[Peace-discuss] Immigration and the working class

[Carl G. Estabrook]

Another result of considering ‘identity’ rather than class.

Identity politics loudly condemns the obvious evils of discrimination as a substitute for having to consider the general exploitation by class.

The substitution was a surrender by US liberals in the 1970s to the rise of neoliberalism ( = the assertion of the rights of wealth). Those liberals - often Democrats - abandoned the New Deal/Great Society tradition of class politics - the attempt to ameliorate the rigors of capitalism - and accepted the reassertion of the 'rights' of capital. But their bad conscience at this betrayal led them to champion ever more vociferously the claims of discriminated groups - blacks, women et al. - so long as there was no interference in the established forms of economic exploitation.  

(Hillary Clinton was the champion of identity politics in the recent election. The general uselessness of 40 years of identity politics for its supposed beneficiaries is illustrated by the fact that women and people of color made up the majority of the Trump coalition <https://medium.com/@MattBruenig/women-and-people-of-color-make-up-the-majority-of-the-trump-coalition-e9bb20f65709#.ur0jyooga>. They didn’t believe HRC and the Democrats - as they shouldn’t.)

—CGE

> On Mar 27, 2017, at 9:11 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> The article on the nature of the local immigrant population and local efforts to support immigrants in yesterday's News-Gazette included this:
> 
> "Immigration is "the engine of our community in many ways," Doyle said, noting that billionaire Shahid Khan, a Pakistani immigrant who lived at the University Y when he first came to Champaign, now provides jobs for thousands of residents."
> 
> http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2017-03-26/c-us-message-youre-welcome-here.html
> 
> Wow. How to unpack this, as they say in academia.
> 
> It seems that a few years ago, the UAW was trying to organize the diverse workers in Khan's plant, with plenty of horror stories of their work conditions being told, at Channing-Murray and elsewhere. I haven't heard much since.
> 
> We have an exploited immigrant community. We also have a highly successful and privileged immigrant community, obviously including on our campus, including both faculty and administrators. We have many highly-skilled immigrants working well-paid, professional jobs around our community. We have immigrants building local businesses.
> 
> And we have fucking Shahid Khan as a local hero.
> 
> A recent feature in the News-Gazette highlighted a collection of local immigrants--enormously motivated, skilled, and talented, and hardly oppressed in the larger scheme of things, including someone I consider a friend:
> 
> http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2017-02-05/big-10-jeff-dalessio-feb-5-2017.html
> 
> At the same time, we have a domestic working class--white, black, Latino, etc.--that is squeezed from all sides in all ways. In the zero-sum game that has become the neoliberal globalized economy, their educational and vocational opportunities have been limited in a number of ways. We have a public university that avidly recruits foreign and out-of-state students, primarily for economic reasons. Meanwhile, many domestic students of relatively modest means go into debt and have in many cases limited vocational opportunities.
> 
> We have complicated relationships among the globalized economy, our aggressive wars (in the ME and Central America and beyond), immigrants, refugees, etc., some of which are personified in our local immigrant population, whether relatively privileged or oppressed. But discussion of those wars and of our general foreign policy  is of course kept apart from advocacy for immigrant rights, as are discussions of the ravages of globalized neoliberalism, which is part and parcel with fiscal austerity, of which working class citizens bear the brunt.
> 
> Among local immigrants are those I have worked with in various ways, including professionally, including children at the school at which I volunteer. I have immigrant friends whom I truly love and have enriched my life enormously.
> 
> In our high-powered analytical community, however, I perceive a reluctance to grapple with the relationships among globalization, economic inequality, trans-national global elites, and the relationship of these things to immigration and immigrant communities of various kinds at the local level, in the context of the struggle of the American working class. I perceive, rightly or wrongly, that such critiques are avoided because they might challenge the prevailing progressive/neoliberal norms of tolerance, as well as "problematize" standard criticism of those who voted for Donald Trump as racist and bigoted.
> 
> Academia is negatively implicated in these pernicious trends, in myriad ways. But academia is, in the final analysis, all about self-congratulation, not self-criticism.
> 
> Even our local right-wing newspaper is apparently on board with a rather sentimentalized and simplistic notion of immigration. And why wouldn't they be? Nothing about general support for immigrants challenges the neoliberal militarism of the ruling class, including the local bourgeoisie. After all, some immigrants enlist in our military and fight and die in our wars. Perhaps one day one of them will be featured in the weekly stories of "those who served."
> 
> Carol Ammons and Scott Bennett are mentioned in yesterday's article. Neither of them would dare miss an opportunity to display their tolerance. But do they represent the interests of their citizen-constituents?  I think it's a fair question, but of course one that cannot be asked in the progressive community as it is currently constituted, especially insofar as it is constituted by the Democratic Party.
> 
> DG
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