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America's migrants have overcome their terror

Gary Younge

A migrant community that has always tried to be invisible has become active. And politicians have to take notice.

LIKE A scene out of a Steinbeck novel, shadows slowly emerged from tents and into the night in New Orleans City Park at the call of "free food, water." "The church brings food and water on Thursdays," explains Mercedes Sanchez, standing beside the tarpaulin construction that is now her home. She paid $3,000 to trek three days and three nights through the Arizona desert to get to the United States. "When you walk through the desert you think you're never going to arrive," she says. "It costs a lot of money and a lot of tears." She was in Maryland when Hurricane Katrina struck. Shortly afterwards she heard the call for work in New Orleans and, like migrant workers anywhere, she responded with a journey.

Over recent weeks, Hispanic migrants have been flocking to another call — not to work, but to arms. Throughout America millions of Hispanics, in big cities and small towns, have taken to the streets to protest against anti-immigration legislation and for their right to stay in the country. Half a million came out in Los Angeles and also in Dallas, 300,000 in Chicago, 200,000 in Washington DC. About 3,000 came in Garden City, Kansas (population 30,000).

Such numbers over such a broad swath of the country hold huge symbolic importance locally and globally. Globally, the demonstrations mark the first example of mass resistance to the West's desire to criminalise migrant labourers and to fortify the borders against those trying to get in.

The Bill they were marching against would see a 3,200 km fence built along the U.S.-Mexican border, and all 11 million undocumented workers on the wrong side of it declared illegal and deported. In some respects, the border between the U.S. and Mexico exemplifies the physical interface between the developing and developed world. The average wage is four times higher on one side. But the tension exposed by these disparities is by no means unique to the U.S. It was present in the British elections last year, when Tony Blair stood before the white cliffs of Dover pledging to tighten immigration controls. It was evident in the Italian elections, where the centre-Left challenger, Romano Prodi, responded to Silvio Berlusconi's anti-immigrant rants by saying: "You cannot need the workers during the day, then go and hunt them at night."

Yet that is precisely what the West has been doing — demonising migrant labourers politically and targeting them legally, even as it depends on them economically. This has made anti-immigration legislation difficult to challenge. Not because migrants are hard to reach — businesses find them easily — but because they are difficult to organise as their fates are vulnerable to the whims of their employers and of the state. The result was a community that, until recently, was hidden in plain sight. The sheer presence of so many Latin Americans on the streets was in itself a political fact to be reckoned with.

Social crossover

One key difference between the U.S. and western Europe is the large social crossover between documented and undocumented immigrants, making the latter less isolated. Roughly one in four illegal migrants lives in a family with someone who is legal — so to attack them is to attack many Latino families. Another is the power of America's assimilationist traditions and immigrant heritage. America has always been keener on immigration than it has been on immigrants. Immigration evokes the mythology of personal reinvention, social meritocracy, ethnic diversity, and class fluidity at the heart of the American dream.

So Latinos have got the politicians' attention; whether they will be able to keep it until election day is another matter. It would be premature to refer to this as a movement, but it certainly has the potential to become one. The diverse grassroots groups that called the demonstrations in each city represent a pre-existing network that thrives under the Anglo radar. But the turnout took even the organisers by surprise — in Los Angeles they had expected just 20,000.

The migrants were not the only ones mobilising recently. One right-wing talkshow host called for them to be placed in the New Orleans Superdome and then shipped back to where they came from. But first they would have to finish the repairs to the Superdome. And it would take Hispanic labourers such as Mercedes Sanchez to do it. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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