by Khalil Nieves

“Most people extricate themselves from familiar environments only when their survival and well-being are in jeopardy. As of 2004, roughly one in every 35 people was an international migrant. If they all lived in the same place, they would constitute the world’s fifth largest country.” —Mike Davis, No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border i>

Currently there is tremendous debate about immigration. One of the most critical issues is the conflict between Latino immigrants and African-Americans as U.S. employers hire Latinos at lower wages. Examining this conflict can help us understand why Latinos are immigrating, and whether African-Americans and Latinos are allies or competitors in a global economy. This way we can address the conflict’s root issues and discuss how to create global labor solidarity.

My father is from Puerto Rico, and his family migrated back and forth to New York City twice during the Great Depression, before settling in New York. My mother’s father left Virginia to work in New York because of segregation in the South. I myself lived in Puerto Rico as a child for three years, and as an adult in Barbados, Trinidad, Dominica and St. Croix for 10 years. My wife’s family is from St. Lucia, and her family is in a constant state of migration among the states of England, Canada, Trinidad, St. Croix and the U.S. So my personal family history and life experience help me understand that creating a just economy requires that we understand how the global economy and the domestic economy are intertwined, and that global workers share common concerns and issues.

Because of this background, recently, when I was reading Planet of Slums by Mike Davis, I understood his argument that most immigration into the U.S. is forced immigration. Davis uses the landmark 2003 United Nations habitat study, “Challenge of the Slums,” that concludes, “The main single cause of increases in poverty and inequality during the 1980s and 1990s was the retreat of the state.”

The study documents how Latin American countries were given loans by the International Monetary Fund on the condition that the country implement structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that repeal certain labor worker protections and remove agricultural subsidies for local farmers. When these subsidies were removed, American farmers (who are subsidized by the U.S. government) sold their corn, for example, cheaper than local farmers could and this drove Latino farmers out of business. In addition, these SAPs “forced governments to cut spending and limit regulation; slash funding for hospitals and schools; privatize public utilities; lay off civil servants; eliminate agricultural subsidies; slash their tariffs and throw open their borders to foreign imports.”

“The so-called ‘Structural Adjustment Programs’ of the IMF — designed to help poor countries both pay down foreign debt and attract foreign investment — are the single most important factor in the dramatic exodus from the countryside and consequent spike in urban poverty in the developing world since the 1970s.” (See more from this Joshua Jelly-Schapiro review of Planet of Slums at www.motherjones.com/arts/books/2006/05/planet_of_slums.html.)

In many countries, including Latin America, such policies decimated rural economies while simultaneously hollowing out city infrastructure even as millions of rural people flooded into the cities. This hollowing out made people even more vulnerable to natural and ecological disasters because they occupied land subject to landslides and other disasters. Between 1980 and 1997 the percentage of Central Americans living in urban areas increased by 3 percent in Guatemala and 10 percent in Nicaragua and Honduras, according to the World Bank. By 1997, 46 percent of El Salvadorans lived in urban areas, 40 percent in Guatemala, and 44 percent in Honduras. Partly as a result of this urbanization, Hurricane Mitch killed 10,000 in 1997 in Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.

When Hurricane Fifi hit Honduras in 1974, 63 percent of farmers had access to only 6 percent of arable land. People were forced onto steep hillsides, and Fifi killed as many as 10,000 Hondurans. In one town alone, 2,300 were killed when a dam created by landslides into a river gave way (Natural Hazards Review, August 2003). This synthesis of natural and social catastrophes only weakened these economies, and people headed north as global economic refugees.

Many of these Latin Americans fled to Los Angeles. They were not even considered when LA’s policymakers and leaders began discussions during Southern California’s most severe recession since 1938. While news headlines analyzed the damage to the aerospace industry, the city’s poor and immigrant neighborhoods were made invisible. Davis states, “In a year — where I lived downtown — a vacant hillside populated by a handful of homeless, middle-aged black males suddenly had 100, 150 young Latinos camped out. They had been day laborers or dishwashers six months before.”

This rapid influx of Latinos then combined with the detonating event of the Rodney King atrocity. The accumulated grievances of Black youth, in a community where employment meant selling crack cocaine, led to the King incident becoming a more complex, larger-scale event because of the widespread looting in Latino neighborhoods where people were hungry and living at the edge of homelessness.

A similar phenomenon of destroying the public infrastructure caused the disaster in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. People in New Orleans were ignored by the media until after Katrina struck. Then, because of the media coverage, most people in the U.S. began to see that systematic disinvestment in public infrastructure in New Orleans created this vulnerability to natural events. Later, people would learn that New Orleans had one of the highest unemployment rates in the U.S.

From this we can see that the same economic and political processes destroying Latin American countries destroy inner-city African-American neighborhoods. The IMF policies are called structural adjustment programs, and similar U.S. policies are called “Ending Welfare As We Know It.” But they are the same phenomenon.

Today in the U.S. the global economy is pitting African-Americans against Latinos. But we are not each other’s enemies. Rather, we need to understand the commonality of the issues destroying both groups. There are public policies that can prevent most of the resulting poverty.

At United for a Fair Economy, one part of our work is to go into Latino and African-American communities and develop a dialogue about the root causes of global labor exploitation. Once awareness is raised, we can then help develop coalitions that address our common problems. One way to do this is to emphasize that Latinos and African-Americans can work together. We can learn from history. For example, during the mid-1800s, Mexicans and African-Americans did work together. A recent article from Black Commentator discussed this collaboration: “By the year 1855, the estimates were that as many as 4,000 to 5,000 formerly enslaved Africans had escaped to Mexico. Slaveholders became so alarmed at this trend that they requested and received approximately one-fifth of the standing U.S. Army, which was deployed along the Texas-Mexico border in a vain effort to stem the flow of runaways.”

When we study this history, we realize that “defiant Mexicans stood their ground, refused to return runaways, and continued supporting slave uprisings and providing assistance to escaping slaves.”

In the words of Felix Haywood, a Texas slave whose experience is recalled in The Slave Narratives of Texas, “Sometimes someone would come along and try to get us to run up north and be free. We used to laugh at that. There was no reason to run up North. All we had to do was walk, but walk South, and we’d be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande.”

Currently there is deep distrust and antagonism between African-Americans and Latino global migrants in New Orleans. However, in reality, we share the same problem — the global economy. African-American and Mexican workers in Chicago in the past have also understood this connection and developed coalitions to fight this global economy. African-American and Mexican workers in New Orleans can do the same.

Reading Planet of Slums will help all of us to develop a more critical and broader perspective of global economics, and understand the relationship between racial divides in the global south and global north. As we do this we can make stronger correlations among the factors that cause worldwide poverty; we can devise policies that address poverty and disenfranchisement in the global South; and we can develop programs that lead to stable societies.

—Reprinted with permission. Please visit the United for a Fair Economy website at www.faireconomy.org.