may day

Tomorrow is May Day, or International Workers' Day, or whatyoumaycallit. It's also going to be an interesting day of protest actions across the country. Especially in California, there are several mass actions planned to speak out against the crypto-racist discussion of the new legislative priority to fight illegal immigration.

The most egregious, uninformed, and frankly stupid comments on this issue have distinguished between true immigrants and false immigrants. The very distinction is so absurd, so intellectually dishonest, so historically ignorant, that it's hard for me to address it without feeling physically ill. I can hardly be bothered to offer any counter-arguments. In fact, I won't. If white people can't tell they come from somewhere in Europe, and can't comprehend that when Europeans arrived here, there were other people living here, logic is not going to impress them.

Illegal immigrants from Mexico, with few exceptions (with fewer exceptions than the legal immigrants from other parts of the world) have no more dangerous or subversive intention than to make some money and help their families rise out of poverty. This is what motivated German, Irish, and Italian immigrants 100-150 years ago. They make their money providing cheap labor to the food industry or the euphemistically-titled hospitality industry. They get paid dirt-cheap wages to do work nobody wants to do, that make hotels profitable and make your grapes affordable. They work damned hard. Leave them the hell alone.

If you want to bug somebody who's stealing jobs from Americans, go and stop multinational corporations from outsourcing.

(On a side note, if we could really do the impossible and "seal the border," but did so in a way that also sealed jobs in, that might be an interesting proposition. I have no idea whether it would be plausible as a national economic strategy, but it would at least be consistent.)

So I plan to support the boycott, in my way. I'll probably mention these events in my classes, and I'll walk to school. It's nothing: I'd walk to school anyway, and I mention this kind of stuff to my classes without stop.