Equal Justice Society News - Newsletter Summer 2007 - Immigrant Rights Marches Not a ‘New Beginning’ but Next Chapter in Civil Rights Struggle

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets on May 1 of last year, and tens of thousands this year, to protest oppressive immigration legislation. Those marches challenged one paradigm of social justice and led to some hailing the protests as representing a “new civil rights movement.”

The demonstrations were not a new beginning, but a continuation of the original uncompleted and embattled original movement for civil rights in this country. The marches sparked debates over the commonalities and differences between the struggles of African Americans and newer immigrants.

African Americans and undocumented immigrants both disproportionately occupy the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, and with shrinking numbers of well-paying working class jobs, both are finding increasingly limited opportunities for social advancement. Due to changing demographics, these two communities are increasingly intertwined in metropolitan and rural areas throughout the county.

The issues faced by these communities, be it quality of schools, public safety, environmental justice, or access to public services are now more than ever shared issues. This has led many advocates in both communities to hope that they can work together to alleviate their common issues.

There are some impediments to successfully building coalitions between these two communities. Racism and xenophobia, as well simple linguistic and cultural differences, are problems that have hampered coalitional work between disparate ethnic and racial groups throughout American history.

Even when these hurdles are not in place, the precarious position of one minority group has limited the ability of that group from forge alliances with another in need of help, often times to the detriment of both. Further how do you make the issue of one group relevant to the other when the linkages are not clear? In this particular case on of the primary issues faced by the immigrant community – the inability for a path to legal status in this county – is by definition not faced by the African American community.

What should be made clear in any discussion of African American and immigrant relations are what hurdles these communities do not face. The diminishing number of well paying jobs and public resources has allowed anti-immigrant groups to suggest that immigration has been the cause of this lack of opportunity.

But detailed social science has pointed out that immigrants and African Americans generally do not compete for the same jobs, except in the extremely low paying service sector, but rather immigrants tend to merely displace the previous wave of immigrants.

What has had a detrimental impact on the African American community (and also on this latest generation of Latino immigrants) is the lack of jobs that offer a road to advancement and a decent standard of life. This lack has more to do with international economic realities. The jobs that enable an advancement out of poverty for “low skilled” workers are increasingly vanishing in the United States, and reappearing in factories pay greatly reduced wages in distant countries. Immigrants are not the cause of this phenomenon: they are the symptom.

Much of the global south is being pushed out of their traditional means of life by trade policies that make them unsustainable, and forced to relocte to both the megacities in their own countries or in the first world nations of the north. The causes of both are one and the same.

It is in the ability to contest the negative effects of this phenomenon that gives rise to African Americans' interest in supporting a just path to naturalization for undocumented immigrants. The ability to combat the negative effects of through united action is hampered by the existence of a de jure underclass of undocumented immigrants.

One only need look at the history of segregation and racism to see how the second class citizenship kept poor people poor. Undocumented immigrants both have less rights, and because of their vulnerable status, less ability to enforce their rights. In fact, echoes of Jim Crow are ringing louder than ever as cities and counties have been attempting to pass restrictions on renting or even serving undocumented immigrants.

A more vulnerable working population means less ability for working people to come together to demand basic rights to decent wages and benefits, a phenomenon that fundamentally hurts a large proportion of the African American community.

Additionally the maintenance of this “second class” status for undocumented hurts the African American population in their ability to receive adequate political accountability and therefore adequate services. Because undocumented immigrants are not represented by the political process and cannot vote, they lack this key avenue to advocate for social needs such as municipal services and quality education. Because these are more often than not shared issues with the African American community – a bad school is a bad school for the Latino and Black students; just as a lack of adequate sewage or the placement of a toxic site is a problem for all - there is often more than a strong common interest.

However, because of the immigration status of many in these communities - and the lack of a way to gain legal stauts or citizenship - they do not have the ability to demand their full share of political accountability for these conditions. Thus, the lack of representation for undocumented immigrants often has an effect on the African American community akin to the vote dilution that occurs through felon disenfranchisement; the rendering some segments of the population without a voice lessens the voice of the community as a whole.

In these ways, the inter-group issues mirrors many historical and intra-group issues, raising serious questions about how we conceive of group constellation and “coalitions.” It begs the question of whether we should not re-conceive the group identity in the first place to stop reinforcing divisions that might not organically be there in the first place.

Let’s remember that Martin Luther King was assassinated while taking part in solidarity work with striking sanitation workers – not protesting the overt vestiges of Jim Crow. King understood the civil rights movement to be part of a larger goal of social justice.

Calling the immigrants’ rights marches the beginning of a new civil rights movement infers that the movement started by African Americans reached its end. The marches instead signify yet another chapter in the social justice movement and the need for a new look on how we move our efforts forward.

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