In 2008, I elaborated, “This emerging apartheid would use the criminal justice-, prison-, and deportation systems – and any other system – at its disposal to make lives of immigrants – both legal and undocumented – as hard as possible. What we would see, whether we won reform or not, would be more arrests, more raids, more detentions, and more deportations. In sum, more destruction of our communities.”

There is nothing joyful about saying “we told you so” for a third time.  Whenever I write about immigration, I wish that I could write a different conclusion, but I can’t.  I remember first walking into a detention center in 1999 and thinking to myself, “this is one of the worst things I have seen in this country being done to people by this government.”  I sometimes bitingly joke with my friends that I miss 1999.

Fast forward to 2010, to the surging popularity of Arizona’s SB 1070, to conversations among previously “supportive politicians” to basically de-naturalize the citizen children of undocumented immigrants, and it seems like the most we have won since the huge immigrant rights protests 2006 is the stalling of full-blown apartheid.

But I think it may be possible to delineate where and why we are losing.

1. Fighting the expanding immigration enforcement system-the linchpin of Immigrant Apartheid-has always taken a backburner to the greater dream of Comprehensive Immigration Reform.  As a close colleague of mine has pointed out, Arizona’s SB 1070 would have never become so popular if Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his 287 (g) agreement with ICE (an agreement that gives local police enforcement powers) were not allowed to go unchecked.  Groups in Arizona have been organizing against Arpaio and the 287 (g) program for years, but were never given the outpouring of support they needed until after SB 1070 was passed. Florida was the first state to sign a 287(g) agreement in 2002.  But 287(g) programs are just the tip of an ICEberg (get it?) known as ICE ACCESS.  Most of the programs under ICE ACCESS have been operational for at least since I started doing this work.  But there has always been a tendency within the immigrant rights movement to think the bigger more important fight was for Comprehensive Immigration Reform as opposed to local battles, enforcement battles or local enforcement battles.  At the same time, ICE grew its reach into communities by pushing its ICE ACCESS programs in every corner of the country, until a program like “Secure Communities”, for example, made it into every county in Florida. The rationale was always that Comprehensive Immigration Reform would fix these other systemic problems.  But that was never really true.  Which leads me to my next point.

2.The Grand Compromise was never grand and never a compromise.  In the immigration reform fight, there was always this implicit understanding of a compromise between increased enforcement and a path to legalization.  In the process, I feel like our side often conceded important arguments on enforcement.  For example, the repealing or reforming the basic pieces of the 1996 Immigration laws-the strictest immigration laws in decades-whether it be mandatory detention, mandatory deportation, restricted judicial review, 287(g) and expanded local enforcement, has often been left out of the immigration reform debate entirely.  The idea that thousands of people dying at the border is a bad thing has been largely left out of the policy debate.   When I say debate, I mean the debate amongst policymakers that are crafting the parameters of the debate.  Because the immigrant rights movement has always had a vibrant and vocal debate about these issues.  But enforcement policy sort of came out of what lawmakers and the successive presidents from Clinton to Obama thought they could get away with. So what we have year is more enforcement without a roadmap or pathway to  legalization.

3. We have succeeded in moving leaders but leaders have lost their luster.  The immigrant rights movement has done a remarkable job moving major institutions and the leaders of those institutions to their side.  Whether it be church leaders, business leaders, or labor leaders, the immigrant rights movement has been impressive on this front.  However, and this is an educated hunch (not empirical), I think that while we have been able to move these leaders, the political climate (that we often have no control over) has become so volatile that winning leaders hasn’t led to winning the hearts and minds of the people that would typically listen to leaders.  People are really angry right now for a lot of really good and bad reasons.  And people form all sides of the political spectrum are openly and actively challenging even their most well respected leaders.   If you just look at the struggle that politicians (John McCain), religious leaders (name a Bishop, any Bishop), and other leaders have had to go through to maintain their relevance and credibility, it is startling.

4. Communications, communications, communications.  I feel like the immigrant rights movement has gotten really good at communicating to elected officials, to immigrants themselves, and to people that nominally care about immigrants.  However, we have not been able to effectively communicate to people that are legitimately on the fence or falling off the fence to the other side.  I will give you one example.  The whole “immigrants are good for the economy” stuff.  I don’t care how good the numbers are, a lot of Americans, even those that would believe it when we are not in a recession, just don’t believe it.  If you work in the construction or restaurant industry, it is really hard to believe that.  I could write a whole article on how our message framing has alienated some folks in African American communities.  We have to be able to communicate the idea that both immigrants and non-immigrants are hurting right now and it is neither’s fault.  As organizers we know that exploitation is the problem.  Exploitation hurts immigrants, hurts non immigrants, and pits us against each other.  How do we communicate that in a way in which we don’t sound like commies?  The way that the other side has one message “what part of illegal don’t you understand?”, we should be just as effective at saying “what part of exploitation don’t you understand?”  Plus I feel like we haven’t been as good at fighting xenophobia and racism WHILE showing that we are feeling other (read citizen) people’s pain.  To put things in perspective, there are citizens literally killing themselves and their families because of this economy.  Why would folks treat the “other” (read immigrant) any better than they are treating their own families in this economy.  We all know that any economic problem citizens feel, immigrants often feel more, but just demonstrating empathy in messaging may move mountains for us.

Reasons for optimism

Although, the road ahead for the immigrant rights movement is really rocky, it is still by far the biggest and most organized social movement in the country.  With every loss, it gets smarter and its organizers become more conscious of the root causes and their solutions.

1.  Arizona has made everyone think local and think enforcement.  After SB 1070, real attention is being focused on local enforcement, on ICE’s reach into our communities, and into the spread of anti-immigrant legislation at the state level.  The energy isn’t just filtering into the fight against SB 1070 in Arizona, there are literally pitch battles being set up in state’s trying to replicate SB 1070.  It feels like EVERYONE is trying to understand ICE ACCESS, 287 (g) and SECURE COMMUNITIES.  And I truly believe that different sectors of the immigrant rights movement are finally getting a grasp on how Immigration Enforcement happens and how to stop it.

2.  Uncovering the truth.  Secure Communities, ICE’s flagship enforcement program seemed like a bullet proof vest.  A program that purports to go after the most “dangerous criminal aliens” seems too hard to fight, especially when ICE is aggressively marketing it as the best enforcement program. In fact, in Florida our first attempts to fight Secure Communities ended with ICE marketing heavily to editorial boards, winning them over, and effectively casting us as “sympathizers for violent illegal aliens.”  But it seems like the shell is slowly beginning to crack.  And it seems like it has touched a nerve with ICE.  The information of what ICE’s flagship program really means in communities is slowly starting to get out and raise eyebrows.  It is too early to declare victory yet, but the fact that news outlets that thought Secure Communities was great months ago are now asking questions is really good news for our work.

3.  No more Mr(s). Nice Immigrant.  This year marked a turning point for immigrants and civil disobedience.  I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say that January alone probably had more acts of civil disobedience than all of the immigrant rights movement last year.  Since then, from sit-ins, to mass arrests, to flash-mobs (something I think I am too old to know about), the tactics in the immigrant rights movement are getting more direct and more confrontational.  To be clear, there is also a greater desire to specifically target the Obama administration to do more to protect the rights of immigrants.  I believe the press is making the outcomes look better than they really are, but it has had some pointed results.  Not least of which is virtually forcing the administration into a lawsuit against SB 1070 as its popularity has increased.

4.  It’s the Latino vote stupid…No matter how much anti-immigrant hysteria is drummed up, it ends up creating diminishing returns for the politician or party that is anti-immigrant.  On a personal level, I have always been skeptical that voters had the electoral power to improve the lives of people who don’t have the right to vote.  However, with the notable exception of Joe Arpaio, anti-immigrant politicians have ignored the Latino vote to their own detriment.  In Florida, Attorney General and gubernatorial hopeful Bill McCollum switched from denouncing the idea of an SB 1070 in Florida to actually authoring a Florida version of the bill that is probably worse.  In the process he alienated much of the Latino Republican leadership and his new found crusade probably cost him the nomination.  There seems to be a trend amongst anti-immigrant politicians of ignoring the Latino vote, but the Latino vote seems to have a real ability to punish anti-immigrant politicians.

Subhash Kateel has been organizing immigrant communities for over ten years. He was the initiator of the detention and deportation work Desis Rising Up and Moving and of co-Founder of Families For Freedom in 2002. Besides facilitating some of the most sought after know your rights trainings in the South East, he is an avid watcher or right-wing social movements and pushes the left to take notice. Currently he is a statewide organizer with the Florida Immigrant Coalition.

We came to Arizona from the copper mines in Cananea.  Recruiters came to Mexico trying to find people who would come work.  We came in wagons, there was nothing here..nothing!  They dropped people off from place to place.  Our job was to clear the desert.  And look at it now!   – Antonia Franco

I remember a childhood of listening to the stories of my elders, sitting at a kitchen table with thick mugs filled with more milk than coffee. There was my Nana Tonia, who came in the early 1920’s with her family from Sonora, México. My Tata Emilio’s eyes would gleam as he spoke, describing the orchard trees along South Mountain and Baseline Road, the ranches, the farms all around. He loved to point out how much things used to cost in the early days, break down what it cost to feed his family and pay the rent and match that to the wages he made as a janitor, a musician and a groundskeeper.

Stories like theirs constitute the backbone of the history of the state of Arizona. Their labor helped build the foundation upon which the 5^th largest city of the United States operates upon today.  And I wonder, what would they think about what is happening in Arizona now, days after the passage of the nation’s harshest anti-immigrant law?

In the Arizona of today, you can get charged with smuggling – yourself.

In the Arizona of today, the chain gangs of the Jim Crow era are alive and well.

In the Arizona of today, undocumented students are forced to pay triple tuition for a college education.

And, after the signing of Senate Bill 1070, police can stop and question you because you look illegal.

Arizona – a state built by the hands of many people, of many colors and many languages – has taken another step in the wrong direction. Since 2005, almost 6,000 immigration-related bills have been introduced in the state legislature; many have passed with examples noted above. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has made it his personal mission to hunt migrants in the community and humiliate inmates in county jails. Check points are scattered throughout the state.  Others have begun to follow this example, as day laborers have been attacked as they wait for work on street corners.  Last summer, nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father were shot and killed in their home; three members of the Minutemen Militia have been arrested and charged for the crime.

The state government has been converted into a legislative laboratory and thus represents an epicenter of the anti-immigrant movement. And as a result, a veil of fear and terror has been laid upon the population.  Daily routines have become a risk.  A child going to school has to wonder whether she will see her mother or father when she comes home.  A quick trip to the store requires heavy good byes reserved for long journeys.  I was in Arizona the week SB1070 was signed into law and I heard stories of pregnant women coming in to community centers to ask if it was safe to go to the hospital to give birth.  The answer was, “No.”

The struggles around immigration are among the defining civil and human rights issues of our time, and Arizona has become the new Alabama.  Governor Jan Brewer made the choice to stand on the wrong side of history last week.  In exchange for votes she has solidified her place in history alongside segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace.  Wallace clung to the institution of racial segregation in the South, defending it by arguing for state’s rights over the federal government.  Governor Brewer and Republican politicians in Arizona will echo this argument, a general strategy of the Right wing under an Obama Administration, which emerged in the health care debates this year.

In a state nearing bankruptcy, with exploding foreclosures and growing unemployment, elected officials have chosen to target the state’s most vulnerable population instead of develop serious solutions to the state’s problems.  In this time of economic instability, people are increasingly fearful and uncertain of how things can get better.  The rhetoric behind bills like SB1070 is reckless and irresponsible, as they paint a narrative that blames immigrants for all the nations ills.  But there is a silver lining that comes from characters like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, legislation like SB1070 and politicians like State Senator Russell Pearce: they wake the people up. Because of SB 1070 the nation has turned its eyes upon Arizona. Now, the question becomes: Will the resistance multiply, or will the hate?

Ya Basta! Enough is Enough

Something tells me that if Antonia and Emilio were here to witness this, they would say: “Esto no se va quedar aqui!” Translation: It ain’t gonna go down like that!

On the Sunday after the passage of the bill, thousands of people gathered to demonstrate at the state capital. Long after the official program had ended and the media had left, hundreds of people stayed and continued to march.  And there on the lawn of the capital, one man approached longtime organizer, Salvador Reza, and said: “The speeches are done. We need to talk for real now. What are we going to do?” A conversation unfolded, and the crowd grew to 200 people. In this spontaneous meeting, people gave testimony and made passionate calls to organize boycotts, to vote, to resist in any way possible.  One man said: “What more can they do to us?  I stand to lose everything, everything I’ve built here.  We have nothing left but to fight.”

SB1070 and the reactionary politic it represents do not represent the sentiment of all Arizonans.  And it’s showing.  Outrage and fear is growing into resistance and organizing – on the streets, in the schools and in the neighborhoods.  People don’t want another Jim Crow, or even a Juan Crow for that matter.  Student walkouts are in motion united by the rally cry, ‘Don’t Hate! Educate!’, bullhorn caravans cruise through the barrios, people are donning new t-shirts branded with the slogan ‘Legalize Arizona!’ People who have never been active are finding ways to do something. DJs are organizing cultural events.  Unity building across Latino and African American communities is happening.  Even my sister in law has been inspired to organize the parents and children of my nephew’s little league.  (yes!)

The battleground has emerged.  The latest invention from the legislative laboratory of Arizona foreshadows immigration enforcement in the U.S. if we don’t turn the tide.  This law must not only be stopped legally, it must be rejected in the court of public opinion.  Compañer@s, we have a window of opportunity – NOW.

Millions of people across the country are outraged – it spans across color, age, religion, and income level.  We have an opportunity to transcend the tangled web of legislations to ask ourselves the basic questions of what kind of communities we want to have, what kind of country this should be.  Now is the time to tell our stories, to state the alternative solution and most importantly, to create the arena for action- action that will turn the tide on immigration enforcement, as well as immigration reform.

We cannot allow the Arizona legislature to lead immigration policy in the United States. The enforcement of immigration policy is the sole function of the federal government, not local police.  Just as states cannot declare war or sign treaties, they are not to enforce federal immigration policy.  The stories of people in Arizona are the same stories that can be heard across the country.  Todos Somos Arizona. We are all Arizona.

SB1070 is set to be implemented in 90 days.  In that time, we will defeat this law and advance the agenda of justice for civil and human rights.  We are on the right side, now, we just have to make history.

Here’s how you can join the fight:

• Demand that Obama Administration take decisive action to defend civil rights in Arizona and assert that local police are not to enforce federal immigration policy.
• Donate to groups in Arizona who are on the frontlines of this battle!
• On May Day and beyond take the Todos Somos Arizona/We are all Arizona message and promote the demand for federal intervention in Arizona.
• Take action in your city: push for your local government to pass resolutions against 1070, to boycott Arizona, organize direct actions on the criminalization of immigrant communities.
• Come to Arizona on May 29^th, for a mass direct action to “Stop the Hate.”

For more information and updates, please go to www.altoarizona.com

Marisa is the Lead Organizer with the Right to the City Alliance, a national alliance of grassroots organizations working for urban justice. Prior to working at Right to the City, Marisa worked as an organizer at POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) in San Francisco where she focused on building the Women Worker’s Project. Marisa was one of the authors of Towards Land, Work and Power: Charting a Path of Resistance to U.S.-led Imperialism. Marisa also worked briefly with Domestic Workers United in New York City.

The original article “New Kids on the Historic Bloc”  was written by Jon Liss and David Staples This article  takes off from where that one left off and  is based on an interview between Rishi Awatramani and Jon Liss.

New Kids on the Historic Bloc – Workers’ Centers and Municipal Socialism – A Summary and Postscript

Crisis, Capitalist Refounding and the Reagan Historic Bloc

Over the last 30 years capital has ‘re-founded’ itself by imposing neo-liberal programs (see Theodore/Peck) linked with imperialist expansion.  This refounding was a response to a crisis of accumulation or declining profit rates.  Components of neo-liberalism include: privatization, aggressive attacks on unions, attacks on the ‘social’ wage in general and women of color in particular.  We use a framework of ideas, institutions and program of actions to describe the New Right program for the last thirty years. The dominant ideas of the New Right include concepts that support ‘getting government off the people’s back’, stop taxing and spending, etc. Institutions that propagate and implement neo-liberalism range from the Manhattan Institute (urban policy) to the U.S. Congress, while programs have included efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy or slash welfare as we know it.  Up until the last 18 months their program could largely be classified as a smashing success.  Because of their ideological hegemony, both dominant electoral parties accept some variation of their ideology concerning the role of government in the functioning of the economy.  These politics and policies were made dominant through the forging of an historic bloc that both elects like-minded officials but also serves as a political tail wind that keeps things they way they are. By expertly blending racism with appeals to capitalist mythology, Reagan manufactured an anti-new deal majority that was tied to industrial capital, military and industrial capital, extractive industries/capital, white workers, farm owners and outer suburbanites.  In one form or another this bloc has set the parameters of dominant politics for the last thirty years.  However, the twin jolts of economic collapse and demographic shifts (massive immigration from Latin American and Asia) created the reality of Obama’s election and indicate a conjunctural opportunity to aggressively challenge the dominant ideas, institutions and program of the last 30 years.

Recomposition of the Working Class

These massive changes in the political economy had major effect on the composition of the Working Class in the US. There are a number of factors responsible for this re-composition: 1) Over the last 30-40 years, manufacturing jobs moved overseas. In this period in particular, the US experienced massive de-industrialization of sectors that had been at the heart of the economy and the main provider of stable employment for the dominant white male sector of the working class (and therefore a central site of Working Class organization and struggle). Flexible and unstable employment in the low-wage service sectors, public service  and government jobs, or some form of state welfare dependence emerged as the primary bread-winning opportunities for working-class people. 2) During this same period, there was a significant increase in immigration, due  to both the liberalization of immigration policy in the 60’s and 70’s, as well as the deepening economic crises of working people in the Third World (crises which were caused primarily by the creation of massive national debts through Structural Adjustment policies). 3) The disappearance of well-paid working class jobs and the increase in unstable, low-wage jobs meant that women of color in particular were to, more than ever before, be forced to work double time: in their unpaid labor in domestic work in their own homes and in paid work, typically in low-wage service sector positions (in some cases, doing paid domestic work for other families).

Through these changes, the working class has been recomposed, and is much more populated by immigrants, people of color, and women. Significantly, this recomposition has also created a more unstable, highly flexible, and poorly compensated working class that faces speed-up pressures, contingent work, and limited benefits.

A central task for our period, then, is to figure out which are the key nodes in this reshaped political economy at which we must build strong, fighting mass organizations, and which are the key historical actors that can build unity and lead a movement against capital and exploitation. For example, a part of our project is to develop demands for child care providers, taxi drivers, janitors, and even computer or biotechnology workers (who share the contingency of work and low/no benefits with other members of the new working class).

We face an uphill battle to achieve the key tasks of this period, as we fight against a dominant ideology which is not on our side, labor laws that do more to divide workers and protect the interests of bosses than promote workers’ rights, a historical trajectory that has left us with diminished social movements and organizations, and spatial divisions that isolate our organizations and movements.

Social Reproduction: gender, market integration, and a rising history maker!

Part of the dominant class response to the accumulation crisis was to bring fully into market conditions socially reproductive labor, or in other words, to move work that was not traditionally waged into the waged work world.  This is work usually done by  women that is involved in the reproduction (schooling, childcare, housekeeping, elder care, etc.) of the next generation of workers.  Capital continually looks to fill its insatiable need to expand by moving unwaged work to waged work.  The movement of women into the labor force, particularly its most undervalued and super-exploited sectors, expands the labor market and the production of surplus value.

Neo-liberal restructuring drove a polarization of wealth and power and created a new demand for a whole range of domestic service and services.  This emerging stratum of the working class is the lowest paid, works the longest hours and is in perennial crisis.  In addition, immigration laws further segment the labor market creating a gray market for undocumented workers who have little legal productions under the law.  At this intersection of race, class and gender has emerged the rising history maker – working women of color – who are largely the social base of the new working class organizations that have arisen in the last two decades.

In Northern Virginia this has meant immigrant women who work in hotels or the service industry who join Tenants and Workers United. Elsewhere – in urban areas throughout the country – it is women of color who have come together to motor the overwhelming majority of  New Working Class Organizaitons that have developed over the last 20 years.  Particularly for the 40 organizations who are members of the Right to the City Alliance our political demands are centered around social reproduction that is around needs and wants associated with sustaining and raising working people.  This includes fights for affordable or public housing, high performing schools and a range of social services.

Organizing During the Neo-Liberal Era: Pragmatism in Unions and Community Organizing

For decades, the old-school Alinsky form of organizing has dominated community- and workplace-based organizing, and it is time to formally declare it’s failure. The Alinsky model of organizing emphasizes a purportedly non-ideological, pragmatic approach to organizing that is ill-equipped to winning power for the oppressed people. It grew in the space created by the decline of the New Left, the rise of progressive or liberal foundations, and the decline of organized labor. The internal crisis of ACORN in some ways flows directly from the political limitations and failures of the Alinskly model, and ACORN is in the beginning of a period of serious decline in which it will lose dominance in it’s two former foundational strengths: electoral organizing and fundraising from private foundations.

At the same time, the labor movement, with few exceptions, is not organizing the most militant and dynamic sectors of the working class, and it has not adapted well to the formation of the new working class referenced above. Over 87% of the workforce in this country are not union members. The Labor Movement on the whole has not broken from a Gomperist (see Fletcher and Gapasin, Solidarity Divided) relation to the dominant class.  That is, it fights to get a slightly better deal for its members vis-à-vis the rest of the class.  It does not fight for the class as a whole, nor does it challenge the fundamental rules of capital.

Organizations for the new class: Emergence, Approach and Self-Analysis/Critique

Over the last 20 years a new urban movement is emerging in the growth of new working class organizations – such as Just Cause Oakland (now Causa Justa/Just Cause), Miami Workers Center, Tenants and Workers United, Domestic Workers United, POWER, and others.  These organizations social base is oppressed nationality women; including African American’s and others forced into the low-wage labor market because of welfare ‘reform’ and globalization-forced immigration.

These groups attempted to organize whole neighborhoods, cities, or sectors of the workforce in campaigns that raised demands against the state. Through direct action, conscious political education and raising counter-hegemonic demands (that is, framing demands in ways that challenge the dominant class’s ‘common sense’), these organizations fought for affordable housing and an end to displacement in the face of intense land privatization, recognition of domestic work as dignified work, the rights of marginal and informal workers, access to quality transportation for these new tiers of workers, and an end to the wanton criminalization of youth of color.

Perhaps most uniquely, there is a conscious effort amongst these New Working Class Organizations to link local base-building work with work against the US empire, by engaging members in struggles and solidarity actions against war, occupation, and financial control of the Third World, but also by developing a tier of leaders from this new working class that is highly conscious of the role the US plays financially, politically and militarily in the world. Whereas an most unions would focus leadership development exclusively on skills to be used for the narrow purpose of workplace organizing, these new organizations prioritized a form of leadership development that developed ‘hard’ leadership skills with ideological development and analytical skills.

This form of organization is relatively new, however, and has many weaknesses. The leadership of NWCO is primarily university educated, ‘middle class’ and oppressed nationality, with relatively few advanced leaders directly from the new class. It is dependent on foundations for its financial base, which has meant that, while most NWCO’s are organizer-centered, they are not typically funded to have a density of organizers moving any one campaign; new funding streams more often lead to more campaigns rather than a larger base organized around larger scale campaigns. As a result, most organizations have expertise in developing a small handful of very sophisticated members and very little success in organizing large organizations with large mass bases. New Working Class Organizations have generally focused narrowly on organizing this new sector of the class and has limited experience with broader formations. The financial crash and the corresponding drop in foundation funding has left many of these groups in financial crisis.

Interestingly, over the last two years an increasing number of these organizations are experimenting in electoral work.  This is creating opportunities to organize more broadly both spatially and also broader strata within the class.

Right to the City: further self defining as a new urban movement

In 2007, 40 community-based organizations – representing many of the most ideological of the New Working Class organzations – allied academics and resource allies (eg, Advancement Project, Florida Legal Services, the Data Center) met in Los Angeles and created the Right to the City Alliance.  This coming together represented a collective jumping of scales for a maturing and r9ising sector of the working class.  Organizations, heretofore, had generally just worked on demands at local and state levels.  Cominmg together we have begun to enunciate a collective vision for our cities – for all, green, feminist – as well as begun the difficult process to make national demands on the federal government and to claim political space at the national level vis a vis unions and other national formations.

The state: a new moment

One can see in the electoral majority that elected Obama the prefigurative possibility of a rising historic bloc – centered on a unified Black nation, with wide layers of immigrants and other people of color, unionists, and broad stratum of the cybertariat and new economy working class (many with self-identified as working class.  New Working Class Organizations broadly share much in our approach to organizing: a historical subject, a broad but common understanding of race, class and gender, and our strategy for change. An area where we have less in common is our analysis of the state.  We believe that our strategic approach should draw from Poulantzas and create political space that neither builds a parallel state that leads to a complete replacement  of the old with the new, nor simply elects new people to fill the existing state. By creating new structures and laws we seek to create fissures that increasingly alter the class, race and gender power disposition of the state. Examples of this may include efforts at democratizing the system – same day voter registration or mail in voting, felon voter registration (still an arduous process in Virginia and elsewhere in the south), others might work to eliminate structural obstacles that systematically disempower people of color such as statewide election of senators, non-proportional elections, or participatory budgeting. Others challenges could seek to democratize the economy through taxes on financial transactions or community control over banks or other flows of capital.

New organizing approaches with this in mind

Along with the above-mentioned aggressive, innovative forms of campaign work and organizing, many NWCO’s are engaged more and more in electoral work. For New Working Class Organizations (Right to the City organizations, for example), electoral work presents the opportunity to push our strengths in organizing to a scale we have been unable to reach up until now.

Often confused with social democracy, this work, when led by NWCO’s can allow us to:

1) Develop counter-hegemonic demands, or at the very least counter-hegemonic framing that we advance through issue-based or even candidate campaigns. While these campaigns are in some way assessed by a simple measure of success (i.e. winning the election), NWCO organizations must use their electoral efforts to challenge the underpinnings of neo-liberalism and empire.

2) Win concrete material demands that improve life for our social base, build a sense of movement for our social base and force resources to be moved from the war economy to the social wage (increasing the social wage, albeit on a smaller scale, is essentially the hallmark campaign form of most NWCO’s).

3) Advance our practice and theory through engaging broader mass forces in, what is for the most part, their principal form of political involvement (elections).  Thus we (and our allies) will be actively engaged in strategizing that will force us to continue building our base but also actively constructing a historic bloc – or ensemble of race and class forces – necessary for a new order no dominated by Capital.  This provides an opportunity for different organized sectors – unionists, teachers and students, NWCM activists and others to work together in a coordinated manner.

4) Practice limited forms of governance and power. NWCO, Alinsky organizations, and Unions have experience fighting targets and powerbrokers. We don’t have experience with even limited forms of power at his scale, and for a budding movement, it is crucial practice for different epoch in history when questions of revolutionary democracy, working class power, and organized accountability will be staring us in the face.

Finally, the scale at which our organizations must fight are always changing. While it is important to not necessarily concede political space to the ruling class, some scales of power might present opportunities at various moments in history that beckon us to action. This moment in history, due to the convergence of the economic, ecological, and political crises (the latter represents the crisis in which the ruling political classes find the legitimacy of their system of power waning) presents opportunities for struggles at the national scale which are essential to moving our base, and oppressed people broadly, into action and towards victories against exploitation. We would do well to seize these opportunities.

Jon Liss has been organizing in Virginia for almost 30 years. He was a founding member and is currently the Executive Director of Tenants and Workers United and Virginia New Majority and a founder and steering committee member of the Right to the City Alliance.   Prior to his time at Tenants and Workers United, Jon was involved in a number of grassroots organizations in Virgina, including: Proceso de Educación Popular, the Rainbow Coalition/Jesse Jackson Presidential Campaign,  Northern Virginians Against Apartheid  and the Fairfax County Taxi-drivers Association.

Rishi Awatramani is Lead Organizer at Virginia New Majority (VNM). VNM is a member of the Right to the City Alliance. Rishi is on the US Social Forum National Planning Committee representing Leftist Lounge, has previously worked as a union and community organizer, and is a long-time activist with several organizations.

What do you think are the most significant political and economic dynamics at play  right now, and what do they mean for our work?

By means of introduction, let me tell you a bit about National People’s Action.  In addition to our training and consulting work to build a strong affiliate network, policy analysis and big ideas work, we run three national campaigns, though our affiliates are active in others as well.  Our three national campaigns are the Housing Justice Movement which is organizing to preserve and create social housing in America, the Immigrant and Worker Justice Campaign that is active on city, state and national issues of inclusion and equity, and the Showdown in America Campaign that is in a major fight to win accountability and transparency in the financial system.  Together, these campaigns and our affiliates are developing our vision, roadmap, and campaign for a new economy.

I want to start by reflecting on the state of the different mobilization movements such as the right to organize/union movement, immigrant rights movement, health care movement, climate change movement, anti-war/peace movement, and financial reform movement. For each of these issues, there’s a set of organizations that can really mobilize. They each saw an important opportunity to move some important policies forward in 2009: the Employee Free Choice Act, climate change treaties, major health care reform, and so on.  They all ran national issue campaigns over the last year, and they were all disappointed in the outcome of those campaigns.  They either had to give up hope for now that something truly decent was going to pass out of Congress, or they were disappointed that nothing was able to pass last year but had hopes going into 2010. I’m not sure what is going to happen by the end of this year, but by April everyone in these different movements is likely to be seriously disappointed with the pace of reform.

There were a number of reasons why nothing is moving, but I’d say one major reason is that we each waged our campaigns on our own. For example, the health care movement built a big tent, and they brought a lot of people out. But it wasn’t like everybody was “all in” on the health care fight or on any of these other fights.  Of course, there were a lot of organizations and networks and unions that participated in several of these national issue campaigns, but we weren’t doing big coordinated efforts to mobilize together across movements last year.   But now I think we’re at a point where we could actually turn those disappointments around, where we can turn these different issue campaigns into something bigger.

When I travel around the country and meet with the different organizations that are affiliated with National People’s Action (NPA), I see people who have a lot of energy to organize.  These are regular grassroots folks that we’re talking about, and they’re not feeling that disappointment as despair.  They’re taking that disappointment and asking, “So what do we have to do to win?” The soil is rich; it’s not depleted. That’s led us at NPA to think about how can we play a part in creating a frame and a story that would allow some of these seemingly disparate movements to begin to work together.

At NPA, our strategy is to mobilize to and run sustained pressure campaigns and actions that force negotiations with people who have the power to make decisions. We don’t limit ourselves to just pressuring elected officials.  In this day and time, we need to target corporations.  If you had to distill the Right’s message, it’s “Big government is the problem.” It’s a really basic idea (wrong as it turns out) but definitely succinct.  On the left and in the progressive world, we tend to be a little more complicated in how we frame things.  We usually take more than three or four words to describe what’s wrong (more like three or four books).  But if we had to put out our message in equally succinct words, it’d be “Big corporations are the problem.” Those five words capture the idea that because of corporate power and all of the money that they’ve spent in Congress and in cities and states across the country, we really don’t have a functioning democracy. NPA is framing our national conference in May with “Reclaim our Democracy” because we need to reclaim our democracy from the corporations that have stolen our democracy, our money, and our economy from us.  Leading up to that conference, we’re planning a variety of actions based on the “Showdown in Chicago” model to force big banks – in particular Bank of America and Wells Fargo – to negotiate with us. Those actions will be happening at the Bank of America annual meeting in North Carolina, at the Wells Fargo annual meeting in San Francisco, on Wall Street and in other cities.

We think that the different movements can come together to target the big corporations that have gotten us into this mess that we’re in today.  So we’re trying to figure out what movements are in the same place as we are, what other movements are interested in joining forces to mobilize and negotiate. We’re not into symbolic marches; we want to do actions that can actually force negotiations. Our sense is that a lot of other people are coming to a similar conclusion about the need to work together. What if the health care people started marching with the immigrants and the unions started marching with the climate change people?  We’re back in a place that we haven’t seen for more than ten years, since the WTO and anti-globalization protests, where multiple movements were open to working together and were turning out sizable numbers of people.  We need to take advantage of this opportunity.

I know you’ve been thinking about what we can learn from the Populist Movement that took place in the United States in the 1880s.  Can you talk about the lessons you’ve been drawing from that movement?

There are a couple things that I’ve been drawing from the Populist Movement, particularly from a book written by Lawrence Goodwyn. He talks about the conditions for the development of a major social movement.  One of them is he says that you don’t automatically get a big national movement when times are hard. By itself, that’s not a sufficient condition for a movement. Also, having a clear platform (which is what we normally do on the left) is not a sufficient condition.

You have to create a political culture that actually injects spirit, discipline and energy. This political culture plus hard times plus a clear platform are the conditions you need to create the ground for a movement to emerge.  We can look at the Populist movement and the People’s Party as examples of a time when people were able to create this combination of conditions, forge a movement, and have millions of people acting together for serious change.

Goodwyn talks about the process of democratic movement-building that took place in the Populist Movement in four stages.  First, there was the creation of autonomous institutions where new ideas that run counter to the prevailing authority can develop, a development which – for the sake of simplicity – he describes as “the movement forming.”  And we have a lot of that kind of work in this moment. Over the last few decades, we’ve seen the formation of institutions focused on organizing and providing an autonomous space that runs counter to the prevailing political narrative.

The second stage in the movement-building process is the creation of a “tactical means to attract masses of people.” Now, this is a big stumbling block for organizers in this moment.  Haranguing doesn’t attract masses of people. Even our traditional style of disciplined door-to-door and congregation-by-congregation organizing can only bring together a certain critical mass of activists, but – even in the best of cases – we only reach a tiny fraction of the population of a neighborhood or a city.  Of course, the sad truth that we’ve learned over the last couple of decades is that you don’t actually need a majority to influence politics. You only need an organized minority.  But we actually do need to organize masses of people if we want to impact change on a more serious scale.  The development of the Internet and institutions like MoveOn.org have created the possibility of recruiting masses of people. Shifting to that scale of politics is a transformative question in the community organizing field right now.  Small has been beautiful for a long time; now we want figure out how to act on a truly bigger scale while preserving the dynamic political culture that we have carefully nurtured and rooted in the power of grassroots leadership.

If we can make a break-through on this question of scale, we can move toward what Goodywn describes as the next stage in movement-building which is the “achievement of a heretofore culturally unsanctioned level of social analysis,” in other words the movement educating people on a mass scale.  In the Populist movement, they did this by developing economic cooperatives which helped people grow politically.  That education manifested on many levels, from the analysis of why they were necessary to the experiences of building them.  In many places, the cooperatives had a really hard time acquiring credit, and they had to fight with the railroads and the banks.  This was political education in real time for people.  It’s that kind of process – of trying to do something that you should be able to do and not being able to do it because these institutions are holding you back that is the most deeply radicalizing.  That happened in the Civil Rights Movement too, where people were radicalized by being prevented from doing something that they should have been able to do, like sitting at a lunch counter or sitting on a bus.  They tried to do those things, and they got held back. That was the basis for new innovations in the movement, like the Children’s March in Birmingham.  The Civil Rights Movement didn’t start out saying, “Let’s march out all the kids and get them all arrested.” But as all the adults tried to do what they should have been able to do and got arrested, this new strategy emerged.  And it ended up being quite a radicalizing and formative step for the movement, to have children take those risks and be treated the way they were.  So I think we need to take those kinds of actions today.  We have to stop doing symbolic marches, and instead we should start doing what we want to do in the world like trying to build our own neighborhoods.  And when people get stopped from doing what they should be able to do, that’s going to be really radicalizing for masses of people.

The fourth stage that Goodwyn identifies in the movement-building process is the “creation of an institutional means whereby the new ideas shared by the rank-and-file of the mass movement can be expressed in an autonomous political way.”  So this would look like a national campaign with a transformative demand.  In the Populist movement, their transformative demand was for a new basis for the currency of the United States and a new way to distribute credit outside of the Eastern banks. At the time, in 1890, it was radical to demand something like that.  In a way, they achieved their vision because that idea was the foundation for the Federal Reserve system and the elimination of the gold standard. Today, we need to do some more thinking about what our transformative demands could be. What is a fundamental demand that could be very transformative with far-reaching implications for the U.S. economy, like, “Corporations should not be people.”  What we need to avoid is very abstract ideas like, “What we want is a worker’s democracy;” I don’t even know what that means really. We need a concrete demand that is somewhat inconceivable, but at least 1% conceivable.  So we’re asking everybody, “What is your transformative demand?  And what can we do right now that radicalizes people?”  What we’ve settled on for the interim is that we need to fight with the banks.  You don’t have to go through Congress to try to get Bank of America to stop foreclosing on people. You can go to Bank of America to get Bank of America to stop foreclosing on people. We can go to Bank of America and Wells Fargo and say, “Stop financing payday lending. Stop foreclosing on people. Stop breaking the budgets of cities and states with these interest rate swaps. And start doing X, Y and Z.”  We can put some intermediate demands on the table telling the banks what they should do that would help our economy and rebuild our communities.  But in order for it to actually be radicalizing, lots of people have to be involved.  So, therefore, we need lots of people in the streets doing these bank actions next month.

You can tell you’ve achieved the kind of transformative political culture that we need when you have two things.  First, do the people who join the movement because that movement helps them develop individual self-respect?  Having the ability to act, to have a say in your life and to have a say over the institutions that control it, that’s profoundly human. If you don’t have power, you can’t really feel self-respect. Movements should provide people the space to be powerful in a very individual way, and it should help them regain their individual self-respect. I think that’s the reason why people join organizations, because they feel like they’re going to regain some self-respect. The second point is on a more collective side; it’s collective self-confidence.  We need to build organizations that have the possibility of winning and are therefore self-confident. Organizations should feel like they can develop a strategy, execute that strategy with discipline and win – or at least win benchmarks along the longer road.  If an organization doesn’t have self-confidence, people will drop out of it pretty quickly.  We can use those points as litmus tests for the political culture of our organizations: Do people develop individual self-respect through our work?  Do we have collective self-confidence?  Do we have a political culture that will win?

How do you integrate your left politics into the organizing work?  Why do you see organizing as a central method for left people to use?

I’m quite committed to fundamental change in America, change that will allow us to actually realize the unachieved promise of America. This could be a country where people vote and actually have their say about things, where we’re not subject to tyranny. But today we are subject to tyranny. I would call the control that multinational corporations have over the U.S. government a form of tyranny, just like I would call the English government’s colonial control of America tyranny. But I came to understand a while ago that it’s a long road to get to that kind of fundamental change.  My hope is that I will see something pretty positive by the time I pass away, but I’m not sure. I’ve never thought that it was right around the corner.  It’s a long road, and that road goes through organizing.  I don’t know any other way to have radical fundamental change in America other than organizing masses of people.  People develop analysis by having the experience of building with each other and fighting on campaigns together.  I don’t believe in handing analysis to people. I think that radicalization happens through the practice.  Of course, we have to read our history books, and we have to talk and debate.  But I’ve never seen that as something separate from organizing.  We can’t just develop a political line and apply it to everything; instead we need to integrate reading, talking and reflection into the practice of organizing.

What are old strategies that our sector should turn away from? Which new tools and ideas are you now experimenting with?

One of the old strategies we need to turn away from is the orthodoxy about scale. This question of scale challenges orthodoxies about the structure of our organizations. We need new ways to think about how to structure the memberships and leaderships of our organizations so they can be built for speed and built for scale.  One of the orthodoxies that has limited us is that people have to be super active to be members.  What if – instead – you could have members who are basically committed to your work but are not that active? Of course, you need to build a set of super active people to be your leaders, but you could also have another 10,000 or 15,000 people who buy into your work. You could find them through a canvass or internet work or through public events. Then you could actually have 50,000 members in the Bronx, not 5,000.

We also need to move beyond the orthodoxy that the “local” is everything. The local is important, but we need to move beyond the local.  National Peoples’ Action was founded by local groups in 1972 to run a national campaign, so “scale” was in our DNA from the beginning. But I think that people are starting to understand that – even though organizing is local and you need to talk to people where they are at – you can also link up and connect campaigns across a state.  State-level organizing provides a great platform for working on a larger scale.  You can have lots of local organizing projects across a state – individual membership-based organizations in a single city, unions that have memberships across a state, religious denominations and so on.  If we can knit those different organizations together, we can build a permanent grassroots power blocs state-by state. Those power blocs should bring resources and expertise and energy to the local organizing, but they should be able to fight at the state level: to move progressive policies that could lay the groundwork for national fights, to prevent reactionary policies and even to corral a congressional delegation. Building a permanent alliance like that is different from starting new issue coalitions. Every time we start to work on a new issue, we shouldn’t start a new issue coalition.  We should run that issue campaign though a permanent power structure. As long as it has a core set of values and principles of operation, a structure like that can address many different issues and can incorporate many different types of organizing. There are a number of tremendous experiments across the country – in ten or twenty different states – where people are building state-level alliances that are working towards permanent progressive power. The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is one exciting example, and there’s tremendously interesting things happening in Minnesota.  But you can keep going down the list: Florida, Virginia, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and plenty more. These are important experiments to keep an eye on.

Another orthodoxy that we need to overcome is, “No permanent friends. No permanent enemies.”  Well, guess what? I have permanent friends and permanent enemies. We should actually form permanent alliances with our permanent friends.  And our enemies?  We want them defeated and neutralized.  I don’t want Bank of America to exist as it does. It’s hard for me to conceive of a world where Bank of America is not an enemy of mine. I want to break it up. That’s what we’re doing through our financial reform campaign, trying to break up these big banks that are our permanent enemies. And if this campaign against them doesn’t work, then you know we’ll do? We’ll take the hammer to them again until we succeed in breaking them up.

James Mumm is the Director of Organizing at National People’s Action. James began his organizing career at NPA in 1990, serving as their Chicago organizer, national conference coordinator and newspaper editor.  He subsequently worked in Chicago for the Metropolitan Tenants Organization and Organization of the NorthEast before moving to the Bronx to become the Co-Director of Mothers on the Move and then Executive Director of the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition.  James has led successful campaigns for inclusionary zoning, living wage jobs, and community-led development in both Chicago and New York.  He served on the board of the National Organizers Alliance and the Chicago Community Organizing Cooperative, writes periodic articles for progressive media.  After fifteen years away, James rejoined the NPA staff in late 2008 and is excited about building a powerful network and social justice movement.

Sushma: These are dramatic times, politically, socially and economically.  What do you think are the most significant shifts happening right now and how do you think they change the context of our work.  Clearly, your knowledge and skills base is broad.  So please draw from whatever is relevant, especially from your experiences organizing within the black community as well as your media work.

Makani: The first thing is that we are in a period of extreme contradictions.   On one hand, our people are celebrating an important racial benchmark — Obama’s election.  On the other, we are fighting to counter the narrative that his election is a sign that we’re now in a post-racial context while we are in the midst of this highly racialized context as evidenced by the rise of hate crimes, hate media and speech and increased media stereotyping in news and entertainment media.

When you consider what might be indicators of a society that is dealing fairly and justly with communities regardless of race and ethnicity, you think of educational attainment, income, equal protection before the law, equitable access to services, to the vote, etc.  We are at an all-time low in this indicators since the early 1970s and yet we have a Black president. In many ways, it is reminiscent of Black political discourse in the 1930s where we were engaged in this debate about whether we as a people should be fighting for  “hiring Black” or “buying Black.” The “hire Black” camp was about what is going to be the best way for the masses of Black people, the vast majority of whom are working class, poor and not college educated, to improve their lives?Buy Black focused on creating a Black middle class and owner class as a primary strategy.  Through Black buying power, Black providers would replace the mostly Jewish retailers in Black communities and this new class of entrepreneurs would reinvest its wealth into building our communities.  Essentially, we are faced with a similar question: is having a Black man at the “top” going to result in a trickle down of power and access to the rest of us?,

“Well, what does it mean to have a Black president when so many Black people and other people of color,immigrants, etc., are under incredible criminalization.  We have raids and  families being torn apart.  There’s a rainbow of people who are affected, not just Latinos. It’s people from almost every continent who are being exposed to this kind of hatred and militarization and trauma and terror in the midst of this election that  people believe is a huge victory.  Organizers are having a hard time figuring out how to negotiate it without being “downers.”.

It seems as though we have opportunities. Progressives are being invited to the White House.  Many of our ideas are getting a hearing for the first time.  So we’re not quite sure how to protest, what to do or what to say.  We’re in a place where we are stuttering politically – both figuratively and actually – about what it is that we do next.   And this is really very different. I don’t think anyone can remember a time like this where the left has been so paralyzed by division around what to do next. That in itself is just profound.  We need to reflect on what this means and what is our understanding of the state.  We need to rethink completely our sense of the state and step away from Marx for a minute and think about, “What is our theory of the state? How do we interact with it? What does it mean?  How do we build real change and make sure our people don’t suffer even more during these hard times? How do we let go of this Western paradigm that dichotomizes direct service and organizing as if organizing is some kind of profession?”  All of these contradictions are way up a front right now because our people are suffering   Too many of our folk are hungry, unemployed, abused at work and home, homeless and we will not be relevant if our work ignores this  These are  critical pillars of the contradictions that we have to navigate for the rest of the work to make sense.

S: What opportunities do you think are coming up through the Obama administration and the economic crisis? In the midst of these opportunities, what do you think is the role of the community organizing sector and particularly the role of left-leaning organizers within that?

M: I think that the first thing that we need to do is step back and draw a much broader map about who’s “left”.  And we have to abandon the idea that being left means that you’ve read some left stuff or had certain conversations. We have to step back and say there are people who have analysis drawn from their lived experience.  They may not have read the books or use the terminology but, they’re a part of the left.

The left needs to be able to navigate the opportunities of the current moment. We have to be able to embrace the researchers and folks who have been imagining solutions that are outside of the market paradigm. That means we also have to rethink our division of labor in this left, that this left is not just about the people who knock on doors or build base organizations – which is critical – but we also have to fully embrace the whole division of labor and the whole range of people who are thinking about policies and imagining our lives and our institutions beyond the current system and its oppression; the people who are dreaming and painting that work and singing about that work, the artists.  All of that is part of the tapestry of what the left is.

Having said that, therein lies the opportunities. One part is: how do we move people to a place of concrete hope or belief in the  possibility of  a real alternative? Because people know that things are messed up; they are living it. But there are so many people who just don’t believe that there is another way. And so we have to build relationships with folks who have thought about the alternatives, the other way. It’s about us translating those policies and those visions into concrete fights and into concrete changes in conditions.  It’s about working with with progressive academics and artists to help tell a story that allows people see themselves in the narrative; see themselves in the picture  of what the world can look like without this madness.  This is an amazing opportunity.

Clarifying this vision will help us more effectively leverage the openings in the Obama Administration   It will give us an opportunity to experiment with some of these ideas – within limits – both at the local level and at the national level.  We can actually work the system to provide glimpses of the next world, glimpses of how to be engaged in the governance of our lives, because people do not take anything that they do not believe belongs to them. If you look at any major change in any country, there was  first a point where people engaged the system and understood the way things worked – or didn’t work for them. Then, they made a decision that it needed to work better for them.  Why?  Because they began to understand it as theirs.  And the gift of this election is that there is a new set of people who believe that this society belongs to them. Now, the question is, what do we do as organizers, broadly speaking to help people see:

1. Yes, this does belong to us.

2. Yes we  can run it.

3. Together, we have what it takes to make it run better and make it work for more of us.

That is the opportunity.

We also have to respect the division of labor. There are people who can put on a suit and go up to the White House and make that work. They can figure out how to move these ideas and open up more space for more  to step into that place of co-governance.  They can push the envelope, push the rhetoric. But we also have to understand that  protest in still very necessary.  There are things  we have to do to call attention to the terror.  Raids – they need to be protested, not negotiated. The need for real health care for people, not just a privatized health insurance system.  There needs to be an outside strategy, not everybody in suits having polite conversations. And it goes on.  And so we need to have a strategy that is about power. A strategy that has this vision of the next phase of this work but does not abandon the outside strategy and the need for people to express rage; a way to confront wrong things directly so that folks understand that they’re not crazy.  But we also need to be there with clear solutions like what should the banking system look like? How should people deal with capital and their own personal money? Why is that we have all these check cashing places? Many tools and solutions that – as organizers – we haven’t really explored. Maybe this is because we think, “We’re organizers. We knock on doors. We help people think about the fight.”  But the fight and the policy and the solution and the framing and the story telling, they’re all a tight braid. We can’t abandon any of that.

S: You’ve been getting at the need to expand our division of labor but not letting go of the outside strategy, the protesting and the agitation.  But I want to push you on that a little more. At some point, we’re going to have to make choices. And, at some point, priorities have to be set.  That gets to our next question. What are old strategies that may not work in this new climate, that we need to let go of?  Are there particular analyses or particular methods that you think may not be as relevant now?  And can you talk more about what you are finding innovative or exciting?  Anything you are experimenting with?

M: One thing that we should never abandon is building personal relationships.  There’s this rush towards certain kinds of technology without the understanding that what makes the technology great is the ability to find new opportunities to build relationships with people.  So there’s a lot of folks who are not knocking on doors and they’re not meeting new people directly; they’re not having direct, physical ties with their base.  Yet, these are times when we really have to expand our relationship-building.

Again, I think that we also have to let go of the false dichotomy between direct service and organizing. People are suffering.  If we are not doing anything to deal with their suffering, then we will become irrelevant. We’ve tended to thumb our nose at the idea that direct services are a part of organizing, but they are. Service provision can be both a base-building strategy and a condition-changing strategy. In this climate, good organizing groups need to think about either providing their own services – like food banks – or about having good relationships with service organizations.  I’m not saying that every base-building group has to expand into direct services, but I am saying that everyone needs to let go of the idea that the two don’t go together. To criticize groups that  engage in service provision totally misses the point.   I’m excited about the organizations that are bringing the two aspects of the work together and are really stepping fully into this experiment. I’ve seen some exciting examples in the Northwest like the Idaho Community Action Network.  They have this low-income base. Their people are hungry; they don’t have enough food.  So ICAN asked, “What are we going to do about that? How can we talk about you coming to a meeting and engaging in the organizing work if you haven’t eaten?” But also,  “How do we politicize those services?”  Mississippi Workers Center is trying a similar thing: providing direct services toto improve  their work conditions and then building off those services to develop a base that engages in work that is highly political. Many workers centers do the same thing.  I’m glad to see more groups paying attention to the needs of the base and not just seeing the process of organizing as moving people through meetings and into actions.  I think this idea of organizing as some narrow arena of work is passé.  It’s not going to survive  during this period of incredible social dislocation.

The other practice that I love is Web 2.0 stuff, all of the interesting things that groups are doing with websites and blogs and so on.  You’re able to tell stories; you’re able to bypass the mainstream media, or what’s left of the mainstream media because the mainstream media is in incredible flux right now.  Our understanding of how we tell our stories is dramatically changing. The traditional newspapers are becoming somewhat obsolete. Some people think that doesn’t matter because newspapers never really did a good job of telling our story. That’s true in a lot of ways.  But when we lose these newspapers and these news outlets, we lose the ability to capture an official story about what is happening in the world.  There is no paper record; there is no clear official story based on the principles of journalism.  That means that the people with the most money will get to dominate the narrative more easily.  In the past, when we were able to capture the daily newspaper or the New York Times or 60 Minutes even when we didn’t have money, we got the credibility of being a part of the official story. We’re losing some of that leverage today.  In response to these changes, progressive people are trying to create mega-websites to put out our stories.  They’re trying to brand their institutions as a credible source of information for the media and for the broader public. These big organizations and websites are asking smaller organizations to join in and to merge their credibility with them as a way to fill the vacuum that mainstream media used to fill: legitimate sources, credible stories, a following of people who will read this information and learn from it.  That’s good in some ways, but there’s also some dangers to it. When smaller organizations pool our credibility under these mega-organizations, they suck resources away from local groups. Then they frame our stories using their own political frames, and they often water our stories and our analyses down. So then there’s fewerclear left messages out there.  As a result, we have seen the same kind of concentration of power and voice that we were fighting with the corporate media.  I’m not sure what a better answer is. We do need to have these high-traffic sites that tell our stories, but we also have to be aware of what these sites are saying about our work.  We need to strategize about how they can actually help us to build our work. But at this point, I think the jury’s still out on whether we can do that well.

I think that the other important trend in this period is the development of national-level formations like the Right to the City Alliance, the Pushback Network and Grassroots Global Justice. By developing these formations, people are saying, “There is clearly a vacuum.  We are doing great work locally.  But we need to figure out how to link up, how to have a national or an international frame for our work.” In other contexts, that vacuum would be filled by a political party. But given the absence of political parties in this country, it is primarily non-profit organizations that are building power. They are forming these networks that mirror some of the functions of political parties, specifically the function of building power on a national scale.

Of course, people are still working out what national work should look like.  There is a push for people to come together and examine how to work collaboratively, how to build power together, and how to magnify their local work.  But one of the inherent contradictions in these networks is that people have ambiguity about the kind of power that they want to build, about whether they want to build that power together or whether they want to just learn from each other and build that power wherever they are.  In that case, a national network is a space where they can hang out and be cool with each other; it’s more of a learning community. And if they decide they do want to build concrete power together, then people struggle to figure out how to do that work together without losing their organizational self-determination.  This is especially complicated when the relationships are new and people are still building trust.

We need more collective spaces to get clear on this question of building power.  The Social Forum might be that space, but it isn’t really designed for large-scale discussion.  Hopefully someday, a forum will emerge that will allow larger and larger groups of people to think about how the left can build power. Again, in other contexts, that discussion would have happened inside of a political party. Today, people are afraid of parties, and I understand that.  So that forum may not need to look like a party.  We could be imagining some new amazing and different kind of formation. For the last 150 years, when people talk about the “left,” they’re usually talking about certain kinds of formations like left political parties. But that definition has really shifted since the 1970s.  Right now, when we talk about the left, we’re talking about a completely different set of networks.  The left today is much more like “swarms,” as they say in community psychology, groups of people who come together and then come apart but not in formal institutional ways. We have to learn more from anarchist work and other political models that help us understand how people can work together and have networks and connection with each other but also maintain self-determination.

S: It’s helpful to have someone with experience like you remind us about similar points in history where some of these questions have come up, and provide some bookmarks from history that people should be going back and looking to so we don’t have to re-imagine or rethink everything today in isolation.

M: I’ve been watching these kinds of national formations come and go for years.  In the 1980s, in the face of Reaganomics, there was another period where these national formations were in vogue.  I don’t think that people doing this work today have sufficiently studied what happened with those earlier formations. There are important lessons to be learned, like how to understand the needs of the individual members and the relationships between groups, that networks should remain actual networks and shouldn’t devolve into becoming their own organizations, that it’s crucial to think about power and to have clear strategies, etc.

Actually, I think we need a serious conversation about what organizing was like in general during the 1980s.  For example, there was this amazing Family Farm Alliance (though I might be getting the name wrong).  It was this amazing left formation that came directly out of thoughtful organizing in response to a political moment when the savings and loan crisis became a family farm crisis.  The campaigns were phenomenal, and their analysis was really clear and nuanced. Once in a while when I’m traveling around the country, I run into people  that were part of that formation. Those folks are still doing great  work. They have this deep analysis of the economy, and they have strong race politics. We’re talking about places in Nebraska or Idaho or Montana. So these are mostly white folks surrounded by white folks and maybe some Native folk.  And their work is still holding in the hearts and minds of a wide range of people in their communities.  Iowa is a great example; a lot of people don’t realize how much of Obama’s victory in Iowa was directly related to that organizing from twenty years ago.   It’s invisible now; other people on the left don’t know about it or don’t understand it.  But there was a point in the late 1970s and the 1980s where there was a commitment to organizing white people in a  profoundly anti racist, left way. I often  wonder what would have happened if that work had taken off at a different level of scale.

S: Any other kinds of closing thoughts?

M: I think that one challenge we have – particularly in racial justice work – is people’s ambiguity about Black liberation.  There are ways in which Obama’s presidency heightens those contradictions.  We have an administration that is basically afraid to deal with anything “Black” because they’re afraid of what it will mean politically because many people are Afrophobic.  There’s a great deal of fear and hatred of Black people that we  just don’t want to confront openly.  Now, I’m not talking about white people liking hip-hop music or saying “Whassup” or whatever. People think that’s the same thing as liking Black people.  But it’s not. And it often seems like people doing racial justice work feel like Black people had their day in the sun in 1960s, that because other communities of color were rendered mostly invisible during that time, that Blacks should take a step back because other communities  need to be seen, too. It is true that other communities  need greater  visibility,support and solidarity for their work.  We need to be clear about the way in which white supremacy makes it seem like we have to pick one group to be the special one, like, “Let’s pick the colored people who are going to be in the sunshine because we can’t really concentrate on more than one.”  That idea – that there just isn’t enough space for all of us to be seen and heard and fought for – is at the root of these challenges.

But the people who are engaged in the work of Black liberation are having some really important conversations that I think would interest  lots of organizers outside of these communities.  There are concrete benefits to be gained through building alliances in our community beyond the sheer numbers.  And we as a community need the solidarity ourselves.  The Obama administration is not addressing the incrediblevulnerability of Black people in this economy  Of course, we’re not the only folks dealing with these challenges. I’ve mentioned the immigrations raids — lots of different folks are under the gun.  But there are ways in which some of these targeted communities are  avoiding solidarity with the African American community.  They want support from  African American communities but they are not building genuine alliances. Some of this is driven by funding.  For example, there are dollars moving to non Black groups to do outreach  in African American communities to increase their support on a whole range of issues, from marriage equality to immigration. That’s good, but it’s being done without any sense of quid pro quo.  Black groups rarely receive support from these pools and it sets up an uneven dynamic that essentially conveys a lack of commitment to Black self determination and institution building.  We are not going to have a viable base of progressive power in this country until we figure out how to develop a multi-racial cross-community work that is deep and principled and that explicitly addresses the general Afrophobia and Islamaphobia in this country.

Aarti Shahani is a public service fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a writing fellow at Justice Strategies. She talked to Roberto Lovato, businessman, activist and founder of Presente.org, the face of the campaigns to demand Lou Dobbs’ ouster from CNN by Latino and pro-immigration activists. Here’s their conversation (which was originally published on the

A.S.: Why did you go after Dobbs?

R.L.: To be clear, CNN was our target. Lou Dobbs was their 800-pound gorilla. We used him to get to (CNN/US President) Jon Klein. Dobbs was repudiated among colleagues and managers. Peers confirmed that he’s a volatile person. We assessed his vulnerability, and decided it was ripe.

We also looked at the market conditions. His ratings and CNN’s were both falling. Like any media company, CNN has to establish a beachhead in a mission-critical Hispanic market. It’s 50-million strong and growing. If you have a problem in the Latino market, you have a problem with your very future.

CNN’s gotten other threats of boycotts. None had delivered anything resembling a credible threat.

A.S.: What’s a credible threat?

R.L.: We didn’t call for a boycott. We made a strategic choice to tease out a contradiction. CNN was preparing the series “Latinos in America,” a major attempt to court [us]. We produced a YouTube video that contrasted Dobbs with its host Soledad O’Brien. We made it clear that we’re not targeting her.

Our video went viral. We had events in eighteen cities.

In the 2006, millions of immigrants marched for rights with their feet and defeated laws that wanted to put us in jail. We haven’t had wins since then. We went back to where people marched, in Denver, Miami, Oregon. Hundreds signed up via text messages after we talked on Spanish radio. Immigrants are incensed. They marched with their fingers, so to speak. We gathered 100,000 signatures online in just over a month. It stunned even us.

CNN knew what that meant. Klein says that Latinos had nothing to do with Dobbs’ departure. What do you expect? Power concedes nothing without a demand. It conceded our demand. Obviously CNN doesn’t want to encourage other activists.

The funny thing is, Dobbs left at an inopportune time. We began conversations with CNN advertisers and were planning a hemispheric press conference in ten Latin American countries.

A.S.: When I asked Newt Gingrich about your campaign at a public event last month, he said, “If we can get conservatives to petition for MSNBC to dump a couple of people, then I’m pretty happy to look at this petition for Lou Dobbs.” Are you surprised he didn’t run to Dobbs’ defense?

R.L.: A lot of people don’t like Dobbs. Funny thing is, the majority of people adversely impacted by him didn’t even know who he was. Our campaign got the word out to Spanish speakers.

A.S.: Dobbs called you a flea. How do you respond?

R.L.: Dobbs is a mouthpiece for the extreme right’s hate. Our campaign was as an act of love. I don’t care if people think that sounds touchy-feely. Strategy is nothing if not the spirit of one adversary taking on another. The combative spirit of Latinos was central to our calculations. We won’t take verbal violence that results in physical violence. We started and ended with love for ourselves.

A.S.: Didn’t you infringe on Dobbs’ right to free speech?

R.L.: Is it a legitimate business model to make money off hate? Dobbs himself started hiding behind the 1st amendment. Sure he can speak. But the Constitution doesn’t say anything about his right to a show on CNN. Even Ted Turner said in a 2008 interview that he would fire Dobbs immediately. There’s precedent on hate speech. Remember Don Imus?

Media hasn’t done serious coverage of media justice issues. We expected the reception context for our message in liberal editorial rooms to be unfavorable. We assumed we’d be racialized and interpreted not advantageously. Rather than whine and lament, we strategized. We got good, significant press coverage, even in mainstream national media.

A.S.: Nicco Mele, the cyber-organizing guru who ran Howard Dean’s online campaign, says “the internet is very powerful for anti-establishment underdogs and issues.” Now that Presente.org won, what’s next?

R.L.: A whole lot of listening. We’ve amassed a modicum of people power. Our mission is to build on it by hearing our base. We’re consciously celebrating our victory. It’s important for a people to stop and reflect. This is my first day of rest. I turned on CNN at 7 pm and there’s John King. Oh my god. What have we done?

Our Moment

New York, 2009 – The minority is about to become the majority in the United States. This fact is seen and feared by the Right, particularly White nationalists. Meanwhile neoliberalism – specifically the contradiction of free capital and closed borders – is giving us border walls, cheap “illegal” labor, and a new cash crop for the super-sized prison industry.

Immigrants are the fastest growing segment of the US prison population. In 2003, all immigration functions were inserted into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. Immigration authority has passed through many hands, from the Department of Treasury to Labor to Justice. Today, for the first time in American history, we are structurally treating immigration as a security threat to be solved by police and prison.

You can see this shift as a radical break with how the U.S. has historically managed migration, or continuous with how the U.S. relies on the criminal justice system. While other countries approach risk with environmental, health, or education solutions, the United States develops crime strategies—that is, writing the “risky” behavior into penal codes and prosecuting it. Immigration is simply the latest field where our society is, in the words of scholar Jonathan Simon, “governing through crime.”

Recently I co-authored “Local Democracy on ICE,” a study on a tiny law that, for the first time in American history, allows federal executives to extend to local community-based agencies the extraordinary arrest and incarceration powers originally carved out for immigration police stationed at the borders. This devolution – shifting immigration enforcement from federal to local hands – is the rightwing strategy on immigration. Let’s make sure that the border follows illegals into every street of the interior by turning teachers, nurses, librarians, landlords into La Migra.

Today, the American public won’t stand for all that. But we will accept Poli-Migra. The first step of the devolution strategy is to turn cops, jailers and court officers into deportation agents. Its success is reflected in the easy words of a New York Times reporter, “The country is polarized between those who want a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and those who want to deport them. But just about everyone agrees that the doubly illegal, immigrants with no documents and who have committed crimes, are not welcome.”

President Barack Obama’s pick to head Homeland Security agrees. Janet Napolitano is the Democrat’s leading hawk on immigration. She is a prosecutor who embraces devolution through the criminal justice system as a “force-multiplier,” a way to take the handcuffs off law enforcement. Never mind who and how we are putting the handcuffs on.

The immigrant rights movement needs to get with it. We are organized along the lines of Good and Bad. We deserve rights because we pick your tomatoes, not your pockets. We don’t deserve rights because we are human. But our central crisis is precisely that, one of human rights. We are witnessing the emergence of what organizer Subhash Kateel once called Immigrant Apartheid. Immigration status is legal code for race.  While you can’t legally discriminate between White and Colored, you can between citizen and non-citizen. After September 11^th, we all saw how migration status was used in Brooklyn to shatter the very institutions that allow people of color to rise above subsistence and form a middle class. We saw how the criminal courts were used in Postville, Iowa to turn Good undocumented workers into Bad criminal aliens.

If the problem is Immigrant Apartheid, and the rightwing strategy is devolution, then our strategy must be to make migration status less relevant. But the nation’s largest “immigrant rights” campaign has done the exact opposite – falling into the trap of wedding our rights and dignity to our legal status, and, worse yet, trading that status for the rights and dignity of those left out of the deal. Since 2005, mainstream immigration advocates have pushed for Comprehensive Immigration Reform – a campaign built on the exchange of a bigger border wall, more deportation and devolution for limited legalization. Sage voices have criticized the campaign for monopolizing the debate when we could have been winning small and steady; for shooting our own people in the foot; and for running us into a trade deficit. State and federal laws are stripping greencard holders of economic and legal rights, thereby devaluing the prize itself.

Since 2005, racists who don’t want any legalization have effectively blocked Comprehensive Immigration Reform from passing. Strangely enough, these haters were our saving grace under Bush. But we can’t rely on them much longer. Obama will effectively neutralize Right opposition. We have to take advantage of his strengths on defense, and move to offense. Our job is to make the impossible possible, and the possible inevitable.

Short-term Interventions

If the mainstream is shorthand for those who count, we need to claim the mainstream as our own. We can’t settle for, or grow comfortable with, being in history’s margins. We must spend less time criticizing the proposals on the table and more time unabashedly translating our grassroots demands into legible policy. The Obama Administration has promised to take on Comprehensive Immigration Reform as soon as it finishes health care (which could mean 4 years, or 4 months). Campaign proponents try to scare those of us who won’t benefit into keeping quiet, charging that if we raise our voices we will sabotage the greater good. But our “piecemeal” solutions benefit far more people than their “comprehensive” demand.

Two youth campaigns are models for what we must do more and better. The DREAM Act students are fighting to give undocumented high school graduates who were raised in the United States the right to pay in-state tuition for college and get a greencard. Their bill has more popular support than any other immigration proposal. The Child Citizen Protection Act, born from movement in New York, would allow an immigration judge to consider the best interests of an American child before deporting a parent. Local communities who learn about this bill always say, “This is exactly what we need. Why haven’t we heard about it before?”

To expand progressive possibilities, the immigrant rights and criminal justice movements need to ally immediately. Everyone talks about Black/Brown solidarity. In the progressive labor sector, that means we fight for the rights of all workers, across race and migration status. But Black/Brown solidarity hasn’t translated into a meaningful platform for the victims of mass incarceration.

Learn from Black history. Criminal courts and jails were used to disenfranchise the Black community immediately after their wins in the Civil Rights Movement. In 2006, our people rose into million strong marches in every corner of this country. While our strength was beautiful, our message was not. The most popular sign in those marches was “We Are Not Criminals.” Technically, that’s not true. We are criminals. An Arizona county prosecutor who is securing criminal convictions before sending defendants off to deportation explains, “The policy of requiring a felony conviction for any plea agreement is an important one…That conviction will harm their ability to immigrate here legally and become a citizen…In a sense, it is this office’s attempt to enforce a no-amnesty program. It’s hard for somebody with a felony conviction to receive amnesty down the road for citizenship purposes, so it serves that additional purpose. All the better, as far as I’m concerned.” Meanwhile Homeland Security is tagging our youth as gang members, putting their names into databases that are more permanent than tattoos. You can’t “rehabilitate” yourself out.

What could Black/Brown solidarity against criminalization look like? It could mean ACORN, a respected (and now targeted) grassroots organization with a long history of civic engagement, joining forces with the young and robust National Day Laborer Organizing Network to unseat racist sheriffs who are terrorizing Black and Brown alike.

The alliance of immigrant rights and criminal justice is an explicitly Left intervention, not just a grassroots one. This is work we must do, that does not feel safe for the Democratic Party (given its own tough-on-crime history). There are plenty of reasons it is more strategic (as Saul Alinsky would say) to organize to fix Stop signs than to shut down prisons. You must come from a perspective of radical love and truth to understand the caging of our people as a form of violence that requires symbolic and material intervention.

Finally, we must intensify our direct action. In the real world, devolution looks like a war of attrition. Raids are like air bombs. They target communities, not specific people. Suddenly our people are afraid to walk the streets. Suddenly our ministers and English language teachers are raising bail bonds, visiting jailed congregants and students.

But amidst even the greatest despair, there is the brightest light. Arizona – where immigration and criminal law enforcement are fusing – is not just the nation’s leading laboratory in devolution. It is Ground Zero in organized resistance. In Phoenix, indigenous spiritual leaders rallied citizens to physically hold the line against off-duty police (hired by a racist business owner) who were trying to make day laborers stop seeking work in a parking lot near Home Depot. When White nationalist motorcyclists came driving by, hurling insults and physically pushing their weight into the stand off, the pro-immigrant side didn’t budge. When Joe Arpaio, self-dubbed “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” brought his forces to arrest the day laborers, they still didn’t fold. Instead they videotaped his abuse and called the New York Times editorial board. Suddenly elite newsreaders all over the world were reading about Sheriff Joe, and the paper found itself echoing the grassroots campaign’s demand to stop him.

Liberals placed great hope in Janet Napolitano, as head of Homeland Security, to reign in Sheriff Joe. She used to be governor of Arizona, and knows all too well the causalities of his “crime suppression sweeps.” When it looked like she wasn’t moving fast enough, 5,000 marched in February 2009 to demand help. The Department of Justice gave hope when it announced an investigation into Sheriff Joe. After another 5,000 strong march on May 1^st, featuring Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine, over 1,800 prisoners in Joe’s jails were emboldened to go on hunger strike. They knew people outside had their backs. Criticism culminated with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and 500 civil rights organizations petitioning Obama to stop the program that gave Sheriff Joe his legal cover.

Despite these actions, Napolitano not only denied help. She exported Sheriff Joe’s tactics to other parts of the country. A Phoenix organizer said with a heavy heart, “When we started we thought, ‘if we tell the nation about Sheriff Joe, the nation will come in and help us.’ But the help hasn’t come. And maybe now other sheriffs will copycat.” My hopeful guess is that their organizing has taught us what it takes to get powerful people to care. If devolution is not going away anytime soon, then the rest of us have to follow Phoenix’s lead and expose their brand of “law and order” as the war of attrition that it is.

Flipping the Script

To be crystal clear: I am not advocating that we “open” the borders (the U.S. has two). My point is that so long as immigration is a security issue, to be solved by hawks, jailers and others in the security game, we will never fix this broken system. We’ll make it worse by multiplying error and injustice.

We need to take immigration out of the Department of Homeland Security, and elevate it to a cabinet-level position that manages rather than polices migration. We need federal leadership that can hear and mediate the interests of a range of invested actors – from the day laborer to the business leader, teacher, priest, imam, county sheriff, and even foreign head of state.

The path to this solution is long and rocky. A vehicle we need to get there is muckraking journalism. Homeland Security holds onto information like a toddler clutches his toys. And most journalists – to pressed for time to penetrate the security information bubble – go by the government’s press releases, taking their word for it. Exposés as new data are effective to tip people on the fence into our camp, to move our side to deeper outrage, and school us on the targets of our organizing. Investigative journalism is a field that is dying, but we need to re-invest in it. From Daniel Zwerdling’s groundbreaking report on the death of Richard Rust to the New York Times expose on detainee death three years later, popular awareness of prison gulags and congressional action (or inaction, depending on how you measure) has grown phenomenally.

The call for more investigators is part and parcel of a call for diversified expertise. In my years of organizing, I always wondered why people who want to change the world go to law school. My field’s over-saturation with lawyers messes up our game. For example, our policy experts are focused on the Judiciary Committee. In this moment of economic crisis, we need better ins with Appropriations. ICE is not a volunteer force. The money trail matters even more than the letter of the law. If we had more economists, business leaders and organizers, we’d have more angles into problem-solving.

Third, we must engage mid- and long-term in mass-based organizing. Visionary labor organizer Bhairavi Desai reflects, “Any issue that affects masses of people requires a mass solution.” There are 2.3 million people locked up. Another 2 million have been deported in the last decade, all held in prisons and jails. There’s no shortage of a constituency. There are natural leaders who can anchor prison organizing, like jailhouse lawyers, hunger-strikers, and families on the outside who are taking collect calls from their loved ones and other people’s too. There’s not yet any mass-based prisoner group in the country. If organizing is a field with rigorous methodology, we need to bring it to prisoner work. There are groups trying and making in roads, but we need to talk across the board about how to build a mass base for this sector, which is distinct from labor.

Finally, we need movement vehicles to scale. I am not talking about think tanks that are just like the elite Manhattan Institute, only with our ideology. I mean open spaces of cultural and political transformation that are structured to be cross issue, multi-generational, multi-regional, cross-disciplinary and, as a victorious Salvadoreña leader urges, spaces of “alegria” (profound joy, celebration, dance). The Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Catholic Worker and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee stand out as historical models. We need to adapt them to the 21^st Century. Corporations went transnational a long time ago. But our institutions have resisted crossing borders, out of deference to state boundaries that are pretty porous after all.

Conclusion

History has put the immigrant rights movement in a bind. Our young country used to have a quota system that in practice excluded non-Europeans. In 1965, quotas were opened to Asian and African nations because Congress was pressured by a robust Civil Rights Movement, and needed to look good to the world in the midst of the Cold War. But universalizing quotas did not mean ending them. Numerical limits to the number of people who could come here stayed. Illegality became the central problem of federal immigration policy. Mexicans became the illegals. Thus illegal immigration became, in the words of movement historian Mai Ngai, an “impossible subject…a social reality and a legal impossibility… a person who cannot be and a problem that cannot be solved.”

Today, 45 years later, legalization is the most popular cry of the immigrant working poor. “How can I get a greencard? I just want papers so I can drive here and visit my family back home.” With the nightmare of deportation ever present, it’s no wonder that our people’s first Hope for Change is amnesty under Obama. But given the reality of deportation and devolution – which is making migration status relevant in every waking and even sleeping moment – legalization is becoming less and less strategic. Throwing people over the legal/illegal line doesn’t solve the fact that the non-citizen/citizen divide is deepening.