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Article Excerpt
Harald Bauder, Labor Movement: How Migration Regulates Labor Markets (New York: Oxford University Press 2006)
Justin Akers Chacon and Mike Davis, No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violente on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Chicago: Haymarket Books 2006)
Philip Martin, Manolo Abella, and Christiane Kuptsch, Managing Labor Migration in the Twenty-first Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2006)
Jonathon W. Moses, International Migration: Globalization's Last Frontier (London: Zed Books 2006)
UNDER REVIEW HERE are four books that deal--in very different ways--with labour markets, global migration, and the politics of open borders. Published in the wake of the millions-strong May Day 2006 strikes and demonstrations led by working-class undocumented immigrants in the vs, Mike Davis and Justin Akers Chacon's No One is Illegal is the most explicitly oriented to contemporary immigrant justice movements. As such, it provides an important point of departure for examining neo-liberal labour regimes, globalization, sovereignty, and citizenship from the standpoint of migrants and the deported. As the book's subtitle indicates, No One is Illegal is a primer on the racism, violence, and class exploitation which organizes working-class migrant lives in the us; it is also an anatomy of the organized attacks on immigrants by the state, employers, powerful right-wing coalitions, and vigilante groups such as the Minute Men. At the same rime, the book aims to chart a course (both inside and outside the labour movement) for a new civil rights movement of undocumented people. Indeed, the massive May Day demonstrations which stunned the us were built on years of difficult organizing, backed up by the power of community organizations, immigrant workers' centres, organized labour, Spanish-language media, and the Catholic Church. But crucially, as us labour scholar Kim Moody has pointed out, they also rested on the new strategic power of undocumented people in key sectors of the us economy such as construction; meat processing; and landscaping, among others. (1) The mass character of these campaigns and movements in the us has been reflected in cultural production, further demonstrating the ways these struggles have captured the imagination of many. Films such as Ken Loach's feature, Bread and Roses, based on the us Justice for Janitors struggle, come to mind, as does the hilarious Mexican-us co-production, A Day without Mexicans. The latter in fact inspired the very title, "A Day without Immigrants," of the mass May Day mobilizations.
While excellent activist journals such as the California-based ColorLines, and independent writers such as David Bacon and Elizabeth Martinez, have often provided crucial orientation to these movements, there are relatively few accessible full-length left-wing treatments of immigration politics and activisto today. (2) Drawing on existing immigration scholarship and journalistic accounts, Chacon and Davis's No One is Illegal was clearly written to address this gap. Co-writer Mike Davis, a well-known leftist scholar currently in the Department of History at University of California at Irvine and the author of many influential books including City of Quartz and Planet of Slums, is actually the junior writer here; the great majority of the book was written by Justin Akers Chacon, a professor of us History and Chicano Studies based in San Diego, California. Along with Arizona, California is one of the key fronts of anti-immigrant and anti-immigration organizing, and Chacon and Davis are able to build on their knowledge of the ugly history and politics of that state to develop many of the book's key themes.
No One is Illegal is divided into five sections, of which only the first--a powerful and very disturbing historical analysis of white vigilante violence in California--was written by Davis. The remaining four sections of the book, all authored by Chacon, take up the history of the us conquest of Mexico and the contemporary organization of the us-Mexican border economy; the making of the Mexican-American working class, including the history of the bracero programs; the contemporary "war on immigrants" both before and after September 11; and, finally, the current immigrant rights movement. The book is illustrated with photographs by Julian Cardona, himself a Mexican migrant to the US. Many of the photos are disturbing portraits of migrant lives and of Minutemen on the militarized us/Mexican border. Unfortunately, however, the text does not offer any commentary on the photos and they exist as a parallel text, inviting us to reflect on the everyday normalized violence done to migrants both at the border and in other sites where "bordering" of migrants takes place.
No One is Illegal makes a number of important contributions; one of these is its treatment of violence, of the "extraordinary centrality of institutionalized private violence in the reproduction of the racial and social order." (15) The opening section of the book, in particular, is a strong reminder of exactly how much brutal violence--beginning with genocidal violence directed against indigenous peoples--backs up the institution of wage labour and how much violence it takes to create and secure hierarchical white geographies and landscapes out of multi-ethnic/multi-racial spaces such as California. This section offers a solid understanding of the long history of vigilantism--very often operating in conjunction with official law enforcement--at the border and in the workplace and serves as a crucial orientation to the "political, class, and racial origins" (8) of today's powerful anti-immigrant/anti-immigration formations. Out of this violence--as well as the defeat of radical proletarian motley crews such as the Industrial Workers of the World--came the production of key divides among working-class people that continue to haunt our analysis and organizing today, shaping who does--and doesn't--get taken into account as part of the "national" working class.
Chacon opens his four-part contribution to No One is Illegal with two parts focussed on the US-Mexico relationship, past and present. He highlights how often ignored (at least in immigration debates) histories and practices of colonialism, imperialism, and the "capitalist development of agriculture and its integration into the world market" (110) have shaped the massive displacement of generations of Mexican workers. Today's migrant justice movements have often returned to the history of the us bracero programs...
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