Black immigrants overlooked in the immigration Debate

Addressing Black Immigrants’ Overlooked Rights
Written by Larry Aubry, (Columnist), on 04-30-2009 00:00

Black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, Haiti, et.al, are barely footnotes in the immigration reform conversation. A recent meeting of the fledging Black Immigration Network (BIN) in Baltimore, addressed this issue that is largely ignored by the public and the media.


The gathering was sponsored by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), Which Way Forward program of the Center for New Community (WWF) and the American Friends Service Committee. Over the past two years, these organizations, working together, shared a vision of creating a Black immigration network that encompasses people of African descent who reside in the United States.


The meeting's Vision and Goals Statement reads, "Our shared African ancestry and similar experiences with racism and exploitation in the U.S. and globally can give us a common frame of reference for common struggle. BIN can be an important space for gathering the African Diaspora for joint strategizing, information-sharing and work for the benefit of all of our respective communities."


The specific goals were 1) To examine critical issues around African-American immigrant relations, especially the relations between African Americans born in the U.S. and immigrants of African descent; 2) Strategize about ways to address immigration and other key social and political issues facing our communities; 3) Foster group cohesion and explore networking and collaboration.



The sponsors considered the meeting an opportunity to bring Black groups and communities together to address some critical issues of the day that impact all of us. They believe that the struggle for immigrant rights is one of the cutting edge issues in the fight for racial justice and full democracy in the U.S. today.


They contend that racism and economic globalization have created displacement and poverty in virtually all of our communities and countries. And they also maintain that immigrants and others of color, in general, were exploited and scapegoats for many of the country's economic problems, even before the current economic crisis. African Americans are being locked out of the formal economy and immigrants of color "super-exploited" as a way to undercut the wages and working conditions of the U.S. workforce as a whole, creating greater profits for U.S. corporations.


The sponsoring organizations have developed overlapping networks of individuals and organizations they work with consistently. They believe that bringing a range of groups together to address immigration and related issues can magnify the impact of (separate) groups in changing immigration policy and promoting racial justice. They also feel that BIN can be instrumental in bringing the issues and perspectives of various Black immigrant communities and African Americans into the broader immigrant rights and racial justice movements.


Participants at the BIN confab included African American immigrant rights groups as well as representatives of Black African groups here in the U.S. Discussion ranged from the virtual absence of a national focus on Black immigrant rights and labor unions' role in immigration reform, to pending immigration legislation, Black-Latino relations and the need to deal specifically with the complex issue of Black immigrants.


The last day of the gathering was the most challenging. It included brain-storming and strategy development related to the formation of a sustainable national BIN. Discussions were intense, but not contentious and focused on key internal matters such as respect, values, structure, communication and the need for unapologetic advocates for Black immigrant rights.


There was consensus that there is a critical need for people of African descent to work together in order to achieve mutually agreed upon goals and objectives and that this is based on operational unity within each group, indispensable for successful collaboration between all participating groups.


Sustained follow-up determines the value of any attempt at group unity, particularly where actual change is the desired outcome. Considerable time was devoted to linking recommended structure, capacity-building, accountability, and concrete results to BIN's mission. A Continuation Committee was formed to review and synthesize the content and recommendations of the meeting. The Black Alliance for Just Immigration, together with the other sponsoring organizations and other volunteers, constitute the Continuation Committee, that will make its first report via E-mail within thirty-days.


The magnitude of issues facing Black Americans and immigrants of African descent remind us that we must work collaboratively, and on a sustained basis, to secure our own future. No one else will. Turning public education on its head so that good schools for Black children are the norm, effective, group-oriented leadership, and Black immigration networks, are part of the Herculean challenge to improve the quality of life for Black people. link


Larry Aubry can be contacted at E-mail l.r.aubry@earthlink.net.

The Accidental American

I found out about 'The Accidental American' via facebook. This book is a must read for those of us concerned with immigrant rights and racial justice in this country. To find out more about the authors of this book listen/read/watch the interview with the authors in the Tavis Smiley show.

Tavis: Rinku Sen is president and executive director of the Applied Research Center and the publisher of "Color Lines" magazine. Fekkak Mamdouh is a restaurant union organizer who this year co-founded the country's first national restaurant workers' organization. The group is called Restaurant Opportunities Center United. The two of them have teamed up for the new book, "The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization." I'm glad to have you both here.

Rinku Sen: Thank you.

Fekkak Mamdouh: Thank you.

Tavis: My pleasure. Rinku, let me start with you. The title of the book actually got me - "The Accidental American." The more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe we're all accidental Americans. But you tell me what you meant by the book's title.

Sen: Well, that's exactly what we meant, actually. It started out as a reflection on the way that most immigrants come to the country; many people don't imagine staying forever and becoming Americans, but as soon as we start thinking about that, it eventually became clear in our minds that all of us are accidental in some way. So no one actually can claim 100 percent to be the real or true American and to make immigration policy as though there were such a thing would be dishonest.

Tavis: To your latter point now, which is where I wanted to go, how do you think not acknowledging that reality, that we are all accidental Americans, how does not acknowledging that reality impact the immigration debate as we now know it?

Sen: Well, one of the things that happens is that we make immigration policy as though we're trying to preserve some kind of pure or natural American identity - something that got set up in 1776 and hasn't been changed in the 200-some years since then. And we argue that there is no such thing; that American culture has been changed many times through its history, often from people inside of the culture, and also by people who are outside of the culture to whom Americans became exposed and who influenced the way that we listen to music or the foot that we eat or even the way we do our politics.

Tavis: With regard to how the book is written, the storyline here, the narrative, weaves in discussion of policy with Mamdouh's personal story. You got these two things that are being woven together from the front to the back of the book. Why was that important, and how does his personal immigrant story augment the kind of narrative that you think it's important for us as Americans to understand in this debate - does that make sense?

Sen: Yeah. I think that people are pretty confused by the immigration debate. They don't really know what the laws are and how they actually affect human beings. And what you got to see in Mamdouh's story is how he starts out organizing immigrants who are of color, working in kitchens and at the back of the house in restaurants, and gradually in six years how that community grows and grows and grows until it includes everybody.

It includes U.S.-born workers who are working at the front of the house, it includes employers who are trying to do the right thing, and it includes diners who want to get a decent meal in New York without exploiting anyone. And at the same time, we track what happens to immigration reform in Congress in that same period, and in contrast to this beautifully expanding community that Mamdouh is building, in Congress the idea of who belongs in America gets narrower and narrower in that six years, and meaner.

Tavis: Mamdouh, tell me more, given Rinku's introduction of you - tell me more about the work that you're doing now, and how you got into doing the work that you're doing as an immigrant.

Mamdouh: Well, it all starts - I come from Morocco, and why I come here, because I was really poor and I cannot afford to live the life that everybody living in Third World country, so I managed to come here. And when I come here, like every immigrant, we start in low jobs.

So I start working as a delivery boy, even I have a degree in physic and chemical. And all immigrant, they come, they're driving taxi and they are doctors in New York, because where we come from. We don't get the help that other people get when they come here. So start working in restaurant and very quick I was moved from delivery boy to busboy to waiter, and they moved me very fast because I speak French.

Other immigrants and people of color does work as busers and dishwashers stay for life there because nobody help them and because of the look. They want pretty face - blue eyes, white skin - to be serving, and all the rest doing the hot job in the back.

And the difference between the back of the house and the front, the back will make up, like, $25,000, $30,000, and the front, in good places, you make $60,000 up to 80, to 100, to $120,000 where it's a livable job, but it's not given to people of color and immigrants.

In my case, I was given that because I speak French and in 1996, I ended up working at Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. And after 9/11, I lost 73 of my coworkers; 350 of us left with no jobs, and there was nowhere to go. We're lucky that we have a union there, (unintelligible) area local 100 - all of us went to the union, and the union didn't have the capacity to work with all of us.
...Rest of interview

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