Some Comments on Migration

Homo Sapiens have been migrating for at least 70,000 years. We are a migratory species. More migratory than our Neanderthal or Denisovan cousins who, as far as we can tell, never made it to the American continent or Australia, let alone Polynesia, Tobago, the Aleutian Islands,  or Oahu. We are adept at moving.

Nearly every ecological niche, from the Amazon basin to highland glaciers and arctic tundra were settled by our migratory ancestors. They became Germans, and Chinese, and Tongans, and Māori’s,  Aboriginals, Tasmanians, Guarani, Quechua, and Koreans and Koryaks and Burmese and a thousand other peoples. Whether 40,000 years ago or 40 months ago, it was all about migration.

Those who migrated to the European continent from Africa those 10s of thousands of years ago, themselves became migrants in the modern era.  Europeans, beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese, later the French, Belgians, Brits, Dutch . . . left their regions to travel. But they weren’t called migrants. They were called discoverers, adventurers, buccaneers, seafarers, conquerors, investors, merchants, settlers, and pioneers. They spread across the globe where no borders existed. They never asked permission, nor had to. They discovered, so it’s said, but never invaded, they expropriated, but never stole, they claimed land that had henceforth been the birthright of common humanity and made it their private property, invoking the Doctrine of Discovery bestowed on them by Feudal religious lords called Popes. In later years the continuing process would be called “Manifest Destiny.”

And so began the era of Colonialism

They took the land, the resources, the gold, the silver, any metal with a monetary value and then they took the people in chains and transformed them into commodities and sold them as well. Everything became a commodity in the lands they’d explored or wandered, seized, and settled. Such was the glory of that “Rosy Dawn” of capitalism!

In the 527 years since European migrants began to colonize the planet they took 110,000 tons of silver, and 15 million shackled bodies and left no IOUs.¹

The $262 Trillion of wealth (in current dollars)² they plucked and repatriated was a tidy sum to fund their industries, build their militaries, construct their monuments and universities, palaces, and towers and endow the scholars and scribes who embellished their heroism, and glorified their wealth while ignoring its source!

By the 1880s these most flourishing nations and their prodigal offspring, America, controlled 80%³ of the world’s financial wealth made from coerced and free labor and products of the earth transformed by capitalist  alchemy into Pounds and Lira, Pesos and Francs, Rubles and Marks, and Dollars.  Amassed were riches beyond anything a fable could conceive of, at one end of the world, while monumental poverty beyond description gathered at the other. Or as one historian noted wryly, “Europe did not develop colonies, the colonies developed Europe.”⁴

When religious justification for this mendacious thievery no longer served as an acceptable defense, they invented others. They took note of  skin color, hair texture, eye shape, lip and nose contours, language, and cultural variations— and invented something they called RACE to sort out those to elevate, and those to debase.

Borders

They drew demarcations called borders⁵ and defined those inside them, and those outside them, not only by their national differences, but by their human value as well. Prejudice dressed itself in legal language. And laws enforced the prejudice.  A vocabulary emerged to brand each division with an appropriate label: There was the explorer vs. the savage, the conqueror vs. the barbarian, the civilizer vs. the brutes. And so that today we have businessmen vs. aliens, retirees vs. illegals, and ex-pats vs. wetbacks.

Each year three trillion dollars migrates silently and invisibly from the poorer countries to the wealthier ones.⁶ It does so without ever being stopped by an agent in a green uniform, or barbed-wire barriers, but slips quietly into the banks and vaults in the marbled edifices of empire.

Not so the migrants who follow in the wake of that fleeing wealth, desperate to earn a few pesos, quetzales, lempíras, córdoba’s, gourdes, soles or reales, to augment the diminished sustenance of their battered lands. It is they who cross blistering deserts, wade the swift currents of rivers, sit for weeks in muddy encampments hoping for a call only to endure the indignities of a uniformed agent yelling, “levantate perros!!”⁷

It’s the modern day migrant that must move when their homelands have become hells on earth by plunder and climate catastrophe, and other by-products of this monstrous organism we call “free enterprise.”

Rebellion

What do Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Haiti, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Grenada, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, have in common? They have all had their borders violated by U.S. troops or agents sent to establish “the order” of proper commercial relations or restore it when economic plunder produced political upheaval.⁸ Those armies never asked permission to cross, never waited their turn to enter, never filled out their asylum applications, never paid their back taxes, never were made to sleep on the bare floor of a chilled room, never had to remain hidden, never feared being detained, never languished in a detention center, never rode in the back of a pickup under a load of dirty rags, never were handcuffed and thrown into the back of an immigration van, were never were chased through the fields, were never thrown into a ditch to drown, or hid in a safe house fearing rape, were never beaten by thieves, never suffocated in the back of a big rig, never died of thirst in the desert. Those troops, at times referred to by the ungratefully invaded, as Yankees (or Yanquis), removed uncooperative government leaders, secured tyrants and corporate plunderers, or slaughtered the rebels who dared rise against them— but they were always, always, always the “defenders of our freedom.”

Contract migrants

During World War II several million Mexican migrants came north, contracted to work in U.S. fields and railroad yards. They were not referred to as human beings but rather as braceros, brazos, for the arms  they used to sow and harvest the crops. Rent-a-slaves brought north, expected to do body-breaking labor at shit wages and then leave so that their overlords wouldn’t have to endure their presence in those Manifest lands.

The Braceros made possible the U.S. victory in that second world war by supplying a nation with food. But there have never been any Bracero anniversaries complete with Presidential proclamations lauding their heroism. No tickertape parades organized by a grateful nation thanking them for their service!! No wreaths laid by the tombs of those who died from their toil and mistreatment. No!!

If the Bracero was spoken of at all it was to vilify them for daring to stay within U.S. borders to become “illegals.” Woody Guthrie sang about how these workers were “Chased like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves” if they dared not leave at the end of their contracts and then were only mentioned in the news when their lifeless bodies were recovered and sent across the border, as “Deportees.”

It is said that since 2008, 22.5 million people have fled their homes seeking respite from climate disasters. If all the people forced to leave their homelands were brought together as a nation it would be the 4^th largest on earth. And this is bound to grow exponentially, not from some uncontrollable disaster of nature but rather because of a manmade disaster caused by, let’s not be afraid to call it by its name, capitalism imperialism.

Revolution

This is a system that turns the sacred into something crass. Embraced if profitable, discarded if not— that hurls nations against each other in a frenzied search for competitive advantage or a lethal edge— that uses and abuses immigrants as cheap labor and highly toxic propaganda.

Can this obsolete enterprise that lies at the foundation of all this misery  be brought to a merciful end—so that the wealth humanity has created with its collective ingenuity might benefit those who fashioned it with their efforts and skill, that is, humanity as a whole,

so that Guatemalans, Hondurans, Haitians, Congolese, Cambodians, Cubans, Venezuelans, Mexicans, Salvadorans, Colombians, Ukrainians, Russians, Italians, Turks, Moroccans, Palestinians, Chileans, Timorese, Americans, Laotians, Latvians, Bolivians, Bengalese, and all the other variations of our migratory or settled kin might find a place to live and prosper in their own parts of our beautiful but abused planet, to enjoy the fruits of that which we have always produced together?  Yes, wealth has always been a cooperative and collective enterprise of our wandering, migrating, hopeful, wondering, quarreling yet cooperative species we call Homo Sapiens. Might that cooperative reality become the foundation of our organized political structures as revolutionaries like Bob Avakian advocate? So that those who may wander or migrate or may not, yet may find peace and prosperity in a sustainable land, where we can cherish and appreciate each other in this world, which, in the words of Carl Sagan, is “the only home we’ve ever known.”⁹

Notes.

1. Walton, Timothy  The Spanish Treasure Fleets Pineapple Press, 2002

2. Hickel, Jason “Enough of Aid– Let’s Talk Reparations” Guardian, November 27, 2015

3. Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Foreign Language Press, 1973. 

4. Hickel, Jason “Enough of Aid– Let’s Talk Reparations” Guardian, November 27, 2015

5.  40% of all the world’s national borderlines were drawn up by England and France. Many of these by British and French diplomats Mark Sykes and Francois-George Picot during World War I.

6.  Saloman, Mathew and Spanjers, Joseph “Illicit Financial Flows to and from Developing Countries 2005 – 2014” Global Financial Integrity (May 1, 2017)

7. A young immigrant from Guatemala told me how he was in a group of migrants just inside the U.S. border waiting to be picked up by ICE when agents approached with a bull horn and yelled at them, “Levántate perros.” (Get up dogs!)

8. United States invasions, occupations, border violations:  Nicaragua from August 4, 1912, to January 2, 1933; Iraq 2003; Afghanistan 2001; Korea 1950; Vietnam 1964; Lebanon 1958; Guatemala, 1954; Haiti 1934; Panama 1989; Dominican Republic, 1965; Grenada, 1983; Cuba 1898 and 1961; Puerto Rico, 1898; the Philippines, 1898.

9. From Carl Sagan’s “A Pale Blue Dot.”