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i'm picking out shani's posts above to work off from below--i could have picked out dk's or tellurides or any number of other folk--but i thought that shani's responses, based on her relation to her community was most interesting, and probably is the most difficult to get at from the outside. since this topic has come up repeatedly and like many others in politics, debate about it shows no signs of progression, i figure going after the most difficult version of it at least makes this sad topic marginally interesting to go through again again again....
there is no illegal immigration "problem"--there are undocumented workers. these people come to the states because firms will hire them.
to call these flows of people in (AND OUT) of the us "illegal immigrants" is to fundamentally distort the question that the term is used to address.
but "illegal immigration" does get the nativists riled up: it sets up yet another Them which threatens US somehow--perhaps via their brown-ness, perhaps by way of their spanish-speaking-ness.
once you buy into this category--that it refers somehow to something--then it is easy to organize your perceptions of your community around it--the term functions primarily to structure your projections and so voila--in this thread post after post based on nothing but projection and that whcih is projected through it, anxiety.
what are you looking for as "data" when you do this?
that folk speak spanish?
the assumptions seems to be that if folk spoke english fluently, then they'd be "legal immigrants" but since they dont...they are--well what? what exactly can you determine from language competences? how hard have you tried to make any determinations based on something that goes beyond projection? any? it is not enough to just gather a bunch of aggregated infotainment off of far right anti-immigrant website and map it wholesale onto the spanish-speaking people that you now imagine are "invading your community" with the intent of "taking it over."...
it is absurd.
you want to complain about something, then complain about how capitalist labor markets are presently operating. it is now somehow rational for a firm to locate facilities or to tie themselves to subconractors/suppliers who locate their facilities in place with the lowest possible wages and the most repressive anti-union regulations. it is now somehow rational and acceptable for firms to exploit transnational labor flows within the united states in order to "maintain a competitive advantage" by paying below minimum wage, using forced overtime, shitty working conditions, totally deskilled work, etc etc etc,..people like to imagine that the economic systems within which they operate is organized on the same lines as those which they prefer to think obtain in the world--well, it doesn't. it hasn't for 40 years (if it ever did). for example: at the public corporation level, stock has traded internationally since the early 1970s--firms that trade publically are not in any meaningful way owned by amuricans.
another fine feature of the capitalism that has somehow dropped out of the debate about this non-issue of "illegal immigration" is old -school:
capitalism treats territories as interchangeable, as abstract, and working people as numbers, as extensions of the machines, as abstractions: that a community within the states would find its population being reorganized along the lines that shani (to take one example) is freaking out about has to do with the changing character of capitalist relations of production and nothing--AT ALL--to do with any imaginary invasion of the land of White People by some new brown Plague. this is a labor pool dynamic that you are seeing. nothing more, nothing less. and if it bothers you--for whatever reason--the problem is not american border "security"--but rather the patterns of hiring that the firms which operate in your community have chosen to adopt.
so this is a LABOR ISSUE, and NOT an immigration issue.
typing the word ILLEGALS in caps, according to the collective preference of those who are bugged out by this sorry non-question changes nothing at all.
(where did this tick come from anyway?)
let's play a little game of perceptual organization:
you can organize what you see in any number of ways...that you "see" a phenomenon does not mean that it exists in any meaningful way--you can describe a common feature in your visual field in any number of directions--what would let you evaluate one over another would be the extent to which each description aligns with EXPECTATIONS ABOUT your experience--so it is entirely possible that you could have a number of ways of framing the same experience each of whcih would be internally as compelling as the other--so the question of how one reacts based on the category "illegal immigrant" vs. "undocumented worker."
i could look around the room i am sitting in now and isolate all the black lines that run through or around features in the images that hang on the wall: i could extend them in my imagination and decide that this room is filling with barbed wire. if i posted something about my anxiety over being forced out of my space by an influx of barbed wire and someone were to respond "uh--what are you talking about?" i could make the same claim as shani does above, which amounts to "this is MY space, i have lived in it for years and there IS an influx of barbed wire you dont know what you are talking about"
the material that i would be using exists in my space: there are many images on the wall and lots of black lines running around them. the extension of that material into an invasion of barbed wire would be a function of (a) the category that i was using implicitly to organize that information (the black lines) and (b) the anxiety that enabled this category to have some effective hold on how i thought. from an outside viewpoint, what would link the material (the black lines) to their results (barbed wire spilling into my space) would be a breakdown in edge recognition. if a situation were to exist where i could go online and find a bunch of websites devoted to fighting the scourge of barbed wire, i would probably feel that my connecting-together of surface features of my experience was now legitimated. and the invasion of barbed wire DOES lean on an aspect of my experience (the black lines in the images on my wall) and i know those images in the same way that i suspect shani (and others above--i really am singling shani out because her posts are difficult to get to and for no other reason) knows this population she talks about--i look at them from a distance..
the point is that the fact that you SEE what amounts to social data does not mean that you KNOW anything about the elements that you group together to make that data. teh category that you use does that work for you.
the response "i know what i see, asshole.." or a variant doesnt actually address the problem.
the problem is that this category "illegal immigrant" organizes a certain amount of visual data--and in the main it IS visual data. you have a spectator relation to it. you know this information in the way that i know the black lines in the images on my wall: except less intimately.
it doesnt really matter then that you try to push the debate back onto your community. all it really points to is the effect a category like "illegal immigrant" can have in ordering what is experentially close to you. you SHOW why this category is dangerous. you DEMONSTRATE its danger.
rather than think about the labor market in your area, it is enough to imagine that your area is being invaded and to blame the people who are drawn to your area by its labor market for the labor market itself. it seems a screwy way to think.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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