Bread and Roses. posted by Richard Seymour

Liberal pieties abound about migration in the United States: the country is, after all, a nation of migrants, a splendid Disneyland of multiculturalism, tolerance, and inclusiveness. These anti-immigration laws are downright unAmerican. Racism, as Christopher Hitchens once insisted, is as far away from what it means to be Americans as can be imagined. Let's call bullshit on this absurdity once and for all. The United States is a nation of colonists, founded on genocide and slavery. The latter didn't officially end until 1865, and desegregation didn't begin until 1954. The native Americans, enslaved and murdered from day one, were still being massacred and driven off their land in 1890. Native Americans, where they are not assimilated, suffer from dirt poverty, legal repression and some of the worst rates of disease and infant mortality in the Americas. Having eliminated much of the Native American population, the colonisers honour the dead by appropriating their culture and symbols in the naming of football teams and cruise missiles, having abandoned the more primitive habit of depicting the Savages in Wild West fantasies.

These days, the big injun fear is what'll happen if the Natives start moving across the Americas in search of money for their families. The folks Rush Limbaugh calls "wetbacks", but whom the rest of the media are simply happy to call "illegals", might sneak across the border for a year or two to work in modern plantations in breakneck conditions for poverty wages - and wouldn't that just be too awful? Black Commentator retorts: "Before complaining about immigrants, compare yourself to a Wampanoag. Are Mexicans giving you small pox? Are they attacking your neighborhood and slitting your throat? Have they claimed your town as a colony for Mexico? Present day Americans are getting a much better deal from newcomers than the original Americans ever had." Ah, but that misses the role of fantasy and projection. Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo, already noted here for his Muslim-bashing antics during the banlieue uprisings, says that 'illegals' "need to be found before it is too late. They're coming here to kill you, and you, and me, and my grandchildren." Minuteman leader Chris Simcox says: "They are hard-core criminals. They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughters and they are evil people."

The fact that the viciously racist offensive by Republicans against migrants has produced the vast demonstrations that it has is of course vital. The proposals included criminalising millions of unauthorised workers in the US, making it a crime to provide any aid or assistance to them, and eventually constructing a "separation wall" across the US-Mexico border. Hey, why not build walls on all sides and put a roof on? That would solve a few hundred of the world's problems in one fell swoop. I'm kidding. The proposals now being considered are a compromise - between those who want to exploit the pants off the migrants under 'guest worker' programmes then discard them so that they can fill up prisons, and those who want to simply criminalise them, jail them, shoot at them, send them back to the Southern hemisphere, where bombers and CIA putschists will shortly follow.

The trouble with migrants is this sort of thing. You let them have a bit of the American dream, and they start striking for higher pay and union rights. Can't trust 'em. What is perhaps most moving about this strike by Miami janitors, most of whom are Haitian or Cuban migrants, is that they have won a 25% pay increase and still haven't given up - because they are still fighting for union recognition, and for a proper living wage because the raise they have been offered is inadequate. They demand not just bread, but roses also. To hell with Kapitalist Realism, they are demanding what employers across America would shudderingly describe as 'unrealistic'. The greedy bastards. And maybe as well they are reminding the ruling class of what terrifies them about the white working class, why all those years of indoctrination, McCarthyism, FBI repression and union-busting were necessary. Their presence is the 'return of the repressed' in more ways than one. And of course, the conservative gesture par excellence, is to displace class struggle onto a racial one. The idea is obvious enough: the polity is a harmonious, organic whole, disturbed only by migrants, students exposed to Europeanised anti-American doctrines and a truculent 'underclass' (mostly black). Hence - build walls across borders, report anti-American professors to Fox News, erect bigger prisons, crack down on evil-doers like José Padilla, bust the ILWU with Taft-Hartley, cut welfare (just pays for the crack pipe), spy on citizens...