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Disposable Domestics | Excerpt
Chapter 1: Breeding Ignorance, Breeding Hatred
In 1994, during one of the worst, but certainly not unprecedented, systematic attacks on immigrants to the United States, immigrants and their allies began sporting T-shirts bearing the face of an indigenous man and the slogan, "Who are you calling illegal, Pilgrim?" reflecting indignation at the ignorant and malicious anti-immigrant sentiments of the day. Specifically, this was in direct response to a campaign that had been brewing for years in policy circles and "citizen" groups, culminating in California state's Proposition 187. The initiative proposed to bar undocumented children from public schools and turn away undocumented students from state colleges and universities. It also proposed to deny the undocumented an array of public benefits and social services, including prenatal and preventive care such as immunizations.
While the overt purpose of this voter initiative was to curtail immigration, ostensibly by restricting the use of public benefits and social services by undocumented immigrants, the real agenda behind it was to criminalize immigrants for presumably entering the country "illegally" and stealing resources from "true" United States citizens. More to the point, Proposition 187 came out of and was aimed at perpetuating the myth that all immigrants are "illegal" at worst and, at best, the cause of our society's and economy's ills.
Throughout US history, immigration has been viewed and intentionally constructed as plague, infection or infestation and immigrants as disease (social and physical), varmints or invaders. If we look at contemporary popular films, few themes seem to tap the fears or thrill the American imagination more than that of the timeless space alien invading the United States, and statespeople have snatched up this popular image to rouse public support for xenophobic policies. Ironically, in every popular "alien invasion" movie, only the United States is hit by invaders, and so it is in the public imagination about invasions by intraterrestrial aliens. The common perception mirrors popular media in Americans' adamantly held conviction that Third World emigrants only have interest in landing in or taking over the United States, forgoing all other territories on earth, presumably because the United States is the most civilized society with the most coveted resources.
In stark contrast to these American fantasies, less than two percent of the world's migration actually ends in the United States, and migration by people within the Third World is far more common than the movement of Third World citizens to the First World. [Network News; Tactaquin interview, 1/15/99] Furthermore, neither America's natural resources nor social service system, which is in fact one of the stingiest among industrialized nations, is the attraction but jobs. These jobs, however hazardous and low-paying, are still preferable to the poverty most migrants are escaping in their home countries, often the result of First World imperialism. As the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights outlines in its 1994 "Declaration on Immigrants and the Environment," First World imperialism and development policy in the Third World have resulted in resource depletion, debt and poverty for many people in these nations. The extraction of resources by the United States and other First World nations forces many people in the Third world to migrate to follow their countries' wealth.
Moreover, the "draw" of the United States is more accurately described as a calculated pull by the United States and other First World countries on the Third World's most valuable remaining resources: people or human labor. This "pull" or extraction is often facilitated by a desperate "push" or expulsion of people by sending countries, which are also often the result of First World economic and military interventions. What I'm suggesting is not to be confused with one of the most popular theories used to explain the causes of migration, the "push-pull" theory, proposing that factors such as high unemployment in sending countries act as a "push" and perceived opportunities in receiving countries serve to "pull" migrants from the Third World to the First World.
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I argue that First World countries routinely make deliberate economic interventions in order to facilitate their continued extraction of Third World resources, including and especially people. Like Sassen, I suggest that immigration from the Third World into the United States doesn't just happen in response to a set of factors but is carefully orchestrated—that is, desired, planned, compelled, managed, accelerated, slowed and periodically stopped—by the direct actions of US interests including the government as state and as employer, private employers, and corporations. For example, austerity programs imposed on Mexico and other nations effectively create situations of debt bondage such that these indebted nations must surrender their citizens, especially women, as migrant laborers to First World nations in the desperate effort to keep up with debt payments and to sustain their remaining citizens through these overseas workers' remittances. As President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico declared to US audiences during the North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations in 1991, Mexico would either export its people or its products to the United States, although the latter was preferable.
In the past, public opinion and the rhetoric surrounding immigration have emphasized the charge that male migrant laborers steal jobs from "native" workers. In the last decade, however, this concern has been drowned out by cries that immigrants impose a heavy welfare burden on "natives." A 1986 CBS/New York Times poll found that 47 percent of Americans believed that "most immigrants wind up on welfare." In a review of studies on the economic impacts of immigration to the US, Annie Nakao reported for the San Francisco Examiner, "What is generally accepted is that immigrants do not take jobs from natives..." While the abundance of studies examining how immigrants affect the U.S. economy disagree on many points, most recent studies imply that Americans should be more worried about protecting public revenues than their jobs.
This new emphasis on the alleged depletion of public revenues by immigrants signals an implicit shift in the main target of anti-immigrant attacks. Men as job stealers are no longer seen as the major "immigrant problem." Instead, immigrant women as idle, welfare-dependent mothers and inordinate breeders of dependents are seen as the great menace. Thus, a legislative analyst on Governor Wilson's staff reported that Latinas have an AFDC dependency rate 23 percent higher than the rate for all other women. Such "findings" are almost always coupled with statements about higher birth rates among immigrant women and the threat they pose to controlling population growth.
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