CISPES Global Apartheid Workshop – July / August 2016

OBJECTIVES:

  1. Critically examine common US narratives about migration by identifying:
  2. How we’ve been taught to think about migration
  3. How this narrative justifies various US policies
  4. The concrete outcome of such policies
  5. Examine how racism and xenophobia inform this narrative
  6. Analyze the intersections between migration and capitalism
  7. Identify the role of racism and xenophobia in the criminalization and marginalization of immigrants and how the capitalist class benefits from these divisions within the working class.
  8. Identify ways we want to interrupt and reframe the narrative in terms of how we talk to the media, Congress, our communities

TIME:The full workshop will probably take about 2.5 to 3 hours (including time for breaks, and assuming that some parts might run over the times estimated below)

PART 1: How do media narratives frame Central American migration?

ACTIVITY (20 min): Get into small groups of 2 or 3 [hand out 2 headlines to each group]. Invite the groups to analyze the underlying assumptions that the headlines carry regarding:

  • What is happening? (answers may be: Central Americans are crossing the US-Mexico border, including families and children)
  • How are the migrants described?Answers may be:
  • Equating them to a criminal, invasive, or even non-human force: onslaught, flooding the border, crossing border like ‘feeding frenzy,’ illegal flow, surge, surged across border)
  • Describing them as a burden: on border centers, migrant kids overwhelm US border agents, detention centers are a ‘headache’ for the Obama Administration, on New Orleans schools
  • What is the cause? (answers may be: the children, the parents, US presses Latin America to act, the gangs)
  • What is the solution? (answers may be: border security buildup, detention, raids & deportations)

BIG GROUP DISCUSSION (20 min): The small groups share their headlines, and we address the above questions together. Note the way the headlines:

  • Emphasize current arrivals as surprising and new
  • Define people by their victimhood or criminality
  • Dehumanize migrants
  • Explain violence in Central America & Mexico as unconnected to the US
  • Describe the US as burdened by these arrivals, and as a benevolent helper

PART 2: How are people who move across borders constructed differently?

ASK the group: When you picture the following types of people who move across borders, what characteristics are commonly associated with them? Why do they travel? How easily can they cross borders?

  • Tourist
  • Ex-pat
  • Migrant
  • Refugee

ACTIVITY (20 minutes): Divide the participants into 4 groups, and give each group a poster paper. Make two columns on the papers. Have 2 groups compare “tourist” and “ex-pat,” while the other two compare “migrant” and “refugee”

Answers might be something like this:

Tourist and ex-patmay be associated with privilege, wealth, whiteness, and origins in relatively wealthy countries of the Global North. Tourists and ex-pats may travel for pleasure and adventure. Crossing borders may be relatively easy for them, because they have access to funds and it is not too much trouble for them to get a passport and visas. They generally do not need to worry about being detained or deported.

Migrantmay be associated with a lack of privilege, poverty, people of color,origins in relatively less wealthy countries of the Global South. They may be moving out of necessity for work, to reunify with family members, for greater opportunities, or for a great variety of other reasons. Crossing borders may be difficult for them, because they may not have access to funds, and it is not easy to get a passport and visas. They are criminalized, and are vulnerable to detention and deportation.

Refugee may also be associated with a lack of privilege, people of color, victimhood, dire necessity, and origins in relatively less wealthy countries of the Global South. Some participants may point out the different between refugees and asylum seekers. Asylum seekers are people who have fled persecution in their home country (often constructed as a dangerous and chaotic place, far-flung place) and arrived in another country to ask for humanitarian protection. They are criminalized until they can prove that they were persecuted in a particular way recognized by the state. They are vulnerable to detention and deportation. Refugees are people who have been officially recognized as in need of protection.

BIG GROUP DISCUSSION (20 min): Review the responses together. Examine how:

  • These are often racialized, blunt classifications based on place of origin and relative privilege
  • Global inequalities mean that borders matter much more for some than others.
  • These categories may operate on the assumption of geographic separateness, premised on a racist and imperialist logic. For example, that Central American asylum seekers arriving in the US right now are fleeing some distant and ahistorical problem.
  • The categories may not tell us much about any role the US has played in people´s displacement, racialization, and criminalization.

PART 3: What does migration have to do with capitalism?

ACTIVITY (10 minutes):[1]Put the timelines on the wall that we have already prepared (see 2 timeline print-outs), with 2 timelines side-by-side (one of US intervention in Latin America, and the other of US immigration policy). Have people walk around and read the timelines, plus write in any additional events they can think of.

BIG GROUP DISCUSSION (20 min): Reflect on events that happened around the same time that may have liberalized capital, while restricting the ability of workers to organize or restricted their mobility:

  • For example: mid-20th century Bracero program + “Operation Wetback”
  • For example: 1996 exclusionary immigration reform + 1994 NAFTA – note capital is liberalized, while workers are criminalized
  • Identify the cyclical nature of this over time
  • ASK: Why liberate capital and militarize borders at the same time? Who benefits from this?
  • Potential answers: big business owners, given that workers’ ability to organize will be inhibited; border industrial complex – private prison companies; etc
  • Note that in the US, citizenship and immigration status have always:
  • Been used to advance the political, economic, and social interests of corporate elites and attack social movements
  • Operated under a logic of white supremacy and excluded people of color, poor people, women, LGBTQ people, disabled people, etc
  • Point out that the US (including government, corporations, and individuals have played central roles in destabilizing Mesoamerica, allowing capital and goods to flow across borders, while restricting the movement of particular people who are often left with insufficient resources

PART 4: What is the US role in global apartheid?

QUESTION to the group (15 min): Has anyone heard the term global apartheid before / what does it mean?

Discuss, and share hand-out definition from Joseph Nevins:

National territorial boundaries thus often have life and death implications. The global poor and disadvantaged, in their great majority those historically constructed as people of color, are typically forced to subsist where there are insufficient resources. Or, in order to overcome their deprivation and insecurity, they are compelled to try to leverage authorized access to the national spaces of privilege—the odds of success of which are extremely small—or risk their lives trying to overcome boundary controls put into place by countries that reject them—at least officially.

This is what many deem “global apartheid” given that all nation-states, especially relatively wealthy ones, regulate mobility and residence on the basis of, among other factors, geographic origins and ancestry—foundations of supposed racial distinctions. On a similar basis, Apartheid South Africa sought to limit black mobility and to ensure a sufficient supply of black labor in nominally white areas, while denying those workers political rights and making their presence conditional and reversible.

QUESTION to the group: How might this term apply to the current migration dynamics between the US and Mesoamerica?

Nevins also discusses a right to stay, a right to move, and a right to the world:

Historical injustices coupled with the rapacious consumption and dispossession associated with colonizing and imperialist powers is why so many in Honduras and elsewhere across the world today do not enjoy a right to stay—in places of origin rendered inviable. Remedying this requires, among other things, a right to move (i.e. migrate), but more expansively, it necessitates what we might consider “a right to the world.”

A right to the world complements a “right to the city”—the right to radically remake places and those who inhabit them in ways that are inclusive and socially and environmentally just and sustainable—that many on the political leftchampion. A right to the world envisions more than a right for those who already inhabit a place, however. It also seeks a right to a just share of the earth’s resources and to a sustainable “home,” and a right to traverse global space, especially for the globally disadvantaged.

QUESTION to the group (15 min): How do we want to challenge the mainstream narratives about migration that we have been discussing? For example – in our press conference, report, and any publications?

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[1] This activity draws directly from an SEIU Race and Immigration Training. The timeline about the US immigration system is also adapted from the SEIU training.