Sliding Scale Citizenship
You know the times are a-changin' when the so-called "conservatives" are on board for loosening immigration restrictions. While paleocons like Pat Buchanan is still talking about building a wall on the Rio Grande, Bush is proposing that we let folks in on temporary work permits.
I had an inkling that this might happen a few years ago when I was doing a little summer teaching gig in Palo Alto, CA at Stanford. Palo Alto is such a prized Silicon Valley location that even tenured professors at Stanford can't afford to live in town. Yet there is a whole lower class serf population that keeps the town running - mainly Mexican immigrant labor. I remember thinking at the time: beds have to get made, and these rich folks are not going to do it. Since then, the ghettoization of the service sector has become more visible. Is it just me?
Over the past 20 years, the US has become a managerial hub of the world. Whereas factory manufacturing used to dominate, now the workforce is in one of three big areas - global production management (overseeing overseas factories), marketing/entertainment industry (they've melded into one), and the shifting temp workforce (Manpower being the largest employer in the US). To a lesser extent there are others like R&D, retail, military, and domestic agribusiness. With such a grand consolidation of the world's wealth, we have indeed become Reagan's shining city on a hill - or, better yet, the great gated community on Nob Hill. Now our biggest business concern is not breaking up the labor unions, but rather policing the world's export processing zones.
But again, beds need to get made. Who will do this? 1) Former factory labor, now temp labor (usually handling the non-skilled paper-cut and data entry jobs); 2) The prison industrial complex, which is taking an ever larger slice of the population (1 of 74 males is in prison, just edging out China for world's largest prison population. Privatization of prisons and the use of prisoners for cheap labor by Microsoft, Dell, Northwest Airlines, YouNameItCorp, etc.); and 3) Temporary immigrant labor.
This last one is a recent switch in approach. Whereas the paleocons demonized immigration to ostensibly protect American factory jobs when we had them and whip up racial fear to keep the color caste system in place - now the new global economic consciousness says hey, these immigrants are money in the bank! In other words, while the new economy has figured out how to export manufacturing jobs to the third world, it hasn't figured out (until now) how to get the third world to come to the US to do the service sector jobs we can't export. The answer: temporary work permits. All the benefits of low wage labor without all those pesky citizenship rights. See Fritz Lang's Metropolis or Mario Cuomo's response to Reagan's shining city at the 1984 DNC: the tale of two cities: one above ground, one below. None dare call it slavery.
This changing econcomic landscape is captured with remarkable sensitivity in the 2004 PBS POV documentary Farmingville, about a small town on Long Island battling over the influx of Mexican day laborers. It's highly recommended if you can get your hands on it. It's the story of reactionaries, racists, and paleocons on the one hand lining up against neocons and immigrant rights groups on the other. Some strange bedfellows. Of course, the Bush administration and various business interests are mobilizing the "compassionate" rhetoric of conservatism to push this liberalization of immigration policy. Managing the global economy while increasing the wealth disparity is messy business. Get ready for sliding scale citizenship. Already we have a partial infrastructure of this with the War on Terror, do-not-fly lists, felony voting and job restrictions, etc. Remember the neocon slogan, "All men are equal, but some are more equal than others."
I had an inkling that this might happen a few years ago when I was doing a little summer teaching gig in Palo Alto, CA at Stanford. Palo Alto is such a prized Silicon Valley location that even tenured professors at Stanford can't afford to live in town. Yet there is a whole lower class serf population that keeps the town running - mainly Mexican immigrant labor. I remember thinking at the time: beds have to get made, and these rich folks are not going to do it. Since then, the ghettoization of the service sector has become more visible. Is it just me?
Over the past 20 years, the US has become a managerial hub of the world. Whereas factory manufacturing used to dominate, now the workforce is in one of three big areas - global production management (overseeing overseas factories), marketing/entertainment industry (they've melded into one), and the shifting temp workforce (Manpower being the largest employer in the US). To a lesser extent there are others like R&D, retail, military, and domestic agribusiness. With such a grand consolidation of the world's wealth, we have indeed become Reagan's shining city on a hill - or, better yet, the great gated community on Nob Hill. Now our biggest business concern is not breaking up the labor unions, but rather policing the world's export processing zones.
But again, beds need to get made. Who will do this? 1) Former factory labor, now temp labor (usually handling the non-skilled paper-cut and data entry jobs); 2) The prison industrial complex, which is taking an ever larger slice of the population (1 of 74 males is in prison, just edging out China for world's largest prison population. Privatization of prisons and the use of prisoners for cheap labor by Microsoft, Dell, Northwest Airlines, YouNameItCorp, etc.); and 3) Temporary immigrant labor.
This last one is a recent switch in approach. Whereas the paleocons demonized immigration to ostensibly protect American factory jobs when we had them and whip up racial fear to keep the color caste system in place - now the new global economic consciousness says hey, these immigrants are money in the bank! In other words, while the new economy has figured out how to export manufacturing jobs to the third world, it hasn't figured out (until now) how to get the third world to come to the US to do the service sector jobs we can't export. The answer: temporary work permits. All the benefits of low wage labor without all those pesky citizenship rights. See Fritz Lang's Metropolis or Mario Cuomo's response to Reagan's shining city at the 1984 DNC: the tale of two cities: one above ground, one below. None dare call it slavery.
This changing econcomic landscape is captured with remarkable sensitivity in the 2004 PBS POV documentary Farmingville, about a small town on Long Island battling over the influx of Mexican day laborers. It's highly recommended if you can get your hands on it. It's the story of reactionaries, racists, and paleocons on the one hand lining up against neocons and immigrant rights groups on the other. Some strange bedfellows. Of course, the Bush administration and various business interests are mobilizing the "compassionate" rhetoric of conservatism to push this liberalization of immigration policy. Managing the global economy while increasing the wealth disparity is messy business. Get ready for sliding scale citizenship. Already we have a partial infrastructure of this with the War on Terror, do-not-fly lists, felony voting and job restrictions, etc. Remember the neocon slogan, "All men are equal, but some are more equal than others."
posted by thebaffler at 4:08 PM
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