The recent defeat of the immigration bill has a lot xenophobic nativists celebrating. Sadly, the bipartisan immigration bill caused a split among Latino leaders. Some Latino leaders called the legislation a “step backward” because of the provisions that would limit judicial review of legalization cases and make it extremely expensive to become a legal resident. While other Latino leaders endorse the proposed bill, and were disturbed when the legislation died last month.

All parties agree that immigration reform is badly needed, but differ on how to achieve it. In order to fix it, we must examine the source of the problem - globalization. With economic globalization, international labor migration is promoted as a way to minimize labor costs in order to increase profits. Although this is not new, it must be noted that the tactics used to undermine domestic labor to maintain these inequities have increased over the past few years. On this blog, I have mostly discussed only a small part of the immigration problem.

The movement of high-skilled workers and jobs between India and the United States is also a source of political attention and controversy. The current debate about the impact of the globalization of high-skilled jobs in sectors such as IT is not much different from the debate over the movement of manufacturing jobs to Asia and Latin America. Recently, a popular video surfaced on YouTube showing an individual identified as Lawrence Lebowitz, vice president and director of marketing for Cohen & Grigsby, talking to a group of business people in May regarding how employers can use the current immigration laws to their advantage as a way to hire foreign workers instead of using the talent found here in the US.

The goal here of course is to meet the requirements, number one, but also do so as inexpensively as possible, keeping in mind our goal and our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker.

We’re complying with the law fully, but our objective is to get this person a green card, and to get through the labor certification process, so certainly we are not going to try to find the place where the applicants are going to be the most numerous; we’re going to try to find a place where, again, we’re complying with the law and hoping and likely not to find a qualified or interested worker applicant. - Lawrence Lebowitz

The seminar provides details on how businesses are able to stay within the boundaries of the federal requirements of the Permanent Labor Certificate (PERM) program, so that an employer can sponsor a foreign worker. PERM is the federal program that enables businesses to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency by demonstrating that are unable to find a US worker to fill the employment. A common tactic is to limit the amount of potential applicants by advertising in papers with lower circulation. The trick, according to Cohen & Grigsby attorneys, is to go through the motions of a search without ever intending to.

The video has sparked a sharp backlash within the political blogosphere, such as DailyKos and Democratic Underground. On June 21, Sen Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep Lamar Smith (R-TX) fired off a letter to Cohen & Grigsby demanding an account for its advice, as well as going so far as to ask for the terms of its clients. The same day, the legislators wrote a separate letter to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. They asked for information about how the government is managing the program for temporary work visas, known as H-1Bs.

The media also participated in the backlash by using language that is directed particularly against a distinct immigrant population – the undocumented worker. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury to the Reagan Administration, and Lou Dobbs were quick to bombard viewers with misleading narration and constant repetition of negative imagery and stereotypes of undocumented workers to imply falsely that they are the cause for the American economic woes.

But there are two facts that people keep forgetting — seven out of 10 visa requests under the H-1B program come from Indian companies in the United States to provide employees to outsource to American companies and reduce wages. And the other little minor item which is supposed to be high-skill jobs, four out of five jobs under the H-1B program are level-one jobs, not level four, i.e., low-skilled jobs, not high-skilled jobs. These are Americans trying to screw American workers. -Lou Dobbs

Dobbs and Roberts adverse reaction is not new. The fact is, this is not an issue between Democrats and Republicans like Dobbs is trying to make it out to be, the reality is, the political debate on immigration is being shaped by overt economic rhetoric. What this issue really illustrates is the on-going debate between free marketeers who argue that the free flow of people across national borders, like that of goods and capital, contributes to prosperity, and nativists who oppose immigration policies that allow non-whites to enter the US because they dilute the whiteness of American culture.

If there is panic surrounding the dangers of immigration, it is also a moral panic. That is, those who favor restrictionist policies tend to engage in rhetoric that refers to widespread personal, social, and economic threats posed by legal and illegal immigration. Stanley Cohen, the author of Folk Devils and Moral Panics, defines moral panic as

A condition, episode, person or a group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by the editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and become more visible.

As moral panic mounts, there is a sense of urgency to do something now or else society will suffer even graver consequences later, compelling social policy to undergo significant transformation in a rash attempt to diffuse the putative threat. Sensing a political opportunity, many politicians would rather pander to popular fears than offer their constituency firm leadership that would produce a sound and fair-minded policy. As a result, this will escalate into public hysteria leading to numerous legislative campaigns, thus reinforcing hostility and discrimination against immigrants.

Moral panics tend to come in cycles and they do not last very long, however, when opportunistic politicians and certain elements of the media intervene, it is prolonged and can eventually become part of societies thinking. The impression that immigrants were endangering American society began in the early 1990s, according to Michael Welch’s Detained: Immigration Laws and the Expanding I.N.S. Jail Complex. In 1992, conservative journalist, Peter Brimelow published a controversial article in the National Review, “Time to Rethink Immigration,” in which he attacked America’s immigration policy by stating that immigrants were destroying American society because “[the] United States has lost control of its borders - in every sense.”

What concerns Brimelow, who happens to be a British immigrant, and other nativists is that the current US immigration policy will dilute the whiteness of American society and culture. Welch writes:

Brimelow’s argument against immigration is driven further by previous legislation that he believes has created an immigration disaster, namely, the 1965 Immigration Act. That law serves as a basis from which Brimelow expresses his dissatisfaction for current immigration policy, and in doing so, he shows his disdain for the 1960s activism and the civil rights movement: “The 1965 Act can be seen to have invented one quite new type of immigration: a black inflow, both from Africa itself and from the Caribbean” (1995: 61). Brimelow continues, “Because of affirmative action quotas, it absolutely matters to me as the father of a white male how large the ‘protected classes’ are going to be. And that is basically determined by immigration. …To get a sense of perspective, we have to go back to the beginning. And in the beginning, the American nation was white” (p. 66). In his own defense for sounding racist, Brimelow longs nostalgically for white America before the civil rights movement desegregated the nation: “Suppose I had proposed more immigrants who look like me. So what? As of late 1950s, somewhere up to nine out of ten Americans looked like me. That is, they were of European stock. And in those days, they had another name for this thing dismissed so contemptuously as ‘the racial hegemony of white Americans.’ They called it, ‘America’ ” (1995: 59).

Politicizing immigration is significant because political rhetoric not only inflames public anxiety but also shapes the content of legislation. Hostility contained in moral panic manifests in several ways; as we shall see in the next several sections, immigrants are vulnerable to being criminalized, marginalized, and scapegoated.

Since 9/11, the question of what immigrants contribute to American society is at the forefront of the immigration debate. Stoking anti-immigrant hostility, nativists and restrictionists commonly resort to marginalizing immigrants by relegating them to an economic underclass. Critics of outsourcing have pointed to India as the source of America’s economic woes, but the issue is a lot more complicated than it is being portrayed. Nativists contribute to the stigma of immigrants are draining social services. However, immigrants actually generate significantly more in taxes paid than they cost in services.

Researchers have also found that as more immigrants enter a particular geographic area, they generally don’t take jobs because immigrants tend to work in different types of jobs - either jobs that are considered on the very low end that many Americans are unwilling to work for because they deem those jobs beneath them. Or they are simply not qualified for the high end jobs. The in age of the consumer culture, the US has become an image that is being sold not only to Americans, but also to consumers worldwide. No matter how much Dobbs and Roberts will moan and groan at the corporations for doing pulling off these tactics, the truth is they will never tell you stop boycotting them because they know that it is them who is paying their salaries, so they deflect the argument onto innocent people because something can be done, such as detaining them so they are no longer seen and we can continue to feed our pathological tendencies to supersize our houses, our cars, our collect of stuff we will never use.

If Dobbs and his ilk were concern, why not go after the price gouging by the oil cartels or mount an attack on the pharmaceutical cartels to lower drug prices to help the average American. They won’t and can’t, because the most dangerous and corrupt elements of these cartels keep them on the air. America has been co-opted by the agendas of large and powerful corporations and nothing will be done to stop them unless we start waking up.

Related posts

• Senate’s Second Secret Immigration Bill (9)
• Public betrayal: The Children Are the True Healthcare Victims (3)
• Courting The Latino Vote (3)
• America and Mexico, Being Played For a Fool (5)
• Shattered Dreams (7)

Tags: consumerism, Democrats, Immigration, Lou Dodds, Paul Craig Roberts, Republicans |  Print This Post |
functional