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Title: Refuting the Rooster Author: Luis J. Prat Date: September 18, 2010 Language: en Topics: immigration, United States of America, The Utopian, racism Source: Retrieved on 5th August 2021 from http://utopianmag.com/archives/tag-The%20Utopian%20Vol.%209%20-%202010/refuting-the-rooster/ Notes: Published in The Utopian Vol. 9.
When someone uses public air waves emanating from a community radio
station, that person wields the power to address the general public.
When such access is granted free of charge, all in the name of the right
to free speech, free speech also demands that opposite voices be heard.
I recently heard on the radio a bigoted tirade against Mexicans and
Latinos in general. The DJ claimed that when he was growing up in
Sacramento, California, there were only white and Asian people there,
that the overwhelming majority of people were of European descent,
Asians being the largest minority, and that his high school had no
segregation problem because there werenât any students who were not
Europeans. How you can segregate a homogeneous group is beyond me,
though itâs hard to believe that in the 1950s there was not a large
population of Latino farm workers living in Sacramento.
What happened to history? Werenât Latinos here before the Anglos? Whence
all those Spanish names that grace our cities, mountains, rivers,
indeed, the entire state? The whole southwest?
The DJ went on: âWhen a new wave of immigration arrived thanks to the
do-gooders, that created a segregation problem; prejudices, affirmative
action... befell the USA because of those who insisted that immigration
be worldwide and not just from the European area.â
This is a deeply racist mindset. My rebuttal does not attempt to make
those who think this way see how ugly, destructive, and evil such racist
sentiments are. No, Iâm not about to waste my time and energy trying to
educate people like that. But it is necessary to refute such notions
with facts. Iâve tried to access the web site the DJ mentioned
(immigration counter.com.) and couldnât find it. But I did do some
research of my own and have come up with a number of facts that ought to
be aired in order to help dispel the many myths that surround
immigration, both the documented kind and the undocumented kind. (I
refuse to use the term âillegal.â No human being is illegal. The simple
fact that one is on this planet should by all natural law give you some
automatic rights, but people- and government-made borders tend to
obscure this basic fact by imposing layer upon layer of rules, laws,
lines on maps, and fences and walls on the ground. Latinos have lived on
both sides of the US-Mexico divide for 400 years, so we speak the truth
when we say that âwe didnât cross the border, the border crossed us.â)
In another segment of his show, our racist DJ has stated that the
solution to the healthcare crisis in the US is to deport âall the
illegals.â (Such drivel would be funny if it werenât so dangerous.) This
kind of speech, which is primarily designed to incite racism and hate,
has no basis in reality. The healthcare crisis is what naturally occurs
when you apply capitalism to the healthcare of the people: it creates a
greedy, heartless system in which doctors make money when youâre sick
but not when youâre healthy, where every incentive exists to keep you
unhealthy, where drug companies constantly promote chemicals of
questionable therapeutic value, some of them downright killers, and
insurance companies play with the money and the lives of working people.
The healthcare crisis has nothing to do with immigration, and to
conflate the two is a cynical misrepresentation, in other words, a big
fat lie.
Many myths abound about immigrants, particularly about Latino
immigrants, since we constitute the majority of the current immigrant
population, but also about other nonwhite immigrants. During times of
national stress such as today, the Powers That Be find it useful to have
a convenient scapegoat, somebody whoâs defenseless and can be hammered
without fear of retaliation. Such a scapegoat galvanizes and unifies the
population. The Nazis demonized the Jews, the Roma, and many others,
which brought us the Holocaust during WWII.
Racism has a long history in the US, a country founded by white European
settlers imbued with ideas of white supremacy who used African slaves to
work for them while killing off the native population in order to steal
the land. Here, many people from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds have
been demonized by societal powers such as the press and the pulpit to
provide the âmajorityâ of white people with a convenient scapegoat to
confuse and distract attention from the root of their problems: the
capitalist imperialist system that rules this country and, indeed, the
entire world.
Today a similar dynamic is at work. The demonization of Arabs and
Muslims in general, the to-do about immigration legislation last year,
the increase in the frequency and brutality of immigration raids, the
increased publicity surrounding the issue, the Minutemen vigilantes,
etc., all attest to this. Because we live in such a climate today,
incendiary speech has to be addressed; we are not going to be silent
anymore. On May Day, 2006, 30,000 of us took to the street in Santa
Barbara to make that point, and millions more did so elsewhere in the
US.
Letâs shed light on some common myths about immigration. What follows is
from the Center for American Progress (
heck_immigration.html):
Myth: U.S. public health insurance programs are overburdened with
documented and undocumented immigrants.
Reality: Twenty-one percent of total medical costs were paid through
public sources for native-born citizens, compared to 16 percent for
documented and undocumented immigrants. In terms of taxes paid per
household, this equates to $56 for healthcare for documented immigrants
and $11 for health care (emergency Medicaid services) for the
undocumented.
Myth: Immigrants come to the United States to gain access to health
services.
Reality: Immigrants are most likely to be employed in industries that do
not offer health insurance coverage, such as agriculture, construction,
food processing, restaurants, and hotel services. Uninsured rates in
these industries are more than 30 percent for all workers compared to 19
percent for workers across all industries.
Myth: Undocumented immigrants are âfree-ridersâ in the U.S. health care
system.
Reality: The National Research Council concluded that immigrants will
pay on average $80,000 per capita more in taxes than they will use in
government services during their lifetimes. The Social Security
Administration, for example, estimates that workers without valid social
security numbers contribute $7 billion in Social Security tax revenues
and roughly $1.5 billion in Medicare taxes annually, yet elderly
immigrants rarely qualify for Medicare or long-term care services
provided through Medicaid.
Myth: Out-of-work natives could replace undocumented immigrants in our
workforce.
Reality: Removing all undocumented immigrants from the U.S. workforce
would leave 2.5 million low-skill jobs unfilled. In a paper commissioned
by the Center for American Progress, William & Mary economist David A.
Jaeger found a telling disparity between myth and reality in the effects
of immigration on the workforce: out-of-work natives could not
effectively replace undocumented workers. The jobs that undocumented
immigrants currently hold require a substantially lower skill set than
most jobless natives possess. As a result of the skills gap, only
105,000 natives could appropriately replace the 2.5 million immigrants
in very low-skill jobs, leaving 2.4 million positions unfilled. Such a
loss would put states with large immigrant populations, such as Arizona
and California, in dire straits.
Myth: Undocumented immigrants are a drain on the U.S. economy.
Reality: Even conservative estimates show that undocumented immigrants
play a substantial role in supporting the U.S. economy and boosting its
potential. In Arizona, they earn 2.9 percent of total wages; that is 2.5
times more than physicians and 3.1 times more than lawyers and police
officers or firefighters. Immigrantsâ presence in the labor force not
only buttresses that forceâs lower tiers, it also fosters overall
economic growth. A 2006 study found that state revenues collected from
undocumented immigrants in Texas exceeded by $424.7 million what the
state spent on these immigrants in public services such as education and
health care in 2005.
Myth: Undocumented immigrants do not pay taxes.
Reality: Undocumented immigrants pay income, sales, and other taxes. The
majority of undocumented immigrants pay income taxes using Individual
Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) or false Social Security
numbers. All immigrants, regardless of status, will pay on average
$80,000 per capita more in taxes than they use in government services
over their lifetime. The Social Security system reaps the biggest
windfall from taxes paid by immigrants; the Social Security
Administration reports that it holds approximately $420 billion from the
earnings of immigrants who are not in a position to claim benefits. This
last item is from Testimony on the âITINâ and Social Security Number
Misuse, presented by Patrick P. OâCarroll, Jr., Social Security
Administration, Office of the Inspector General, to the House Committee
on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Oversight, Subcommittee on Social
Security, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC, March 24, 2004,
www.ssa.gov/oig/ communications/testimony_speeches/03102004testimony.htm
.
Myth: Deportation is a realistic and economically feasible way of taking
care of the backlog of undocumented workers currently in the United
States.
Reality: Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has stated â[T]he dirty secret is that
we couldnât deport 10 million illegal immigrants if we wanted to.â
Deporting 10 million undocumented immigrants would cost $41 billion
annually over five years, or $206 billion total, using conservative
estimates of key variables. Compared to other current budget figures,
the cost of a mass deportation policy would:
the 2006 fiscal year ending in October 2007 ($34.2 billion)
agencies responsible for homeland security activities for FY 2006 ($49.9
billion)
security ($19.3 billion)
($16.8 billion)
Immigration Reform.
Myth: There is weak support among the public for immigration reform.
Reality: Voters consistently express support for comprehensive
immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship. Data from a
recent CNN poll, for example, show that 80 percent of the public favors
a program that would allow illegal immigrants who have been living in
the United States for several years, have jobs, and are willing to pay
back taxes, to apply for citizenship. A Quinnipiac University poll from
November 2009 similarly showed that a very strong 69-to-27 percent
majority of registered voters favor a similar program.
Another popular myth is that Latino immigrants use and abuse the welfare
system. This is false. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for any
form of welfare benefits, including food stamps, and documented
immigrants have a 5 year moratorium on the use of federal benefits. The
only public services undocumented immigrants now enjoy are Medicaid, but
only for medical emergencies, and public school education for the
children of undocumented immigrants, per the US Supreme Court, Plyler v.
Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982).
Business needs immigration, legal or illegal, but preferably the illegal
kind, since workers with few rights can be more easily manipulated:
their wages can be set below minimum wage; they wonât complain when they
are denied their breaks; they donât file a workers compensation claim
when they are injured on the job; they donât file complaints when they
are sexually harassed by foremen and bosses; they donât join unions
(although this has changed a lot), but in general they are a much more
vulnerable and therefore malleable work force than documented workers,
who have, at least on paper, the right to seek legal redress of their
grievances.
Hereâs what the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, TX (hardly a leftist
organization) had to say about this:
âImmigration and Monetary and Fiscal Policy. The fact that immigration
tends to fluctuate with the business cycle is one way it facilitates the
work of monetary policymakers. By providing workers when and where they
are needed, immigration raises the speed limit of the economy by keeping
wage and price pressures at bay. In 2000, at the height of the economic
boom, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan attributed the U.S. economyâs
remarkable growth record to two main factors: growth in productivity and
growth of the labor force. Both factors held down unit labor costs and
allowed the economy to grow faster with less inflation, thereby reducing
the need for the Fed to intervene by tightening interest rates to slow
growth.
âIn the long run, immigrants also have a beneficial effect on the fiscal
health of pay-as-you-go government programs, such as Social Security and
Medicare. Because immigrants are, on average, younger than natives and
have higher fertility rates, immigration decelerates the aging of the
population. This slows the ongoing decline in the ratio of workers to
retirees and helps maintain the solvency of these programs.â
This last point is very interesting. As the Bard would say, âThere lies
the rub.â This is the racistâs fear: that in the future the majority of
the population of the United States will be brown, not white,
ânon-European.â Fear of âthe otherâ is a basic characteristic of racism.
One of the many reasons for the large increase in immigration from
Mexico during the last 10 years or so is NAFTA, the free trade agreement
Bill Clinton negotiated with Mexico that came into effect on January
1^(st) 1994, also commemorated by the Zapatista uprising. The number of
Mexicans living in severe poverty grew by 4 million since then. Fifty
thousand Mexican farmers lose their land annually, victims of free trade
produce grown on US corporate mega-farms generously subsidized by the
government being sold in Mexico at prices Mexican farmers cannot compete
with. As a result, they lose their farms and migrate to the North or to
Mexican cities, where they try to eke out a living, and when they canât
find work in Mexicoâs largest cities, many of them eventually make their
way here to work in the lowest paying sectors of our economy. Thus blame
for the increased levels of illegal immigration can rightfully be placed
on the US government and the corporations it is beholden to who worked
so tirelessly to get NAFTA passed.
Here are some more pertinent facts from the US Census Bureau:
The Hispanic population of the US was estimated to be 42.7 million in
July 2005, about 14% of the total population. This does not include 3.9
million residents of Puerto Rico (who are US citizens, not immigrants).
In 2004 approximately 40% of Latinos were foreign born. In 2005 88% of
Latinos under age 18 were native born.
Latin-Americans constitute 53% of all foreign born people in the USA, or
18.3 million people. The breakdown by country is: Mexico 10 million, El
Salvador 937,000, Cuba 925,000, the Dominican Republic 688,000,
Guatemala 590,000, Colombia 500,000.
Latino immigrants make enormous cultural contributions to American life.
Many fields, such as music and sports, have been greatly enriched by the
presence of Latinos in these endeavors. Ours is a very rich and ancient
culture emanating from three main roots: Spain, Africa, and the Native
peoples of Central and South America. Our Spanish language has produced
world-class works of literature in every sense comparable to the
literary gems of English or any other language. We have excelled through
the centuries in art, painting, sculpture, both in Spain and in America;
we have excelled in the cinema. To try to diminish us by implying that
we are culturally inferior bespeaks of either abysmal ignorance or
malicious intent.
Another contribution we Latinos make is our service in the armed forces.
Although I do not agree with war and would like to see each and every
army, each and every missile, each and every bomb in the world
eliminated, I have to say to those who hate us that, yes, we even shed
blood by the buckets in defense of this nation. In Vietnam, a very
sizable segment of the forces in the jungle were Latinos, who along with
our Black brothers bore the brunt of the fight. Today in the Iraq war,
there are many of us doing the dirty bloody work for Uncle Sam enabling
him to get even richer.
Quoting from âIllegal Immigrants: Uncle Sam Wants Youâ By Deborah Davis,
from In These Times:
âIn the Iraq war, citizenship is being used as a recruiting tool aimed
specifically at young immigrants, who are told that by enlisting, they
will be able to quickly get citizenship for themselves (sometimes true,
depending on what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch
of the Department of Homeland Security finds) and their entire families
(not true; each family member has to go through a separate application
process). Nevertheless, with the political pressures on Latino families
growing daily under this administration, many young Latinos are unable
to resist the offer, which immigrantsâ rights activists see as blatant
exploitation of a vulnerable population ...
âThe large majority of new military recruits are signed up through the
Delayed Entry Program (DEP), which operates in high schools, GED
programs and home-schooling networks across the nation.â
Later in the same article we read:
âThe Department of Defenseâs casualty database doesnât publicly break
down the dead and injured by ethnic group, but a tally of Latino
surnames found that between January 10 when the surge began and July 1,
20 percent of the 174 young people (aged 18â21) who died were likely to
have been Latino (the military does not keep public data on the race or
ethnicity of casualties). With the intensification of DEP recruiting
efforts in largely Latino high schools since the invasion began, this is
no surprise.â
Documented or undocumented?
Again, quoting Deborah Davis,
âHow many of these young Latino recruits are illegal immigrants? Nobody
knows, says Flavia Jimenez, an immigration policy analyst at the
National Council of La Raza. âBut what we do know is that recruiters may
not be up to speed on everybodyâs legal status.... We also know that a
significant number of [illegals] have died in Iraq.â The recruitment of
illegal immigrants is particularly intense in Los Angeles, where 75
percent of the high school students are Latino. âA lot of our students
are undocumented,â says Arlene Inouye, a teacher at Garfield High School
in East Los Angeles, âand itâs common knowledge that recruiters offer
green cards.â Inouye is the coordinator and founder of the Coalition
Against Militarism in Our Schools (CAMS), a counter-recruitment
organization that educates teenagers about deceptive recruiting
practices. âThe practice is pretty widespread all over the nation,â she
says, âespecially in California and Texas.... The recruiters tell them,
âyouâll be helping your family.â â âWhat recruiters do not tell their
targets, however, is that the military itself has no authority to grant
citizenship. It forwards their citizenship applications to ICE, which
will then scrutinize them and their entire families for up to a year.â
So, what I have to say today to America is, that as a community, we
constitute the largest minority group in the USA; we have ancient roots
in these lands, older than those of most European immigrants; our
contributions to the economy far exceed what we take out of it. We take
care of your gardens; we harvest your crops; we build your houses; we
make your beds in hotels, residences, and palaces, and cook your food
and serve it to you. We take care of your children, your old and your
sick; we toil in slaughterhouses and pack the beef and poultry that
stocks your supermarket shelves. We grace you with our music, with our
dances; we delight your palate with our food that you love to eat and
constantly imitate. And we fight, bleed and die for you, America. Donât
you ever forget it.