricula that speak to her soul and her academic needs. She would need the funds to flood children like herself with books so they can find their own voices through literature.

As the white over-educated mother of a public school high school senior excelling in the same public school system that is failing Janelle, I know how much daily assistance my child has needed in the last thirteen years, from adjusting to kindergarten rules to mining the college application process. If we are ever going to close the education gap Janelle would need a school that provides evening and weekend homework assistance. This is a tall order. It means providing transportation, lights, and heat and salaries.

Janelle would need to know there will be a place for her in college when she gets there. We need to pay her tuition and find her an institution that will take her the next step. As a college educator I know that despite the current hype, selectivity does not create excellence in the higher education institutions. It only ensures that the next crop of college-educated leaders will be as insular and narrow-minded about protecting their class privilege, as the last. We need more colleges and more access, more ideas and backgrounds in the best and brightest pot, so that the next generation of people with

know-power will have the interests of Janelle’s children in mind.

From a home to live in, to college tuition, everything Janelle needs costs money. Anyone who thinks they have a solution to the education gap that will not involve spending more on the needs of our neediest children is wasting their breath and our time.

But here is a question to ask yourself: Would your life be better or worse if the policy makers, from the President to local school boards, asked What Would Janelle Need before they acted?

Would you be better off if no-one was homeless; if everyone had adequate work, and mothers could afford to choose to stay home or access high quality childcare; if everyone had health coverage and every child felt they had a future with choices and a positive and fulfilling role to play in society? Would your world be better or worse if every child was given the resources to reach their education potential at their own pace; if every child had the choice to become a college-educated adult?

It’s an election year. The pundits would have you believe that you, the public, can be divided by your issues – domestic or foreign, economic or social, health care, or housing, or education. Tell them these are fools’ choices. Demand that the candidates and the media spinners dig deeper. Tell them to ask WWJN?---- What Would Janelle Need? And when they come back with “How do we pay for it?” Tell them to begin by STWS---- Stopping The War ……Sweetie !

Anne Winkler-Morey, Ph .D teaches history at colleges and Universities in the Twin Cities area and is a reading tutor for “Janelle” and others in the Minneapolis Public school District.

IMMIGRATION DEBATE: Back of the Line

The Back of the Line

To hear some Presidential candidates tell it, Americans’ problems will be solved if we just send the lowest paid workers in this country home and make them, “get to the back of the line.” Yes, to those who clean our nations toilets, break their backs in our fields, stand in a frozen puddle of blood processing our nation’s meat, change the diapers of our nation’s children: we not only refuse you citizenship, we not only call you names, but we act as though you are criminals, we arrest you and deport you and tell you to get in the back of the line.

Lets call this what it is: scape-goating. It happens every time things get worse for the majority of us in the vast and diverse middle. We look for someone to blame.

And things are defiantly getting worse for those of us living on $20-100 thousand. Some of us must sell that second home, some of us are cutting back on everything else to pay that mortgage, some of us are facing foreclosure and some of us are looking for a place to rent that we can afford. We all feel the squeeze of rising healthcare, rent, mortgage, food and gas prices. We are seeing our real wages decline.

We are looking for someone to blame.

Instead of looking in front of us to those mortgage, health insurance, pharmaceutical, and utilities corporations, making a killing off our hard times, we turn around and glare at the back of line, to those who feed families and relatives in other nations on salaries of $12,000; those who live without drivers licenses and health care access, those who face discrimination in housing and education. We look back and say “get to the back of the line”!

Immigrants are already at the back of the line. They share that growing backspace with Iraq War veterans, homeless citizens, inner city kids, small farmers and a growing number of people losing their livelihoods as factories cross borders seeking cheaper wages. Let’s show those corporate hogs who say we have money for war, but not housing and education and veteran health care, that we know who is to blame.

It’s not immigrants.

Anne Winkler-Morey has three college degrees, works four jobs, makes $20,000 and would have no health insurance if not for the husband’s union job. She is trying to figure out how to pay her daughter’s college tuition.

IMMIGRATION, GLOBAL VIEW: As Paris Burns: Unfinished Thoughts on Race, Class, and Immigration

As Paris Burns: Unfinished Thoughts about Race, Class, and Immigration.

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us. Thich Nhat Hang—Vietnamese monk, activist and writer Writing about her years in Paris, Maya Angelou related a conversation she had with someone who claimed that racism did not exist in France, because the French never engaged in the slave trade. Incredulous at the native’s lack of historical consciousness, Angelou replied, “What about Haiti? What about Martinique? ” France, of course, profited mightily from slave plantations in its Caribbean colonies. The fruits of Haitian slave labor sweetened French coffers in the 18th century. Cheap Caribbean-grown sugar, mixed with succulent French grapes, produced the finest wines in the world, and sipping these liquors during long afternoon lunches became synonymous with being quintessentially French. Unlike in the United States, French slave plantations were located far from the European continent. This made it easier for the French people to harbor the illusion that their society was free of the racism so blatant in the U.S. South where Maya Angelou grew up. At the same time many French people believed the false notion that there was such a thing as a homogenous French (white) culture; that must be protected. It is such an idea that helped nurture the seeds of racism, manifested in oppressive conditions experienced by French citizens of non-European heritage living in Paris suburbs today Angelou’s experience reminds me of conversations I have had with white Minnesotans about my move from North Carolina to the Midwest. “It’s really racist in the South, isn’t it?” they would ask. Often they would follow with an aside that seemed relevant to them about “those black single mothers who come up from Chicago to take advantage of our welfare system” or “those Mexicans who cross the border in order to break the law and take our jobs,” or “those Indians who use treaty rights to gain special favors.” I had never heard the term “I’ve been Jewed” before moving to Minneapolis. It was a favorite at the grocery store where I worked in Dinkytown, used whenever someone shortchanged the cashier. While shocked and personally insulted, at the time I was still using “gypped” to connote the same thing, totally unconscious of the racist origins of that term. What all these deeply racist comments indicate is that people feel that they are being cheated. When resources are tight, humans look for those who are different from them to blame. We tell ourselves that we belong. We harbor this illusion that our lives would be better if the “other” were removed. Today racism is on the rise, and its origins are in the global economy which continues, not unlike the Atlantic slave trade that produced wealth for France and the United States hundreds of years ago. Like the French Angelou encountered, many of us use geography to remove ourselves from the scene of the crime while reaping its benefits. Sweatshops produce products that consumers thousands of miles away can enjoy without seeing the slavelike conditions sewn into the fibers of their shirts. On the other hand, try as so many of us do to find a NIMBY (not in my backyard!) haven, a home, a neighborhood, a suburb, a vacation spot, we cannot shield ourselves from the gross injustices and devastating fallout of this system of global capitalism. That is what the white population of Paris is discovering today. As disenfranchised children of North African immigrants demand to be seen and accounted for, middle and upper class French today are confronting a legacy of racism that is centuries old and decades new. But let us not get carried away picking on the French. Immigration is a global phenomenon, as is the racism that attends it. Our global economy is based on having a cheap labor force that can be moved from place to place to do the dirtiest work. For nearly 400 years Europeans forcibly removed Africans to the Americas to produce labor-intensive plantation crops. In the United States, European and Asian immigrants were recruited to build railroads in the 19th century. North Africans provided a cheap labor force to rebuild war-torn Europe in the 1950s. Mexicans have been recruited since the beginning of the 20th century to work in factories and farms from Texas to Minnesota. Today immigrants from all over Asia and the Middle East are recruited to work in war-torn Iraq. Even Louisiana is looking south to find cheap labor to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Immigrant labor is more attractive than native labor for employers because: 1. When you remove people from their homes they are more easily exploited. 2. The local population, resentful of the competition for labor, will shun the new arrival, rather than invite them into their unions, especially if they are from a different ethnic group whose life-ways can be demonized. 3. Language and cultural barriers will make it difficult for them to organize and understand their rights. 4. It is easier to hire and fire foreign workers, which mitigates against organizing. The often temporary nature of the employment makes it difficult for workers to commit to organizing in the new place. The system of immigrant labor works because there are rich countries and poor countries and the system depends on the perpetuation of internal class distinctions based on race. In turn, it feeds on and multiplies inequalities. And it happens everywhere. Not just in white-dominated societies like France and the United States. In the Caribbean region there is a spiral of oppression that begins, at the outer edge, with Haiti. Haitians working in the Dominican Republic, Nicaraguans working in Costa Rica, and Guatemalans working in southern Mexico are all experiencing virulent racism in their host communities and hyper-exploitation in the workplace. Race, class, and nationality are one as Dominicans, Costa Ricans, and Mexicans distinguish themselves as “whiter” than the immigrant workers, thereby perpetuating the legacy of indigenous conquest and Atlantic slave trade. If Haiti is at the outer edge of this immigration spiral, the United States is at the center. We are indeed in the belly of the beast. What do we do? Here are some unfinished thoughts. When Camilo Mejia (the young soldier who went to jail rather than return to Iraq) was in the Twin Cities in November he talked about the intense solidarity that develops between comrades on a platoon. It is this solidarity that is essential to keep an army fighting. Mejia described this bond as “greater than the bonds of family.” That is a profound thing to say. Also, when questioned, Mejia downplayed the idea that the army particularly discriminated against Latinos, saying that class was the most important distinction and poor whites were equally its victims. Although there are many stories of racism, I have also heard people talk wistfully of the interracial solidarity that develops in the army. Some people, whites included, actually experience the army as a haven from the racial divisions that poison civilian society, even as they propagate new racist ideas about the “enemies” in order to make them killable. Can we create such a bond in our own communities? Can we stop the endless search for bigger backyard fences and start building interracial solidarity in our neighborhoods? To do so, the focus of our protest needs to be not just on the ugly manifestations of racism by people who feel put upon, but on the giant crimes of corporations who use immigrant labor and race/class distinction to keep us from working together. In the Twin Cities the potential of solidarity in our increasingly racially mixed neighborhoods is powerful. And it is happening—in some unions, some classrooms, some religious institutions, and community groups. The army has a system of building platoon solidarity that seems to fill a basic human need for profound connection, in ways that few other experiences do. Maybe we need to borrow a page from their book and build our own bonds of solidarity, name our own comrades, define our own adversaries, but in order to pursue an infinitely more worthy mission than killing.

IMMIGRATION, GLOBAL VIEW: When the Walls Come Tumbling Down

Dateline: June 7, 20XX:

Jerusalem is aglow with color and light; teeming with people from every corner of the globe. The third annual international labor convention, GLOBAL3, is about to begin.
GLOBAL1 set worldwide wage and benefit standards, making it impossible for corporations to find cheaper labor costs by moving to impoverished regions or inducing super-exploited workers to migrate for jobs offering substandard wages. Overnight, centuries of inequalities began to vanish as workers everywhere began receiving just wages for their work. But there was still much to be done.

GLOBAL2 set about designating reparations needed to adjust for centuries of environmental devastation, neglect of health and education and other basic human needs, and robbery of natural resources in oppressed regions. Creating sustainable local economies enhanced by global fair-trade networks is the focus of GLOBAL3.

The delegates are easily identified. They all wear colorful ribbons designating their union, ethnic group, and country. They all have wires attached to their ears, since everything that is said is simultaneously translated into any language, and all are carrying tote bags, with the number 3 in rainbow colors against a tan background. The bags hold conference schedules, guides to Jerusalem, commemorative coffee cups and two little pebbles. One represents the wall that once divided Israelis from Palestinians, the other—the wall that once divided Mexico from the United States.

The walls came down a few months after GLOBAL2. Without inequitable wage scales and with reparations there was no longer a need for walls to hold people from each other. The guns and army tanks that fortified these walls have also been removed. People began crossing borders to resolve conditions of the heart and soul rather than for economic need. Loved ones were reunited. Others moved to “find themselves” in the places that suited their temperaments best.

The delegates’ first task is to decide how best to spend their three weeks at the conference. There are thousands of workshops to choose from. Only one is required, it is entitled: “Never Again: Learning from 2006.”

There is no set canon for this workshop. Many presenters offer their evidence and theories for the delegates to consider. Still, there are some common themes, and the basic facts to review. 2006 was the year the United States sent the armed National Guard to protect the United States from working people in Mexico seeking jobs across the border. That was when construction began on a 350-mile wall between the two countries. It was the same year that Israel built its so-called “separation barrier” walling in Palestinians, depriving them of water rights and access to productive land, and blocking essential food and medical aid.

Many panelists are quick to point out that the walls were only symptomatic of long-term policies in Israel/ Palestine and the U.S./ Mexican border: seizing land, stealing natural resources like water and oil, creating wage differentiations based on race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion, and a super-exploited migrant labor system. Always, state-supported violence was needed to hold these systems of inequality in place. In addition, many panelists emphasize the role of racism in upholding these systems of inequality. They argue that negative stereotypes kept working people across borders of race, nationality, religion, and ethnicity from uniting.

One panelist provides a quick review of the history of the immigration debate in the United States in 2006. She shows slides of “minutemen” volunteering to build the wall in San Diego on the Mexican border. The crowd breaks into peals of laughter when someone cracks that they don’t even appear to have a minute’s worth of humanity.

The panelist does not laugh. She holds up her hand to silence the crowd. “Yes, we can laugh now,” she says. “But we must not forget how easy it is for people to be fooled into thinking that those with a different language, religion, ethnicity, history, are to blame for the oppressed conditions imposed by elites. For example,” she continues, “remember that in 2006 government officials and citizens’ groups were calling for an English-only United States.” She pauses for effect, as the crowd gasps and guffaws. “Yes, I know it sounds absurd now . . .”

She pauses to let the point sink in and then ends with: “My friends, the events of 2006 are now a receding nightmare. To keep the walls and wars from happening again, we must learn to forgive these trespasses against humanity. But making sure that it is never again will also require that we never forget.”

The next speaker takes an entirely different tack. “The second half of 2006 was the beginning of the Great Coalition. Antiwar forces came together with immigrant-rights advocates. The labor movement, already showing its backbone in the early months of the year through its participation in the burgeoning immigrant-rights movement, began to see itself as the glue that connected peace and immigrant-rights causes. They began to speak of a ‘human-rights movement without borders.’ Many of the policies passed during GLOBAL1 and GLOBAL2 were beginning to be discussed during that long summer. The mass mobilizations of that fall were unprecedented in size and diversity. We must never forget how, in one local community after another, turf and territory receded and solidarity moved from slogan to core emotion. We would do well to study this transformation so that we never move backward.”

The workshop ends there, and the delegates, exhausted but enlightened, head for the best potluck in the history of the world.

LATIN AMERICA LEFT: Thoughts about the Mexican Election on September 11, 2006

Thoughts about the Mexican Election on September 11, 2006

When I used to teach U.S./ Mexican relations at the University of Minnesota, there was always a student who would brush his or her hand in the air dismissively and pronounce, sometimes with a smirk, other times with a look of genuine concern and frustration: “Why don’t the Mexicans care for their own people? Why do Mexicans put up with so much corruption?” In response I would acknowledge that Mexican history is indeed rife with examples of government corruption. I would then embark on a semester-long project to erase two areas of ignorance, common to so many of us educated in the United States. 1. Ignorance of the United States. The comments assume that Mexican corruption and inequality make it a society apart; that its history can not be compared to that of one’s own, in this case, the United States. There is a racist assumption here: that what is wrong with Mexico is cultural. But mostly there is a profound ignorance of U.S. history. As we make our way through the semester and through the decades, comparing and contrasting the U.S. and Mexican experiences, the parallels are astonishing. From the U.S.-Mexican War when both governments were motivated by a desire to conquer indigenous groups and both woefully mistreated their conscripts, to the Bush/Fox administration under which privatization is the watchword, and electoral victory at any cost is the practice. Overlaying these parallels is a consistent tale of robbery. The United States government, in cahoots with big business, steals Mexican land, oil, food, and workers, impoverishing the Mexican majority, depleting resources for generations to come, while a tiny Mexican elite holds the door open and shares in the profits. One hundred and sixty years ago Mexico lost half its territory to the United States. Today Halliburton and other oil interests wait eagerly for the new president, Felipe Calderon, to fulfill his promise to privatize PEMEX, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, cutting the heart out of Mexico’s economic sovereignty. 2. Ignorance of Mexican social movements. The student’s remarks also reveal a common false assumption about the Mexican people; that they are docile, willing to put up with ever greater amounts of corruption. It has to do with conflating the Mexican government with Mexican people, and with a misunderstanding of how in Mexico, as in the rest of the world, class interests usually trump national ones. Then there is our basic ignorance of the remarkable history of Mexican resistance. Not that we have learned much about U.S. resistance either. When we study both together we can see that here too, there are historical parallels. At the end of the 19th century U.S. workers and farmers rebelled against railroads conglomerates, many of whom were the same companies and individuals that gained control of Mexican mines and agriculture, inspiring Mexicans to engage in revolution. In the 1930s, U.S. workers, farmers, farm workers, students, and veterans engaged in mass protests and Mexican workers, peasants, and students took over takeovers of mines, universities, and plantations in response to the Great Depression. Likewise, in the late 1960s, huge demonstrations against U.S. imperialism occurred in both nations. However, there is no denying a general difference of degree: The people in the U.S. protest; Mexicans revolt. While students in the United States might be able to stage a one-day sit-in to protest a tuition increase, or effort to break a union on campus, in Mexico, teachers, students, and workers shut down the national university (UNAM) for months at a time on a regular basis, to protest wage decreases, tuition increases, or efforts to curtail academic freedom. Today, as Mexico faces a fraudulent election, the losing candidate, Lopez Obrador, is promising to create a parallel government. If that sounds unlikely to those of us who grew up in the United States, it is because we have no experience with that level of political action. We can hardly imagine Al Gore or John Kerry making such a declaration. The Democratic Party is too invested in the status quo to risk unleashing such a social movement in the U.S.. In Mexico, however, there is a long tradition of parallel governing structures, erected when the powers that be are unresponsive to the demands of the people. According to the Associated Press (August 29, 2006), Lopez Obrador likes to see himself as the modern-day Benito Juárez, who ran a parallel government during the French occupation of Mexico in the 1860s. There are many other precedents, however. During the colonial period up until the eve of the revolution in 1910, regional indigenous political structures existed parallel to the official colonial and post-colonial government. Emiliano Zapata himself was one of those local leaders whose power was legitimized by his ability to address the demands of his people. During the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) there were no less than four parallel governments at one point. And of course the Zapatistas in Chiapas have been operating since 1994 within their own regional autonomous governing structure. As I write, what began as a teachers’ strike in Oaxaca has become a regional revolt. The coalition of teachers, students, indigenous groups, and others has wrested control of the region from the official government. Now there is talk of throwing their support behind Lopez Obrador’s “legitimate government.” Why is the soil so much more fertile for grassroots democracy in Mexico? I can’t tell you for sure, but I don’t believe it has anything to do with superior ethnic or cultural ways. Rather it has to do with the hundreds of years of Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism that have left Mexicans with less to lose and more to win when they unite and fight. We, the ordinary people in the United States, have always been in an awkward in-between position. We are oppressed by multinational corporations who lower our wages to increase their profits, yet at the same time we profit from sweatshop conditions in places like Mexico that provide us with lower consumer prices, and Mexican workers who cross borders and provide cheap labor that lowers the cost of food and services in the United States. Understanding the complex economic relationship between Mexico and the U.S. without blaming Mexican workers (for leaving home to seek better-paying work) is a huge challenge. Instead of feeling threatened by Mexican immigrants, U.S. workers would be better served by analyzing the commonalities they have with the Mexican working class. If racism was not part of the equation, Mexican and U.S. workers working together would prove a formidable bloc to the globalized corporate structure that defines so much suffering and exploitation in North and South America.

GLOBAL, LOCAL CONNECTIONS: Lurking With Intent to Seek Justice

Lurking, with Intent to Seek Justice

March 2007 This past week a discussion has ensued over whether to make amends to immigrants fleeing Hitler who were denied U.S. visas, by giving Anne Frank citizenship. Well, as a historian and one who seeks justice I’m all for reparations. But first, let’s stop manufacturing crimes for the next generation to repair! If we want to right the injustices of our immigration system, let’s first provide citizenship and, while we are at it, livable wages and collective bargaining rights for all farm, service, construction, and other underpaid workers. What does immigration have to do with workplace justice? Everything. According to a March 4 New York Times article, farmers in Colorado are bringing in prisoners to replace undocumented workers who aren’t showing up there due to recent immigration crackdowns. Iowa is following suit. The prisoners make 60 cents a day. Yes, you read that correctly. Those farmers pay a fee to the state. So prisoners are subsidizing both farmers and the state of Colorado. Colorado Corrections officers tout it as a way to provide job skills for inmates. The desire of employers for an exploitable workforce knows no bounds. The government needs to intervene with subsidies for certain sectors if necessary, to make sure that all workers make a decent living for their labor. Otherwise employers will continue to search for more vulnerable workers, communities who are criminalized and can’t fight for their rights, be they undocumented immigrants or prisoners. Speaking of criminalization, Minneapolis city councilperson Cam Gordon is introducing a motion to repeal a 47-year-old law that, in effect. criminalizes African American men. In 2006, 133 of 167 of those arrested for “lurking with the intent to commit a crime” were people of color, the vast majority of them African American men. The law allows the police (and those people calling in with complaints) to decide what someone is intending to do. At a March 7 Urban League Forum on the subject, the moderator asked, “Where are African American men in Minneapolis safe to just be?” Duane Reed, president of the Minneapolis NAACP, replied, “In my home.” While we fight lurking legislation in Minneapolis, George Bush has been lurking in Latin America with the intent to retain supremacy over the region. He is stealing the rhetoric of resistance. He is countering moves by Latin Americans to use their high-profit resources to fund human needs and build sustainable diverse economies based on fair trade and regional economic interdependence. Bush wants to make sure those natural resource profits stay in the hands of multinational corporations. So he has exhibited a sudden awareness of Latin American poverty and offered aid, such as a naval ship hospital, as if that could address continental health-care needs. Guatemalans greeted Bush’s recent visit with a demonstration of 2,000 demanding: No to the war in Iraq, U.S. military out of Guatemala, yes to immigrant rights, social justice, and fair trade between all peoples! Bush’s assertion to Latin America that the United States is “about health care and education” is especially galling as we continue to struggle in Minneapolis with a yawning race/education gap kindergarten through grade school. Everyone (including me) has their theories. But it is action we need. One thing we can do immediately is to pass the Dream Act now so that this year’s senior high students who came to Minnesota without documents have the possibility of college. And we need to stop the war. Money for schools, not war. Money for health care, jobs, immigrant resettlement, not war. Let’s do that first. And yes, we must take care of our wounded soldiers. Properly. But first: Stop the state-sponsored spread of a mass epidemic of PTSD; stop the war. Then we will need to talk about reparations. In Iraq, Latin America, at our borders, for our veterans, for those conquered and enslaved, and those abused by our military-industrial complex, here and around the world. It will be a long conversation. And when we begin to sort out reparations priorities, I vote that we do as Mother Jones said: Pray for the dead (including my childhood heroine, the beloved Anne Frank) and work like hell for the living.

IMMIGRATION DEBATE: "But this is Not Honduras...."

But this is not Honduras……..

My friend Michael Livingston once told me that teaching social justice involves lying a little - if you tell the uninitiated the straight truth they’ll write you off. I have found this to be true about teaching in general, whether its trying to persuade a person on the street to oppose the war, teaching history to college students, helping 13 year-olds learn how to read, or even teaching dance to middle school girls - I need to meet my students half-way even if it means walking in the opposite direction of where I want to go with them.

Sometimes however, I wonder.

The immigration debate is heating up in Minnesota and nationwide. Last December Governor Pawlenty presented a “study” that claimed that illegal immigrants and their offspring are costing Minnesota tax payers more than they contribute.

Similar caustic rhetoric coming out of Washington, in the guise of proposed legislation illustrates that Pawlenty is not the only politician using hate- mongering as an election year, vote-getting ploy.

Meeting these politicians and their unwitting supporters half-way we point out that undocumented immigrants pay taxes and pay into social security without receiving a dime. We say that immigrants do work that other Minnesotans don’t want for wages they would not accept, providing citizens with inexpensive goods and services. We remind them that we are a nation full of immigrants. We tell them to thank an immigrant for their high quality of life.

These arguments, may help someone to reject the latest hate campaign but they do not get to the heart of the immigration issue: Our economy has been dependent on the super- exploitation of a labor underclass for centuries. Substandard immigrant wages perpetuate labor and race inequality, imperialism and war.

How does this system work?

1. PERPETUATATING RACISM Throughout U.S. history the hierarchy of labor has been justified by dehumanizing workers on the bottom of the ladder: People from Africa: “ 3/5 of a person“, women: “property of father or husband“, children: ‘half the size, half the pay,” the last off the boat: “of inferior ethnicity.” People of the global south “simple people who need less.” Prisoners: “in debt to society- not deserving.”

Today, defining immigrants as illegal and therefore undeserving is the lynch pin behind Pawlenty’s anti-immigrant campaign. Children of undocumented immigrants (regardless of their citizenship) are not deserving of an education, their parents do not deserve a decent wage and labor protections, and none in the family deserves health care.

2. VULNERABLE WORKERS
Slavery worked by keeping workers as vulnerable as possible. The middle passage -mass torture- left people physically and emotionally battered. Language barriers among slaves made it difficult to organize. Legally sanctioned corporal punishment heightened the cost of rebellion. Laws defining this sector of the population as not deserving of political representation made legal recourse impossible. Jim Crow laws legalized a race hierarchy post-slavery. Similar tactics have kept women, children and prisoners vulnerable, allowing employers to super exploit these workers. Neo-colonial policies left workers in other countries working for U.S. corporations in mono-crop economies without employment alternatives or the ability to vote out their oppressors, forcing many to seek work across borders.

New immigrants have always been in the most vulnerable worker category. Language, cultural and citizenship barriers and the desperate economic and political conditions that prompted their decision to leave home, create vulnerable conditions for immigrant workers. Illegal status, like slavery and disenfranchisement is a powerful way to intensify the vulnerability of a group of workers.

Free trade policies, illegal status and geographic proximity- which make it easy deport organizers and replace them with other desperate workers, are factors that together help to maintain the super-exploitation of working people from Mexico and Central America.

Preserving a super-exploited labor force requires military force. The Iraq war is not just about oil but oil profits. Migrant laborers from all over the world are working in Iraq today.


Well yes Anne, that’s all quite true, but what do you say to the dedicated Mpls. Public school teacher, who when faced with job of incorporating a non-English speaking student into her overcrowded classroom exclaims

“after all, this is not Honduras!

How do you meet her half way so she can hear you? Maybe this is not the time to talk about global capitalism or how immigrants shore up social security. Maybe this is the time to talk about social change, posing the question: How are we going to get the sources we need to teach our children?

We can remind her of the gains made by past labor, civil rights and peace movements. It is through organization and coalition building that we can turn bombs into books, bring teachers the resources they need to serve an increasingly diverse student body, and parents the salaries and benefits they need to provide kids with what they need to be school-ready.

Today more than ever these movements overlap. The immigrant rights movement not only brings all these issues together, but here in the Twin Cities it provides the opportunity for unprecedented coalitions of diverse ethnic communities and representatives of labor, religious and civil rights organizations.

Peace activists can help make Governor Pawlenty deeply regret he ever commissioned an immigration study. Let’s not miss this opportunity to build a coalition against racism, inequality and war that is unprecedented in this North Star state .