Sí se puede = We Shall Overcome
Today is May Day, a day of worker celebration of the struggle for the 8 hour day around the world. It is fitting today, that we honor the emerging immigrant/undocumented workers uprising taking place here in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and cities around the country.
Today I see the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the Emma Lazarus wrote about on that poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.
This movement is a movement for dignity, for human rights, for the integrity of an entire community now being targeted by divisive and hateful legislation and social policy. Immigrants have made our country great. And today we join with immigrants in their fight for democracy, citizenship rights and to leave repression and poverty behind. We are a nation of people brought here by force and volunteer labor, but always cheap and under exploitative conditions.
Today’s mass immigration movement is being driven by globalization of capital—capital that knows no borders. And a government policy that exports capital, jobs and whole industries in search for the greatest profits and the lowest possible wages.
Growing desperation between the privileged wealthy and well off, and the desperately poor continues to grow and create tensions in the world community, within our country, within our hemisphere and throughout the Third World —triggering wars and anger and hatred and desperation.
Desperate people go to desperate measures in their yearn to breathe free. The crisis that we are now in, the tension we feel, is not driven by desperate workers, it’s driven by the corporate greedy and their desperate search for cheap labor under conditions that are unholy.
Globalization of capital is taking place without globalization of worker’s and human rights, environmental or children’s rights. NAFTA has left small farm communities devastated and impoverished. Unable to make a living wage and take care of their families in their home countries, they seek opportunity in the U.S. in their desperation leads them to seek safety and security. It has created tremendous tension and imbalance in the world. The tendency is to blame the desperate, the condition under which they live, and to pit one desperate group against the other.
Undocumented workers did not send the shoe industry to India; and manufacturing to China. They did not export the auto, steel industries abroad. They did not hijack gas prices with government-protected thievery.
The immigrant rights movement is not a local movement, but a global uprising. Whether in Paris or Latin America or Africa, people fleeing Haiti or the Dominican—it is a global movement resisting the employer’s greed and exploitation.
There is an attempt by some to place the issue in a race frame; it must be put in an economic frame. It is a distortion to just put a Mexican face on the issue. It is a diversion to focus on undocumented families and not focus on the source of tension: globalization, government and employer driven policies.
For example, Wal-Mart, the largest employer, is exporting capital and manufacturing jobs and capital to China. They pay Chinese workers —mostly women and children—just $2.00 day, the engine of China’s huge purchasing department. Wal-Mart then imports these products back to America, sold at the cheapest of prices.
Wal-Mart is also the one of the largest employers of undocumented workers, with several lawsuits filed against them for labor and immigration violations. It’s a double-sucking sound. Exporting jobs and seeking cheap labor abroad, and then importing cheap labor and products, and exploiting workers with the lowest possible wage and no health care benefits at home.
As capital and corporations globalize, it must be balanced with globalization of economic rights, workers’, environmental and human rights to raise the living and working standards of working families around the globe.
Without a greater balance of the world’s resources, people will keep coming—over fences, thru rivers and tunnels—because they seek not to be criminalized, but seek a will to survive. Undocumented workers are not criminals. They are trapped by unjust laws that manipulate them when it’s convenient—as guest workers, hire them to fuel profits in the service and agricultural industries, construction.
Stereotyping them as “aliens” only blinds us to who they really are. The huddled masses who yearn to breathe free that we have always read about.
They are our mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins, teachers and shopkeepers. All part of the American family, all part of what makes us a great nation. Whatever differences we may have are dwarfed by what we have in common and what unites us as a human family.
For African Americans we were too long undocumented and without legal protection. 246 years without citizenship. And then second class citizenship fro another 100 years. And now we are threatened with the loss of voter protection in New Orleans: Iraqi Americans had more voter protection to vote in the Iraq election than Katrina survivors have to vote in New Orleans.
Our nation became addicted to slave labor, hating the enslaved and leaving great scars on our culture. Those that work without wages were left without education, health care, capital, land and legal protection. I often wonder what would have happened if on May 1, 1861, Blacks would have celebrated May Day with non-violent economic discipline to show our worth to the economy?
Now we have become addicted to immigrant labor, without an effective plan for citizenship. There are those that are resenting those whose cheap labor subsidizes their privileged lifestyles. They clean dormitories in our schools; cook in our restaurants, cut our grass, service our cars, care for our children and clean our homes, and work in our hospitals. These workers have worked their way to becoming a necessary force to America’s future.
This must not degenerate into ugliness and hostility. We must look for a plan of bridges and not walls, order and not chaos, sharing and not exploitation.
This drive is not about amnesty or fences and mass deportation. It’s about integrity, democracy and dignity. We support comprehensive immigration reform, as expressed in the Kennedy-McCain bill. We want a process with one set of rules for all. One set for Haitians. One set for Cubans. One set for all.
We bring Cubans in to the United States with a subsidy; yet we let Haitians perish on our shores. This is morally wrong. It’s legally wrong. We need one set of rules.
Lastly, we honored and highlighted American immigrants who joined the military and went to Iraq as “great patriots.” Immigrants from around the world were enticed with a fast track to become eligible for citizenship in they joined the U.S. military. How cynical of this administration, as young undocumented immigrants were killed in action and were given a flag and citizenship at their burial site.
They worked in the shadows for cheap labor and were offered a deal to die for a green card.
We are a great nation. We can do better. And as the hands that picked the cotton, join hands with those that pick our lettuce, that work in our hotels and restaurants and make our economy grow… we will win, with our minds focused on freedom.
Sí se puede. We Shall Overcome.
Jesse
