[Marxism] Continuity and change in Caribbean immigration

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Fascinating review of Caribbean immigration into the
United States and the positive role so many of these
immigrants play in the life of the United States today.
Numerous leaders of the Black struggle have roots in the
Caribbean, like Marcus Garvey, Richard B. Moore, Malcolm X
and Stokeley Carmicheal among many, many others.

("While the largest Caribbean immigrant sources to the
U.S. are Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Haiti,
U.S.-citizen migrants also come from Puerto Rico and the
Virgin Islands."

("While in the 1990s the African American population
increased by 10 percent, to 31 million, the number of
Blacks from the Caribbean increased by 63 percent, to over
1.5 million.")
=========================================================

Continuity and change in Caribbean immigration  
Editions July 9, 2005
Author: Martin Frazier  
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/07/05 14:18
http://pww.org/article/view/7359


NEW YORK - On June 27 the House of Representatives passed a
bill introduced by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) to designate
a national "Caribbean American Heritage Month."

"Establishing Caribbean American Heritage Month will
celebrate the contributions of millions of Caribbean
Americans to the United States since the inception of the
country," Lee said, arguing for the bill.

The Caribbean is the source of the U.S.'s earliest and
largest Black immigrant group and the primary source of
growth of the Black population in the U.S. The region has
exported more of its people than any other region of the
world since the abolition of slavery in 1834. The fact that
there are close to 50 Caribbean carnivals throughout North
America attests to the permanence of the Caribbean
immigration experience. According to a report by Lee's
office, from 1820 to 2002 more than 68 million people
emigrated from the Caribbean region to the U.S.

Caribbean music, such as soca, calypso, reggae, compass and
now reggaeton, is having a profound impact on U.S. popular
culture. Other Caribbean cultural expressions, like food,
dance and art, are becoming established in mainstream
America. The prominence of first-and second-generation
Caribbean figures in U.S. labor and grassroots politics for
many decades also testifies to the long tradition and
established presence of the Caribbean population.

Caribbean immigrants add to U.S. tapestry

Today many Caribbean workers can be found in the hospital,
construction, service and hotel industries, but there is
also a growing professional sector. Estimates of the
Caribbean population in the U.S. range upwards from 2.6
million, depending on how one defines the Caribbean.

While the largest Caribbean immigrant sources to the U.S.
are Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Haiti,
U.S.-citizen migrants also come from Puerto Rico and the
Virgin Islands. These U.S.-colonized territories are major
gateways to the United States. A large segment of Black
migrants from Central America (Panama, Nicaragua, Costa
Rica and Belize, for example) are also identifiably
Caribbean. It's part of the legacy of the more than
one-quarter million laborers who migrated from the
English-speaking Caribbean to Central America between 1881
and 1915, reflecting, in essence, the drive to build the
Panama Canal.

"The estimate of undocumented Caribbean immigrants far
exceeds those of documented immigrants," said George Irish
of the City University of New York Caribbean Research
Center. Irish said that for a variety of reasons the U.S.
census tends not to reflect accurate statistics on
Caribbean immigrants. During the 1990s, Caribbean island
nations, with a population totaling 35 million, sent more
than 1 million immigrants to the U.S. He added that
political representation for Caribbean communities has not
yet reached its potential.

Black population growth

According to the Mumford Center at the State University of
New York at Albany, 25 percent of the Black population
growth between 1990 and 2000 was attributable to newcomers
from Africa and the Caribbean.

While in the 1990s the African American population
increased by 10 percent, to 31 million, the number of
Blacks from the Caribbean increased by 63 percent, to over
1.5 million.

The New York metropolitan area is the destination of most
English-Caribbean immigrants, but emigration to Florida has
increased during the last two decades. It is estimated that
6 of 10 Caribbean immigrants live in the New York, Miami
and Ft. Lauderdale metropolitan areas. More than half of
immigrants from Barbados, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, and
Trinidad live in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. The
Caribbean Research Center cites data indicating slightly
less than half the population of Grenada lives in Brooklyn.

Historic roots of Caribbean-U.S. immigration

The history of African-Caribbean immigration to the United
States is a long one. It can be traced back to slavery when
the British colonies in the Americas shifted enslaved
Africans to different territories, as the demands of
capital and the plantation economy dictated.

For example, one of the earliest such exchanges was
Barbadians who were taken by their British owners to South
Carolina during the 17th century. Many of the earliest
Africans to arrive in what would become the United States
were seasoned men, women and children from the Caribbean
islands.

Immigration from the region to the U.S. gained momentum
during the World War II when 50,000 Caribbeans, Black and
white, arrived in the 1940s, taking advantage of the
rapidly expanding war economy and post-war economic growth.
Thousands more came as legal migrant workers brought to
work in agriculture, primarily on Florida's sugar
plantations.

By the end of the war, thousands of contract workers from
the Caribbean were employed as "W2 workers" in nearly 1,500
localities in 36 states. Many, especially in Florida,
toiled in intolerable conditions. Many engaged in acts of
open rebellion, ignoring the no-strike clause in their
contracts and engaging in other forms of resistance. Others
broke their strict contracts and fled from their assigned
jobs to other opportunities.

Language and geography

CUNY's Irish sees proximity to the U.S. and fluency in
English as reasons for the disproportionate numbers of
Caribbean outflows to the U.S. The civil rights struggles -
mostly borne by native-born African Americans - and the
passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Amendments
led to a surge in Caribbean immigration to the United
States.

"Since the civil rights legislation that opened the doors
to free flow of Caribbean immigrants, we have had a
dramatic increase in numbers," Irish said. "Prior to 1965
we had a mostly middle class migration going to the U.S.
for education and to join family - pretty much urban
travelers. The post-1965 period saw a tremendous influx of
rural working-class migrants." A new wave of working-class
immigration began in the mid-1980s, peaking in the 1990s.

The collapse of agriculture in many islands has devastated
their economies. The growing replacement of agriculture by
tourism in the Eastern Caribbean has greatly increased the
urban population and led to neglect of rural communities as
well as greater migration to the U.S. from the Caribbean
countryside.

Capitalist globalization

The influx of direct, capital-intensive and labor-intensive
foreign investment has accelerated the push to migrate out
of the region, to the extent that these investments
overwhelm small-scale agriculture and manufacturing and
displace workers who must then seek jobs elsewhere.



St. Lucia's popular calypso artist, Mighty Pep, laments on
the impact on his country:

All-inclusive tax elusive
and truth is
they're sucking up we juices
buying up every strip of beach
every treasured spot we reach
for Lucians to enter
for lunch or for dinner
we need reservations, passport and visa
and if you sell near the hotel
I wish you well
they will yell and kick you out to hell

(From the Calypso song "Like an Alien in We Own Land")



Capitalist globalization has had a lasting and very
powerful impact on the English-speaking Caribbean, and the
cultural reach of the U.S. corporate media is very strong.

"Particularly because much of the Afro-Caribbean population
is English-speaking," it has been easier for "American
media to penetrate directly to them," said John Logan,
professor of sociology at SUNY Albany. U.S. cultural
influence has been greater in the Caribbean than in many
other parts of the world, he said.

U.S. cultural products - film, cable TV and music -
predominate in a region where ownership of the means of
cultural production is minimal. Many in the Caribbean share
the same television programming with the U.S. This shared
cultural space has also been a migration pull to the U.S.
Many have argued that this pervasive U.S. cultural presence
and the extensive kinship, ethnic and employer networks
have created widespread expectations of settlement in the
U.S. For millions in Caribbean territories, the United
States is now an urban alternative to their home capitals.

Economics decisive

But economic questions are decisive. Bill Fletcher Jr.,
president of TransAfrica, said in a special appeal for
Black solidarity with the Immigrant Worker's Freedom Ride
in 2004, "What is all too often missed in discussions about
immigration is that the massive global flow of people over
the last 20 years is the direct result of the legacy of
colonialism, wars and economic crises driven overwhelmingly
by governments and corporations," he said.

"To put it more bluntly," Fletcher said, "immigrants in
huge numbers come to the United States for a better life
precisely because the U.S. and U.S.-supported regimes have
made life in their countries of origin often inhospitable."

Solidarity and shared experience

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), in an interview with The New
York Times, indicated that solidarity and shared experience
are salient features of the African American experience.
"[African Americans] have joined forces over the years with
Africans and people from the Caribbean to fight colonialism
and poverty," he said. He pointed out that the colonial
struggles in the Caribbean and the African continent were
similar to the patterns of struggle and degradation that
Blacks in the U.S. experienced.

According to the conservative, Washington-based American
Enterprise Institute, the United States has intervened in
the Caribbean Basin with military force over 60 times in
support of its declared interests in the region, more than
anywhere else in the world. These military actions included
some lengthy occupations: 25 years in Haiti, nine years
each in the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The invasion and
occupation of Grenada in 1983 coincided with a great wave
of population outflow from the Eastern Caribbean to the
U.S.

Brain drain and remittances

This population outflow has had a particularly negative
effect on the small island economies, creating a real
"brain drain" as the hemisphere's countries with the least
resources continue to supply the U.S. with thousands of
skilled workers. Recently there has been active recruitment
of teachers from the region to better help serve the
thousands of Caribbean immigrants in the New York City
school system.

Speaking of some of the underlying economic factors, CUNY's
George Irish said, "It really shows to what extent
immigrant population is pivotal to the survival of
Caribbean countries . when you consider that in many of the
Caribbean countries remittances from the U.S. account for a
significant percentage of their revenue. In the island of
Monserrat, remittance is the second highest revenue
earner."

Recently, however, there has been a new kind of
"remittance"' to the Caribbean - the forced repatriation of
"undesirables." As Irish points out, this phenomenon has
peaked under George W. Bush and after 9/11. Referring to it
as largely a Republican, right-wing phenomenon, he points
out that it is part of the Bush administration's
anti-immigration trend.

"Most of these islands are not able to absorb the level of
deportation," Irish said. "It has really upset the social
equilibrium in most places. Some of these people didn't
even grow up in the islands."

Looking forward

The Caribbean community in the United States has grown and
matured over the decades, and now a number of leading
figures from Caribbean backgrounds are in the top
leadership of trade unions, civil society and participate
in government at all levels. With the inception of
"Caribbean American Heritage Month, many expect greater
coalition building, solidarity and advocacy on behalf of
this important region of our hemisphere as well as for the
full equality of Caribbean immigrants in the United States.

Martin Frazier (mfrazier@xxxxxxx) is PWW contributing
editor on African American/Caribbean/African affairs.



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