System should stand for legality
By Joe Atkins

A round of speakers had just completed talking about the need for “black-brown unity” in the fight for social justice in Bush’s America when Rene Muñoz Chapman came over to speak to me. Maybe he had seen me taking notes.

“We have a lot to learn about sensibilities,” said Chapman, a native of the Texas-Mexican border who now lives on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. “I follow the Golden Rule, the old-fashioned ideas. It’s about fair play.”

Fair play was a major theme at the recent “Black-Brown Unity Conference” sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance. The event took place at the United Auto Workers Justice Center in Canton, a former church but now a gathering place for working people of all races.

Even in the spirit of fair play, black and brown unity isn’t easy at a time when the nation is wrestling with what to do about an estimated 12 million undocumented workers in the country. As many as 200,000 of them live and work in Mississippi.

Many blacks fear immigrant Latino workers are taking their jobs. Latinos fear blacks in a more fundamental sense. Real and alleged incidents of black criminals attacking Latino workers aren’t uncommon. An example is the slaying of a half-dozen Mexican immigrants in Tifton, Ga., two years ago. Five black males were arrested in connection with the killings. Tifton is a town where Latino and poor black workers had been in competition for farm jobs.

Politicians exacerbate the situation. During the reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who is black, asked a group of contractors and business owners this: “How do I ensure that New Orleans is not overrun by Mexican workers?”

With the nodding approval of politicians, contractors further the divide. In post-Katrina New Orleans, they much preferred hiring Latino workers for $6.50 an hour rather than paying blacks $14 an hour to do the backbreaking work of rebuilding the city, said Saket Soni of the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice at the Canton conference.

Neither President Bush nor Congress seem willing to risk upsetting corporate America in trying to resolve the issue.

Consider the recent comprehensive immigration reform bill that failed to get out of the U.S. Senate despite bipartisan backing – including U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss. – and the support of President Bush. Corporate America liked the bill because its provisions for a temporary worker program would guarantee continued access to the cheapest labor pool in the nation. Ultimately the bill would have set in place a semi-permanent underclass of immigrant workers who might never become citizens but who would always have a job.

At the grassroots level, however, the American people want a system that stands for legality, not cheap labor. By and large, they hold the same beliefs that Rene Muñoz Chapman holds – old-fashioned ideas like the Golden Rule and fair play. These are the shared ideas of people of all races. Too bad it’s not what they hear on the campaign trail.

Joe Atkins is a professor at the University of Mississippi. E-mail him at jatkins@olemiss.com.