Letters
Mexico's COCEI I'm embarrassed to say that I just got around to looking at your December 1992 issue. Be that as it may, I was delighted to see "A Grassroots Challenge," Alison Gardy's article...
...Yet enforcing borders has also protected domestic workers from competition with cheaper and more exploitable foreign labor, as the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement makes clear...
...Lamentably for her, no state advocates mutilation before execution, unlike Shining Path, which cut off the ears of many of the 62 Ashaninka Indians killed in September...
...For one, the homeland is saturated with "talk and images and evidence of life en el norte"-that is, with misleading symbols of consumption far beyond local means of attainment...
...He told me two things that Gardy leaves out of her account...
...This was pointed out to Shining Path supporter Heriberto Ocasio during a recent radio interview...
...An interesting sidelight on this: After Nicaragua's 1972 earthquake, leftist juchitecos organized a blood drive for Nicaragua as a solidarity action...
...I find it ironic that Shining Path supporters in the United States have tried to further their campaign to "defend the life" of Abimael Guzmin, Shining Path's founder and leader, by appealing to deathpenalty abolitionists...
...Maria Jimenez argues against militarizing the Mexican border ("War in the Borderlands," July, 1992) on the premise that "freedom to cross international boundaries" should be "recognized as a fundamental human right...
...A visit to COCEI-controlled Juchitin was the high point of a trip around Mexico some friends and I took in 1981...
...By sheer accident, we arrived on a fiesta night, and I ended up talking with a young auto mechanic who was a COCEI militant...
...For the sake of scholarly debate, perhaps she could forward to NACLA her personal list...
...Who else should die, according to Andreas...
...In one town where I've worked, the immigration stream to the United States consists mainly of small businessmen and owners of television sets who are dissatisfied with their level of consumption...
...Be that as it may, I was delighted to see "A Grassroots Challenge," Alison Gardy's article on the COCEI in Juchitdn...
...I fear Andreas may also be disappointed to learn that even gas-happy states like Florida have something they call appeal and mercy...
...The ecological implications are compounded by the higher birth rates of immigrants...
...when the COCEI was cut off from federal aid, the Sandinistas offered assistance in return...
...standards these people are not well-off, but they are by the standards of the community from which they come...
...What ultimately will be achieved by leaving open the border to anyone who wants to cross...
...For another, cash sent home from the United States sets up highly dependent remittance economies which deepen inequalities and create new underclasses which do not share in the bounty...
...A second issue that needs to be discussed is the sanctuary movement's assumption that every undocumented immigrant from Central America deserves political asylum...
...The reason for the steep increase over earlier projections is heightened immigration and the effect on birth rates...
...Sanctuary activists have been slow to question the motives of applicants for asylum, and the latter can learn to present themselves as human rights victims...
...But as allies of the labor movement, we have to consider the impact of large-scale immigration on U.S...
...Questioning population growth is almost a taboo subject on the U.S...
...While he and his friends plied me with beer, brandy and bull's head, he told me the already complicated history of the COCEI up to that point...
...Unfortunately, every Third World immigrant who settles in the United States is likely to became another car-driving, beef-eating resource hog like most of us...
...Wage parity with Mexico...
...In the middle of a human rights crisis, you may say, it's better to err on the side of generosity...
...For Andreas, all of the achievements she grudgingly allows Moyano-her leadership, her advocacy on behalf of poor women like herself-were worth not a single hair on her head...
...In response, the city government launched a self-help-based public works program...
...If 250 million North Americans are already an unsustainable burden on the planet, what about the Census Bureau's new mid-to-high range projection of 380 to 500 million of us by 2050...
...Since the costs of mass immigration are spread so unevenly, those of us who do not compete in the low-skill end of the North American job market should pay special attention to those who do...
...In fact, Shining Path is an enthusiastic practitioner of the death penalty...
...Moyano crossed that most sacred of boundaries: the limits of what 46 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 46 LETTERS Andreas and those she champions believe is right and wrong for Peru...
...Partisans of blanket admission of Central Americans need to consider how their constituency will fare in competition with the millions of immigrants arriving for similar reasons from other parts of the world...
...Abuses by Peru's government continue, and are egregious and deplorable...
...Perhaps only Andreas would be charmed by his blunt reply: "That's what you do with snitches...
...The most obvious is border enforcement...
...Many of us assume that the most important motive for restricting immigration is nativism and racism...
...High fertility rates are also a labor issue, as it is hard to imagine a better way to keep workers in their place than to encourage them to outbreed the demand for their labor...
...High fertility rates are a feminist issue, because they are associated with lack of schooling and unequal opportunity for women...
...Worrying about population is considered Malthusian, reactionary and racist, and that's supposed to be the end of the discussion...
...Realistically, how will farmworkers ever extract significant concessions from growers without limits on the supply of labor, that is, without militarizing what has been a porous border...
...And does she, in the end, prefer the method employed by Moyano's killers-beating an unarmed woman to her knees in front of her children, a rapid shot to the base of the neck, close enough to leave a powder bum and that slight, satisfying scent of burned hair-or would others suffice...
...My acquaintance with the immigration stream from Guatemala suggests that many of the people applying for asylum have not been at any particular risk...
...What their unease suggests is that immigration needs to be looked at in terms of class and labor supply as well as identity politics...
...Knowing what consumer society has done to popular consciousness in the United States, we should greet migratory responses to the imagery of consumption with profound reservations...
...The reason is apparently that many of these people are highly vulnerable first- and second-generation immigrants themselves...
...By U.S...
...As human rights activists (see Robert Self's article, "Intimidate First, Ask Questions Later: The INS and Immigrant Rights," in the same issue, as well as much of "Coming North," the July 1992 NACLA Report), we defend the rights of refugees and the undocumented to enter the United States...
...It's good that many members of the NACLA community are involved in defending the rights of refugees...
...Left...
...Second, though Gardy refers to the violent repression that the PRI unleashed against the COCEI in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she omits the fact that when the COCEI managed to claim the city government in 1980, the PRI promptly cut off all federal aid to the city, and instead transferred the aid to the PRI's own party organization...
...Robert Smith raised a third issue in "New York in Mixteca...
...According to the Latino National Political Survey, 75% of MexicanAmericans-an even higher percentage than in the general population-say there are too many immigrants coming to the United States...
...Finally, rapid population growth is a basic ecological issue, as its consequences will outlive the social system and historical period that spawned it...
...workers, particularly the most lowskilled and vulnerable, at a time when sweatshops are booming and unions are in retreat...
...Yet in the same issue, Richard Mines, Beatriz Boccalandro and Susan Gabbard point out that illegal labor flows have made it harder to organize farmworkers, many of whom continue to face appalling conditions...
...Generally, NACLA has given more attention to the rights of immigrants than to the implications of their arrival in large numbers...
...David Stoll Davis, California Shining Path n her letter to NACLA [JulyAugust, 1993], Carol Andreas tries to justify Shining Path's coldblooded murder of Maria Elena Moyano, the Peruvian feminist leader...
...In the utopian society she envisions, just how would other Peruvians die (for Moyano is just one in a list of thousands murdered by Shining Path since 1980): in the electric chair, the gas chamber, or at the point of a sterile needle...
...But if immigration policy is to be consistent-and equity is a major argument of immigration lobbyists-the definition of any undocumented Guatemalan or Salvadoran as a political refugee can be applied to anyone in economic difficulty under an authoritarian regime...
...A fourth issue is the environmental impact of turning low-consumption Third Worlders into high-consumption First Worlders...
...Robin Kirk Americas Watch...
...But we ignore the awkward ramifications at our peril, because downplaying them leaves more room for unbridled nativist reactions...
...Obviously, immigration and population debates have great potential for bigotry...
...Chris Tilly University ofMassachusetts Lowell, MA The Immigration Conundrum Cecilia Mufioz ("Immigration Policy: A Tricky Business," May, 1993) is to be commended for wrestling with the contradictions posed by Latin American migration to the United States...
...It might be in Andreas' professional interest to tour this country's busiest death states and report back...
...But I hope it won't be in these pages...
...Revolutionaries," she says, "had no alternative but to end her life...
...Mixteca in New York" (July, 1992): the implications for the Third World societies sending immigrants here...
...Yet they do not justify murder...
...First, from the start, the COCEI was deeply involved in workers' struggles for unionization, wages and dignity, as well as the peasant struggles to which Gardy alludes...
...The growing audience for anti-immigration appeals suggests that we need to discuss some uncomfortable issues...
Vol. 27 • November 1993 • No. 3
