In reading Jimmy Higgins' earlier post here on anti-immigrant sentiment and the danger of nativism--and the interesting responses--something struck me sharply. Living for my whole life in New York City, it’s hard for me to analyze or even relate to the fear and loathing of immigrants that grips some parts of the U.S. What we in NYC fear is somewhat different, and was clarified for me by a conversation with a cousin at a recent family gathering.
My cousin, whom I’ll call Tony, has a semi-skilled job with a telecommunications company and recently moved with his wife and kids from Staten Island to a New Jersey suburb. Tony’s widowed mother, now about 70, had made her global proletarian passage from a small town near Naples to the industrial Red Belt of Bologna to a textile factory in Scotland to a laundry in Staten Island—where she met and married my late uncle, and still lives.
“I don’t feel good about where my mother lives,” Tony was telling me. His mother is in the house that had been my paternal grandmother’s, across the street from a city bus depot in a racially mixed poor and working class neighborhood. Though not an activist or a self-identified progressive, Tony is married to a woman of part-African descent who looks like a person of color (as do their kids), and he is sensitized to racial stereotyping on a gut level. He groped for words to articulate his concern about his mother’s neighborhood. “There’s too many people who—I don’t know what’s the right way to put it—lowlifes, people who don’t work.”
“People who don’t work” really captured for me what many folks in New York City fear. People who don’t follow the rules of civil behavior because they have no stake in keeping it together and getting ahead, in getting up in the morning and functioning. People who will turn a little brush or disagreement into a big fight because they have nothing better to do and no other way of feeling effective or gauging their impact on the world. People who leave their garbage in the hallway because they’ve given up on taking any pride or pleasure in how their surroundings look. People who might mess with your elderly widowed mother or throw garbage in her yard just for the hell of it….
Now, often the expression of fear and loathing of people who don’t work can be white people’s code for dumping on Black and Puerto Rican people, or a way of simply blaming the victim and ignoring the historical and structural economic dynamics that cut off some racially and nationally oppressed peoples from stable jobs, viable home mortgages, etc. But it’s not always that, or only that. And it’s not expressed only by white people.
I remember about eight years ago when I was working in a second chance high school for older teens, counseling one African American young woman who was very proud and happy that she was holding a part-time job. With no parents around, she was living in the projects with her grandmother and also with two uncles who were dealing drugs. Their apartment had recently been raided at 6 a.m. by a SWAT team who put 9 mm pistols to everybody’s head and asked where the drugs were. My student, with help from nobody that I could tell, had gotten her self back into school and found a job. Looking toward the future, she said, “ I just wanna come home at night and have to ask what was on Jerry Springer--‘cause I was working all day.”
For many working class people, especially those with the least economically secure lives, the contempt for people who don’t work is fueled by the terror of what you know could happen to you if you lose your grip and can’t make it into work—and could happen very quickly.
All of which goes to say that in New York City, most people seems to know that most immigrants work their butts off for very little money and came here because they do want to get ahead. And therefore, from what I can tell, there is very little of the classic anti-immigrant hysteria, but a lot of fear and loathing of people who don’t work.
February 17, 2007
In NYC, It's Not Fear of Immigrants...
February 7, 2007
Where Will The Nativists Go?
Some spooky stuff in the last few days has brought back to the fore a concern I've been chewing on since the November election: What's going to be the organizational expression of the deep current of nativist sentiment among a substantial chunk of the white population in this country?
True, the main aspect of the shellacking the Republicans took was the occupation of Iraq, but very important as well was the fact that Latina/o voters also rejected them because the party was identified with the rabid anti-immigration stance of Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado and his ilk. In their post-mortem commentary, Republican bigwigs and associated thinktanks and pundits have been vociferous in declaring that their party can’t afford to go the anti-immigrant route.
A couple of days ago, the Anti-Defamation League released a new report suggesting that right wing extremist groups like the Klan are stepping into the vacuum. An article about the report highlighted the danger.
“Extremist groups are good at seizing on whatever the hot button is of the day and twisting the message to get new members,” Deborah M. Lauter, ADL civil rights director, said Monday. “This one seems to be taking hold with more of mainstream America than we’d like to see.”
Activists and NGOs in the Chicana/o community and doing work with immigrants sure see it.
“I’ve been doing (Hispanic advocacy work) for a long, long time and the atmosphere has never been as poisonous as it has been in the last few years,” said Lisa Navarrete, a vice president at the National Council of La Raza. “The level of vitriol is new.”
Some of the more foam-flecked anti-immigration ranters will doubtless wind up in swastika t-shirts, but I don't think most of their calmer, quieter, but no-less-bent-out, white Middle American counterparts are going to--yet. But the question recurs: if the Republican Party hierarchy decides that it simply can’t afford to let the likes of Tom Tancredo be their public face, where will these folks find a home?
Let's step back for a moment. The issue of immigration today roils right below the surface of political life in the U.S. During the massive and historic immigrant uprising of last spring, many of us were unpleasantly surprised at the response of some of the plain-old, everyday, Marcia-Brady-hair-having white folks we know. (And some Black folks who should know better, too, but let's leave that for another post.)
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I highly recommend folks look at The Nation's issue on "The New Nativism" from last fall (available online here). Folks living in large cities, with diverse and cosmopolitan populations, can have a hard time recognizing how jarring the last decade or two have been for folks in older ‘burbs, smaller cities, and towns. Whiteness has been the norm in these areas, or perhaps a simple white/Black binary with a long ugly history, but whose presence and rules are known by all.
For some people, already insecure about their place in a country undergoing massive economic transformation and the erosion of community, the presence of a bunch of stores on Main Street with Spanish or Chinese language signage is a threat to their very sense of self. It's what my pal Napolitana Piemontese sometimes calls "the wounded narcissism of empire."
Now freaked-out white folks have never been a group to stir a lot of sympathy in me, but I do like keeping an eye on what’s up with them, especially when they are freaked out in large numbers. Lou Dobbs is reported to command the highest ad rates on CNN--and his high ratings come because he’s the country’s leading "respectable" immigrant-basher, not because anybody’s getting rich off his show’s banal reportage on the business world.
So where are they going to go? Some bloggers who posted comments to a thread on this subject yesterday at the left liberal DailyKos site suggest that 2008 will see a serious right wing third party effort by the Constitution Party (better known in some states by its local affiliate, like the American Independent Party in California). I have no way of judging how real this might be.
But one thing I do know is that nobody better rely on the Democrats to stand up to nativism. Terry McAuliffe, former DNC chair and currently a key figure in Hillary Clinton's campaign brain trust, was asked about immigration on a radio call-in show a few dsys back:
I couldn't agree more. We've got to shut these borders down. These people shouldn't be coming in this country. We need to enforce our border protections. We have to do something for the people who have been here for years and have paid taxes -- you know, we're for the people who have been in this country and paying taxes and raising their family. But for the people who have not been here, who have been here illegally and have taken advantage of the situation, we need to have a plan to get them back to the countries they came from, and more important, which is the first thing John talks about, we have gotta shut these borders down. I couldn't agree more. (h/t MyDD)
So lemme throw this open to Fire on the Mountain readers. Where do you think the nativist sentiment bubbling under out there is going to go? And what should we be doing about it? Is my concern overblown? What is the next recession going to do to the situation?
Hit the "Comments" button directly below and weigh in.
