Issue of the Week: Blacks and Immigration Rights
This week's issue is about the involvement of Blacks in the immigration rights movement. Today an article appeared in the NY Times about the unease some Blacks appear to be feeling about supporting this issue--check it out. Most of the discomfort has to do with competition for jobs and comparisons made between this movement and the Civil Rights Movement. What are your thoughts? Do you share these concerns or do you think they are off base? To what degree should we be involved in this issue and why? What are the implications for the Black community? Just some questions to get things going...
If you are interested in the history of Black/Mexican relations you can check out this article on BlackCommentator (Stephanie, thanks for bringing attention to this).
posted by BGSA @ 9:17 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I live in Richmond Va,I have lived all over the country but I ended up back here!
I teach literacy in a title -one elementary school that is 99.9% black, in a neighborhood where abject poverty is generational , possibly extending through centuries in these families and don't forget being Richmond's prominent history in the slave trade .I teach low literacy adults from this same demographic .I also teach adult ESL and speak Spanish ,my ESL students are mostly undocumented blue collar workers.
Recently a television ad has been running her in Virginia where the speaker in the ad is the former leader of the black caucus ,he claims " studies" show black men are unemployed as a direct result of immigration-no specific studies are sited.He goes on to say that it is not racist to be anti immigration . http://bconservatives.blogspot.com/2008/02/black-caucus-leader-is-anti-immigration.html
Richmond is majority black and of the middle class black people ,there is very low unemployment,among the demographic I teach there is high unemployment,high incarceration rates ,violence,welfare ,low literacy,large 1 parent families.Is this a result of immigration? Immigration is recent in this area ,a result of the construction boom .These are large contractors who prefer legal workers and cannot find people. I see ads here from states all over the country looking for labor or the skilled trades.
This ad greatly disturbs me because by pointing the finger at immigrants we overlook the true issue.Why aren't people from areas with generational poverty able to access this employment ?Are we avoiding the real issue of the civil rights movement was for the middle class? That those at the bottom never gained the skills to partake of the opportunities that became available to them?When I say skills I mean psychological ,and this poverty is a cycle passed on and a product of generations of conditioning ,and I ague for this group of people ,it is not an excuse to say that it is a result of slavery and Jim Crow and I suspect these families were not living next door to Maggie Walker or later Doug Wilder or Bill Cosby today ,that they were at the bottom ,a group marginalized within the marginalized.
This is why it a very big deal to get out of the "ghetto" and not the norm ,if you work directly with people from this demographic you find a lack of ability to see oneself as anything other than what you were born into despite intact intellect and creativity .Is this a result of immigration or are immigrants an easy scapegoat for those we have deemed disposable for centuries.
Not everyone is born with priviledge
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