Sonny's Corner: Fremont is burning!
"Sonny's Corner" is a regular column in Prairie Fire, featuring commentary on civil rights and justice issues. Our friend and Omaha colleague, Joseph P. "Sonny" Foster, died suddenly at age 54 in August 2005. He left an uncompleted agenda, as did many of our civil rights and justice mentors and heroes. We shall attempt to move forward on that unfinished agenda through this column.
In the wake of the vote last month to approve an ordinance limiting housing access to undocumented immigrants in Fremont, Neb., I began to think long and hard as to why this has all come about. No reasonable mind can deny that the citizens of Fremont were frustrated at the dynamic changes that were and are occurring in their community, and it stands to reason that because of the perception of a flood of “illegal immigrants” that they should take steps to address this “invasion” on the sanctity of their way of life by essentially outlawing the mostly Latino population of undocumented immigrants. Here are the facts: 56 percent of the citizens who voted favored imposing the ordinance. Insofar as the turnout was a paltry 44 percent, it came down to 3,900 voters determining how the 25,000 citizens of Fremont will have to deal with the implications of the decision. This has already prompted the threat of a suit against the city by the ACLU, and it appears that the hits to the city’s budget to cover legal costs will unfold as predicted. Ironically, there are only about 1,000 Latinos in the Fremont area, most of whom reside south of the city limits. We can legitimately estimate that about half are U.S. citizens or “documented” immigrants.
So in reality, what was this about? The Fremont ordinance will impact all renters, but only around 100 Latino households, so why expend all of this time, energy and resources to let Latinos know that they are not welcome? Some people get very tweaked when racism or xenophobia is mentioned as the reason, and while it may certainly be present, to my mind it is only an artifact or an implication of some deeper reason that is not only driving this attempt to regulate or staunch the flow of illegals into Nebraska but is also stoking the fires of discontent in the most destructive way.
All of this reminds me of a connection to a larger set of forces at play. At the end of the last century, public intellectuals were extolling to us the promise of the emerging global economy and what it would bring us. While there were certainly doubts, the vision was one of a “flat” world where nimbleness and flexibility were the new hallmarks of economic success. The admonishment to those paying attention was that the bullet train to the future was at the station; “get on board or get left behind.” Yet, already at that time, there were concerns about the global economy, especially if you were living in a developing state, about where that train was going and about what one would find when it arrived at the station. At that time, there was a perception that all of the benefits of this brave new economic world were accruing to the already rich nations and the rest of the world was being left to pick over the shambles of what globalization had wrought. More and more, it appeared that what the developing economies had found was destruction of their agricultural sector, the concentration of low-skill, low-wage industries in urban centers, people being forced to migrate to survive and a gnawing sense that getting on the train had been a colossal error. Americans believed that they were mostly inured or immune to the ailments and discontents of globalization, but the past decade has proven that to be anything but true, which brings me back to Fremont.
What we have is a community struggling to make sense of the damage that has been wrought by globalization, even if they didn’t know what it was. By and large, the same forces that have devastated villages in Mexico and across the Americas have now visited Fremont. After the initial euphoria and economic promise over the dispersion of meatpacking facilities across the Midwest to communities just recovering from the farm crisis, the new reality was that what new work there was held neither the communal or economic cache to attract locals to work there, and the logical reaction was and still is to leave. Yet these industries are integral to our way of life. They ensure that we can continue to access relatively cheap food, even if it means we are feeding the beast. I mean, who can fathom having to pay $8 for a hamburger at the local fast food outlet? So the same industries did what any going concern would do: they recruited the labor needed to meet the demands of the market. More and more, this meant attracting mostly Latino immigrant workers. Although displaced from their sending communities, these workers are now here working in an industry that is not the same as it was a generation previously: an industry offering good-paying, stable jobs with benefits. The global market forces now dominate, competition has drawn firms from Brazil and beyond, and the low pay and meager benefits that the industry now offers guarantee that all workers are now one missed paycheck away from disaster. What ails Fremont, like so many other communities across the country, is that political leaders neither understand what is at stake nor can they contemplate the implications of the new economic landscape for their community. But this same leadership class has to be willing and open to explaining this reality to its constituents if we are going to be able to deal with the magnitude of these changes. For the most part, there has been little explanation other than simplistic blaming and scapegoating, and by and large, what steps are taken are diversions that in the end results in policies that do nothing more than impose suffering on other people. This is what now passes for leadership in tough times, especially if you are adept at shielding your voters from the suffering. This is becoming more and more difficult because across the country the mandates of perpetual campaigning have replaced making good policy in the minds of many politicos.
Where this ends is at crossroads. Do we continue to pursue the “enforcement first” agenda that now stands in for immigration policy? Or do we try to bring about a change? What is disconcerting is the insistence by proponents of the Fremont ordinance that federal inaction on immigration policy is sufficient cause for responses from local and state government to address the illegal “problem.” Yes, this is a federal issue, but it is not solely an executive branch responsibility. The Congress is charged by the Constitution to enact the law of the land; it is the responsibility of the president to either sign or veto the legislation and then to implement the law. Insofar as Nebraska’s representatives to Congress have mostly sat on the sidelines and watched the debate, it would be useful to ask the citizens of Fremont how effective “enforcement first” policies have been for them. If this approach is working, then why have they been compelled to act to restrict the presence of the immigrants in Fremont? We should be mindful that the efforts of former President George W. Bush and Senator Chuck Hagel to promote comprehensive immigration reform were met with derision and rejection, leaving us with the “enforcement first” solution. In the end, we are not satisfied with the results of this approach, it only stands to further ostracize those among us—and all the while Fremont burns.
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