The immigration battle

from 'The New Republic'

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060116&s=judis011606

THE FIGHT OVER IMMIGRATION IS A FIGHT OVER IDENTITY.
Border War
by John B. Judis

Issue date: 01.16.06

A battered yellow school bus rumbles up a bumpy dirt road on the
outskirts of Sasabe, a small Mexican town just over the border from
Arizona. At the top of the hill, the bus winds around brick and mud
huts. Ragged children stand in the doorways, and emaciated dogs forage
for scraps. The bus passes dented pickups and old cars without wheels
and stops in a dusty clearing, where it disgorges about 40 teenagers
dressed in blue jeans and carrying small knapsacks. One boy's t-shirt
features a picture of Che Guevara. A girl's pale blue top says
adorable in sequined letters. They are subdued, almost expressionless.
They mill around, waiting for the coyotes, or smugglers, who, for a
hefty fee, will take them in pickup trucks to the border.

There, they will climb through holes in the barbed wire fence
separating Mexico from the United States. Some will not make it
through the 100-plus-degree Arizona desert on the other side (from
October 2004 to October 2005, 261 would-be migrants died in the desert
before reaching Tucson or Phoenix) and about one-third of them will be
apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol. But, over the course of a year,
almost two million will make it, sometimes after several tries, and
enter the underworld of undocumented migrants: working on farms, as
day-laborers in construction, as servants and maids, or in sweatshops
and meatpacking plants. Unable to protest mistreatment, they will be
subject to abuse and exploitation, but most of them will still fare
better than if they had stayed in their native villages.

This influx of migrants into Arizona--and the fact that many stay in
the state rather than moving north or west--has created a political
explosion. In November 2004, anti-immigration activists won a bruising
campaign to pass Proposition 200, which denies "public benefits" to
people who can't prove their citizenship, despite the opposition of
the state's congressional delegation, including Republican Senators
John McCain and Jon Kyl; Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano; and
major business groups and labor unions. Last spring, the Minuteman
Project, which George W. Bush wrote off as a group of "vigilantes,"
set up shop in Tombstone, near the border, to dramatize the failure of
the Border Patrol to prevent "illegals" from getting through.
Republican state legislators, equally hostile to McCain and
Napolitano, are trying to expand Proposition 200 and plan to make
illegal immigration the focus of the 2006 elections. "We are ground
zero" in the battle over immigration, warns former Arizona House
Majority Whip Randy Graf, who spearheaded the campaign for Proposition
200 and is now running for the Tucson-area House seat to be vacated by
Representative Jim Kolbe.

The furor over illegal immigration is sweeping the country--from
California and Washington to Virginia and Tennessee, and even up to
Vermont, New Hampshire, and Minnesota--but Arizona is indeed ground
zero, having surpassed neighboring states as the principal gateway to
the United States for illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central
America. Beltway politicians who want to clamp down on the border
claim this furor is the result, as Colorado Republican Representative
Tom Tancredo has suggested, of immigrants "taking jobs that Americans
could take." And many Americans far from the Arizona border certainly
believe that--in low-immigration West Virginia, for example, 60
percent of respondents in a recent poll agreed that "immigrants take
jobs away from Americans." But that's not what's happening in
Arizona's citrus groves or hotels or restaurants. And, in Arizona,
those who are most up in arms over illegal immigration are far more
concerned with its sociocultural than its economic effects. They are
worried about what is commonly called the "Mexicanization" of Arizona.
That kind of cultural concern extends to legal as well as illegal
immigrants--and it can't be easily fixed by legislation.

Mexicans began crossing the border to Arizona in the early twentieth
century to work in "the five Cs"--construction, copper, citrus,
cattle, and cotton--but, until recently, the great majority of illegal
immigrants came through California and Texas. In 1990, for example,
about 90 percent entered through those two states, while only about 5
percent came through Arizona. But, as the uproar over "illegals"
grew--in 1994, for example, California passed Proposition 187, denying
public benefits to undocumented workers--the Border Patrol instituted
Operation Gatekeeper in California and Operation Hold-the-Line in
Texas. These programs reduced illegal immigration to those states, but
not overall. Instead, illegal immigrants were simply diverted to
Arizona's desert border, and, between October 2004 and October 2005,
about half of the four million illegal immigrants who entered the
United States came through Arizona. According to Princeton University
sociologist Douglas Massey, about 1.5 million of them crossed the
eastern part of the Arizona border, south of Tucson, and about 470,000
entered through the area around Yuma, near the California border.

Going through the desert is far more dangerous than walking over a
bridge into a Texas or California border town or even fording the Rio
Grande. And it's more expensive, too. But Mexicans and other Latinos
are willing to pay the coyotes, because they hope to find well-paying
jobs in the United States. And, relative to where they came from, they
will. In 2000, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA),
a farm worker in Mexico could expect to make $3.60 in an eight-hour
day, while his counterpart in the United States made $66.32 in the
same period. The discrepancy has increased since the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect in 1994, removing tariff
barriers on the importation of U.S. farm products and decimating small
farmers in Mexico. Says Sandra Polaski, a trade expert at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, "Small farmers who produced for
subsistence but also for the market lost their market access."
According to the USDA, Mexican farm income fell 4.3 percent per year
during the 1990s. Young men and women left in search of work, and,
while some of them found jobs in U.S. factories on the border
(maquiladoras), many of them crossed the border in search of
better-paying jobs.

Most of those who make it do find jobs--92 percent of males, according
to one estimate. And, with undocumented workers adding to the normal
population increase, Arizona's Latino population has ballooned, going
from 19 percent in 1990 to 25 percent in 2000. Phoenix, which was once
a primarily Anglo town, has gone from 20 percent to about 34 percent
Latino. Says former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods, one of the
state's prominent Republicans, "When I was in the first grade in 1960,
Phoenix was the same distance from the border. Phoenix now feels much
more like a border town than it did even ten years ago. Billboards in
Spanish, a lot of people speaking Spanish. Most of us think this is
great, but a lot don't." This transformation in Arizona society and
culture, along with the disorder created by the dramatic rise in
border-crossings, has made immigration the biggest issue in Arizona
politics.

In the 2002 gubernatorial election, when Napolitano barely edged out
Republican Representative Matt Salmon, the two candidates rarely
mentioned immigration. But, soon after Napolitano took office in 2003,
she and her chief of staff, Dennis Burke, were astonished to discover
that the state's voters were preoccupied with the issue. Says Burke,
"The first time we looked at polling, the number-one issue was
immigration, not education. Then, a year and a half ago, it got pretty
visceral. It started to permeate all issues." That was largely because
political activists and conservative Republican state legislators had
begun organizing.

In July 2003, Phoenix resident Kathy McKee established the Protect
Arizona Now Committee and got a lawyer to write what became
Proposition 200, basing it on California's Proposition 187. It was put
on the November 2004 ballot. And, although almost the entire Arizona
political establishment opposed it, the measure still garnered 56
percent. Then, last year, the state legislature passed a raft of
anti-immigrant bills, including measures to deputize local and state
police officers to enforce immigration laws and to broaden the
definition of the "public benefits" denied to illegal immigrants under
Proposition 200. Napolitano vetoed all but one of the bills but has
since backtracked in the face of growing public pressure. And Russell
Pearce, the powerful chairman of the Arizona House Appropriations
Committee--who, with Graf's departure in 2004, has become the leader
of the legislature's anti-immigrant force--is currently championing
legislation that would make English Arizona's official language and
construct a wall along the entire Arizona border.

Graf, Pearce, McKee, and the Republican legislature have clearly
tapped a growing sentiment among the state's white voters. Wes
Gullett, a political consultant and a key adviser to John McCain,
recently conducted a poll in Cochise County, south of Tucson, to test
voter concerns. "Instead of asking what are the top three issues,"
Gullett says, "we have to ask what are the top four, because the first
three are immigration. You have to ask, 'What do you care about other
than immigration?' It's crazy down there."



But what, exactly, is this craziness about? In Washington, politicians
and political organizations regularly attribute the obsession with
immigration to illegal migrants taking the jobs of native-born
Americans. Tancredo makes that claim, and so do the two leading groups
advocating restrictions on immigration, the Federation for American
Immigration Reform (FAIR), which bankrolled Proposition 200, and the
Center for Immigration Studies. That did happen in Midwestern
meatpacking plants several decades ago, and it may still be happening
in some parts of the country, but it does not seem to be the case in
Arizona, where unemployment hovers below 5 percent and where
construction, agriculture, and tourism are plagued by acute labor
shortages. Illegal immigration doesn't even seem to be having a
dramatic effect on wages, with pay for unskilled work in Arizona
regularly exceeding the minimum wage.

Unskilled workers currently make up 32 percent of Arizona's labor
force, and they are constantly in demand. Tom Nassif of Western
Growers, a trade association, recently complained that the
construction industry was "siphoning off" the migrant workers that
growers needed in the field. "Farms will not have enough workers to
harvest their crops," he warned. Meanwhile, Arizona's tourist industry
says it can't find enough workers for its hotels and restaurants.
Bobby Surber, the vice president of Sedona Center, who runs three
restaurants, two shopping plazas, and a resort, and employs 200
people, says, "Even though we pay larger than average, and full
medical and dental, we cannot find enough employees."

Of course, Arizonans could still believe, just as Americans in West
Virginia do, that illegal immigrants threaten their jobs. And
pollsters invite this response by always asking about the economic
effect of immigration and refraining from raising uncomfortable
cultural concerns. But, in interviewing Arizonans, one rarely
encounters complaints about illegal immigrants taking jobs away. One
does hear about the cost of state services for illegal immigrants.
Indeed, even the Latinos who voted for Proposition 200 were worried
about the burden that illegal immigrants were placing on schools and
hospitals. And, in border towns, crime and disorder are pressing
issues. (Some of the coyotes double as drug smugglers, and the
migrants traipse through farms and ranches.) But, among many
Arizonans, the most important issues are cultural. They fret about
"Mexicanization"--about Arizona becoming a "Third World country" or
"the next Mexifornia."

In interviews I conducted last fall, leaders of the movement to
restrict immigration usually began by expressing concerns that illegal
immigration was undermining the rule of law and allowing terrorists to
sneak across the border--concerns they seem to believe are most likely
to win over a national audience. But they invariably became most
animated, and most candid, when talking about what they see as the
unwillingness of Mexican immigrants--legal or illegal--to assimilate
into American culture.

Connie, who doesn't want her last name used for fear of retaliation
from immigration advocates, was one of the first members of the
Minutemen. She lives in Sierra Vista, a small retirement town near the
border. Barely five feet tall, with short, graying hair, she prides
herself on her feistiness. She is now in charge of patrolling the
Nacos area near the border. She says that, at night, she and her
husband station themselves on a hill in view of the fence and watch
for "illegals." She says that she became interested in the Minutemen
because the organization was upholding the rule of law and keeping out
terrorists. "We have many apprehensions of Pakistanis and Iraqis on
the border. They are coming in disguised as Hispanics and blending
in," she says. (When I ask a human rights worker in Sasabe if he had
heard of Iraqis entering the United States disguised as Latinos, he
laughs. "The [Mexican] army is very watchful about that kind of
thing," he says.)

Connie insists that the Minutemen are neither "extremist" nor
"racist," but, as we ride along the border in her Ford Navigator,
Connie voices distinctly cultural and racial concerns. She says that
the illegals she sees coming across the border are the "darker"
Mexicans. Mexican President Vicente Fox, she says, "doesn't want them
in the country." She speculates that Mexicans might want to take over
Arizona: "In Mexico, they are taught this land was taken from them.
They are not taught they were paid tons of money for it. There is a
belief they want this back." (After defeating the Mexican army in
1848, the United States bought all of California and the Southwest
from Mexico for $15 million.) When I comment that California has
remained in good shape despite massive immigration, she takes
exception. "California is not a shining example," she says. "You have
the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Russians, all these people
immigrating. How many languages do you have to have on the ballot?"
Asked if she would support McCain's proposal to allow Mexicans to
enter the country legally as guest workers, Connie demurs. "Who is
going to pay for it?" she asks. "When my grandmother came from
Czechoslovakia, one thing she did was assimilate. She was proud to be
an American. Their attitude is, 'We won't assimilate.'"

That's what bothers Graf as well. "We are talking about assimilation,"
says the congressional candidate, as we sit in his East Tucson
campaign headquarters. "I don't have any problem about anyone who
wants to salute our flag and learn our language and be a citizen. What
got me into the whole issue was that I was standing in line in a
Safeway, and this woman was ahead of me, and she had an infant, and
was pregnant, and her mother was with her. She was paying for
groceries in food stamps. And, when the clerk asked for her signature,
she acted like she didn't understand English, and neither did her
mother. I found it odd that an entire family could be here on welfare
and not speak any English. On welfare!"

Graf's chief ally is Pearce, who lives in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa.
Last fall, he complained to a reporter from Stateline.org about his
hometown: "It's not the Mesa I was raised in. They have turned it into
a Third World country," he said. By "they," Pearce means Latinos in
general. On his website, he warns, "Over 800,000 Americans fled
California last year because LA became a clone of Mexico City."
Pearce, like Connie and Graf, envisages a cultural conflict between
the white America he grew up in and an invading army of dark-skinned,
Spanish-speaking immigrants from south of the border.

Ray Borane, the longtime Democratic mayor of Douglas, a border town in
Cochise County, laments that Graf "represents the majority opinion" in
the state. That may be an exaggeration, given Napolitano's and
McCain's continued popularity, but Graf and his angry allies do
represent a significant segment of voters--perhaps one-third or
more--who are up in arms. And longtime observers of Arizona politics
confirm that a concern with Mexicanization lies at the heart of their
opposition to illegal immigration. "Nobody is afraid of jobs," says
Gullett, the McCain adviser. "We have got labor demand. That's not a
problem. There is no feeling that people are losing their jobs. There
is a tremendous fear that our community and our way of life is
changing." Dave Wagner, the former political editor of The Arizona
Republic, who is writing a book about Arizona politics, says that, in
Phoenix, "Mexicans and Mexican-Americans have their own culture and
stores. It is possible if you are Spanish-speaking to disappear into
that culture. That scares the hell out of some people." Says Woods:
"Arizona has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, and a lot of
people are uncomfortable with that."



It's a discomfort that politicians like Graf and Pearce hope to take
advantage of. They want to purge the Republican Party of pro-business
conservatives like McCain, Woods, Kolbe, and Phoenix Representative
Jeff Flake, all of whom favor a guest-worker program and some form of
amnesty for undocumented workers already in the United States. Graf
ran against Kolbe, an opponent of Proposition 200, in 2004, and, in
spite of being massively outspent, got 43 percent of the vote. He's
running again, and, with Kolbe out of the race, he has a decent chance
of winning the Republican nomination. Republicans in the legislature
are also preparing a witches' brew of new anti-immigrant legislation
for the term that begins in January.

And the underlying conditions that have fueled their protest and made
Arizona ground zero are likely to persist. Arizona businesses have
relied on migrant labor for 100 years. Says Phoenix College political
scientist Pete Dimas, author of Progress and a Mexican American
Community's Struggle for Existence, "Immigrants have provided the
cheap labor on which this whole part of the country has depended." And
the demand for unskilled labor is likely to continue. According to
statistics from the Department of Labor, 13 of the 20 occupations in
Arizona that will experience the highest growth from 2002 to 2012
employ unskilled workers. Many of these jobs in food-processing or
building service are now spurned by the native-born and are filled by
illegal immigrants. And, with all of Mexico's tariffs on farm products
due to disappear under NAFTA, and with the Central American Free Trade
Agreement going into effect, the supply of unskilled labor looking
northward is likely, if anything, to mount.

As immigrants continue to cross the border, the "culture war" is
unlikely to abate. Connie is right. Mexican and Central American legal
and illegal immigrants probably won't assimilate in the way her Czech
grandmother did. European immigrants who came to the United States in
the last century had to travel over an ocean to arrive here, and many
of them came from countries undergoing political or economic
upheavals. Their identification with the homeland rarely lasted past a
generation. That's not as true of Mexican or other Latino immigrants,
who have their own claim on the culture of the West.

Many of the migrant workers who crossed the border after 1848 did so
to make money to bring back home. They retained their language and
national identity. According to Douglas Massey, Jorge Duran, and Nolan
J. Malone in Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, 23.4 million of the 28 million
undocumented workers who entered the United States between 1965 and
1985 returned to Mexico. What's changed in the last decade,
ironically, is that more extensive border enforcement has discouraged
illegal immigrants from returning to Mexico for fear that they will be
unable to get back into the United States. Still, many continue to
support extended families in Mexico, call themselves Mexicans, and
consider their primary language Spanish. They are contributing to a
bicultural America that stirs fear and resentment among some
native-born Americans and that will continue to inspire calls to close
the southern border.



Arizonans on both sides of the controversy are looking to Washington
for solutions. They know that states can't pass their own guest-worker
programs; nor can they police their own borders. But there is little
chance that the Bush administration and Republicans in
Congress--sharply divided between social conservatives and business
interests--will be able to pass legislation this year. And, even if
the House, the Senate, and the White House could agree on an approach,
it would not end the furor over immigration.

Last month, social conservatives in the House, led by Tancredo and
Wisconsin Representative James Sensenbrenner, passed a punitive bill
that would erect new walls along the border, make illegal immigration
a felony, and require employers to weed out illegal workers by
checking their immigration status against a national database. In the
Senate, McCain and Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy introduced a
bill that is backed by business and by some labor groups. It would let
migrant workers obtain renewable three-year visas and allow
undocumented workers already in the country to stay provided they pay
a fine. McCain and Kennedy probably can't get their bill through the
Senate--too many Republicans fear being tagged as proponents of
"amnesty" for illegal immigrants--but they could certainly muster
enough votes to prevent the Senate from passing a version of the House
bill.

In the past, Bush has leaned toward McCain's approach--the president
encouraged McCain after the 2004 election to seek Kennedy's support
for a bill--but he has recently attempted to appease social
conservatives, praising the House's measures to "protect our borders
and crack down on illegal entry into the United States." Bush holds
out hope for a Senate bill that would somehow combine McCain's
approach with Tancredo's. But that's unlikely to happen.

Even if Congress were to adopt one of these approaches--or a
combination of the two--it would not quiet the controversy. Punitive
approaches have either had unintended consequences (for instance,
encouraging illegal immigrants to stay in the United States rather
than return to Mexico) or have proved unenforceable. Border Patrol
spending has increased over 1,000 percent since 1986 without reducing
border-crossings. McCain and Kennedy's approach is far better,
acknowledging the inescapable reality of Latino immigration and its
net benefit to the U.S. economy. But granting amnesty to undocumented
workers, and inviting new workers in, will not satisfy Americans who
are offended by the growing presence--legal or illegal--of Latinos in
their midst. And combining the two proposals would more or less
reproduce the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which hiked
border spending, threatened employer penalties, granted amnesty to
undocumented workers, and led to almost two decades of clamor over
immigration.

That furor will not abate until at least one of two conditions is met.
The first is a dramatic generational change in the cultural attitudes
of non-Latino Americans--meaning the acceptance of biculturalism in
large parts of the United States, including Arizona. Frank Pierson,
the supervising organizer of Arizona's Valley Interfaith Network, a
coalition of church and labor groups that promotes cultural
integration, wants Arizonans to adopt the biblical tradition of
showing "love for the stranger." But non-Latino Americans probably
have to reach a point where they no longer see immigrants from south
of the border as strangers at all.

The other condition is a change in the unequal economic relationship
between the United States and its neighbors to the south, which would
reduce the supply of unskilled laborers seeking jobs in the United
States. Such a change could probably only occur if the United States
were to assume the same responsibility toward Mexico and Central
America that the more prosperous nations of Western Europe did toward
Spain, Greece, and Portugal when they wanted to enter the European
Union--granting them aid, along with protection of their industries
and agriculture, over a transitional period.

But neither condition is likely to be met in the near future.
Americans are not ready to embrace the teenagers who gathered in
Sasabe as their own, and U.S. business is not ready to see Mexico and
Central America as anything other than a platform for exports and
investment. As a result, the conflict over Latino immigration will
continue. And, if what's happening on the Arizona border is any gauge,
that's not something to look forward to.
John B. Judis is a senior editor at TNR and a visiting scholar at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.



John B. Judis, a senior editor for The New Republic, has been a
contributor since 1982. He received his B.A.in 1963, and his M.A. in
1965 from the University of California at Berkeley. As active member
of SDS and the left of the Sixties, he taught philosophy at Berkeley
and at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Judis was a founding editor of the Socialist Revolution in 1969, now
called Socialist Review. In 1975 he started a new monthly called East
Bay Voice. He moved to Washington in 1982 as the Washington
correspondent to In These Times. Soon afterwards, he began writing for
The New Republic, and for GQ. His articles have also appeared in The
American Prospect, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post,
Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, American Enterprise, Mother
Jones, and Dissent.

His books include The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special
Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust; William F. Buckley:
Patron Saint of the Conservatives, and Grand Illusion: Critics and
Champions of the American Century.

UFW second response re: Miriam Pawel

Puzzled by Miriam Pawel’s L.A. Times series
 
            We are grateful to the hundreds of good people who know our work and have contacted us expressing outrage at Miriam Pawel’s recent series in the Los Angeles Times. For a few, the articles have raised concerns, and we appreciate you contacting us directly so we can answer any questions. Please email us at UFWofamer@aol.com and we will respond.
 
            • Pawel’s main premise—that the United Farm Workers is “failing to organize California farm workers”—is directly contradicted by reporting from no less than 22 Los Angeles Times reporters and two columnists between April 25, 1994 (when the current UFW organizing drive began) and Sept. 23, 2005.  These stories chronicle substantial UFW organizing, election, strike and boycott activities plus new union contracts and legislative victories.
 
            Either all the stories by those L.A. Times reporters are wrong or Pawel’s stories are wrong. They both can’t be right. There is a long list of accomplishments and facts in that L.A. Times coverage raising serious questions about Pawel’s reporting.  Please see citations for just 48 of the 1994-2005 news articles and columns by Times writers on UFW activities by subject matter with headlines, reporters’ names and dates at www.ufw.org.
 
• Among other things, L.A. Times stories from 1994 to 2005 chronicle:
 
—A string of UFW election victories and campaigns to win contracts, with workers at 32 companies voting for the union in secret ballot elections and dozens of important UFW contract successes, including the largest strawberry, rose, winery and mushroom firms in California and the nation.
           —Fierce grower resistance to farm worker organizing.
           —The UFW’s major organizing campaign among Central Valley table grape workers last summer that produced modest pay hikes and a near win in the largest private-sector union election in the nation last year, at Giummara.
           —New laws and regulations aiding farm workers the UFW won since 1999, from seat belts in farm labor vehicles and fresh protections for farm workers cheated by farm labor contractors to an historic binding mediation law and new pesticide protections for farm workers. The UFW even convinced Republican Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2005 to issue an emergency regulation to prevent further heat deaths of farm workers and all outdoor employees.
 
            • If Pawel was telling the full story of the UFW and the Farm Worker Movement, her writing would have reflected it.  You decide:
            —Tuesday’s story totaled 121 column inches.  Only 5 inches contained facts or perspective provided by the UFW.
            —Monday’s article was 135.5 column inches. Just 8.5 inches were from the Farm Worker Movement.
            —Sunday’s story was 132 column inches. Only 10 inches were from the Farm Worker Movement.
 
We plan to take these facts and much more to the editors of the L.A. Times and demand the full story of the UFW, Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement be told. We’re never satisfied with the progress we have made. But we’re proud of what we have accomplished and remain committed to overcoming the many challenges we face. We hope you will join us. Please send your letter to the editor of the L.A. Times if you have not already done so. (A much more detailed refutation is being prepared and we will share it with you.)  

2005: The year hatred went mainstream along the border

2005: THE YEAR HATRED WENT MAINSTREAM ALONG U.S-MEXICO BORDER

EDITOR'S NOTE: Christian Ramirez is the director of the American Friends
Service Commitee in San Diego, a human rights organization offering job
placement, legal advice and housing leads to undocumented people crossing
into the U.S. On Dec. 31, 2005, he was interviewed by Cliff Parker and
Carolyn Goossen, who work for New America Media, a collaboration of over
700 print, broadcast and online ethnic media organizations.

BY CLIFF PARKER AND CAROLYN GOOSSEN, PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE

Q: Describe growing up three miles north of the U.S./Mexico Border.

Christian Ramirez: I grew up knowing that the border was a place where I
could take a nap. It wasn't until I traveled to other places that things
started to click. As a kid you ask yourself, why can't my grandma come
visit me, and why do I have to wait in line to go visit her?

Q: What does the border mean to you?

CR:I cannot imagine myself not living in a border community, where you can
be in a new place within seconds or hours depending on the border wait.
It's a place of great artistic expression, especially in Tijuana. It is a
place of violence and a place of inspiration.

You have to live here to see the many stories that go through this border.
People wishing to go north because it's their only hope, and people going
south because it's the only form of entertainment. A border is place where
all these different ways of thinking meet for an instant. You have a bunch
of Navy guys going south to get drunk, and bunch of migrants coming north
with all they have, just to find a little bit of hope. Where else in the
world can you see something like that?

Q: What are the differences you've felt along the border before and after
the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)?

CR: Throughout the history of the border, we've dealt with the Dept. of
Treasury (DOT) or customs, and the Dept. of Justice (DOJ), the INS and the
U.S. Border Patrol.

With the DOT, there was always a very cold relationship, but with the DOJ,
particularly the INS, there was an openness, a willingness to sit down and
dialogue about important tactics.

When 9/11 happened, and we began to hear the discourse about the border as
a national security concern, there were long waits at the border, there was
a stronger presence of border patrols in border communities and advocates
started being detained and beat up.

The DHS has refused to speak to border communities and border residents.
This is a different border, a police state, with border patrol enjoying
more impunity than ever before.

Q: How have you responded?

CR: After the DHS came into existence, we knew we needed to invest time in
building leadership in the border areas. We felt the only way to change
policy in Washington was to create a strong base of people who were
impacted on a daily basis by immigration policies and that they would
themselves would become advocates in the long run.

Q: How would you characterize the past year in terms of the immigration
debate?

CR: In 2004, the mainstream media began covering border issues, and the
language turned to "broken border" "alien invasion." We began to see a very
violent discourse, a justified use of violence.

2005 was the high mark for this. Suddenly, in 2005, the vigilante groups,
paramilitary formations that have always existed here, became mainstream.
The groups that were once on the fringes of our society became folk heroes
for mainstream America.

This has been a year of mainstream hate and mainstream violence at the U.S.
Mexico border.

The border patrol now operates with full power, above the constitution, and
with no judicial review. Not since the McCarthy era have we seen something
like this. If it continues, it will not stop here. The Mexico-U.S. border
will not simply be an imaginary line -- it will expand to the rest of the
country.

Q: What needs to happen in the debate on immigration?

CR: We have heard the voices from the Minutemen, from policy makers, from
presidents, but the one voice that has not spoken, and will speak, is the
border communities.

Q: What issues do the immigrant voices bring to the debate?

CR: We are tired of counting the dead. We want a new reality. We want
family unification, to be treated with the same rights and dignities as
products. We want to have the right to drive a vehicle, so we can drive
from home to our place of employment. We want the possibility for our
children to go on to higher education if they have the ability to do it.
This is what border communities are calling for.

Q: What happens if the Sensenbrenner bill becomes law?

CR: It means that anyone without documents in this country would turn into
a federal criminal. And it means that anyone who aids and abets
undocumented people would also be criminal -- like a church that provides
shelter, clinics for women fleeing domestic violence and organizations like
us. If it passes, we will be forced to go underground.

Q: What is the main cause of death on the border?

CR: The main reason is the climatic conditions. Most people die because
they are cooked to death in the desert, or they freeze to death in the
mountains. And it happens, because the U.S. government under Clinton pushed
the migrant flows away from the urban areas and into the most remote and
inhospitable terrains along the U.S.-Mexico border. This, they said, would
deter the migrants. But they failed in their analysis.

Two million people were undocumented in 1986, and currently, the official
number is 11 million. This policy has only been successful in pushing
people to the deserts and mountains where they are going to die.

Many Americans don't know this. If they knew that innocent people were
being killed, there would be a different reaction to border policies. The
Minuteman project would not be a welcome group.

Q: And how does the year 2005 end?

CR: Today, a young man was shot by border patrol trying to cross the
border. It is a common occurrence here. This is how the year will end on
the border. Just the way it began -- with shooting, with violence, with
bloodshed.


_________________________________________
Arnoldo Garcia
National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
Red Nacional Pro Derechos Inmigrantes y Refugiados
310 8th Street Suite 303
Oakland, CA 94607
Tel (510) 465-1984 ext. 305
Fax (510) 465-1885
www.nnirr.org

UFW leaves the AFL-CIO

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-011206ufw_wr,0,5262207.story?coll=la-home-headlines&track=morenews
From the Los Angeles Times
United Farm Workers Breaks With AFL-CIO
From Associated Press

3:34 PM PST, January 12, 2006

WASHINGTON — The United Farm Workers union has left the AFL-CIO and will join a group of breakaway unions known as the Change to Win Coalition, in a move the UFW hopes will boost recruiting efforts, officials said today.

The UFW, with about 27,000 members, joins the Service Employees International Union, the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers, UNITE HERE and the Carpenters in forming the dissident Change To Win Coalition. The Laborers International Union of North America also is part of the new federation, but has not left the AFL-CIO.

"We view this as a positive step in fulfilling our twin commitments of focusing more resources on organizing and finding new ways to pursue employers that fiercely resist the right of workers to organize," said Marc Grossman, a UFW spokesman. "No employers more fiercely resist the right to organize than agriculture."

UFW already was allied with the Change to Win unions, but sent a letter two days ago informing the AFL-CIO, a federation of more than 50 unions, of its plans to leave.

"We regret to see them leave the federation because there's a lot of history there," said AFL-CIO spokeswoman Denise Mitchell. "It's a union with a proud legacy that got a lot of support from the entire movement, especially the AFL-CIO. I hope we will make history together again in the future."

The farm workers union was founded by Cesar Chavez, an agricultural worker. He died in 1993.

When the AFL-CIO formed 50 years ago, union membership was at its zenith, with one of every three private-sector workers belonging to a labor group. Now, fewer than 8 percent of private-sector workers are unionized.

The breakaway movement started last summer with the departure of the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union. The departure of a half-dozen unions has left the labor federation with more than 50 unions representing almost 9 million workers.

My response to the Miriam Pawel articles in the L.A. Times

One of the central problems of the series by Miriam Pawel, an Associate Editor of the L.A. Times is that the writer strings together a long list of crises with little acknowledgement of the internal contradictions in her own presentation.

For example. Suppose that you as reader are shocked by the purges.
Then you read;

“Ganz had helped oust Jones, but by 1978 he had grown troubled by
Chavez's reluctance to tackle key issues: Should the union focus on
the vineyards, its symbolic heart, or on the vegetable fields, where
it had built a strong base of support? Should organizers try to win
more elections and add members, or consolidate and work on
administering contracts effectively? “

So Jones had helped purge people, and then he was purged.
Ganz had helped to purge Jones, and then he “decided” to leave.

It is not just that you need a scorecard to keep up. What the writer seems to have done is to tell a tale and then select statements to support her thesis. At times the statements are almost neutral, such as those by Dolores Huerta, but they are linked by placements in paragraphs to charges of conspiracy etc.

It appears to this reader that the writer has been loose with her use of evidence.
This is a problem with anyone writing this story. Each person who you turn to for “evidence” has their own view. Indeed, many have their own view of when the crises occurred. The writer, Miriam Pawel, sees the turning point in 1977-79, around the issues of the Synanon game. Her final article on Eliseo Medina focuses on this same time.

But, there were crises and purges earlier. For a first person account of an earlier “purge” read the account by Philip Vera Cruz, once Vice President and a leader of the Pilipino in the union. His autobiography tells the tale. ( full disclosure. Philip was a friend of mine). The point is that this “purge occurred without any Synanon game.
Union life was tumultuous. There are many tales of struggle.
The author selected a few of the crisis times to focus on.

There were earlier major conflicts over a variety of issues. What we have is the view of some of the participants and usually a recording of when they left. Well, many of the same participants stayed through earlier conflicts, crises, and purges which are not mentioned. So, we have a partial story.

In particular if you look at the third article Pawel offers comments that many problems emerged from the use of The Game by Synanon founder Charles Dederich. Now, I am not going to make a case for the use of the Game. I have only read about it.
However, as I read it, it seems to be a structured form of confrontation group training which was popular in the 70’s, a particular and peculiar “therapy”. Many organizations used this approach. I was personally involved in two Colleges of Education using this approach during this time. Yes, it has many problems.
But, lets not convert it to some sinister project different than what others were doing. Synanon has its own story and I do not chose to get into that. You can look it up on the web.
Other readers who took part in the Game are invited to tell me if it was more than confrontation group therapy. There is a history of poor use of therapy models and manipulation on the left.

From my own experience with a social change project I can say that we rejected the confrontation group approach because it assumes that all cultures respond to openness and criticism in a similar manner. It is a highly culturally specific project and the UFW was culturally diverse. That is precisely the environment which I would not use confrontation group gaming in.

The remnants of this approach still are used in areas of anti racism education and anti sexism education. In my experience, it usually does not work to build unity and solidarity.
I have written some more about this in “Beyond Diversity: the struggle for Justice and Solidarity”, posted as a pdf at
www.dsausa.org/antiracism
Duane Campbell

UFW responds to L.A. Times articles

UFW response:
L.A. Times attacks farm workers with lies
Please send a letter to the editor today
The Los Angeles Times is running a series of inaccurate, dishonest and untrue stories by reporter Miriam Pawel viciously attacking the Farm Worker Movement and Cesar Chavez.
We know the conditions farm workers endure on a daily basis and recognize much work remains. Despite supplying extensive, detailed information and unparalleled access over many months refuting specific inaccuracies and misleading charges, L.A. Times reporter Pawel refused to include the Farm Worker Movement’s side in her stories. These initial points will be followed by a much more detailed response.
The UFW’s commitment to organizing farm workers is unwavering. Less than 150 union members are non-farm workers. Our limited resources mean we can’t be every place the need is desperate in California. So our focus has been the Central Valley and Central Coast, the greatest concentration of farm workers in America.
Thousands of farm workers benefit daily from the United Farm Workers’ efforts:
-1. 32 election victories, most in California, since the current organizing drive began.
-1. Dozens of UFW contracts including the largest strawberry, rose, winery and mushroom firms in California and the nation plus victories in other states.
-1. Over the last decade, the UFW has dedicated up to 50% of its resources to organizing, among the highest of all unions. Donations provide key support for organizing.
-1. Ongoing UFW organizing faces stiff resistance, as evidenced by the state of California’s ruling that last summer’s election at Giumarra table grape vineyards could be thrown out because of the grower’s illegal actions.
-1. The UFW has helped tens of thousands of farm workers through recent legislative gains: the 2005 regulation to prevent heat deaths; seat belts in farm labor vehicles; remedies for workers cheated by farm labor contractors; new pesticide protections; the historic push for immigration reform could aid hundreds of thousands in farm labor.
The Farm Worker Movement is continuing the legacy of its founders, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, who believed the movement had to go beyond the work place through non-profit, independently-run groups with distinct missions and staff. Annual independent financial audits give all the organizations clean bills of health.
-1. The nine-station, three-state Radio Campesina network mixes Mexican music with extensive educational programs for 300,000 daily listeners. Radio Campesina blankets the highest concentrations of farm workers in the nation.
-1. More than 1,900 of 3,500 amenity-rich affordable housing units serving about 10,000 people are in farm worker areas in the Central Valley, Arizona and Texas.
-1. Community organizing efforts where farm workers live are improving the lives of thousands in the Salinas and Central valleys and in South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
-1. The Cesar E. Chavez Foundation empowers and equips tens of thousands of young people to carry on Cesar’s life and work.
It is natural for members of Cesar’s family to be inspired by his example. Less than a dozen of 400 committed movement employees are family members; just four hold policy-making positions. Many spent decades as full-time volunteers, work hard for modest pay. They all serve without compensation as board members. Arturo Rodriguez was elected UFW president directly by farm workers.
You can help! These facts and much more that didn’t appear in the L.A. Times are why we ask you to help us bring balance to these unjust stories. Please write down your own feelings and send a letter to the L.A. Times.
Sign your letter to the editor with your full name, street address and phone number, and send it today to: letters@latimes.com or Letters to the Editor, 202 West First Street, Los Angeles, CA. 90012

For more: go to www.ufw.org

L.A.Times writer assaults UFW history

I author a second blog, www.choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com where I deal with public schools and poor media coverage of public education.

Now, A series on the UFW has been published by the Los Angeles times written by Miriam Pawel. It has a great deal of information. It also has some strong conspiracy theories and denunciations.
It seems appropriate while recognizing the validity of some of the information to question and dispute other information. See below.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ufw8jan08,0,6620187.story?coll=la-headlines-california


Quotes and historical references are drawn from letters, board minutes, memos and statements and tape recordings made during the 1970s and 1980s. The material is housed in the UFW archives at the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit.

PART ONE: The UFW betrays its legacy as farmworkers struggle.

PART TWO: The family business: Insiders benefit amid a complex web of charities.

PART THREE: The roots of today's problems go back three decades.

PART FOUR: A UFW success story — but not in the fields.

Second story:
This article is rather similar to the piece written by Marc Cooper and posted here about 3 months ago.
Major parts of the article are accurate. Some are accurate but taken out of context.
It is clearly true that farmworkers throughout California lack basics, water, housing, good wages, health care, et.
The UFW has not been able to win contracts in most of these farms. So, the conditions have not improved. It would be nice if the UFW could win these fights. They have not. They are very weak, for a number of reasons.

Lets look at some context. What % of carpenters are in unions? Non union carpenters are exploited. Is that the fault of the Carpenters Union? Non union grocery clerks are exploited. Is that the fault of the UFCW?

Many of the problems listed here are the result of a de unionized society---particularly in farm labor.

Now, beyond context: Lets look at this:

"The UFW undercut another union to sign up construction workers, poaching on the
turf of building trade unions that once were allies."

This is a statement of a position that is not clear about what the actual issue was.
Carpenter labor in California is largely non union, particularly in private housing. In the last two decades this work has become dominated by Mexican laborers working with contractors. (BTW; my son is in the Carpenters Union and I follow this)

The case referred to, I think, is where a group of construction laborers approached the UFW to represent them. The Carpenters Union is almost absent from the field. So, the specific complaint would be that the UFW responded to a request to organize from a group of Spanish speaking workers. Yes, it was the Carpenters usual jurisdiction.
In part four the author refers back to building housing without using union carpenters. That may be what the author is referring to.

The UFW forfeited the right to boycott supermarkets and stores, a tactic Chavez
pioneered, in order to sign up members in unrelated professions.

Again, poor writing or poor understanding. Yes, we used the boycott. And, a secondary boycott is prohibited by the NLRA.
So, I guess what she is referring to is by accepting workers in other trades ( ie. the handfull of carpenters) the UFW comes under the NLRA and would be prohibited from secondary boycotts. Well, that is a leap.
I worked for 4 years on the second boycott and supported the subsequent boycotts. The UFW accepted and wrote the California Farm Labor act ( there is no national legislation) because the boycotts were not winning.
Declaring a boycott is easy. Winning one is hard.


The essays on the fund raising of the UFW seems accurate.
As Marc Cooper asserted there are a number of fundraising venues and most are employing Chavez family or close friends.
That is, the UFW has become like many other groups ; NOW. the Sierra Club, the Republicans, the Democrats, the most of the NGO world., etc that spend a great deal of time on the fundraising.
And, the UFW has added some hiring of family members. Now, that is a shock. The part three article goes into great detail on this.

That the UFW has made little progress with the newer immigrants, most of whom are MiXTEC, often not Spanish speaking, and are currently often the majority in farm working fields is accurate.
No one has successfully organized these folks. There are a dozen or more local service centers run by volunteers and church people, but no union density at present.

I would say the writer got part of it right, blamed the UFW for the non unionization of farmworkers which is stretch, and got some of it wrong.
As another example, most newspapers including the LA times are now non union. Whose fault is that?

The writer expects the UFW to do more and be more others. That is not reasonable.
The reports on UFW political mobilizations are essentially correct.

All of labor has suffered a severe collapse. The UAW, the Steelworkers, the Teamsters and the UFW.
Since the UFW was always small and weak, the relative collapse has weakened it even more than the others.

To see the many places where the ufw is organizing and successful see their web page at www.ufw.org

The major services for farmworkers, English classes, legal protection, housing, etc. have always been provided by social service agencies, not the UFW. For example, major services are provided by Legal Services.

So, Farmworkers reap little. And, the UFW has strayed from its roots.
That could be called adaptation.
But there is little evidence that this is a causal relationship. Both events occurred. Farmworkers reap little. Yes.

anti immigrant rallies

San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/01/07/state/n120857S80.DTL

Illegal immigration rallies attract few protesters

- By MICHAEL R. BLOOD, AP Political Writer
Saturday, January 7, 2006

(01-07) 14:22 PST Los Angeles (AP) --


Small groups of protesters rallied nationwide Saturday against illegal immigration and lax border security, demanding the government penalize employers who hire illegal workers.


The so-called "Stop the Invasion" protests were organized in 19 states, but in several cities only a smattering of opponents of illegal immigration turned out.


In Glendale, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb, about two dozen protesters waving American flags gathered outside a home-supply store, but they were surrounded and shouted down by more than 100 drum-beating supporters of immigrant rights who chanted, "Racists go home."


The two groups traded shouts and obscene gestures for more than an hour. One man was arrested for assault, police said.


"We are keeping the debate on illegal immigration in the forefront of the American consciousness," said Joseph Turner of Save Our State, which wants to shut down day labor centers set up near large home-supply stores that the group claims are magnets for illegal immigrants. The centers pair employers with people seeking temporary work, such as painting or landscaping.


In Danbury, Conn., about 50 people calling themselves the Connecticut Citizens for Immigration Control spent about two hours chanting and holding signs that read "Arrest Illegal Employers."


Paul Streitz, who organized the demonstrations, said members believe illegal immigrants are taking jobs from citizens while driving down property values.


"This is not a racist thing," said Daniel Anastasia, 46, a construction worker from Westchester, N.Y. "We pay taxes, they don't. I get paid what the union says. The contractor pays them cash. It's not fair to me."


In Las Vegas, John Holiday, 43, and his son, Conner, 9, held signs near a convenience store where undocumented workers are picked up by employers. The boy, who held a sign that read "Our lawmakers encourage lawbreaking," said illegal immigration has divided the country.


"Do you think the problem will be over when I grow up?" Conner asked.


In Farmingville, N.Y., where immigration-related violence erupted several times in recent years, only about a dozen protesters showed up and argued against the growing number of day laborers on eastern Long Island.


The hiring has been a source of tension among longtime residents since at least the late 1990s. In recent months, town officials have been cracking down on illegally overcrowded houses, leaving many of the day laborers scrambling to find new housing.


"Close our borders," protester Bill Pearson said. "Close down the businesses that are hiring these people."


In Framingham, Mass., near Boston, a small group protesting illegal immigration was met by a much larger group of counter-demonstrators, some of whom surrounded them and temporarily disrupted the protest.


"What they are doing is just harassing people who are out here to go to work every day, and they're doing it in a hateful manner, which is against everything this country stands for," said Manuel Olivera, pastor of the nearby New Life Presbyterian Community Church.


<><><> 3B

I Believe Only in the Power of the People

"I Believe Only In The Power Of The People"

By Evo Morales

countercurrents.org December 22, 2005
http://www.countercurrents.org/bolivia-morales221205.htm


Thank you for the invitation to this great meeting of
intellectuals "In Defense of Humanity." Thank you for
your applause for the Bolivian people, who have
mobilized in these recent days of struggle, drawing on
our consciousness and our regarding how to reclaim our
natural resources.

What happened these past days in Bolivia was a great
revolt by those who have been oppressed for more than
500 years. The will of the people was imposed this
September and October, and has begun to overcome the
empire's cannons. We have lived for so many years
through the confrontation of two cultures: the culture
of life represented by the indigenous people, and the
culture of death represented by West. When we the
indigenous people _ together with the workers and even
the businessmen of our country _ fight for life and
justice, the State responds with its "democratic rule
of law."

What does the "rule of law" mean for indigenous people?
For the poor, the marginalized, the excluded, the "rule
of law" means the targeted assassinations and
collective massacres that we have endured. Not just
this September and October, but for many years, in
which they have tried to impose policies of hunger and
poverty on the Bolivian people.

Above all, the "rule of law" means the accusations that
we, the Quechuas, Aymaras and Guaranties of Bolivia
keep hearing from our governments: that we are narcos,
that we are anarchists. This uprising of the Bolivian
people has been not only about gas and hydrocarbons,
but an intersection of many issues: discrimination,
marginalization , and most importantly, the failure of
neoliberalism.

The cause of all these acts of bloodshed, and for the
uprising of the Bolivian people, has a name:
neoliberalism. With courage and defiance, we brought
down Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada _ the symbol of
neoliberalism in our country _ on October 17, the
Bolivians' day of dignity and identity. We began to
bring down the symbol of corruption and the political
mafia.

And I want to tell you, companeras and companeros, how
we have built the consciousness of the Bolivian people
from the bottom up. How quickly the Bolivian people
have reacted, have said _ as Subcomandate Marcos says
!ya basta!, enough policies of hunger and misery.

For us, October 17th is the beginning of a new phase of
construction. Most importantly, we face the task of
ending selfishness and individualism, and creating from
the rural campesino and indigenous communities to the
urban slums _ other forms of living, based on
solidarity and mutual aid. We must think about how to
redistribute the wealth that is concentrated among few
hands. This is the great task we Bolivian people face
after this great uprising.

It has been very important to organize and mobilize
ourselves in a way based on transparency, honesty, and
control over our own organizations. And it has been
important not only to organize but also to unite. Here
we are now, united intellectuals in defense of humanity
_ I think we must have not only unity among the social
movements, but also that we must coordinate with the
intellectual movements. Every gathering, every event of
this nature for we labor leaders who come from the
social struggle, is a great lesson that allows us to
exchange experiences and to keep strengthening our
people and our grassroots organizations.

Thus, in Bolivia, our social movements, our
intellectuals, our workers _ even those political
parties which support the popular struggle _joined
together to drive out Gonzalo Sanchez Lozada. Sadly, we
paid the price with many of our lives, because the
empire's arrogance and tyranny continue humiliating the
Bolivian people.

It must be said, companeras and companeros, that we
must serve the social and popular movements rather than
the transnational corporations. I am new to politics; I
had hated it and had been afraid of becoming a career
politician. But I realized that politics had once been
the science of serving the people, and that getting
involved in politics is important if you want to help
your people. By getting involved, I mean living for
politics, rather than living off of politics. We have
coordinated our struggles between the social movements
and political parties, with the support of our academic
institutions, in a way that has created a greater
national consciousness. That is what made it possible
for the people to rise up in these recent days.

When we speak of the "defense of humanity," as we do at
this event, I think that this only happens by
eliminating neoliberalism and imperialism. But I think
that in this we are not so alone, because we see, every
day that anti-imperialist thinking is spreading,
especially after Bush's bloody "intervention" policy in
Iraq. Our way of organizing and uniting against the
system, against the empire's aggression towards our
people, is spreading, as are the strategies for
creating and strengthening the power of the people.

I believe only in the power of the people. That was my
experience in my own region, a single province _ the
importance of local power. And now, with all that has
happened in Bolivia, I have seen the importance of the
power of a whole people, of a whole nation. For those
of us who believe it important to defend humanity, the
best contribution we can make is to help create that
popular power. This happens when we check our personal
interests with those of the group. Sometimes, we commit
to the social movements in order to win power. We need
to be led by the people, not use or manipulate them.

We may have differences among our popular leaders _ and
it's true that we have them in Bolivia. But when the
people are conscious, when the people know what needs
to be done, any difference among the different local
leaders ends. We've been making progress in this for a
long time, so that our people are finally able to rise
up, together.

What I want to tell you, companeras and companeros what
I dream of - and what we as leaders from Bolivia dream
of - is that our task at this moment should be to
strengthen anti-imperialist thinking. Some leaders are
now talking about how we _ the intellectuals, the
social and political movements _ can organize a great
summit of people like Fidel, Chavez and Lula to say to
everyone: "We are here, taking a stand against the
aggression of the US imperialism." A summit at which we
are joined by companera Rigoberta Menchu, by other
social and labor leaders, great personalities like
Perez Ezquivel. A great summit to say to our people
that we are together, united, and defending humanity.
We have no other choice, companeros and companeras _ if
we want to defend humanity we must change system, and
this means overthrowing US imperialism. That is all.
Thank you very much.

Recorded by Adam Saytanides Translated by Ricardo Sala

_______________________________________________________

The Border Wall

The border wall in Berlin and East Germany was 67 miles long.
The new wall that the Republicans propose in the immigration bill will be 700 miles long.

Immigration : urgent action

The House of Representatives is likely to consider H.R. 4312, the Border Security and Terrorism Prevention Act, as early as December 12th. The legislation contains enforcement provisions designed to increase enforcement along the Southwest border. It is unlikely that the House of Representatives will consider other immigration reform provisions, including a path to citizenship, a temporary worker program, and family backlog reduction as part of this measure.
Since your Representative will be in the district over the next two weeks, you may contact his/her district office as well as the office in Washington, D.C. Please ask your Representative to oppose H.R. 4312 on the floor of the House of Representatives. Enforcement-only legislation will not provide a solution to our immigration crisis. Since 1994, Congress has spent almost $25 billion on border enforcement, including the tripling of the number of Border Patrol agents. At the same time, the number of undocumented has more than doubled and deaths along the border have increased significantly. Only comprehensive immigration reform which features an earned legalization, temporary worker program, family-based immigration reform, and due process protections will provide a humane and effective solution to our immigration crisis.
. E-Mail Your Representative to oppose H.R. 4312, the Border Security and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2005 on the floor of the House of Representatives.
If you prefer to personally call your Representative you can use the following link to find their contact information and use some of the talking points we provide you with. You can also simply use your own talking points if you prefer.
. Call Your Representative to oppose H.R. 4312, the Border Security and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2005 on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Finally, please inform the media about this important legislation. Encourage members of the media to give informed and balanced coverage on comprehensive immigration reform
. Contact the Media to Encourage Informed and Balanced Coverage of Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

Cornel West at CSU-S on Dec.1

Themes in the speech by DSA Chair Cornel West. Dec.1, 2005.

DSA Honorary chair Cornel West spoke at CSU-Sacramento tonight to a crowd of over 3000. It was an excellent speech.
Major themes were the predominance of white supremacy and the centrality of white supremacy in the foundations of this nation. And, how white supremacy keeps us from developing into a true democracy.
After paying tribute to Rosa Parks, Cornel asked, “Do we have the courage to think critically about our society?”
He urged students and the audience to cultivate their own best self. “What kind of human being do you want to be?”
He quoted James Baldwin as saying that, ‘innocence itself is a crime.” That is persons who claim to not see racism and white supremacy are themselves perpetuating an unjust society and weakening our struggle toward democracy.
He spoke of facing painful truths and realities in our society such as the realities of U.S. imperialism. Cornel encouraged the audience to establish balance in their lives and their priorities and to keep justice and democracy alive, not to only pursue individual riches.
And he spoke of the need to create networks of activists and justice oriented people.
Cornel referred to the DSA table and recommended it and DSA.
We were the only table in the room except for a commercial table
selling his C.D's.
We gave away all the DSA literature we had. And, picked up 5 sign ups.
Cornel West. Author of Race Matters ( 1993) and Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (2004) and Honorary Chair of Democratic Socialists of America. Professor at Princeton. University Union. 7:30 P.M.
Duane Campbell
Sacramento

Immigration Advocates Face Challenges

Immigration Advocates Face Challenges:
Tom Barry

The most obvious challenges—including new anti-immi-
grantlegal measures, rising anti-immigrant bias in the
media, and an expanding backlash movement against
immigration—are not necessarily the most difficult ones.
More daunting are challenges facing pro-immigration
groups and immigrant advocates as they seek to estab-
lish a framework for discussing immigration.
If immigrant advocates and immigrants themselves are
to move from the sidelines to the center of the intensify-
ing immigration debate, and by doing so help staunch
the growing influence of the retrograde restrictionist
forces, they must meet five major challenges.
The first challenge is to gain credibility as advocates for
an immigration policy that considers the totality of U.S.
national interests—not just the needs and problems of
immigrants or the demands of business for new foreign
sources of cheap and skilled labor. Marshalling the same
facts and figures used by the Wall Street Journal and
Corporate America, as pro-immigration advocates often
do to describe the net economic benefits of immigration,
falls far short of what is needed if immigration reformers
are to gain the attention and support of the U.S. public.
Macroeconomic figures that show immigrants boosting
national economic growth provide little solace to workers
who see immigrants holding jobs they or their parents
once had, or who find themselves competing in a labor
market where immigrant workers are willing to work
longer, harder, and for substantially lower wages.
The challenge, then, is to offer a progressive vision of a
healthy, multiethnic, multicultural society. Such a society
would collectively move forward with policies to assure
full employment, protect labor rights, and provide basic
social services to all, without unfairly burdening the mid-
dle class, while at the same time facilitating social inte-
gration and a sense of community through language
instruction and good basic education.
The third challenge that immigration advocates face is
overcoming their hesitation to describe the immigration
problem as a class problem. The first step in injecting
class analysis into their advocacy is to disentangle them-
selves from business—whether it be Fortune 500 corpo-
rations, the National Association of Manufacturers,
agribusiness, high-tech firms that increasingly rely on
skilled foreign workers, or even the strong lobby of immi-
gration lawyers—which often support liberal immigration
policies based on their vested professional interests.
Corporate, pro-immigration positions often coincide
with those of immigrants and immigrant advocates. But
failing to distinguish between immigration reform moti-
vated by a desire for cheap labor and immigration
reform advocated to attain a just society make the entire
pro-immigration movement extremely vulnerable to the
critique that it is an open borders lobby.

http://americas.irc-online.org/pdf/commentary/0508immig.pdf

Divided we fall

DIVIDED WE FALL
By David Bacon
Colorlines, 2/06

If Congress' current proposals for immigration reform pass this year or next, will they help the immigrant workers now doing reconstruction on the Gulf Coast? What about the residents hoping to return home - what might these proposals mean for racial divisions already fanned by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and syndicated newspaper columnist Ruben Navarette in the wake of the flood?
Both Nagin and Navarette play on growing insecurity on each side of the migration divide. "How do I ensure that New Orleans is not overrun by Mexican workers?" the Mayor asked in early November. Navarette praised immigrants for "not sitting around and waiting for government to come to the rescue. They're probably living two or three families to a house ... that's how it used to be in this country before the advent of the welfare state." African American politicians, he said, just want to "keep the city mostly Black."
It's not a theoretical problem. The Gulf Coast disaster is having a profound and permanent effect on the area's workers and communities. The racial fault lines of immigration politics threaten to pit Latinos against Blacks, and migrant laborers against community residents hoping to return to their homes. Community organizations, labor and civil rights advocates can all find common ground in a reconstruction plan that puts the needs of people first. But flood-ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana could also become a window into a different future, in which poor communities with little economic power fight each other over jobs.
Even before Hurricane Katrina hit, the unemployment rate among Gulf residents was among the nation's highest. According to a study commissioned by the Congressional Black Caucus, 18 to 30 percent of people in the region live under the poverty line, and among Blacks in New Orleans, the poverty rate was 35 percent.
After the flood, jobs for workers in the area simply vanished along with their homes. Thousands of residents were dispersed to shelters and housing hundreds of miles away. Businesses closed for lack of customers. With no taxpayers filling the coffers, cities and school districts face bankruptcy. In New Orleans, Blacks, concentrated in public-sector jobs and already reeling from the storm and flood, were hit again by massive layoffs.
With no sure job waiting for them, few families had the resources to simply go back and take a chance on finding new employment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found in October that 500,000 of the 800,000 people evacuated had yet to return home. According to Jared Bernstein, an economist at Washington, D.C.'s Economic Policy Institute, the average unemployment rate for evacuees is 24.5 percent-10.5 percent for those who've been able to return, but 33.4 percent for those who haven't.
What did New Orleans residents need to go back? Within a few weeks of the disaster, the People's Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF) came up with some simple demands. The Federal government, it said, should provide funds to enable families to reunite, and make public the lists of evacuees maintained by FEMA and the Red Cross to help people find each other. Then disaster victims needed the same kind of immediate relief the World Trade Center fund provided in New York City. Finally, to enable people to restart economic life, the PHRF demanded public works jobs, at union wages. It called for putting community residents on the boards planning the rebuilding, and making their discussions public.
Steven Pitts, an economist at the University of California in Berkeley, points out that "the fundamental question in reconstruction is the role of the displaced residents, both in planning the rebuilding itself, and in the support given them by the government."
What actually took place, however, was far from this community-based vision. As the floodwaters receded, a host of wealthy contractors invaded the waterlogged boulevards. Federal agencies signed no-bid contracts, guaranteeing that what little money they were willing to spend on reconstruction would become a source of private gain for the politically connected. Dispersed residents got no help in returning to rebuild their homes and lives. When they tried to go back, they were treated as threats to law and order-impediments to potential gentrification.
The Gulf Coast became instead a playground for advocates of free-market nostrums. The Davis Bacon Act's protection for workers' wages was suspended-reinstated only after massive protest organized by the AFL-CIO and many community groups in the region. Affirmative action, which might have diverted a small percentage of those no-bid contracts to locally owned firms, was abolished. The meager budget a Republican Congress was willing to divert from the Iraq war became a justification for slices to food stamps and student loans.
In this vast enterprise zone, sacrificing the welfare of workers and the poor was just one more incentive to attract corporate investment.
Contractors did come, sometimes bringing their workforce with them. Many migrants were also drawn to Mississippi and Louisiana on their own, by the word-of-mouth network that passes along news of any area where employers are hiring, and asking few questions about legal status. Employers wanted workers, but workers without families, who needed no schools or community services. They wanted workers who could be housed in homeless shelters, or packed into trailers like sardines.
Bill Chandler, political director in Mississippi for the hotel union UNITE HERE, and president of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, describes the conditions for migrant workers: "We've found instance after instance of workers sleeping outside or in tents," he says, "or in abandoned trailers or even school busses. There's no enforcement of any health standards, no safety gear, and no immunizations for people who can easily get tetanus from cuts or punctures. Migrants work from sunup to sundown, without any benefits, and sometimes even without paychecks."
Inspectors for the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division wait in their offices for workers to complain. In Jackson, Mississippi, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is on the floor above the inspectors, and the detention center for deportees in the basement. As one might imagine, the Wage and Hour office doesn't get much walk-in traffic from immigrants, many of whom lack immigration documents. Instead, labor and immigrant rights groups are the ones who gather complaints and demand enforcement.
The biggest contractors-Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR, BE&K (a construction giant with a history of recruiting strikebreakers in labor disputes) and others-disclaim responsibility. They hire subcontractors, who hire other subcontractors, who hire labor recruiters, who employ the workers. According to Chandler, while the original FEMA contract might pay $35 for the removal of each cubic yard of debris, the subcontractor who actually does the work probably gets $10. Layers of middlemen absorb the rest. Subcontractors seek to underbid each other by pushing wages as low as possible.
A family seeking to return to the area, needing a living wage, can't make it on $5-9/hour. And for migrants, the contract system imposes conditions reminiscent of a century ago.
This is the dark side of the neoliberal American Dream. The net result is the casualization of the workforce throughout the hurricane-affected area. Temporary jobs instead of permanent ones. Jobs for mobile, single men, rather than for families. No protection for wages. Hiring through contractors and temporary agencies, instead of a long-term commitment from an employer.
Immigration bills currently in Congress will reinforce this system. Most proposals, from that of President Bush to the bipartisan Kennedy/McCain bill to the new measures put forward by Senators Chuck Hegel and Arlen Specter all rest on establishing huge new guest worker programs. They will allow companies to recruit 3-400,000 workers a year outside the U.S., and bring them in to work under temporary visas. Employers will undoubtedly make the same promises of good wages and conditions heard on the Gulf Coast. But the economic pressure of competing layers of contractors, recruiters and labor agencies will exert the same constant downward pressure. In the wake of Katrina, the contractors now in the Gulf will have a more systematic way to recruit the same kind of contingent workforce, with the active assistance of the Federal government.
Under these immigration reform proposals, the Department of Labor, with the same lack of political will to enforce worker protections it displays at present, will have a new charge. Together with the Social Security Administration, these agencies will be the immigration police, poring through employment records for those lacking guest worker visas. Inspectors may indeed leave that office in Jackson, but only to find and deport the undocumented. Those workers without papers, meanwhile, will be even more vulnerable than they are today. Their employers will have new leverage to demand unpaid overtime or impose bad conditions.
If one of these bills is enacted, job competition at the bottom of the workforce will grow more intense. And the likelihood of an immigration reform package passing with more enforcement provisions, expanded guest worker programs, and no worker protections is high, according to most policy watchers.
In the hurricane-affected areas, fears generated by competition are already apparent. Politicians like Nagin, using racial fears to win votes, and columnists like Navarette, seeking to incite racial hysteria among readers, both see gains to be made from increased division.
Yet as immigration changes the demographics of the South, its communities have a good record of reaching across racial lines. "Every immigrant rights bill in Mississippi has been introduced by African American legislators," Chandler says. In the state's poultry and meatpacking plants, longtime Black workers and a new wave of immigrants have found themselves on the same side in union organizing efforts. Hurricane relief is a key test of those bonds, and the desire to achieve common ground.
This year the Congressional Black Caucus made two important contributions to this effort. The CBC-sponsored HR 4197 addresses hurricane recovery and poverty, authorizing funds for housing and new Section 8 vouchers, for increased health care, and for extended unemployment and temporary assistance to needy families. It provides money to help returning residents rebuild their homes or seek new ones, and for schools to help relocated students. The bill reinstates Davis Bacon wage requirements, creates apprenticeship programs to develop good jobs, and requires the President to present a plan for eradicating poverty.
For Pitts, this moves in the right direction. "You have to assure there's a floor under wages," he suggests, "Both immigrants and African Americans need this. To ensure people can return, the government has to recognize the need for two kinds of income-wages from decent jobs, and money to cover the cost of relocation. Immigrants need a living wage too, as well as the right to organize and the ability to move freely, so they're not tied to an employer or contractor."
The CBC also supported another bill this spring, by Houston Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. The Save America Comprehensive Immigration Act of 2005, HR 2092, provides a way for currently undocumented workers to gain permanent resident status, and enforces migrants' rights in the workplace. Unlike every other immigration proposal in Congress, it has no guest worker program, and doesn't call for greater enforcement of employer sanctions. It will take the fees paid by people applying for legal status, and use them to provide job creation and training programs in communities with high levels of unemployment. For community and labor activists who see Kennedy/McCain and similar proposals as dangerous, Jackson Lee's bill provides at least a partial program for progressive immigration reform.
The key to finding common ground is fighting for jobs for everyone. Whether Black, white, Asian or Latino, native-born or immigrant-no one can live without work. Yet this basis for an alliance of mutual interest has largely fallen off the liberal agenda. Even unions, the bastion of support for the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, a 1970s proposal that the federal government provide jobs to eradicate unemployment, pay only lip service to the idea today. In the Democratic Party, free market ideologues ridicule the idea that the government should guarantee employment, as it did in the New Deal programs of the 1930s. Instead, both parties propose to pile guest worker programs, and increased enforcement of employer sanctions, on top of job competition. This is an explosive mixture in which no one has the right to a job, and everyone shares only increased insecurity.
Unemployment and racism in the U.S. economic system pit communities of color against each other, and against working-class white communities. Competition produces lower labor costs and higher profits. It's no accident that the guestworker programs in Congress are pushed by the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, which includes 38 of the country's largest industrial and business associations.
Racial division is a powerful political weapon as well, helping to maintain a conservative Republican majority in Congress and the White House. By the same token, for working communities, overcoming racial division creates new possibilities for winning political power. In the early 1980s a Black-Latino alliance defeated the Chicago political machine and elected Harold Washington mayor. In the spring of 2005 the same strategy elected Antonio Villaraigosa mayor of Los Angeles, where division between Blacks and Latinos was used to keep conservatives in power for decades. The rebuilding of Biloxi, Gulfport and New Orleans can forge a similar political coalition on the Gulf Coast too. But to accomplish that, working class communities will have to reject the use of immigration as a new dividing line to keep them apart.

The Strength of Networks

From: “ None but Ourselves: How the left can get organized”
2004. Susan Chacin
The Strength of Networks.


When I stopped thinking the Left should all unite in a single organization around a single platform, I began to realize that we are united through our networks. Valuing our networks is perhaps the most important way that we can appreciate our strengths and grow the movement. This may seem like common sense to many younger people. They are used to a fluid, networked movement. But older activists tend to have been “brought up” in a left culture that paid attention to the organizations that made up the movement. These strong, often centralized organizations tended to draw attention away from the network of relationships that links us with others irrespective of organizational affiliations.

If you have been around the Left even for a little while, you have probably got a political network. There is the woman who dragged you to another anti-war demonstration in 2002. If you wanted to get in touch with environmentalists, you could call an old classmate who is out in the woods working against logging. Your partner’s sister is married to a man who works in a youth organization. He could put you in touch with anti-police abuse groups. People at your kids’ school have been registering neighbors to vote. Your email address book includes acquaintances who are in touch with independent media, labor, and reproductive choice activists.

Right up front I want to emphasize that by left networks I am referring to more than the Internet. The Internet is an important tool that can facilitate networking. But it is person-to-person connections that are the real threads linking us to each other. In the Internet we have a new avenue for these contacts, but it can also obscure the personal relationships that are the fabric of organizing. An important principle that I learned rather late in life is: all organizing is “one-on-one.”

If you have a personal connection with someone, you are much more likely to listen to what they say or return their calls. And this connection lasts through changes in the organizations we are working with or levels of participation. I’m not shocked anymore to hear that someone I have known to be a strong activist in the past is taking a break from political activity. I can catch up if we get a chance to speak in person, keep track of them through mutual connections, or track them down if I really need to.

What is new about networks?

It’s not that social networks themselves are new. However our awareness of networks is growing exponentially, and they are being used to organize in creative, new ways.

Networks are the basis of the information-based mode of production. Marxists among my readers may find it significant that with networks, the technology and form of production is once again affecting social relationships! Al Quaeda’s attacks on September 11, 2001 turned many people’s attention to the network as a form of organizing that is extremely flexible and difficult to eradicate. But two RAND researchers had predicted in the 1990s that networks would be the basis of wars in the new millennium.

We have just seen groups like MoveOn and the Howard Dean campaign turn networking into powerful avenues for organizing. By understanding how networks operate, consciously building and nurturing them, and taking every appropriate opportunity to activate them, the Left can increase our effectiveness and reach much further than we could by using a strict, organization-based approach.

I began to become aware of the potential of networks for our movement when I got ready to move. I had been active in Los Angeles for 25 years and I was moving to the Bay Area where I knew only a handful of folks. I found myself with tears in my eyes at an open house held by the Community Coalition in South Central L.A. I knew I would be leaving all these people who had been contacts and friends over the years.

When I got to the Bay Area, I enrolled in a social work program and decided to do some research on networks. I interviewed five political activists in the Bay Area about their political connections. What I found amazed me. My informants’ networks extended much further than I had suspected, and had supported their work in unexpected ways.

One of the people I interviewed, Matt Chapell, a gay AIDS activist then in his 30s, had found a connection with Greenpeace for ACT-UP to learn how to stage direct action protests. Then breast cancer activists had come to him at ACT-UP to learn the same information. With this series of exchanges, I could document movement “know how” traveling from the environmental movement to a predominantly gay setting, and from there being disseminated to a largely women’s constituency. A recovering drug addict, the same activist had built relationships with experts in the National Institute of Health’s AIDS clinical trials unit based on his understanding of the technical scientific jargon gained in researching the drugs he was using. He saw part of his mission as helping activists in the HIV world advocate for changes in government policies around medications.

Another person I interviewed had been active in the past with a group of primarily white lesbians to protest U.S. foreign policy, and she brought these contacts into her volunteer work against rape. Thanks to her and other feminists’ insistence, the rape hotline’s mandatory training for volunteers included extensive discussion about racism and imperialism. This organization believed that women who call for help after an assault are affected by oppression in other aspects of their lives. Her knowledge of U.S. imperial exploits and connections to people who had been protesting U.S. military policy in Central America helped her break into a new job in the independent media movement. Thanks to her connections, she was able to put together coverage leading up to the groundbreaking anti-globalization protests in Seattle that helped both to build and document them.

The second woman I interviewed, Millie Cleveland, had been part of an African American rank and file movement in unions. At the time I interviewed her, she working on violence prevention with Oakland youth. She was still in touch with an attorney who had handled her ex-husband’s union grievances while they were in the plant, and the lawyer had recently been elected to the Oakland school board. Millie was part of his “kitchen cabinet” advising him about policy in the schools. She has subsequently gone on to work as staff for a union, and the knowledge of training and mediation skills she gained working with youth is coming in handy in labor.

Warren Mar was working for the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute when I interviewed him, but he also had a solid background in Chinese American community organizing in San Francisco. He had gone into the hotel and restaurant union after doing radical community-based organizing, and had strong connections to the lively academic world in the Bay Area as well. I worked with him later in the Labor Immigrant Organizing Network (LION) which helped change the AFL-CIO’s official position to oppose employer sanctions for hiring undocumented workers. His connections with Chinese community immigration activists, unions, and radical politics helped bridge these disparate worlds. He later went to work at the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, where he co-authored a text for teaching English as a second language using workers’ rights as the subject matter. He is currently serving as temporary director of the Labor and Community Studies program at San Francisco Community college.

In terms of the size and breadth of his networks, the star of my research was Tim Sampson. He had strong connections in the United Farmworkers, the Love Canal neighborhood anti-toxics network, health care, homecare, welfare rights, labor, consumers’ rights, community organizing, legal and social work worlds. Tragically, he passed away in 2001, but his memorial service in downtown Oakland brought people together from around the country. Even though he had talked with me at length about all the people he had known over the years, I was surprised by the breadth and depth of his legacy.

My discussions with these fascinating people showed me the danger of trying to classify activists as belonging in a single field of struggle. In addition to their active connections at the time I interviewed them, all five of the participants still had a wealth of contacts reaching back years into the projects they had worked on before we met. Besides learning a great deal about how diverse political networks can be, my research had an additional benefit. By talking to five politically savvy people in the Bay Area about their networks, I began to understand more about my new home. I started to form my own networks here in a more intentional, conscious way, and I did not totally lose the connections I had made in Southern California either.

SPINS

The idea of applying social network theory to social movements is not new, but I don’t believe this approach has been publicized enough. In the late 60s, Luther Gerlach and Virginia Hine started to look at the structure of movements from this perspective. Their analysis confirms many of my observations. They came up with the acronym “SPIN” to describe key characteristics of these movements: “Segmentary: composed of many diverse groups, which grow and die, divide and fuse, proliferate and contract; Polycentric: having multiple, often temporary, and sometimes competing leaders or centers of influence; Networked: forming a loose, reticulate, integrated network with multiple linkages through travelers, overlapping membership, joint activities, common reading matter, and shared ideals and opponents.”

How Networks Work

“Over the last few decades there has been a paradigm shift in scientific understandings of living systems. Scientists are now discovering what indigenous knowledge has long taught – everything is connected. Ecologists, biologists, physicists, and mathematicians have begun to be able to describe vastly complex connected webs of life, which are made up of networks within networks. They have gradually realized that life has the ability to self-organize and mutually adapt, without anyone in control. Their descriptions of living systems are perhaps the best model yet for how the [alternative globalization] movement functions…

“High-speed film reveals that the movement spreads across a flock [of birds] in less than one-seventieth of a second. Yet this should be impossible, as it is much faster than a single bird’s reaction time. The flock is clearly more than the sum of its parts. But how is this possible?

“Observing the movement of affinity groups from police helicopters during many of the mass mobilizations of the past few years, or trying to map the daily flow of information between the forever-transforming activist groups on the internet must create a similar sense of bafflement for the authorities. Even participants in the movements are often confused as to how everything seems to somehow fit together so well…

“Nowadays software designers, urban planners and ecologists all use these concepts in their day-to-day work; the realm of politics has yet [to] catch up.

“For this is truly organizing from below. The process of simple local units generating complicated global or group behaviour, a process not directed by a conscious entity, but rather emerging through the interrelationships of the system’s parts is known in scientific circles as emergence.

“If numbers, neurons, crowds, computer programmes, cells, city dwellers, bird behave like this, why not a networked movement of movements?”

If the Left wants to grow our movement from a networking perspective, we have to learn more about the nuts and bolts, or should I say the warp and woof, of networks. Fortunately, we are in the midst of a period in which networks are receiving a great deal of academic and commercial attention. In addition to the work of the two RAND researchers, Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s book Linked is a good place for a novice like me to start. It brings science –his discipline is physics– together with highly entertaining stories illustrating properties of networks. He also shows how new the scientific analysis of networks is, and proposes that there are amazing congruencies among networking phenomena in physical, social, and biological sciences.

A few characteristics of networks will be obvious to anyone who is familiar with the Internet. First of all, the whole of a network is difficult, if not impossible, to perceive. When you first connect with the Internet, all you are in contact with is one “page” or node. It takes a few experiences “navigating” from one node to another by means of “links” to understand what you are actually doing. This would explain why so many leftists are missing the essential networked nature of our movement: they see the “page” but not the “links.”

In our movement as on the Internet, large or important nodes can become hubs. A hub can be as simple as an individual’s homepage, or as fancy as Yahoo, but real hubs get huge amounts of traffic. In our movement, hubs can be individuals, organizations, or even web sites that end up transmitting a high volume of useful connections. The relative popularity of web pages is expressed in “hits.” For a social change movement, we could understand a hub’s effectiveness in terms of its links to other hubs, its ability to turn people out, its capacity to raise funds, its influence on a “domain” of struggle, or all of the above.

A key social networking theory shows how this approach can help us organize more effectively. It is a breakthrough by a sociologist named Mark Granovetter. When he got involved with research on social networks in the late 60s, a lot of attention was being paid to small networks with intimate, strong connections, the people we depend on for nurturance, social support, and day-to-day socializing. Members of such close groups tend to agree with each other about many things and feel comfortable in each other’s company.

Granovetter, however, realized that to understand how new information can travel among these strong, primary networks, we have to look further. It is our “weak ties” with people whom we do not know so well that provide us with access to ideas and connections from outside our primary social network. Granovetter’s theory, “the strength of weak ties” has become a basic principle of social network theory. It applies to the Left in several ways.

The “strength of weak ties” principle can explain how important it is to stay in touch with old friends or “hang out” at movement-oriented social events. The real work of the movement moves along just as surely at a party as at a meeting. It’s also important that we not throw away our old address books. When I was doing my research on networking, I told the woman who had been involved with anti-imperialist work about this idea, and she was actually very relieved. “Now I don’t feel so guilty about not being able to be in close touch with people I’ve worked with in the past,” she said. On the other hand, we also commented on how sad it is that the Left has lost the names and addresses of people with whom we have worked for years. Imagine how strong the Left would be if we had maintained contact with all the people who worked on Jesse Jackson’s two campaigns for president in the 1980s! Networking can be the vehicle for the movement to keep connected with people beyond the life of a particular project.

One crucial question that Granovetter’s theory raises for the Left is whether we are good at connecting with people who disagree with us. Too often we are fearful, repulsed, or disdainful of people who support opposing political positions. And there is good reason for our reactions. Our beliefs are anathema to many of our neighbors, and maybe even to relatives and co-workers. We tend to cut ourselves off from meaningful interaction with anyone we fear might treat us with anger or hostility. But according to Granovetter’s principle, these may be the connections that can bring us new information. They are certainly connections that we could use to bring the information we have to a wider audience. How can the Left change people’s minds if we are too angry, fearful, or sure of our own correctness to be willing to talk to them?

Strengths of a Networked Movement

Gerlach acknowledges that movements networked along his and Hines’ “SPIN” model are often “labeled disorganized, poorly organized, loosely organized, or underdeveloped-and thus…(have) been denigrated or criticized not only by opponents or observers but at one time by movement participants.” Instead, these researchers found distinct strengths in these movements. Networked movements are:
• Hard to suppress because there are multiple groups and leaders. If one group is forced out of existence, others come forward;
• Attuned to a variety of social niches, offering every supporter things to do, even though they may have found these spots through factionalism and division;
• Able to divide up the labor by member groups specializing in specific tasks and skills;
• Able to adapt to changing circumstances, with member groups free to innovate and respond quickly to new situations;
• Reliable because the failure of one group does not compromise the whole;
• Good at learning from successes and failures by virtue of having a variety of approaches and experience to synthesize;
• Tactically flexible by including both “hard line” and “moderate” groups, the movement as a whole can roll out a wider range of tactics; and,
• Innovative and energetic as component groups strive to develop new approaches and win support.

Does this mean that there is no need for strong organizations?

None of this networking theory I am proposing negates the need for strong, defined organizations. The National Organization for Women (NOW), for example, is a clearly constituted membership group with local chapters that elect officers and participate in national conventions. They are in the forefront of organizing for a broad agenda of women’s rights.

But even a powerful organization like NOW couldn’t have staged the March for Women’s Lives. In this effort, NOW worked with the Fund for a Feminist Majority, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), Planned Parenthood, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Black Women’s Health Imperative. As a result, the event was much stronger and more diverse than any one of the sponsoring organizations could have managed alone.

Such pro-choice coalitions have existed in the past, although maybe not with the conscious emphasis on racial and age diversity of this one. My question for these groups is: Are you continuing to relate to each other and building linkages that last? If not, we will have wasted an important resource for movement building. If so and an ongoing network is being built, how can we help – and how can you provide access to your network for the millions of people who were unable to attend the march?