COMING NORTH: LATINO & CARIBBEAN IMMIGRATION
THIS REPORT, THE FIRST OF TWO ON LATINO and Caribbean communities in the United States, focuses on immigration, and on the deep ambivalence of U.S. immigration policy. That ambivalence has...
...Not only has freer trade driven down wages and increased the demand for unskilled labor in the United States, but as Sassen reports, U.S...
...This nativism in new clothes simultaneously does battle against non-European immigrants, and against the idea that we are a multi-cultural nation...
...On the other hand, their presense becomes unwelcome wheneverjobs become scarce...
...The increased flow of capital, goods and services across national borders has opened our borders to an increased flow of people...
...Saskia Sassen argues that the role played by the United States in the creation of a global economy-and global labor markets-has had a huge impact on who comes here and why...
...In a recent issue of the conservative National Review, Peter Brimelow, himself an immigrant from England, argues that the United States may be losing the Anglo heritage that has defined it as a nation...
...Maria Jimdnez documents growing incidents of racist hatred along the U.S.-Mexico border, and the transformation of the borderlands into a "warzone," as a multi-agency U.S...
...This fear of loss of identity-however ficticious that identity may be-is a powerful motor of political reaction...
...So, on the one hand, immigrants willing to take lowpaying jobs play an important role in U.S...
...As Jim6nez reports, immigrants and Latino border residents alike are drawn into this conflict...
...The problem, of course, is that another, less inclusive part of the U.S...
...Chief among these new arguments is that "we've lost control of our borders," and chief among the borders in question is the one with Mexico...
...selfimage-seldom reflected in official policy-is that the United States is a nation of immigrants, a nation formed by exiles, refugees and people seeking a better life...
...A powerfully felt part of the U.S...
...On entering," he complains, "you find yourself in an underworld that is entirely colored...
...A ND NOW NATIVISM, INVOKED WITH NEW arguments and new slogans, is back...
...In "losing control of its borders," the United States has created the most powerless and vulnerable segment of its labor force: immigrants, with tenuous legal rights, who are willing to work hard at jobs few others will take...
...investment in Latin America and the Caribbean has destroyed traditional work structures and created an active wage labor force, thus mobilizing people for migration...
...It helps explain why the United States, proud of its reputation as a haven for exiles, refugees and immigrants, has never been open to all...
...But in the course of political struggle, the newest arrivals-like immigrants before them-are creating institutions to defend their interests and rights...
...TTITUDES AND SELF-IMAGE ASIDE, THE natural functioning of our capitalist economy may be rendering our borders moot...
...shores (the old word for borders) from people who were "not like us," lest these newcomers-mostly Asians, and European Catholics and Jews-somehow change the national character...
...nativist ideology draws little distinction among flower sellers, job seekers and drug traffickers...
...Hence the porous borders...
...A century ago, "nativism" was the name attached to the movement to protect U.S...
...The boatloads of Haitians now routinely turned away by the Bush Administration, are reminders of other boatloads of inconvenient-and ethnically incorrect-refugees turned away by other administrations...
...As they find their voice, they are helping to define a new national character...
...self-image may be more salient: that the United States is a nation of Anglo-Americans...
...He compares the waiting rooms of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to the New York subway...
...Nativism culminated in the quotas established by the National Origins Act of 1924, but not until the national character had indeed been changed by-among other things-the absorption of millions of immigrants from backgrounds substantially different from the native born...
...labor markets and must be let in...
...That ambivalence has ideological roots...
...task force engages in daily combat against the flow of immigrants, weapons, drugs and currency...
Vol. 26 • July 1992 • No. 1
