Re: border controls

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a border controls,
el 29 Jul 00, a las 13:37, Philip Ferguson dijo:

> Tony Abdo wrote:
>
> >But San Diego and Tijuana are one gigantic metropolitan area with
> >about 5.5 million population now.     What has been the record in
> >esablishing a Left presence in this area that jointly works together
> >in both sides of the border?
>
>
> I've found Tony's comments on the 'border question' really
> interesting.  I don't read GLW or 'Workers World' so I don't want to
> comment on whether they give sufficient priority to the border issue,
> other than to say that I had the impression that both the DSP and WWP
> probably had pretty good records on the issue.
>
> But leaving that aside, I was quite fascinated by Tony's general
> comments. Although I knew San Diego and Tijuana were just across the
> border from each other, I had no idea that they constituted one big
> metropolitan area with this many people.  Wouldn't this be the next
> biggest urban area north of the Rio Grande,  after Mexico City, New
> York, Los Angeles and Chicago?

Yes, I was stunned by the discovery, myself. Probably this urban area
is not the hidden large agglomerations along the USA-LatinAmerica
border (of course, 5.5. M people are a lot of people, but in Texas
along the River there must be other important cases). Could Tony give
us some more figures? Towns on the USA side of the Rio Grande,
particularly near the Gulf, are also strongly Latino (there are some
cases where Latino population is even larger than "normal" USA
population).

...

>
> In recent conversations with a few friends in other countries, I have
> found that they have been thinking that immigration controls are
> becoming an increasingly important issue and one that can really
> challenge both the political requirements and prerogatives of
> imperialist capital - which is to keep the impoverished masses of the
> Third World out of the First World - and the backward, chauvinist
> ideas which afflict large sections of the working class (especially
> the white working class) in the First World.

This is very strongly true, particularly for the second part.
European workers, specially those in countries that have been
receiving massive amounts of foreign people lately, have shown
various symptoms of chauvinism.  We should be, of course, for OPEN
FRONTIERS FOR PEOPLE, thus affording those of our own camp to enjoy
the openness of frontiers that now exists for the bourgeoisie.

There is, however, a second point to be raised here. And it is the
point that those who leave a country are as a rule the most energetic
and the bolder ones, and they carry with themselves many of the best
heads and hands. This was what happenned to Italy, for example,
during many centuries before the Unification. And this is happenning
to many Latin American countries, which are suffering of a hemorhagia
towards the USA and, in some layers, Europe.

At the same time that we fight for an open borders policy, we should
also fight for a redress of the economic situation that forces people
to emigrate. A good example of unity of the diverse...



>
> In Australia and New Zealand, we don't have land borders with any
> other countries, so it is easier for our ruling classes to maintain
> the fiction that borders are 'natural frontiers' and to rigidly
> control and restrict the entry of Pacific Islanders and poor Asians.
> But even here, there is a substantial tightening up going on.  In NZ,
> certainly, the left hasn't even begun to take this on board.
>
> Cheers,
> Phil
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Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxx
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