Stronger Latin Currencies Signal Declining U.S. Hegemon(e)y

This article from Bloomberg talks about another indicator of the decline of U.S. power in the hemisphere: rising Latin currencies.

Good news for an América Latina preparing, like the rest of the world, for the noxious effects of the U.S. recession. Historically, the continent of América has contracted economic flu and typhoid when the U.S. economy gets a case of a recessionary cold. Stronger pesos, reales and other currencies mean that the countries of the hemisphere are better-able to deal with the trickle down effects of failed U.S. economic policy. According to the Bllomberg article,

“A slowdown in the U.S. will have an effect,” said Silvia Marengo, who manages $130 million of bonds at Clariden Bank in London. “What’s different now is that these countries find themselves in better financial positions. In the past, we would be talking about which Latin American country would be the next to default.”

Oddly enough, Latin America (yes) is home to three of the four best-performing currencies against the dollar this year among emerging markets.

So, buy pesos!

“Post-Racial” Society? Report Says U.S.Treatment of African Americans, Immigrants “Abysmal”

A new report to the to a United Nations human rights committee criticizes the U.S. government for its “abysmal” treatment of African Americans, immigrants and other racial and ethnic groups.

The report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was delivered to the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in response to a ” flawed U.S. government report that underreported the state of racial discrimination in the United States.” CERD is a U.N.-sanctioned group of internationally recognized human rights experts that oversees compliance with a 2004 treaty on the elimination of racial discrimination. Since the Clinton Administration ratified the treaty in 1994, the U.S. government has used CERD to denounce racism and other discrimination in other countries.

Among the many”shortcomings” in the Bush Adminstration’s more positive report to CERD are the ACLU says, “the minor mention of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the outright omission of issues including the dramatic increase in anti-immigrant acts and practices, exploitation of migrant workers, the escalating problem of police brutality and racial profiling, and the “school to prison pipeline,” whereby the criminal justice system overzealously funnels students of color out of classrooms and on a path toward prison.”

Witnesses joining the ACLU for testimony before CERD in Geneva will include Akif Rahman, a native-born United States citizen who was detained, questioned and abused by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on five separate occasions as he re-entered the country after business or personal trips abroad.

The importance of such reports cannot be underestimated. One of the largely unwritten chapters of civil rights history is about how more internationalist and left-leaning African Americans like WEB Dubois and Paul Robeson used international forums to shame the U.S. government before its peers about Jim Crow. Declassified documents from numerous national security archives reveal that officials at the highest levels of government were, in fact, concerned about the international embarrassment brought on them by such acts of outing.

The ACLU report also provides a healthy antidote to the dangerous absurdity of the “post-racial” talk on the left and right side the Obamamania wave. For these and other reasons, it’s important for social movements to pressure Obama to use his abundant rhetorical gifts to speak about things in the report.

Fetishizing for Fun and Profit: Kayak.com Promotes Racist, Anti-immigrant Blogging

The screenshot above documents another example of how immigration “humor” gets used to sell things. The Kayak.com post promotes what it calls a “semi-illegal vacation” designed to “push travel boundaries just enough to cause a little commotion” by having travelers pose as undocumented immigrants.

Well, they appear to have succeeded. Not long after this post went up, groups like the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition (BAIRC), the Center for American Progress (CAP) and other groups and individuals gave Kayak several gigs and earfuls of complaints, forcing them to remove the post because of what representatives called “complaints”, according to folks at CAP.

This type of exoticism marks but another in the long line of insipid and goofy gimmicks that fetishize non-white Others for fun and profit, as mentioned here & here previously.

My advice to the racial thrillride seekers? Go ride the empty kayak of your suburban self.

Thanks to folks at BAIRC & CAP for bringing this to our attention.

President Calderon’s Message of Unity Brings Together Minutemen and Mexican Opposition

This story in La Opinion is bizarre in a uniquely L.A. way.

It describes how, “for a moment” anti-immigrant Minutemen joined pro-immigrant Mexican opposition groups (as in opposed to Calderon and Minutemen they consider racist) to loudly protest the visit of Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

According to the story written (translated por mi) by La Opinion’s Isaías Alvarado,

“The Los Angeles visit of Mexican President Felipe Calderon has, paradoxically, united groups traditionally antagonistic to each other.
As if in unison, protesters marching in front of the Omni Hotel shouted slogans like “¡Sin maíz, no hay país!” (”Without corn, there
is no country”) slogan of the sympathizers of the Party of the Democratic Revolution and ” ¡Pre-si-den-t Cal-de-rón go fix
.Mé-xi-co!” slogan of members of the Minuteman project. There were no violent incidents, including between people who engaged in previous disputes.”

In light of this bilingually bi-national bizarre moment, let me say that I actually believe that, at some point (not yet), those of us defending immigrants ravaged by globalization must make at least some peace with those other victims of globalization, white racists. Yes, I do believe that we need to build a big, unprecedented tent that allows us all to burn down the bigger tent of the corporate interests that unite Calderon, Bush and most other heads of state. Of course, we have to find a way to delete the racism before that happens and that’s a lot of work.

Or are we supposed to support that other election-stealer, Calderon, because he’s Mexican?

Para Nada. Despite his flowery calls to defend Mexican and other immigrants, he, his devastating policies are what turns a Mexicana(o) into an “inmigrante”.

Beware of the nation-state and the false consciousness of nationalism.

Speech: National Security and the Birth of the Anti-Immigrant State or Immigrants and the Birth of the National Security State?

And now for something that deviates from but is directly related to the election mania gripping the country.

This speech given at the Brecht Forum captures well some recent thoughts about the relationship between immigrants and the national security state. Basic idea is that immigrants provide the state with another excuse to put more people with guns in our midst, especially in times of crisis.

The speech goes against the traditional logic around immigration, which tells us that raids, repressive laws, etc. are solely about elections or about controlling low wage undocumented workers needed for corporate and private profits.

While winning elections and keeping a surplus of low wage labor are a part of the immigration equation, these explanations hardly capture the cavernous motives beneath the current immigrant zeitgeist. Stuff in the speech also runs contrary to the rather tired argument that what’s happening around immigration is just about immigrants. It’s also about controlling people like many of you and me, citizens.

To vary on a theme that defined the Clinton era, “It’s the national security state, stupid.”

Lurking beneath the stale arguments of pro and anti-immigrant forces is a nation state, an elite that’s preparing for the social unrest due to the death of the American Dream (if it ever actually existed).

I shared a 2 minute clip of the speech previously, but this link features the speech in its entirety (14 minutes).Hope you like it. I actually think it’s one of the better talks I’ve given in some time. Please do email me or comment if you listen to this as these ideas are a work in progress and I value your thoughts and opinions about it.

And thanks to the Brecht Forum and the folks at Law and Disorder Radio for the opportunity to share these thoughts.

Super Duper Discussion on Democracy Now: Race, Empire and the Primaries

After burning the 3am oil trying to get a grasp on the ultimately ineffable workings of the body politic, I got up at 5:30 am (can you hear the roosters?) to join Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman and guests Bill Fletcher and Frances Fox for an out-of-the-corporate-media box discussion about race, empire and the primaries. Thanks to Amy and fellow panelists, this really turned out to be as probing a discussion about the elections as I’ve had the pleasure of participating in. Check it out!

Those of you without audio setup can read the transcript here (just delete the “Uh”’s)

Latino Officials at the Center of CIA Torture Tape Investigation

Who Will Take the Fall for the CIA Torture Tape Scandal?

By Roberto Lovato, AlterNet
Posted on January 18, 2008, Printed on January 18, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/74033/

As he concluded a closed-door congressional hearing into the CIA torture tape scandal, Committee Chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, on Wednesday opened the country to a historic possibility: that the fate of the investigation into the destruction of the tapes will be decided by Latino government officials. Current and former Latino officials may even determine whether the investigation reaches the White House.

Reyes, the powerful chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is charged with overseeing an investigation into the latest controversy. Reyes’ fellow Tejano, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who was one of four Bush administration officials briefed on the tapes before they were destroyed, may be asked to testify in the investigation. And at the heart of the whole affair is Jose Rodriguez, the Puerto Rican native who was the CIA’s former director of clandestine operations. According to the CIA officials, Rodriguez ordered the destruction of the interrogation tapes in 2005.

Rodriguez was subpoenaed to appear before a closed-door hearing of Reyes’ intelligence committee on Jan. 16. But after Rodriguez’s lawyer informed Reyes and the committee that his client would not testify without a grant of immunity, the congressman decided to postpone the former CIA official’s appearance. Some observers believe the postponement signals a willingness on the part of Reyes to negotiate some kind of immunity deal with Rodriguez.

Developments in the case represent a new, more diverse chapter in the history of national security scandals. How these current and former Latino officials proceed — especially Reyes and Rodriguez — may well determine whether the investigation reaches as far as the Bush administration. President George W. Bush said last December that he could not recall hearing about the 2005 destruction of the tapes prior to a Dec. 6 briefing by CIA Director Michael Hayden, despite recent revelations that Gonzales was among the four White House lawyers debating between 2003 and 2005 whether to destroy the now infamous tapes. Some experts speculate that Rodriguez’s testimony could lead to a wider investigation and that he is trying to avoid becoming a fall guy for the Bush administration.

“If everybody was against the decision, why in the world would Jose Rodriguez — one of the most cautious men I have ever met — have gone ahead and destroyed them?” said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA’s former head of counterterrorism during an interview with the Times of London. Cannistraro’s sentiments were echoed by Larry Johnson, another former CIA official interviewed by the Times last month. “It looks increasingly as though the decision was made by the White House,” said Johnson, who pointed to a likely expansion of the investigation by an eventual Rodriguez testimony. “The CIA and Jose Rodriguez look bad, but he’s probably the least culpable person in the process,” said Johnson. “He didn’t wake up one day and decide, ‘I’m going to destroy these tapes.’ He checked with a lot of people and eventually he is going to get his say.”

Whether or not Rodriguez does, in fact, get his say depends on his fellow Latino government official, Reyes. Unlike Gonzales, whose rise from poverty in Humble, Texas, to the heights of power and controversy became front-page news following his involvement in the Abu Ghraib scandal, Reyes is a much lesser-known Tejano. Called “Silver” by his friends and close associates, Reyes, a very conservative, pro-Pentagon Democrat and Vietnam war veteran from El Paso, rose to the top of the congressional intelligence chain after a 26½-year stint with the Border Patrol.

As the head of the congressional committee responsible for oversight of the CIA and 15 other agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community, Reyes will play a definitive role in determining the breadth and scope of the tape controversy investigation. Derided by Fox News commentator John Gibson and other conservative pundits for being “unqualified” for the position, Reyes’ past statements about Rodriguez may raise questions about his ability to objectively manage the investigation. During a Border Security Conference organized by Reyes at the University of Texas at El Paso in August, he presented an award to Rodriguez, calling him “our good friend and American hero” and speaking glowingly of his claim to fame as the man who inspired the role of Jack Bauer in 24. Rodriguez, he said, was “the genesis — with a few liberties that Hollywood takes — the exploits of Jose Rodriguez are documented in the series 24.” Rodriguez, he added, “admitted to me that he likes fast cars. I won’t tell you about the women, but I will tell you about the fast cars. He is a connoisseur of fine wine.”

Before becoming the CIA’s director of the National Clandestine Service, Rodriguez was a career CIA operative who worked primarily in Latin America for more than 30 years. His role in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s appear to have prepared him to adopt the current legal posture he’s taking before Congress today. When the FBI called Rodriguez in for questioning about his involvement, he was told that Iran-contra was “political — get your own lawyer.” After surviving that affair, he went on to become the agency’s chief of Latin America Division before moving on to become, in 2004, director of the National Clandestine Service, the job that embroiled him in the torture tape controversy. His path to the position, Rodriguez says, was paved by both his Latino identity and his experience in Latin America.

“When I took over the National Clandestine Service in November of 2004,” said Rodriguez during a speech at the El Paso conference, “I did not realize that my experience, my background, my ethnicity, my diversity would be so important in allowing me to successfully lead service.” Appearing to reinforce the position put out by Rodriguez and the CIA — that he decided to leave the clandestine service because of his interest in what CIA chief Hayden called “speaking publicly on key intelligence issues” like “diversity as an operational imperative” — Rodriguez’s speech focused primarily on the link between ethnicity and national security.

In a speech that sounded like a mix between a counterterrorism lecture and a sermon about affirmative action, he spoke to the racial discrimination that many Latinos and others experience in professional settings. “Our government was not going to put someone in charge of the nation’s clandestine, counterterrorism, Humint (Humanintelligence) operations against Al-Qaeda merely to satisfy a ‘diversity’ requirement. I was put in charge because I brought something unique to the mission.” And, as if putting a positive spin on the CIA’s controversial role in Iran-Contra, the Central American wars of the 1980s, the bloody drug war in Colombia and other operations, Rodriguez credited his experience in “counterinsurgency and counternarcotics operations in Latin America.” This experience, he said, also “provided some of the methodology that was adapted to fighting terrorism.” He concluded his brief speech with a slogan popularized by Chicano civil rights activist Cesar Chavez (and, more recently by candidates Clinton and Obama), as he called his CIA experience a “source of inspiration to many minorities who now understand that ’si se puede, si se puede’” (yes we can, yes we can).

Whether or not the tape scandal investigation reaches the White House, the involvement of high-profile Latinos in the controversy has already attracted considerable attention, especially among Latinos. For Antonio Gonzales, the executive director of the William Velasquez Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank, Latino involvement with the CIA has a long history. “The CIA has always used our community,” says Gonzalez, who added, “Many Cubans have always done CIA dirty work in Latin America and the entire world. Oliver North’s Iran-Contra assets were Latinos.” Asked about Reyes’ ability to bring vigorous oversight to the investigation, Gonzales said, “Reyes is a heretofore unknown quantity. He’s pretty [politically] moderate but is not considered corrupt or unprincipled. This investigation will be a big test of his abilities. I hope he does the right thing.”

Roberto Lovato, a frequent Nation contributor, is a New York-based writer with New America Media.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/74033/

WBAI Interview About Obama and “Progressivism”

This just in from New York’s own WBAI. Check out this interview on Wakeup Call. Host Mario Murillo queries historian Gerald Horne, political scientist Valeria Sinclair-Chapman and yours truly about how “progressives” should deal with Barack Obama. Together, I think we brought a broader context to discussion about Obama, “change” and “hope”; We talked about such things as the historical context for Obamania, gender and Obama/Clinton and the geopolitical and economic context for the rise of populist, liberal pols like Obama, Clinton and Edwards.

Hope you like it!

Immigration in the Age of Neoliberalism

This article from Canada’s Rabble Magazine raises many questions, not least of which is: “Why can’t we talk about immigration like this in the U.S.?”

Just check out some of these quotes:

These people migrate out of necessity, even when they know that doing so may be expensive and even dangerous. They also migrate because it is possible to do so: contemporary capitalism, in its neoliberal form, relies on the concept of “workforce mobility”, as various powerful groups like to point out.

We are concerned with an enormous conflict, which ties together a vast range of crises that span Indonesia, Central Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa. The American Empire needs to exert control in these parts of the world over enormous energy resources. This new conquest of the region requires a re-engineering, and the subjugation of the people who live there.

Jeeez, just imagine, imagine what it’d be like to simply live in a country where these kinds of opinions are considered part of the legitimate and rational debate around immigration. Imagine. Instead, we live in a country where most of the key players in the current immigration debate: many national “immigrant rights” groups, their philanthropic patrons, the political-bureaucratic class, the media and the racist right- have an unspoken pact to limit discussion of immigration within the very limited psychic and physical borders of an empire in rapid decline.

That what is considered in this country “rational”, “civilized” and “newsworthy” bears absolutely zero resemblance to what articles like this one say speaks directly of the ‘why’ of this blog.

The “Dreaming Beyond the Walls of Civilization” tag in the title of Of América comes from the perpetual need for ALL of us to interrogate notions of “nation”, “civilization”, “rationality” and other terms tossed around nonsensically -and dangerously, especially around issues like “national security” and immigration.

Anyway, thanks for indulging me in this rant and please do read this piece as it provides some semblance of what a truly rational discussion around immigration might look like in this country. I’ll start believing in, voting for Obama or Clinton when they can say anything in this article.

And don’t you just love how the “Rabble” moniker implicitly knocks “civilization” ? If this is “civilization”, then you need to embrace your inner barbarian, your membership as part of the rabble. I have.

Gracias & enjoy.

R

Immigration in the age of neoliberalism

by the Political Analysis Collective
January 9, 2008

Since the town of Hérouxville made headlines several months ago, a debate has been raging in Quebec regarding the impact of Muslim immigration on “the true values of Quebec.”

Through the media, this debate has sparked the collective imagination. “There are too many immigrants”. “Reasonable accommodations are becoming unreasonable”. An aggressive tone has emerged.

While its mandate is to examine inter-community relations, the Bouchard-Taylor Commission was set against this controversial background. The goal of the Commission is laudable, but one would hope that the debate would be return to questions of inclusion and respect. However, it should not come as a surprise that this polemic controversy should “blow up” in Quebec, as in any other capitalist society.

Immigration and capitalist development

According to the UN, there were roughly 200 million immigrants (3% of the world population) in 2005. Millions of people leave their homes and this constitutes the largest migration in history. These people migrate out of necessity, even when they know that doing so may be expensive and even dangerous. They also migrate because it is possible to do so: contemporary capitalism, in its neoliberal form, relies on the concept of “workforce mobility”, as various powerful groups like to point out.

Neoliberalism is proceeding with a profound restructuring of work which depends on an enormous influx of new “heads and hands”. On the one hand, this is in response to the new needs of capitalistic accumulation. On the other hand, it is in response to demographic changes in capitalist countries. The current cycle requires an abundant workforce with few qualifications to work in agriculture, construction, private and personal services – a workforce that can be found in the large population “surplus” of the Third World.

This workforce is usually destined for low-wage, not very gratifying, sometimes dangerous and non-unionized or hardly “unionizable” jobs. The workforce must be mobile and precarious, while workers’ and social rights are de-emphasized. At another level, capitalism needs to recuperate qualified workers from other countries. The brain-drain is hardly new, but it is accelerated, especially in the “knowledge” economy, where the concentration of capital is greatest. Industrial quantities of qualified workers are required by the information technology, biomedical and engineering fields.

This phenomenon is even greater in the U.S., where more than 30 million “legal” immigrants can be found, and quite possibly as many “illegal” immigrants. The border indeed has become quite porous, letting in “legals” and “illegals”, thanks to policies that favour both legalisation and criminalisation of immigration. This contradiction effectively forces immigrants to accept working conditions that are below the norm. According to various estimates, more than 60% of “unqualified” jobs in the USA will be filled by immigrants within the next 10 years.

The Canadian context

Capitalist restructuring in Canada also calls on larger numbers of immigrants. An estimated quarter of a million persons immigrate legally to this country every year. Though much lower, the number of illegal immigrants is on the rise (especially from Asia). It is estimated that 22% of Canadians will be immigrants by 2017 (the proportion is currently 18.3%), a number unseen since 1920.

As is the case in other countries, the immigrant population is segmented. Even though the percentage of university-educated is higher for new immigrants, their income is, in general, 10% lower than other segments of the Canadian population. Here is another revealing statistic: 15% of immigrants live below the poverty line, which is twice the national percentage. In fact, capitalist social structures reproduce inequality. Pitting workers of the world one against another is profitable. Immigrants against born citizens, men against women, white against black, everyone against everyone: it all maintains the dominant order in place.

Currently, the immigration influx is mainly coming from Third World countries. In Canada, 47% of the population now affirms being from an origin ethnic other than British or French. In most large cities, the skin colour of the population has changed. Along with these indicators, others make singling out – and therefore discriminating and disciplining – immigrant workers easier. Part of this new wave of immigration comes from regions inhabited by Muslims in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. According to certain projections, 10 years from now more than 1.8 million Muslims will live in Canada. These immigrants are often fleeing war and other atrocities in troubled regions such as Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As a rule, Muslim immigrants tend to live their daily lives much like the population at large. Religious identity is expressed through traditions, memories, important religious holidays, as well as food and clothing-related customs. Every now and then, these cultural differences, which count for very little in daily life, are manipulated by projects which seek to exaggerate these artefacts of identity, or they are used to control or manipulate other types of conflicts.

We must remember that similar policies have been used by those in power in the past. Under the rule of Duplessis, Quebec society in the 1950s was dominated by an anti-Semitic discourse. Repression was not limited to Jews only. Other religious minorities were also targeted, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses. However, the true enemy of power was the union movement, with Jews and communists as scapegoats. Nowadays, this scapegoat is Muslim and is visible for other reasons.

War without end

We are concerned with an enormous conflict, which ties together a vast range of crises that span Indonesia, Central Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa. The American Empire needs to exert control in these parts of the world over enormous energy resources. This new conquest of the region requires a re-engineering, and the subjugation of the people who live there. Obviously, resistance is strong, as evidenced by the failures of NATO in Iraq and Afghanistan. The enemy is evil incarnate and dehumanised so that he may be eradicated with little regard for international law. It is us against them, a war of civilizations, as Samuel Huntingdon has stated.

This war is not only fought in Kandahar or Gaza: it is also fought in neighbourhoods where immigrants from those regions can be found. Though this tension existed before 2001, the events of that year have intensified police and security operations and tipped society into a “rights-free” zone. These operations include imprisonment without trial, black lists, so-called “security” certificates, intimidation or worse yet – as in Maher Arar’s case - the use of clandestine means to put “suspects” in life-threatening conditions.

This enemy must therefore “be constructed”. The demagogic media portrays the Muslim immigrant as “perverse, sly, and difficult to assimilate”. His customs are in direct contradiction with the modern world and human (especially, women’s) rights. From this perspective, the young girl wearing a veil is no more than a weapon in the hands of Islamic-terrorist groups. This Muslim menace must then be confined, monitored, controlled, even suppressed and deported, if the members of the community do not accept our “values”.

Responsibilities of civil society

Immigration as an “issue” is thus redefined in neoliberal “reasoning” and helps new, offensive, geopolitical measures that predispose opinion for war. It also justifies obvious regressions in civil rights by creating a feeling of insecurity all over the world. This strategy aims to divide society into numerous “ethnic”, religious and community groups, each one preoccupied in a struggle against the other.

It goes without saying that civil society must stand against this. It is incumbent upon us to rally the working class, immigrant or not, and fight against all these forms of discrimination that single out and marginalize immigrants, with regards to access to services, housing, employment and recognition of foreign credentials.

*Pierre Beaudet, Philippe Boudreau, Donald Cuccioletta, François Cyr, Thomas Chiasson-Lebel, Éric Martin, Michèle St Denis and André Vincent are members of the Political Analysis Collective (Collectif d’analyse politique). The original French version of this article was translated by Julie Daigneault.

Philanthropy Illustrates How Immigration Will Not Stop Without 2 Things: Latin Development & Latinos

This story from the San Francisco Chronicle illustrates nicely how communities in América Latina and the United States are and must be at the heart reducing migration from Latin America to the United States (if indeed that’s what corporations and consumers really want, that is). Though I don’t think the implicit analysis of immigration in the story runs much deeper than a dry creek near the border, I do appreciate the focus on the border-smashing work of Hispanics in Philanthropy (HIP), a group founded by Douglas Patino (a good and honored friend) and other, mostly Latino leaders from the growing universe of Latino philanthropy .

The story makes clear how, rather than adopt the tired and untrue (and largely ineffective) approach of traditional philanthropy, which limits itself to working within the confines of that deadly illusion known as “the border”, HIP adopts what wonks call a “transnational” approach to dealings within the hemisphere Of América.

HIP’s leader, Diana Campoamor, a Cubana immigrant of much consequence, has a choice quote in the story, one powered by her own personal and professional experience (as opposed to the political desperation mixed with a growing sense of decline that motivates politico and racist alike). The quote along with her example as a leader of Latino extraction makes the point solidly:

“People don’t leave their homes unless there’s a hardship, economic or political,” said Campoamor, the president of Hispanics in Philanthropy, who is herself a refugee from Cuba. “Everyone should have a choice. We want to help people have a job and a chance to stay where they are, and to have a voice in their communities and their countries.”

I really like this story because, too often, we forget the economic and material component of the migration equation and, instead, focus solely on the politics of immigration as if it were really defined by politicos, Lou Dobbs and aging (Minute)men in search of a new frontier, a less flaccid empire. Unless Obama (or whoever ends up inheriting the mantle of declining power) can reverse the decimation of the state undertaken by Reagan, his descendants and the corporations that support them, the solutions will have to come from the rest of us.

But before getting too gushy I should mention that, even with good work like that of HIP or the hometown associations (also mentioned in the story) that send billions to América Latina each year, migration to the U.S. will continue without 2 other essential things: stopping the addiction of U.S. corporation and consumers to imported cheap labor and dealing frontally, decisively with the failure of capitalism in the hemisphere. And Barack Obama will fix this in his first 100 days in the White House, right?

Economic aid to give Mexicans, Central Americans work at home

Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, January 6, 2008

From her office on the edge of San Francisco’s Financial District, Diana Campoamor was networking - meeting for drinks with a banker, compiling a briefing book for a foundation trustee, exchanging phone calls with colleagues in Mexico City.

She was putting all the pieces in place so her group, Hispanics in Philanthropy, could cut its first check this month for a three-year, $219,000 grant to expand a goat-cheese cooperative in Guanajuato, Mexico.

More goats, corrals, pasteurizing equipment and refrigerators should allow the operation to grow from one village to four, providing work for hundreds of peasant farmers who might otherwise join their siblings and cousins as illegal immigrants harvesting peaches, slaughtering chickens, driving nails and scrubbing dishes across the United States.

The group’s decision to fund economic development projects in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, after almost 25 years working in U.S. Latino communities, is part of a movement taking hold in Northern California to tackle the root causes of illegal immigration.

“People don’t leave their homes unless there’s a hardship, economic or political,” said Campoamor, the president of Hispanics in Philanthropy, who is herself a refugee from Cuba. “Everyone should have a choice. We want to help people have a job and a chance to stay where they are, and to have a voice in their communities and their countries.”

Immigration is again moving front and center on the U.S. political stage. On the presidential campaign trail, Republicans are vying to be the toughest on sealing the border and enforcing immigration law, while Democrats temper the bad-cop rhetoric with talk of guest worker programs and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here.

But if there is to be a lasting solution to illegal immigration, experts say, it will involve changes not just on this side of the border but in Mexico and Central America, which together account for three fourths of the estimated 12 million undocumented people in the United States.

“As far as what I’ve read about what the candidates are saying, I don’t see much discussion. It’s cheap rhetoric,” said Luis Guarnizo, a professor in the school of agriculture at UC Davis. “Everybody’s looking for a quick fix, the right slogan. … But we have to look at the larger picture. This is not just a law-and-order issue, it involves economic issues, social issues. Migration is a global process.”

In Northern California, some grassroots development and immigrant groups are trying a different approach. They reason that if people in Latin America had a way to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty, they wouldn’t need to leave home, risk their lives crossing the border and live on the margins of U.S. society to earn a living and support their relatives back home.

The projects range from small to large, and involve a variety of players - major foundations, socially conscious consumers and migrant workers themselves - in diverse approaches to improving life in some of the communities that are sending undocumented immigrants north. They’re helping build lagging village infrastructure, incubating productive rural projects and giving farmers fair access to global markets.

Part of the solution

Luis Alberto Rivera is president of an association of Californians originally from his hometown, Coalcomán, in the central Mexican state of Michoacán. Seeing thousands of Coalcomanenses migrate to the United States, Rivera and his compatriots were determined to do something to help improve life back home.

“We decided to push the authorities to clean the rivers, because they’re polluted,” said Rivera, a U.S. citizen, from his home near Modesto. “The whole ecosystem, the ability of people to get food from the river is destroyed. People are migrating because their life is over when the rivers are polluted. But if we go back and restore them, I think that’s part of the solution.”

Rivera and members of his hometown association offered to fund a sewage treatment plant and talked the town government into installing a system of sewers to collect the wastewater. They’ve set a fundraising goal of $100,000 and have already held a couple of benefit dinners in the Central Valley.

And the group plans to apply for matching funds under the Three for One program, whereby the Mexican federal, state and local governments each pitch in a dollar for every dollar contributed to a project by Mexican migrants outside the country.

Recognizing the billions of dollars that expatriate Mexicans send home each year to their families, the Mexican authorities created the matching fund arrangement in 2002 to channel some of that money to public works. In 2006, more than 1,000 Mexican migrant groups contributed close to $20 million to community improvement projects in 845 rural and urban locations, according to Martha Esquivel of Mexico’s Department of Social Development.

Rivera hopes his efforts will encourage more migrants to get involved with their hometowns in Mexico and work to fix the problems that forced them to leave home in the first place.

But some observers criticize the matching-fund program, saying it’s the responsibility of the Mexican government to build clean water systems and to provide schools, ambulances and other infrastructure, not the duty of Mexicans who left home due to a lack of opportunity.

After years of being all but ignored by their government, however, “the Three for One begins to signal to remittance senders that they’re going to get some respect,” said Campoamor.

She is an advocate of building links between immigrants in the United States and their home countries, in the way that hometown associations do. But her organization has opted to channel its funds specifically into initiatives that create jobs in Latin American countries.

Creating jobs

In the village of Tamaula, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, Pedro Laguna hopes that expanding his five-family goat-farming cooperative with the grant from Hispanics in Philanthropy can help stanch the flow of young people to the United States.

“I have nine kids in the United States, three daughters and six sons, but I have very little communication with them,” said the 60-year-old father of 13 in a telephone interview. “I don’t want to lose my children. We want to invest in our community so we have work here where we live.”

An agronomist is advising the cooperative on getting the goats to produce milk year-round, instead of seasonally. With more milk, the farmers can make more cheese and the sweet, caramelized dulce de leche known as cajeta, both of which sell well in Irapuato, the nearest city.

Laguna plans to pass on his cheese-making expertise to a group of women in another village who were left behind by husbands who migrated north, and to a youth group, the children of immigrants. Most urgently, he is working to persuade his 16-year-old daughter, his youngest child, to stay on the farm.

“At first she wanted to follow her brothers and sisters north, but I’ve been trying to convince her that going to the United States is not easy, and returning is less so,” he said. “Little by little, she’s thinking more about staying in school and training to make cheese. And she’s realizing that she can sell her little goats to earn some money. When there are animals at home, there’s work. And when there’s work, there’s money.”

Hispanics in Philanthropy plans to make three-year grants to half a dozen more projects in Mexico this spring and to begin similar efforts in Nicaragua and Guatemala. The group is already working in the Dominican Republic and Argentina.

Fair Trade

On a larger scale, and with a somewhat different approach, Oakland-based TransFair USA is promoting fair trade coffee, tea, chocolate, bananas, rice and other agricultural products from Mexico and many other developing countries.

“Our goal is to give people the tools and the market access to lift themselves out of poverty. When you do that, people don’t want to leave home,” said TransFair founder and president Paul Rice.

Rice, who lived for 11 years in Nicaragua and is married to a Nicaraguan, said he has seen up close in his own family the intense pressures that push people to leave home and seek their fortunes in el norte.

In the early 1990s, after years of working on traditional development projects, Rice realized farmers needed not only access to capital and technical assistance, but better access to markets in order to flourish.

He helped a group of peasant coffee farmers sell their beans in Europe, where a fledgling fair trade market was taking hold, allowing small producers to earn a premium price by eliminating the middleman. Soon Rice was promoting the idea in the United States to businesses like Starbucks and Wal-Mart, eager to burnish their image as responsible corporations. His group is still the only fair trade certifying body in this country.

“Globalization has led to more trade and economic growth,” he said. “But growth for whom? The benefits are not trickling down to the poor. Fair trade tries to make free trade work for the poor. … It’s not free trade if you depend on the guy who drives up in his pickup and says, ‘The price is 10 cents a pound, take it or leave it.’ “

Today, the coffee cooperative Rice started can guarantee $1.51 a pound to its 2,300 member families and still has money left over to invest in community projects.

“In Nicaragua, migration has been growing steadily over the past decade because of the lack of jobs,” said Merling Preza, the cooperative’s manager, speaking from the northern town of Estelí. “It’s leading to family disintegration and a loss of values, and that means more social instability. But the small farmers who have organized into cooperatives and sell on the fair trade market don’t need to leave their communities to survive.”

All these efforts to create economic stability in Mexico and Central America are laudable, say observers, but by themselves they can only help a small fraction of the population. Wealth and complexity in a nation’s economy are created by manufacturing goods, not selling raw materials, and above all, by investing in the country’s human capital, said Guarnizo, the UC Davis professor.

“It’s a political decision,” he said. “Think of the case of India with high tech. How did they do it? Was it because Indians are very clever? No. It’s because the state made a decision to put money into education. It took over 40 years, but they have that now.”

But Mexico, where the economy does not currently create enough jobs for the population, has come to rely on the remittances sent home by migrant workers, said another immigration analyst, Jeff Faux, the director of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

“The deal works for the elites on both sides of the border. The U.S. business community gets cheap labor and suppresses wages, and the Mexican elite gets rid of people who are discontented and restless,” he said. “But you can’t develop a country by exporting your most ambitious people.”

Faux has proposed that the United States give Mexico a push to develop its economy through investing in its own people. In an article in this month’s American Prospect magazine, Faux suggests that the United States offer to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement to promote economic growth and a more equal distribution of wealth in Mexico. That, he said, could produce a real solution to illegal immigration.

In the meantime, groups in the Bay Area and beyond are determined to keep chipping away at the poverty that causes people to migrate. Building economic sustainability in Mexico and its poorer neighbors, they say, will do a lot more to prevent illegal immigration than putting up border fences or even offering guest worker visas.

In Tamaula, Pedro Laguna has built new roofs on his goat pens and when spring comes he’ll be buying more animals. He hopes not only to keep his teenage daughter around, but to encourage some of his other children to return.

“I have one daughter in Georgia who hasn’t worked for a year. She’s going to come home and I’ll have a job for her,” he said. “I hope that in not too long, I’ll be able to offer work to all of them.”

Resources

Hispanics in Philanthropy:

www.hiponline.org, (415) 837-0427

TransFair USA:

www.transfairusa.org, (510) 663-5260

Three for One Program:

www.ime.gob.mx, (213) 487-6577

Hispanics in Philanthropy: www.hiponline.org, (415) 837-0427TransFair USA, www.transfairusa.org, (510) 663-5260Three for One Program: www.ime.gob.mx, (213) 487-6577

E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.

U.S. Boricuas Poised to Debate P.R.’s Colonial Status as Congress Re-visits Issue

 

 

 

Check out this month’s issue of NACLA Report on the Americas, where you will find several solid stories analyzing the ongoing debate around ending the colonial status of Puerto Rico. Included in the issue is the article below, written by my friend, longtime Boricua and Latino thinker and activist, Angelo Falcon of the National Latino Policy Institute.

Angelo places the various positions adopted by the almost 4 million Boricuas in the states within the context of U.S.-Puerto Rican relations (like the Vieques revindication) , immigration history and the growth of a unique political culture shaped by numerous influences. And like any good NACLA article, the piece includes plenty of footnotes that can you followup and delve deeper into the issues discussed.

Enjoy.

 

R

Note: As the debate over the future political status of Puerto Rico begins to be debated in the United States Congress, the role of the close to 4 million Puerto Ricans stateside (outside of Puerto Rico) starts to emerge as an issue. In the current issue of the magazine, the NACLA Report on the Americas (see full article below), Angelo Falcón, President of the National Institute for Latino Policy, analyzes this “diaspora factor.”

The Diaspora Factor:

Stateside Boricuas and the Future of Puerto Rico

by Angelo Falcón

NACLA Report on the Americas (November/December 2007)

The debate over the future political status of Puerto Rico has appeared once again in the U.S. Congress, raising the question of what role the nearly 4 million Puerto Ricans living stateside will play in this debate. Two competing House bills, both proposed by Puerto Rican representatives, call for Puerto Ricans to express their preference for statehood, commonwealth, independence, or even for an associated republic in a new plebiscite. The Puerto Rico Democracy Act, proposed in February by Representative José Serrano (D-NY), calls for a two-stage referendum in which voters would first be asked whether they prefer to maintain Puerto Rico’s current commonwealth status or pursue a permanent solution. If the status quo option prevailed, the plebiscite would be repeated every eight years until a permanent option was chosen. If a permanent solution won, a second plebiscite would ask them to choose between statehood and independence.

 

The bill mirrors the recommendations of a report released in December 2005 by the White House Task Force on the Status of Puerto Rico, commissioned by President Clinton and continued by the Bush administration, to reach a permanent solution following the results of the last plebiscite in 1998. A majority of voters in that vote, 50.3%, chose “none of the above,” a result of a boycott of the vote by the pro-Commonwealth party, the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), which objected to how their status option was defined in the ballot.

 

Meanwhile, Representative Nydia Velázquez (D-NY), who criticized the presidential task force for failing to include Puerto Ricans, introduced the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act, which calls for the formation of a constitutional convention to elect local representatives who would themselves draft the plebiscite to vote among statehood, independence, and a new “enhanced commonwealth” option. The outcome of that plebiscite would then be presented to Congress for approval.

 

Both bills are viewed by opposing island political parties as biased—Serrano’s toward statehood and Velásquez’s toward a commonwealth victory. This perceived difference in perspective between two Puerto Rican politicians from the same party and the same state highlights new complications in the island’s diaspora with regard to the status question, complications that make forging a common agenda difficult. Indeed, the stateside Puerto Rican population has always had a problematic relationship with Puerto Rico. Especially since the post–World War II great migration, this has been a movement of people tied to the failure of Puerto Rico’s economy, symbolizing a colonial dilemma magnified by its concentration in the world city of New York for so many decades in the 20th century.[1]

The diaspora has always been a bit of a mystery in terms of its attitudes toward its homeland. Because they were now participants in the world’s most advanced economy, were they now supporters of statehood for Puerto Rico? Because they came during the long-term regime of the pro-Commonwealth political party, did they support the status quo? Or did their racialization in the United States make them support independence?[2] And, in the end, does this matter to the future of Puerto Rico?

* * *

One of the most striking recent developments in the Puerto Rican experience was the realization that in 2003 the size of the stateside Puerto Rican community exceeded that of the island for the first time.[3] The latest census figures estimate that in 2005 there were about 3,780,000 Puerto Ricans living in the States compared to about 3,670,000 in Puerto Rico.[4] This has generated considerable discussion in Puerto Rico and in the diaspora, signaling that the stateside Puerto Rican community may now in a position to redefine its relationship to the island.

While there have always been strong connections between Puerto Rico and the stateside Puerto Rican community through family ties and migration, it wasn’t until the 1990s that this relationship took on an increasingly political nature. It was then that the stateside Puerto Rican community increased its representation in the U.S. House of Representatives from one to three—two from New York and one from Chicago, all Democrats. This resulted from the growth of the Puerto Rican population and its ability to more effectively use the federal Voting Rights Act in redistricting. Puerto Rico, on the other hand, continues to elect only one nonvoting resident commissioner to Congress (currently Luis Fortuño, a Republican).

During this period, political elites and activists in Puerto Rico increasingly turned to the stateside Puerto Rican leadership for support on local issues. Whether it was getting favorable U.S. federal policies toward Puerto Rico in terms of tax policy or social welfare expenditures, or the campaign to get the U.S. Navy out of Vieques, the three stateside Puerto Rican congressional representatives became invaluable, reliable allies, along with many Puerto Rican officials at the state and local levels.

Supporting this relationship was the strong nationalist identity of many stateside Puerto Ricans. Manifesting itself in myriad parades, festivals, and cultural events throughout the United States, culminating in early June every year with the massive National Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City, Puerto Rican nationalism and interest in Puerto Rico remains high. This was buttressed by the “Latin music explosion” starting at the end of the 1990s in which Puerto Rican entertainers played a major role. The successful campaigns to free Puerto Rican political prisoners, which led to pardons and clemency under presidents Carter and Clinton, demonstrated a level of nationalism that many in the United States found confounding.

But new socioeconomic and political developments both stateside and in Puerto Rico have complicated this relationship in ways that make building a common agenda difficult. The model for some is the powerful U.S. Israeli lobby, but this has proved hard to emulate in the Puerto Rican case. First, as mentioned above, the stateside Puerto Rican congressional delegation doesn’t always agree on central issues, especially as their seniority increases and their ties to different political sectors in Puerto Rico deepen.

Second, while historically concentrated in the Northeast, especially New York City, and the Midwest, the U.S. Puerto Rican population has not only increased but has become more dispersed during the last two decades.[5] In the 1990s the Puerto Rican population in Florida dramatically increased, making it the state with the second-largest concentration. Puerto Rican populations are also growing fast in other parts of the South, in smaller cities, and in suburban and ex-urban areas where a Puerto Rican presence is new. This new spatial distribution was accompanied by new patterns of migration from Puerto Rico and new professional and middle classes moving to these new areas, raising the potential for a new north-south economic polarization whose political implications are yet to be fully clear. This raises challenges to the more traditional stateside Puerto Rican political and economic narratives as a Northeast urban population loyal to the Democratic Party and New Deal policies.

Third, in Puerto Rico the traditional status-based colonial political party system has become increasingly difficult to manage, with political deadlock among the parties and the loss of the tax incentives that formerly attracted U.S. capital, along with ineffective economic management and multiple corruption scandals. With the U.S. Congress now considering proposals for resolving Puerto Rico’s status in the midst of a presidential election, this polarization will only intensify.

* * *

Although Puerto Ricans have been migrating to the United States since the mid-1800s, it wasn’t until after World War II that the size of this migration became enormous and subject to efforts to manage it from both the colony and the metropolis. The out-migration from Puerto Rico as an integral part of its economic development planning, which was based on neo-Malthusian principles, led in 1948 to the establishment of New York City’s Migration Division of Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor. This became the mechanism by which the government of Puerto Rico tried to steer Puerto Rican labor flows and negotiate on workers’ behalf with U.S. local, state, and federal authorities. In 1986, this division, which now had offices in several states, was seen as a way to create a U.S. Israeli lobby–type operation, and the then pro-commonwealth governor elevated it to the status of the cabinet-level Department of Puerto Rican Affairs in the United States. This was short-lived when the statehood party candidate was elected to the governorship in 1992, which resulted in the new department being replaced by a lobbying operation called the Puerto Rican Federal Affairs Administration (PRFAA).[6]

Depending on which political party was in power, this new office’s relationship to the stateside Puerto Rican community changed in dramatic ways. Generally similar in function to foreign consulates, PRFAA differs in technically being a part of the U.S. government and in representing people who are all already U.S. citizens. Under the commonwealth party, this office collaborated closely with the stateside Puerto Rican political leadership, but under the statehood party the relationship was less friendly and often hostile. With the current divided government, the pro-commonwealth governor, Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, has turned the office into a Washington, D.C.–focused lobbying and public relations operation that has made its relationship to the stateside Puerto Rican community focused on narrowly partisan concerns. Pressure to change the mission of this agency in this way came in large part because the divided government in Puerto Rico replicated itself in Washington, D.C., where Resident Commissioner Fortuño is a pro-statehood Republican, while the governor is pro-commonwealth and identified with the Democratic Party.

One reason for this uncertainty about how Puerto Rico political elites related to the stateside Puerto Rican community was the lack of information about the political status preferences of the diaspora. This became a practical political problem for these colonial politicians as the stateside population grew larger and more politically engaged and began in the mid-1960s to demand a voice in determining Puerto Rico’s future status. After a 1967 plebiscite held on the island, the stateside community demanded, with increasing intensity, the right to participate in these votes. Today, the major bills before Congress make some provisions for the participation of the stateside Puerto Rican community to directly participate in this status-definition process.

But knowledge on how stateside Puerto Ricans would vote on the future political status of Puerto Rico remains a problem because they have not been recently polled on this issue, despite extensive polling on this status issue in Puerto Rico. The most reliable survey conducted on the subject was the Latino National Political Survey (LNPS), conducted in 1989–90.[7] It found that more than two thirds (69%) of stateside Puerto Ricans supported commonwealth status. But since then there have been major changes in the social, geographic, and political composition of this community, it is not at all clear what its status preferences are today. One further complication is that most stateside Puerto Rican leaders and activists support independence. In a national Web survey conducted of this elite group in 2006, it was found that 45% supported independence, while in the 1989–90 LNPS, less than 4% of stateside Puerto Rican adults did.[8] It is doubtful that there has been a large pro-independence surge in the stateside community since then and more likely that pro-statehood sentiment has grown, as has been the case in Puerto Rico. The status preferences of the stateside community may now be similar to those of Puerto Rico, but this is only speculation.

The pro-independence preference of a plurality of the stateside leadership and activists has complicated the process in interesting ways. This has made the stateside Puerto Rican more open to controversial issues like freeing the Puerto Rican political prisoners and supporting the ouster of the U.S. Navy from Vieques. It has also made it easier for the pro-commonwealth party to deal politically with them, while the pro-statehood party finds itself at odds with this large sector of the stateside Puerto Rican political leadership. This is a characteristic of the politics of the diaspora community’s experience that has been little studied or understood, but which continues to have a major impact on its relationship to the politics of its homeland.

The role of the stateside Puerto Rican community in determining the future political status of Puerto Rico becomes further complicated by new socioeconomic changes and the changing narrative of race in the United States. Stateside Puerto Ricans, once the poster children for the urban underclass, have developed a more layered economic reality over the last couple of decades. Whereas once the major policy agenda for the stateside leadership was the issue of persistent poverty, there are now more voices joining the U.S. left in focusing the political agenda on the plight of the middle class. But while the community’s poverty rate has dropped significantly over the last 30 years, in 2005 it stood at 23%, compared with 8% for non-Latino whites (for further comparison, in 2006, the poverty rate in Puerto Rico stood at an appalling 45%).[9]

* * *

While experiencing a persistent high poverty rate, the stateside Puerto Rican community finds itself challenged to reframe its agenda in ways that may undermine its economic base. Poverty remains a serious problem in the stateside communities of the Northeast and Midwest, but less of a problem in the newer ones in the South and Southwest. How can the stateside Puerto Rican community recast its policy priorities as it also experiences such a potential economic polarization along regional lines? And how will this affect its relationship to the politics of Puerto Rico and the status question?

The stateside Puerto Rican community has been formally a part of the United States since the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898 and as U.S. citizens since the 1917 Jones Act, and has even had a presence within the states well before then. But along with second- and later-generation Latinos, Puerto Rican issues have been made less visible by the growing attention to the controversial problem of immigration. Although Puerto Ricans have been negatively impacted by the racist backlash from this immigration debate, policy makers at all levels of government and in the private sector have difficulty focusing on the specificities of the Puerto Rican condition and how it differs from those of new immigrants and noncitizens.

With its policy and political agendas at one of those messy crossroads, it is not particularly clear which road the stateside Puerto Rican community will be taking, now that the issue of its formal participation in resolving the status issue is no longer a matter of debate. But whether the diaspora will come down on the side of statehood, commonwealth, or associated republic is not at all clear. Independence? Well, that’s another story about the failure of a movement and the power of the United States’ new imperialism.

Angelo Falcón, a political scientist, is president and founder of the National Institute for Latino Policy (www.latinopolicy.org), based in New York City. He teaches at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.

 

ENDNOTES

 

1 Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Angelo Falcón, and Felix Matos-Rodríguez, eds., Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of Modern New York City (Markus Wiener Publishers, 2004).

2 Ramón Grosfoguel, Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

3 Carmen Teresa Whalen and Víctor Vázquez-Hernández, eds., The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives (Temple University Press, 2005).

4 Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), chapter 7.

5 Rodolfo O. de la Garza, DeSipio, F. Chris Garcia, John Garcia, and Angelo Falcón, eds., Latino Voices: Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban Perspectives on Americans Politics (Westview Press, 1992), p. 104.

6 Angelo Falcón, Stateside Puerto Rican Activist Findings (unpublished manuscript, National Institute for Latino Policy, August 2006).

7 Edna Acosta-Belén and Carlos E. Santiago, eds., Puerto Ricans in the United States: A Contemporary Portrait (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006), chapter 5.

Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Angelo Falcón, and Felix Matos-Rodríguez, eds., Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of Modern New York City (Markus Wiener Publishers, 2004).

[2] Ramón Grosfoguel, Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

[3] Angelo Falcón, Atlas of Stateside Puerto Ricans (Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, 2004). The figure for Puerto Rico indicates the number of residents who identified as Puerto Rican in the census’s so-called Hispanic question.

[4] U.S. Bureau of the Census, American Community Survey, 2005.

[5] Carmen Teresa Whalen and Víctor Vázquez-Hernández, eds., The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives (Temple University Press, 2005).

[6] Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), chapter 7.

[7][7] Rodolfo O. de la Garza, DeSipio, F. Chris Garcia, John Garcia, and Angelo Falcón, eds., Latino Voices: Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban Perspectives on Americans Politics (Westview Press, 1992), p. 104.

[8] Angelo Falcón, Stateside Puerto Rican Activist Findings (unpublished manuscript, National Institute for Latino Policy, August 2006).

[9] Edna Acosta-Belén and Carlos E. Santiago, eds., Puerto Ricans in the United States: A Contemporary Portrait (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006), chapter 5.

Telcos, U.S. Government Collecting Phone Records of Thousands of Latinos and others Calling Latin América

This article in yesterday’s New York Times (NYT) reports on how major telecommunications companies are helping U.S. intelligence agencies collect the phone records of thousands of citizens and non-citizens that call Mexico, Colombia and other Latin American countries. According to the report,

“To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.”

The National Security Agency(NSA), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and other government agencies have been gathering the phone records for several years. News of the telecommunications industry-government collaboration is coming out now because Congress is currently considering legislation that will shield the companies from lawsuits stemming from their support of government eavesdropping.

Reports of U.S. government snooping on Latino and other citizens are nothing new. While the government has likely included Latinos in its intelligence gathering activities since such activities were organized by agencies like Herbert Hoover’s FBI, documentation of the snooping began in earnest only until relatively recently. As reported on this blog previously,

“While (Lyndon) Johnson was signing into law the official celebration of Latinos (Hispanic Heritage month) in 1968, he also signed documents authorizing the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program or “COINTELPRO” to give another big government abrazo (embrace) to the growing chorus of dissident Latino voices. Cesar Chavez, student groups, the Brown Berets, the Young Lords and those who yelled “Viva!” during the “Walkout” in Los Angeles were but a few of those greeted by COINTELPRO during that first year of Hispanic Heritage.”

What is new are the numerous and growing number of ways the private sector collaborates with and benefits from the electronic surveillance components of what critics call the “national security state” apparatus being built since before 9-11. Again, even the NYT article hints at the bigger issues when it says,

“But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime.”

Further on, the article explains the technological reasons behind the government’s urgent need of telecommunications and other companies collaboration in designing the surveillance systems of the post-industrial age,

“The federal government’s reliance on private industry has been driven by changes in technology. Two decades ago, telephone calls and other communications traveled mostly through the air, relayed along microwave towers or bounced off satellites. The N.S.A. could vacuum up phone, fax and data traffic merely by erecting its own satellite dishes. But the fiber optics revolution has sent more and more international communications by land and undersea cable, forcing the agency to seek company cooperation to get access. “

As Peter Swire, former chief counselor for privacy at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under the Clinton administration, told me a couple of years ago, “We used to think of Big Brother as things like government wiretaps, where government is directly receiving the information”. “Today,” says Swire, “the datafeed doesn’t come from a government telescreen like in 1984. The datafeed now comes from your phone calls, your tax records, your bank transactions, your social security number, your grocery purchases, your insurance claims, your credit history, your medical records.” So, Latinos aren’t alone in this one.

I’ve written previously on how these ongoing and expanding collaborations between government and the private sector in the network age make nakedly obvious the inadequacy of the industrial age”Big Brother” metaphor. At a time when digital technology has turned everyone from parents with camera-embedded teddy bears to world’s largest employers into snoopers and eavesdroppers, we should be talking not solely about “Big Brother” state surveillance but also about nano-cousins, Little Teddy’s, micro-brothers and other descendants of the now thoroughly dead surveillance systems depicted in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” in the analog era (see “Enemy of the State” to get a more contemporary sense of what decentralized surveillance looks and feels like). The private sector, not “Big Brother” is now the hands-down largest collector of information about human beings regardless of their legal status.

And Latino Immigrants and Latin migration provide another rationale for further investment in the covert gathering of information on citizens and non-citizens. Allegedly designed to “control” immigrants, laws like the REAL ID Act of 2005, for example, will end up creating what the Electronic Privacy and Information Center calls a “de facto national identification card” that will make rich companies like national ID cheerleader Larry Elllison’s Oracle even richer.  Last year, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe offered (and later “calirified”)to put microchips in seasonal workers coming to the U.S. Up until 2003, U.S.-based database company Choicepoint was selling the U.S. government the personal information of more than 65 million Mexicans. This year witnessed the further implementation of the multi-billion ($8 billion or more) electronic surveillance components of the Secure Borders Initiative (SBI) by military industrial companies like Boeing.

So, this recent report of U.S. government snooping on Latinos and others comes atop a colossal, growing mountain of private information about migrants, citizen and others. Find out more about the privacy policies of telcom and other companies you deal with because they just may be selling your privacy to the government or some other bidder.

Say it Ain’t So: Morrissey, Singer Beloved by Latinos, Another Immigrant Hater?

In what may be a devastating blow to the throngs of Morrissey maniaticos across the hemisphere, the U.K. Guardian and other British news organizations are reporting that the former Smiths singer expressed anti-immigrant sentiments during a recent interview. Today’s Guardian reports on the controversy stirred up by alleged remarks the aging crooner made when asked about immigration in the U.K.. “The gates of England are flooded. The country’s been thrown away”he responded, according NEM, a Brit music magazine.

The row raging on the other side of the pond has many Latinos and Latin Am