“Alien” Invasion in California

Posted on August 26, 2003 in California Watch Immigration

Thanks to Arnold’s announcement that he’d voted for Proposition 187, California voters and bloggers have been arguing whether the state should deny benefits to illegal aliens or, more politically, whether the Democrats should pounce on Arnold for his stand.

Pundit after pundit cites the results of the election where Proposition 187 was passed by more than 60% of the state’s voters. There’s a groundswell of opinion, they say, a definite mood in the state that favors curbing the benefits which “illegal aliens” can have. Moves to render the state “English-only” meet similar wide approval, they argue. So why go against the flow?

By 2025, the state will have 21 million Latinos. A recent book announces:

No one believes any longer the government’s old insistence on a mere 6 million illegal residents nationwide. The figure may in fact be closer to somewhere between 8 and 12 million. Each year over 1.5 million aliens are apprehended attempting to enter the United States illegally, the vast majority on the southern border of the United States. Perhaps ten times that number are never caught. The U.S. Hispanic population — of which over 70 percent are from Mexico — gre 53 percent during the 1980s, and then between 1990 and 1996 rose another 27 percent. At present rates of birth and immigration, by 2050 there will be 97 million Hispanics who will constitute one-quarter of all Americans — and well over half the population of California!

Such numbers are often delivered in tones that ring with panic. We have a crisis! “These people” are coming to California and soon they will overwhelm “us”!

First, I do not panic at the numbers. Populations move about. This is a simple fact of history. Conservatives will rationalize soaring housing market and energy prices here in California as expected and normal, but show people flooding across the border (especially in bad times) and the horns of Armagaeddon ring out loud. I don’t see Latinos as threats, just as new neighbors.

Second, since when is it illegal to be a human being? Conservatives deny racism and Americo-centrism, but then they talk about the “thems” coming over the border as if they were a distinct species. The kindest solution they offer is social modification: converting Latinos into mocha WASPS. Latino rights lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta, friend of Hunter Thompson, knew them as another insect, the “cockroach”:

I found that some Chicanos in the city have a misconception of gringos that we farmworkers could never have. They don’t quite realize that they have an enemy while, in the country, the Chicano knows from birth he is a lowdown cockroach. In the cities, only the lowriders, the vatas locos, are in tune with this.

Conservative commentators like to call this a “politics of victimhood”. I see it as politics of attaining dignity without selling your soul. Why is the price of rising in American society giving up your roots? Why value the Mexican heritage less than the Anglo-Saxon one?

The concept of national boundaries — which was brought about by force of arms — leads us to a concept that is profoundly not founded on genetics at all: that a person can be declared “not of the people” because of the fact of location and location alone. North of the fence, Mexicans who were born in the same manner as the rest of Americans, become cockroaches, an infestation. It’s a bizarre form of specism within a species, where a subtle difference legitimates treatment as an insect, of creature of inferior culture.

There’s the whole issue of projection, too. California, along with the entire Southwest, was not part of the original thirteen colonies. Before the war, Anglo-Americans insinuated themselves into lands owned by Mexico. Then they screamed persecution and brought the force of the United States to bear in favor of what was their minority rule. The land was seized — by force — from Mexico and ethnically cleansed of Latinos despite the assurances of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago. Only when the braceros — the arms — of Mexico workers were needed to work our farms (white people were either needed in the military or the factories) did the numbers begin to rise again. They came invited and then, abruptly, we disinvited them, having given them a taste of the pleasures of the land. They became “illegal” by decree of law, not by fact of nature.

This leads me to my third and final main point: the decision about “what to do about the Latino question” is being discussed without the input of the whole body politic. Those who would be most affected by any laws or initiatives passed to deal with this “problem” are left out of the discussion and out of the decision. They are truly the “cockroaches”, the people who have been branded with the stigma of verminhood. And this has all been done without getting their side of the story or allowing them a vote on the matter.

Of course, the conservative and the moderate will argue “But they’re not citizens”. True, but in this matter, they are involved and should have a voice. They must be able to come out openly to speak about the issues involved, be able to defend themselves as being something other than parasites, people who contribute to the economy and the culture of California.

So far, only a handful of social scientists and labor unions have been able to present the true statistics that show that Latinos contribute far more to California than they take from it in terms of the taxes they pay and the purchases they make. As things stand now, any invitation for one of these to speak out is like setting out a roach motel: if you are a Latino without papers, you enter the discussion at the cost of your life here in California.

The chief price paid by Latinos who come here for the low wages of assembly line workers, janitors, gardeners, and fry cooks is silence about their exploitation. We who live in the luxurious sprawls of San Diego and Orange County, especially, stand on the backs of hardworking people who cannot speak up for themselves. We are free to degrade them, deny the value of their culture, talk about “sending them back” (only to welcome them later after they’ve crawled through sewage pipes across the border again). We are free to create a mythical “60%” of Californians in support of laws like Proposition 187 and the English Only initiatives — when the reality is that when we count the views of all those who live and contribute to our economy, it is likely that the majority would not support these laws. The situation of Zeta’s “cockroach people” is not unlike that of women before the vote: the partisans of Anglo-American culture are free to impose laws over a socially invisible people.