The Creative Class and the Value of Tolerance and Diversity

While eristic-ragemail has focused on exploring the flawed and racist thinking behind nativist and anti-immigrant commentators there is a flip side to this coin. Namely, commentators have pointed out that cosmopolitan and tolerant centers are more vital economically and culturally than less-tolerant places. The most well-known proponent of this theory is Richard Florida, Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, and author two national bestsellers, The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class. His books before that, especially The Breakthrough Illusion and Beyond Mass Production, paved the way for his provocative looks at how creativity is revolutionizing the global economy. Florida basically posits that cities with greater tolerance and diverse environments advance while those that are intolerant and narrow-minded will wilt. It is a provocative idea.

Florida maintains a blog where he sets forth many of his ideas. (http://creativeclass.typepad.com) Of most interest to this site is a view that pro-diversity and a pro-immigration stance is good for the country and serves as an antidote to the daily harangues set out by the nativist crowd. See for example, Great video of Google's VP for People Operations Laszlo Bock -- a Romanian immigrant -- testifying on Capitol Hill regarding the practical benefits of immigration to Google and the US. It is a great testimony and confirms much of what we know on immigration and talent. (http://creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/2007/06/google_testifie.html) Florida posits a host of provocative ideas which run counter to so much established anti-urbanist and anti-immigrant cant, so pushed on Americans by right-wing radio and cable-vision “news shows.” One article that I found especially intriguing was his analysis of how the neo-cons actually started as anti-urbanists and only later became associated with a hawkish foreign policy. (http://creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/2006/12/neoconservatism.html); “Tearing Down the Towers: The Right's Vision of an America Without Cities,” By Jeremy Adam Smith, (The Public Eye Magazine - Winter 2006) One Nation, Two Futures? (http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v21n1/smith_no_cities.html). For those looking to affirm a progressive and more humanitarian view on immigration and other issues, I strongly advocate giving his articles a read.

Viva Barack Obama!!

Floor Statement of Senator Barack Obama on Immigration Reform

Monday, April 3, 2006

Printable Format

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to enter the debate on comprehensive immigration reform. It is a debate that will touch on the basic questions of morality, the law, and what it means to be an American.

I know that this debate evokes strong passions on all sides. The recent peaceful but passionate protests that we saw all across the country--500,000 in Los Angeles and 100,000 in my hometown of Chicago--are a testament to this fact, as are the concerns of millions of Americans about the security of our borders.

But I believe we can work together to pass immigration reform in a way that unites the people in this country, not in a way that divides us by playing on our worst instincts and fears.

Like millions of Americans, the immigrant story is also my story. My father came here from Kenya, and I represent a State where vibrant immigrant communities ranging from Mexican to Polish to Irish enrich our cities and neighborhoods. So I understand the allure of freedom and opportunity that fuels the dream of a life in the United States. But I also understand the need to fix a broken system.

When Congress last addressed this issue comprehensively in 1986, there were approximately 4 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. That number had grown substantially when Congress again addressed the issue in 1996. Today, it is estimated that there are more than 11 million undocumented aliens living in our country.

The American people are a welcoming and generous people. But those who enter our country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law. And because we live in an age where terrorists are challenging our borders, we simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked. Americans are right to demand better border security and better enforcement of the immigration laws.

The bill the Judiciary Committee has passed would clearly strengthen enforcement. I will repeat that, because those arguing against the Judiciary Committee bill contrast that bill with a strong enforcement bill. The bill the Judiciary Committee passed clearly strengthens enforcement.

To begin with, the agencies charged with border security would receive new technology, new facilities, and more people to stop, process, and deport illegal immigrants.
But while security might start at our borders, it doesn't end there. Millions of undocumented immigrants live and work here without our knowing their identity or their background. We need to strike a workable bargain with them. They have to acknowledge that breaking our immigration laws was wrong. They must pay a penalty, and abide by all of our laws going forward. They must earn the right to stay over a 6-year period, and then they must wait another 5 years as legal permanent residents before they become citizens.

But in exchange for accepting those penalties, we must allow undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows and step on a path toward full participation in our society. In fact, I will not support any bill that does not provide this earned path to citizenship for the undocumented population--not just for humanitarian reasons; not just because these people, having broken the law, did so for the best of motives, to try and provide a better life for their children and their grandchildren; but also because this is the only practical way we can get a handle on the population that is within our borders right now.

To keep from having to go through this difficult process again in the future, we must also replace the flow of undocumented immigrants coming to work here with a new flow of guestworkers. Illegal immigration is bad for illegal immigrants and bad for the workers against whom they compete.

Replacing the flood of illegals with a regulated stream of legal immigrants who enter the United States after background checks and who are provided labor rights would enhance our security, raise wages, and improve working conditions for all Americans.

But I fully appreciate that we cannot create a new guestworker program without making it as close to impossible as we can for illegal workers to find employment. We do not need new guestworkers plus future undocumented immigrants. We need guestworkers instead of undocumented immigrants.

Toward that end, American employers need to take responsibility. Too often illegal immigrants are lured here with a promise of a job, only to receive unconscionably low wages. In the interest of cheap labor, unscrupulous employers look the other way when employees provide fraudulent U.S. citizenship documents. Some actually call and place orders for undocumented workers because they don't want to pay minimum wages to American workers in surrounding communities. These acts hurt both American workers and immigrants whose sole aim is to work hard and get ahead. That is why we need a simple, foolproof, and mandatory mechanism for all employers to check the legal status of new hires. Such a mechanism is in the Judiciary Committee bill.

And before any guestworker is hired, the job must be made available to Americans at a decent wage with benefits. Employers then need to show that there are no Americans to take these jobs. I am not willing to take it on faith that there are jobs that Americans will not take. There has to be a showing. If this guestworker program is to succeed, it must be properly calibrated to make certain that these are jobs that cannot be filled by Americans, or that the guestworkers provide particular skills we can't find in this country.

I know that dealing with the undocumented population is difficult, for practical and political reasons. But we simply cannot claim to have dealt with the problems of illegal immigration if we ignore the illegal resident population or pretend they will leave voluntarily. Some of the proposed ideas in Congress provide a temporary legal status and call for deportation, but fail to answer how the government would deport 11 million people. I don't know how it would be done. I don't know how we would line up all the buses and trains and airplanes and send 11 million people back to their countries of origin. I don't know why it is that we expect they would voluntarily leave after having taken the risk of coming to this country without proper documentation.

I don't know many police officers across the country who would go along with the bill that came out of the House, a bill that would, if enacted, charge undocumented immigrants with felonies, and arrest priests who are providing meals to hungry immigrants, or people who are running shelters for women who have been subject to domestic abuse. I cannot imagine that we would be serious about making illegal immigrants into felons, and going after those who would aid such persons.

That approach is not serious. That is symbolism, that is demagoguery. It is important that if we are going to deal with this problem, we deal with it in a practical, commonsense way. If temporary legal status is granted but the policy says these immigrants are never good enough to become Americans, then the policy that makes little sense.

I believe successful, comprehensive immigration reform can be achieved by building on the work of the Judiciary Committee. The Judiciary Committee bill combines some of the strongest elements of Senator Hagel's border security proposals with the realistic workplace and earned-citizenship program proposed by Senators McCain and Kennedy.

Mr. President, I will come to the floor over the next week to offer some amendments of my own, and to support amendments my colleagues will offer. I will also come to the floor to argue against amendments that contradict our tradition as a nation of immigrants and as a nation of laws.

As FDR reminded the Nation at the 50th anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, those who landed at Ellis Island ``were the men and women who had the supreme courage to strike out for themselves, to abandon language and relatives, to start at the bottom without influence, without money, and without knowledge of life in a very young civilization.''

It behooves us to remember that not every single immigrant who came into the United States through Ellis Island had proper documentation. Not every one of our grandparents or great-grandparents would have necessarily qualified for legal immigration. But they came here in search of a dream, in search of hope. Americans understand that, and they are willing to give an opportunity to those who are already here, as long as we get serious about making sure that our borders actually mean something.

Today's immigrants seek to follow in the same tradition of immigration that has built this country. We do ourselves and them a disservice if we do not recognize the contributions of these individuals. And we fail to protect our Nation if we do not regain control over our immigration system immediately.

Nativism's Racist Proponents Exposed

In an extremely well-researched piece, Heidie Beirich (Where Anti-Immigrant Zealots Like Lou Dobbs Get Their 'Facts' - http://www.alternet.org/story/70489/?page=entire) exposes the racist strain that informs the "respected" advocates of anti-immigrant hysteria such as the organization Federation for American Immigration Reform ("FAIR") which is often quoted in mainstream media such as the New York Times or National Public Radio. Beirich dissects the tangle of neo-Nazis who populate seemingly mainstream anti-immigrant organizations.

At the center of the Tanton web is the nonprofit Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the most important organization fueling the backlash against immigration. Founded by Tanton in 1979, FAIR has long been marked by anti-Latino and anti-Catholic attitudes. It has mixed this bigotry with a fondness for eugenics, the idea of breeding better humans discredited by its Nazi associations. It has accepted $1.2 million from an infamous, racist eugenics foundation. It has employed officials in key positions who are also members of white supremacist groups. Recently, it has promoted racist conspiracy theories about Mexico's secret designs on the American Southwest and an alternative theory alleging secret plans to merge the United States, Mexico and Canada. Just last February, FAIR President Dan Stein sought "advice" from the leaders of a racist Belgian political party.

FAIR, which has consistently been treated as a mainstream advocacy group is rife with eugenitist nuts:

Probably the best-known evidence of FAIR's extremism is its acceptance of funds from a notorious, New York City-based hate group, the Pioneer Fund. In the mid-1980s, when FAIR's budgets were still in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the group reached out to Pioneer Fund, which was established in 1937 to promote the racial stock of the original colonists, finance studies of race and intelligence, and foster policies of "racial betterment." (Pioneer has concentrated on studies meant to show that blacks are less intelligent than whites, but it has also backed nativist groups like ProjectUSA, run by former FAIR board member Craig Nelsen.)

Marginal extremist groups are identified as such in most media, however, such is not the case with FAIR and other anti-immigrant groups. The problem is that such groups hijack the seemingly legitimate fears of otherwise rational citizens for their racist agenda. While a portion of the U.S. population is racist many who have been duped into supporting organizations like FAIR do not realize the contribution to organizations that preach hatred.

Hiring Haters

In late 2006, FAIR hired as its western field representative, a key organizing position, a man named Joseph Turner. Turner was likely attractive to FAIR because he wrote what turned out to be a sort of model anti-illegal immigrant ordinance for the city of San Bernardino, Calif. Based on Turner's work, FAIR wrote a version of the law that is now promoted to many other cities. (The law almost certainly violates the Constitution, but that has not stopped many municipalities' interest.)

Turner made one of his more controversial remarks, amounting to a defense of white separatism. "I can make the argument that just because one believes in white separatism that that does not make them a racist," Turner wrote in 2005. "I can make the argument that someone who proclaims to be a white nationalist isn't necessarily a white supremacist. I don't think that standing up for your 'kind' or 'your race' makes you a bad person." The Southern Poverty Law Center has listed Save Our State as a hate group since it appeared in 2005.

Turner's predecessor in the FAIR organizing post, Rick Oltman, was cut from the same cloth. Oltman has been described as a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) in the publications of that hate group, which is directly descended from the segregationist White Citizens Councils and has described blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity."

Lou Dobbs and most of the Republican presidential field give such racism a rational face. Unfortunately, many do not realize that they are been recruited to advance a racist agenda that would do the NAZIs’ proud. Such is the state of discourse on immigration.

Nativism's Apologist

Now that the Republican Party has tethered itself firmly to a nativist immigration policy (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/17/071217fa_fact_lizza) it is worth noting that the present wave of nativism did not originate full blown out of the mouth of Tom Tancredo. Although the United States has had waves of nativism stretching all the way back to the founding of the nation (The Alien Sedition Acts 1798) the current wave of nativist animus is clearly aimed at Latinos. It is fair to say that in large measure, this nativism is nothing short of racially charged animus against brown-skinned Latinos. Contrary to much commentary this nativism did not originate on the part of rednecks, poor whites or the African-American community. Nativism is an ideology put forward by elites in order to divide communities which otherwise have common interests. The foremost in-house philosopher of the nativist ideology is the academic Samuel Huntington.

Huntington: The High Priest of the New Nativism

There is much that is odious in Samuel Huntington but the worst is a relentless racism that is targeted at almost anyone who is “non-Western” and includes Muslims, Chinese, Africans and most pointedly Hispanics. Huntington reserves a great deal of his vituperation against Latinos. His disdain for Hispanic culture is almost pathological but then again so are his positions on other issues. Huntington, for example, provided the theoretical basis for carpet-bombing Vietnam – it will urbanize the peasants who support the Viet Cong. As well he promoted the idea that the best kind of government for developing countries was the monolithic authoritarian single party state exemplified in the pitiful Mexican dictatorship that was the PRI’s 90 year rule. Not one to fade away, Huntington provided much of the neo-con garbage that justified the West’s war with Islam.

Huntington first gave voice to his anti-Hispanic views in a 1993 article for Foreign Affairs entitled "The Clash of Civilizations?" It “immediately attracted a surprising amount of attention and reaction. Because the article was intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about "a new phase" in world politics after the end of the cold war.” Edward Said, Nation, October 4, 2001). This article was expanded into the 1996 book, “The Clash of Civilizations and The Remaking of World Order.” It is at the end of the book that Huntington begins to promote a pointed nativist ideology against Hispanics. The book was thoroughly trashed by the late scholar, Eduard Said in a review for the Nation Magazine. (“The Clash of Ignorance” posted October 4, 2001). (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011022/said) Said demonstrated the inherent racism in Huntington’s arguments.

Most of the argument … relied on a vague notion of something Huntington called "civilization identity" and "the interactions among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations," of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion's share of his attention. In this belligerent kind of thought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in its title, "The Roots of Muslim Rage." In both articles, the personification of enormous entities called "the West" and "Islam" is recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Pluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary. Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization, or for the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam Islam.

Huntington takes on the role of caricaturing the inferior civilizations such as Islam or Latin America. He makes no real effort to flesh out the elements of these “civilizations” much less in providing any coherent definition of his use of the term “civilization.” All this mediocrity was applauded by various establishment high priests as oracular pronouncements.

In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing. This far less visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted warfare that "the clash of civilizations" argues is the reality.

(Said, The Nation). This, of course, is not accidental. Ludicrous though Huntington’s ideas may be they provide a framework which justifies a whole range of hateful policies, not the least of which is the war with Iraq.

Uncountable are the editorials in every American and European newspaper and magazine of note adding to this vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse, each use of which is plainly designed not to edify but to inflame the reader's indignant passion as a member of the "West," and what we need to do. Churchillian rhetoric is used inappropriately by self-appointed combatants in the West's, and especially America's, war against its haters, despoilers, destroyers, with scant attention to complex histories that defy such reductiveness and have seeped from one territory into another, in the process overriding the boundaries that are supposed to separate us all into divided armed camps.

(Said, The Nation, emphasis mine)

Vitriolic Anti-Hispanic Tome Penned by Huntington

In April of 2004, Huntington wrote his nativist tome against Latinos entitled, “The Hispanic Challenge,” Foreign Policy, March/April 2004 (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/gems/culturalagency1/SamuelHuntingtonTheHispanicC.pdf). Huntington makes no secret of his fears. We, the “white, British and Protestant” are threatened in every way possible: “values, institutions and culture.”

Most Americans see the creed as the crucial element of their national identity. The creed, however, was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. Key elements of that culture include the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, including the responsibility of rulers and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a “city on a hill.”

Nothing less than “heaven on earth” is threatened. Notice the facile values that “we Americans” are said to possess and which are presumably absent in Hispanics – Christianity, religious commitment, the work ethic, etc. Values which are not only ambiguous but which are arguably as present in the Hispanic culture as they are in the also-vaguely defined “Anglo-Protestant culture.” Using the same loose paradigm that defined his “civilization” tome, Huntington employs it to argue against the brown menace. He sets up a synthetic civilization that is alleged to have existed and given us a unitary culture. However, the civil rights movements changed that and consequently, “Americans now see and endorse their country as multiethnic and multiracial. As a result, American identity is now defined in terms of culture and creed.” This pseudo-liberal verbiage is intended as a set-up for what is threatened – a monolithic “other” as in civilization- which will wipe out “our culture and our creed.” From here on, Huntington is not so much interested in giving any rigor to these disordered ideas. Rather, Huntington sets forth the familiar elements of the Tancredo nativist framework, a framework that is not intellectual but rather puffery giving comfort to bigotry.

Huntington is not a historian or an economist: he traffics in buzzwords and speaking engagements, the Washington equivalent of a corporate motivational speaker, a Tony Robbins of political power. He offers not a narrative or a specific analysis but a paradigm, a deliberate oversimplification, an effort to find some facts to fit a pattern rather than finding the patterns in a wider range of facts. The problem is even with a decent paradigm, you wouldn’t know when it applies and when it doesn’t. His work’s success is partly owed to being a book of fancy-talk that has the virtue of telling the hardheaded what they think they already know; it gains much by not being read. His secret seems to be that he predicts things that are already happening: warning about a conflict with China, for example, which is hardly a replacement for the Cold War mentality; it is nothing more than an extension of it. Essentially Huntington has written another perennially disposable policy book about the coming war with the East, a work of fortune-telling that will seem prescient at times depending on how things turn out and is pernicious to the extent that it can blind us or limit our expectations.

“Your New Enemies,” by Said Shirazi, www.dissidentvoice.org, November 3, 2002.

Although the foregoing analysis should be enough to discredit Huntington as anything but a bigoted hack it is worth exploring how he seeks to demonize Hispanics in his racist tome, “The Hispanic Challenge.” Huntington starts off by creating a false dichotomy that posits an “us” and a “them.” The us is vaguely referred to as the “Anglo-Protestant” country and creed. In contra to this he slips around the issue of Catholicism which is animating his characterization of the Hispanic community. Thus he posits a historical danger: “would the US be [the] same if settled by French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics” then we would not be the Anglo-Protestant United States but instead fall to become Mexico, Brazil or Quebec. In so doing he sidesteps a couple of historical facts that demolish his narrative, namely the fact that the U.S. was indeed settled by substantial numbers of Catholics, most from Ireland, Italy, Poland and other countries. So much was the immigration of Catholics that Catholicism is today the largest denomination in this country comprising 25% of the population. By this account, Hispanic Catholics should fit in quite well in the United States.

Huntington is not a historian or an economist: he traffics in buzzwords

Nor does Huntington deal with other facts that do not fit his narrative. Are the 15% of the population that identifies itself as atheist or agnostic not “American?” What of the Jews and Muslims. Huntington makes much of supposed dual loyalties by Hispanics but nowhere does he mention the dual loyalties of Jews and Israel. Nor does he ever deal with the fact that this nation has always had discrete minorities who chose not to be part of the vague “Anglo-Protestant” majority, such as Jews, Muslims, Mormons, or Mennonites, amongst others. And what of the divisions caused by racism and the legacy of slavery. It can hardly be said that the Anglo-Protestant majority welcomed the freed African-American slaves with open arms. There is no “traditional identity” which unites the oppressor and the oppressed.

But Huntington makes facile use of this supposed “traditional identity” to countenance its supposed peril at the hands of Hispanic hordes. Leaving aside for a moment that this country has had nativist waves going back to the founding of this country and that such nativism has countenanced violence, segregation and deportation of French Catholics, Chinese, Irish, Southern Europeans, Germans, Japanese and earlier generations of Hispanics, we are left with very little to the Huntington’s concept of traditional identity. To the contrary, Huntington’s vitriol is in keeping with previous period of anti-immigrant hysteria.

Huntington trades in racist stereotypes: "no... Mexican... believes in 'education or hard work...'"

Given the fallacious assumptions underlying his argument, Huntington retreats to racist stereotypes – namely the lazy Mexican. An Anglo-Protestant “work ethic” is counterposed to the supposed "mañana syndrome” that lazy Mexicans allegedly adhere to. “Author Robert Kaplan quotes Alex Villa, a third-generation Mexican American in Tucson, Arizona, as saying that he knows almost no one in the Mexican community of South Tucson who believes in “education and hard work” as the way to material prosperity and is thus willing to “buy into America.” This disingenuous use of the racist stereotype does not bother Huntington who then proceeds to argue that Hispanics are undermining our standard of living by taking jobs at lower pay from Americans. I doubt that Huntington even sees the contradiction in his argument since such bigotry very much informs his views.

What is most disturbing about the Samuel Huntington’s fallacious and racist diatribe is its respectability in mainstream circles. These articles are published in the leading academic journals on foreign affairs. As noted earlier they were warmly received and nary a mainstream commentator bothered to note the logical lapses in Huntington’s pieces. Were it not for leftist commentators Huntington’s words would be, as they are to the Republican right, gospel truth. These are not merely the rantings of an obscure academic. They are the assumptions which now inform the so-called immigration debate and they form the foundation of the resurgent anti-Latino nativism. As well, it is indisputable that Samuel P. Huntington is a racist.