Rays of hope

It's one of the sad paradoxes of social change - the most hopeful and progressive popular movements seem to arise only when alternatives to desperation, oppression and indignity have been exhausted. Thus the end of Tsarist autocracy in February 1917 was finally accomplished by a spontaneous popular movement, sparked by the brave women of Petrograd coming out for a rally on International Womens' Day, tired of spending hours queuing in the freezing cold for bread they might not get at the end of their 12-hour shifts in the factory. The German revolution was also a brief reaction to the horrors of the First World War and the shocking loss of life it involved.
Events hardly on the scale of the two above, and hardly a response to the cataclysms which provoked them, but following a similar dynamic, occurred on the streets of New York yesterday. In the face of a political firestorm over what should be done about them, the Latino community, and particularly those segments of it made up of recent immigrants, have begun to make their voices heard, Juan Gonzalez reports.
The debate is no doubt confused - as immigration debates tend to be, even in the US, the definitive immigrant society - and there is very little appreciation of the demographic dynamics at work. As Mike Davis' careful review of the data has shown, "While nativist hysteria has focused on supposedly ‘unrestricted’ immigration, the growth of the Latino population (32 million in 2000) is equally the consequence of higher fecundity in the context of larger, more successfully maintained two-parent families, especially amongst those of Mexican origin (two-thirds of all Latinos). Even if all immigration were terminated tomorrow, the dramatically younger Latino population (median age 26) would continue to increase rapidly at the statistical expense of ageing, non-Hispanic whites (median age 37)." (see text at note 6.)

It should be of concern that the president's answer is a massive, disenfranchised immigrant-gastarbeiter population (although it should equally be recognised that this already exists de facto to a certain extent, if not yet de jure).

Whether these movements represent a resurgent movement for racial equality, this time with a much greater focus on Latinos, or merely a temporary backlash to an extraordinarily (in political circles) hostile climate remains to be seen. Some are already attempting to recast these demands for basic rights as unAmerican particularism - which may itself add fuel to the fire. Where this all leads we shall have to see, but those who lament a loss of revolutionary consciousness perhaps ought to take note of the nature of the concerns of the new oppressed classes, and their intricate relation to capital relations. "You can't talk about globalized capital and exporting jobs and not talk about global human and labor rights for immigrant workers," Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday. "Immigrants aren't sending good jobs overseas, corporations are."

This (aside from a sensible, coherent plot, decent acting and a script) is what's missing from Hollywood's favourite film of last year.