Immigration and Migration and the Making of a Modern American City

Historical Background

Students will begin their study of contemporary globalization by discussing what the term "globalization" means. During the twentieth century, globalization involved an increasingly dense web of political relationships, economic transactions and cultural influences that cut across the world's peoples, countries, and regions, binding them more tightly together, but also more contentiously. ⁸ While the term globalization may be new, the process was not. Students will be reminded of their earlier study of previous historical periods of "globalization" including the Arab, Mongol, Russian, Chinese, and Ottoman empires; trade routes such as the Silk Road, Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan; the spread of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam which had long linked Eastern hemisphere societies with new rulers, religions, products, diseases and technologies. They will no doubt remember that in the centuries after 1500, European maritime voyages and colonizing efforts launched the Columbian exchange, incorporating the Western hemisphere and inner Africa firmly and permanently into, what many historians argue, was the first genuinely global network of communication, exchange and often exploitation ^. Furthermore, during the nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution took hold and Western nations such as Britain and France began a new round of empire building in Asia and Africa, the global network tightened even more and its role as a catalyst for social and cultural change only increased. In fact, at its height Britain's was the largest empire in history and ruled 1/5 of the world's population. It was the foremost global power for over a century, resulting in a political, cultural, linguistic and legal legacy that was widespread. ⁹ Britain's legacy included imperial circuits of goods, ideas and people that set up post WWII migration of people from former colonies, such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Jamaica that students will see in their film analysis.

Interestingly, given the rapid recent transformation of the world's economy, the decades between the World Wars witnessed a deep contraction of global linkages with international trade, investment and labor migration dropping sharply as major states turned inward, favoring high tariffs and economic autonomy in the face of capitalist economic collapse. The post World War II period saw capitalist victor nations working to avoid this by entering into a set of agreements and institutions including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) forged during the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. This agreement laid the foundation for post war globalization in which rules were negotiated for commercial and financial dealings among capitalist countries while promoting relatively free trade, stable currency linked to the U.S. dollar and high levels of capitalist investment. ¹⁰ Another factor in post-war economic globalization was technology that increased the circulation and exchange of goods, people and information. For instance, containerized shipping, huge oil tankers, and air express services lowered transportation costs while fiber-optic cable and the internet provided communication infrastructure for global economic interaction. Population growth in postcolonial, developing nations helped fuel globalization as they entered the global economy. Commodities traded included agricultural cash crops like coffee grown in Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua and natural resources in the form of oil from Nigeria and minerals such as copper, gold, and bauxite mined in Chile, Peru, and Mexico and Jamaica. Historian Alfred Crosby points out that these nations in the global south are "stuck with the dead-end job of supplying the First World with raw materials, want to industrialize but are starting late with very large populations, already weary ecosystems…" ¹¹ This industrialization gap and structural problems in agriculture as well as unequal standards of living between the global north and south creates the economic climate in which people were pushed to emigrate. ¹²

A further iteration of globalization, neo-liberalism, appeared on the world stage in the 1970's. This period saw the U.S. and Great Britain abandoning earlier political controls on economic activities as political and business leaders increasingly saw the world as a single market. Neo-liberals favored reduced tariffs, free global movement of capital, a mobile and temporary workforce, privatization of state-wide industries, curtailing of government efforts to regulate the economy as well as tax and spending cuts. Neo-liberal policies also favored the private ownership and consolidation of land, which resulted in displacing peasant farmers. ¹³ This displacement of people was augmented by U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War and more recently in the War on Drugs. All these factors fueled Central American and Mexican immigration to the United States. They form a central theme in one of the films students will analyze. ¹⁴

The collapse of the state-controlled communist world at the end of the twentieth century further propelled unrestricted global capitalism. As Jeffrey Frieden states in Global Capitalism, "capitalism was global, and the globe was capitalist". ¹⁵ Some concrete examples of the reach of global capitalism, with which students are familiar, include such well-known transnational corporations (TNC's) as Mattel, Royal Dutch Shell, Sony and General Motors. Indeed, by 2000, 51% of the world's largest economic units were TNC's and not countries! ¹⁶

In such a permissive economic climate these companies moved plants from country to country in search of lower labor costs and the least restrictive environmental regulations. Discussion of the labor needs of TNC's leads to the heart of this curriculum unit. For accompanying the movement of goods and capital in the globalizing world were new patterns of human migration, driven by war, poverty, revolution and the end of empire. An example includes Jews fleeing Europe to Israel in1948, which in turn generated the displacement of Palestinians.

Since the 1960's however, a significant pattern of global migration has featured the movement of people from developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America to industrialized Europe and North America. For example, Pakistanis, Indians, and West Indians went to Great Britain; Algerians and West Africans to France; Turks, and Kurds went to Germany; Filipinos, Koreans, Cubans, Mexicans and Haitians to the U.S.A. The majority of these are labor migrants, who have moved with few skills to escape poverty that resulted from the distorted economies left over from colonialism. Furthermore, British Commonwealth citizens had been encouraged to come to Britain to meet shortages of unskilled labor in several industries in the 1950's. Saskia Sassen in her book The Global City notes that almost half of Afro-Caribbean and Asian entrants settled in London, with the rest settling in other major cities. By 1981, their share of the population rose to 14.6% from 5% in 1971. ¹⁷

In the U.S., the 1965 Immigration Act abolished the National Origins program, limiting immigration to 120,000 per year from the Western Hemisphere and 170,000 in the Eastern hemisphere after 1976, 20,000 from any one country. An unintended result of this Act was that it spurred increased immigration due to family reunification preferences from previously restricted nations. Other migrants are refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, and Haiti fleeing violence and oppression that occurred in the fall-out of U.S. involvement in Cold War geopolitical conflicts. ¹⁸ Indeed, it is clear that these population movements are not random or did not occur by accident, but are part of earlier political, economic and historical processes and represent an important thread of continuity in world history. These postcolonial migrations of former colonial "subjects" to their "mother" countries will be evident as students analyze the films under consideration.

Between 1971 and 2000, 20 million migrated to the U.S. legally, with millions more arriving illegally. This categorization of "unauthorized migrants" will prove to be a major theme of the fiction films studied. It is estimated that there were 11.1 million in 2005, up from around 2.5 million in 1990. Unauthorized migrants comprise 30% of all immigrants in 2005 with Mexico contributing 60%, by far the largest group. The next largest group is from El Salvador, barely 1/10 as large. ¹⁹ Once in the U.S., migrants provide manual labor in the fields, factories and homes of the well-to-do. Typically, these migrant laborers earn higher wages in the U.S. than in their home countries but face higher living costs in food, housing and transportation. Even so, they will send money back to their families, representing Mexico's largest source of foreign exchange.

Another important concept that will be explored in the films is that of the "border". Borders are not simply a territorial filter, but define political citizenship in the nation state. Indeed, "the exclusion of migrants helps define the privileges and the limitations of citizenship, and close attention to the border (physical and metaphorical) reveals much about how we make sense of ourselves. ²⁰ A further aspect of the border, considered by scholars such as Alexandra Hall, is the use of detention centers by the U.K. and the U.S. She describes detention centers as the border "stretched". They serve as spaces where people live, are confined, selected and displaced. Detention centers aim to create distance from "others" who threaten the desired social order. They hold immigrants who overstay visas, are waiting for asylum adjudication, or who have arrived without documentation. In the U.K. in 2011, 2,419 people were held in immigration detention. The U.S. held 230,000 in the same year. ²¹ While the films in this unit do not actually show detention centers, students will certainly have recently viewed images of Central American children being held in Texas and Arizona, sleeping on hastily arranged rows of cots.

Other historians have analyzed the solidification of the border between the U.S. and Mexico as the result of historical processes including the racializing of immigration. George Sanchez notes the creation of the modern version of the border during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Sanchez says of the border, "It became a much more rigid line of demarcation, as the intricate economic relationship between Mexican labor and American capital was perpetuated through the labor recruitment agents." ²² Mae Ngai argues that between 1925 and 1965,

" a process…reconstructed the 'lower races of Europe' into white ethnic Americans….Mexicans, walking across the border emerged as the quintessential act of illegal immigration. The method of Mexican's illegal entry could thus be perceived as "criminal" and…Combined with the construction of Mexicans as migratory agricultural laborers…that perception gave powerful sway to the notion that Mexicans had no rightful presence on United States territory, no rightful claim of belonging." ²³

Students will view portrayals of the "border" and the rituals that accompany immigrants crossing the border. People present passports, apply for visas, submit to security checks, offer biometrics, all of which are rituals that "materialize" the authority of the security state. ²⁴

For students, it may come as a surprise that the U.S. is not unique in drawing migrants. This unit will encourage inquiry and discussion about the extent of immigration around the world. For instance, the U.S. was the focus of world migration in the 19 ^th and 20 ^th centuries, drawing 70% of European migration and more recently 27 million arrived between 1950 and 2001. However, the U.S. is not the only "immigrant nation". It ranks low at 12 percent of total population that is foreign-born. This is much less than the Middle East nations, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Kazakhstan. In fact, at its highest, in 1910 with 14.7%, this is still lower than Argentina at 33% and Canada at 22%. In addition, there has been an increase in female migrants so that they outnumbered males by the 1980's as a result of increasing family reunification and labor migration. ²⁵ The number and diversity of immigrants to L.A. and London featured in the films will help to make this phenomenon of world immigration more concrete for students.

Finally, the films will be windows on the beliefs that people have about immigration. What does the presence of migrants from the global south represent for the receiving countries of the global north? Has there been cultural and political conflict as a result of this relatively recent reversed direction of immigration in the late 20 ^th century? Are there differences between the U.S. and European view of immigration? Does the pluralist tradition accommodating hyphenated identities distinguish the U.S. from Europe who embraces full cultural assimilation? ²⁶ All of these questions will be highlighted and considered by students as they study the films.

Once students have reviewed the basic outlines of globalization and changes in migration patterns, they will be encouraged to consider and to reflect on how these themes of unauthorized immigration, the dual labor market, the border, and gender differences are portrayed in the course material.