Key Words: Latin America, Terrorism, Tourism, Direct Foreign Investment

Transcription

1 321 International Terrorism in Latin America: Efforts on Foreign Investment and Tourism James M. Lutz * Brenda J. Lutz Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne It has been suggested that terrorist attacks can have serious economic consequences for the countries where the attacks occur. An analysis of 23 countries in Latin America between 1969 and 1988 indicated that incidents of terrorism had only modest negative effects on foreign direct investment in these countries even though foreign operations of multinational corporations were frequent targets in this period. The tourist sector, however, was more susceptible to negative influences from terrorist violence. Key Words: Latin America, Terrorism, Tourism, Direct Foreign Investment Introduction In recent years, major terrorist attacks have had a many effects on political systems, economic systems, and societies in general. Among the possible consequences of terrorism is the potential for such incidents to disrupt both domestic and international economic interactions. Among the potential effects that terrorist violence can have would be declines in foreign direct investment and reductions in tourist visits to the countries that have faced greater levels of terrorist violence. These negative effects of terrorism might vary depending upon a number of circumstances, including the frequency and severity of attacks, and other factors such as the types of targets chosen. While the potential for economic disruption is clearly present in the twenty-first century, it is important to assess the economic effects of attacks in the past as well. The analysis to follow will attempt to measure some of the international economic impacts of terrorist attacks in twenty-three Latin American countries during the twenty years between 1969 and 1988, and to determine if the countries suffering from greater levels of international terrorist activity actually did experience greater negative economic effects. * Department of Political Science, Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne, IN , Address for correspondence: Dr. James M. Lutz, Department of Political Science, Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. Fort Wayne, IN HYPERLINK mailto:lutz@ipfw.edu lutz@ipfw.edu Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

2 322 James M. and Brenda J. Lutz Prevalence of Terrorism Since the disasters of September 11, 2001 and the beginning of the war on terrorism, the dangers and implications of violent attacks by dissidents have been widely discussed. Much of the recent focus has justifiably been on Al Qaeda and the efforts being made to find and destroy this loosely organized network of terrorist groups. There has been an increasingly concentration of attention today as in the past on the Middle East and on Islamic groups. At times this focus on the Middle East or Islamic organizations has been mistakenly taken to the extreme, so that analyses exclude groups whose driving force is ideology, ethnicity, or some religious base other than Islam or exclude the present or past occurrence of terrorism in other parts of the world. As a result, the inability to view terrorism more broadly suggests, quite wrongly, that terrorism is uniquely Middle Eastern or Islamic (Lutz and Lutz 2004, pp. xiii-xiv, 3-4). Terrorism, in fact, has been a widespread phenomenon that predated 2001, and it has affected many parts of the world. Europe and Latin America experienced a wave of leftist terrorism that began at the end of the 1960s and lasted until the end of the 1980s and the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe and in the old Soviet Union (Lutz and Lutz, 2005, Chap. 9; Rapoport 2006; Waldmann 2005). The Basque nationalists (ETA) and the IRA have operated for very long periods of time. Asia has seen extensive terrorist violence, often combined with guerrilla action, in Sri Lanka, Kashmir, the Punjab, and Indonesia (Chalk 1998b; Lutz and Lutz 2005, Chap. 10; Tan 2000). Violence by extreme nationalist groups against foreign immigrants and foreign cultures has increased in Europe in the years after 1990 (Bjorgo 1997; Brannan 2006; Wilkinson 2003, p. 119). The only connections these right-wing groups have had to the Middle East and Islam has been that some of their attacks have been against migrants from the region. Violent dissident groups from many countries have frequently chosen targets in third countries, internationalizing the terrorism. Kurdish groups have attacked Turkish targets in a variety of European countries, and anti-castro Cuban groups have launched attacks on Cuban diplomatic offices or other symbols of the regime in a number of Latin American countries. Attacks against exiles by groups or agents working for their home governments have been common. National embassies in foreign countries may be a potential target for dissidents, as are the offices of national airlines. The embassies or airline offices are often more vulnerable than key institutions at home, which may be heavily guarded. Further, an attack on a target in a democratic country The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

3 International Terrorism, Foreign Investment and Tourism in Latin America 323 may have greater publicity-value than an attack in the home country. Countries can also be chosen for such attacks because they are a convenient location or a particularly vulnerable location. Al Qaeda selected Kenya and Tanzania for the 1998 embassy attacks because of the ease with which the attackers could blend in with the local population and the relatively limited security resources of the two countries. Economic Effects of Terrorism Terrorist attacks have economic consequences. Some of the consequences are largely unintended, as happens when money is diverted to police forces or to increased physical security from other programs. In other cases, dissidents directly attack economic targets in much more conscious effort to undercut the economy of a particular state. Further, a major outbreak of terrorism can hinder economic activity in a country in other ways. Foreign investors may withdraw, visitors stop coming, and trade can be disrupted. Terrorism is ultimately a form of psychological warfare, and as such it is designed to change the behavior of target audiences (Chalk 1996, p. 13; Gaucher 1968, p. 298; Hoffman 2002, p. 45). This target audience may (or may not) be defined by economic criteria. Negative economic consequences may be intended by the terrorists, but even unintended economic fallout from terrorism can be significant. Dissidents have targeted foreign investors in the past. Foreign investment in any country will normally provide additional resources for the government in power, and major investments that provide employment opportunities and that spread the economic benefits to the local economy may serve to reduce levels of popular discontent that the dissidents draw upon or hope to draw upon in support of their cause. There have been cases where dissidents have consciously sought to drive out foreign investors in order to prevent an improvement in local economic conditions. For example, the IRA attacked foreign investors in Northern Ireland with such a goal in mind (Drake 1998, p. 57). Similar efforts have been made by groups in Malaya after World War II (Chalk 1998b, p. 120), Banda Aceh in Indonesia (Schulze 2003, p. 260), Algeria (Willis, 1997, pp ), and Colombia (Nitsch and Schumacher 2004, p. 425n). In Latin America, Carlos Marighella, a leftist theoretician, argued that it was necessary to attack investors to increase the likelihood and severity of economic downturns (Laqueur 1977, p. 185). In the 1960s, urban guerrillas in Brazil consciously sought Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

4 324 James M. and Brenda J. Lutz to implement his approach as part of an effort to weaken the national economy (Beckett 2001, pp ). Leftists also kidnapped executives of foreign businesses in many parts of Latin America, especially in Argentina. The kidnappings not only made statements about foreign investment and global capitalism but also raised large amounts for funds for the dissidents from the ransoms that were paid (Bell 1997, p. 230). In other cases, while foreign operations have not been attacked directly, there have been indications the underlying levels of terrorism have led to significant declines in the levels of incoming foreign investment (Enders and Sandler 1996). Interestingly enough, while Latin American leftists launched attacks against foreign investors, the European leftist groups virtually never chose multinational investors as economic targets, although they were sometimes chosen as symbolic targets (Lutz and Lutz 2006, p. 14). One of the most effective targets for terrorists in their efforts to create economic problems has been the tourist industry. Attacks on tourists demonstrate the potential for economic disruption to occur, and the disruptions may be exactly what is planned by the terrorist groups. Tourists bring in foreign exchange that may help the local economy prosper and generate significant tax revenues. The attacks can dramatically interfere in this revenue flow by discouraging individuals from booking vacations in lands that are experiencing terrorist incidents, especially when tourists are the targets of the attacks. In Egypt, dissidents have attacked tourists as part of a campaign against the government in an effort to create economic damage (Alam 2003, pp ; Nedoroscik 2002, p. 47). The 1997 attack at Luxor was followed by a 53% decline in tourist revenues (Gurr and Cole 2000, p. 88). There have been even more recent attacks against tourists in the spring of 2005 in Egypt. The Kurds have intentionally struck at the tourist industry in Turkey in an effort to hurt the local economy. Attacks on tourists in Turkey, Greece, or Israel have led to a redirection of tourist visits to countries that have not been the scene of such actions (Drakos and Kutan 2003). The Filipino group Abu Sayyaf s attacks in Southeast Asia have degenerated into kidnappings for financial gain rather than to achieve political objectives, but tourism in the region has nonetheless suffered (Thayer 2005, p. 88). The deadly attack in Bali in 2002 led to a drop in tourism (Putra and Hitchcock, 2006, p. 160). There was a loss of 10% of the value of the stock exchange in Jakarta as investors contemplated a downturn in the tourist sector for Indonesia. The loss to the Indonesian economy was approximately 1% of GDP (Abuza 2003, p. The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

5 International Terrorism, Foreign Investment and Tourism in Latin America 325 3). In Kashmir, the local economy suffered greatly when guerrilla and terrorist violence in that province virtually destroyed the tourist trade that catered both to Indians from elsewhere in the country and foreign visitors (Schofield 2003, pp , ). In the cases of Algeria, Kashmir, and Indonesia, the effects on the tourist industry and local economy may have been incidental to attempts to drive out foreign influences that were contaminating the local societies, but they were important nonetheless. In Uruguay the Tupameros threatened tourists in the early 1970s, especially Argentine visitors as part of a broader effort to further weaken the struggling Uruguayan economy (Butler 1976, p. 55). The Basque nationalists in the ETA in Spain, on the other hand, consciously struck at the tourist industry in efforts to hurt the Spanish economy. Unlike some of the other terrorist organizations, however, the Basques were very careful to avoid causing casualties. Tourist facilities were bombed in the off-season to make sure injuries were minimal, but the terrorists were still able to send a message that vacations in Spain would be dangerous. Studies have indicated that the Basques dissidents were quite successful in hurting the Spanish tourist industry with these attacks (Chalk 1998a, p. 380; Enders and Sandler 1991). Needless to say, attacks on tourists have become increasingly important in recent years, becoming one of the favorite targets of various terrorist groups. It is possible that the decreases in tourism in a number of countries might also lead to declines in FDI as foreign companies will have less need to invest in hotels and related activities (Putra and Hitchcock, 2006, p. 160). Methodology and Parameters of the Study The analyses to follow will focus on investment flows and tourism for a number of Latin American countries. The countries included in the analysis were the twenty-three Latin American countries that were already independent in the 1960s (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Surinam, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, and Venezuela). The smaller islands that became independent later were not included. Cuba was also excluded, since there was virtually no information on terrorist attacks within the country or data on foreign investment or tourism. Latin America in this period provides an excellent region for the analysis of relationships between international economic activity and terrorism. It was a period during which there was Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

6 326 James M. and Brenda J. Lutz a reasonably large number of international incidents that occurred in most countries in the region. In fact, this period roughly corresponds to Rapoport s (2006, pp. 9-10) New Left wave of terrorism, one with significant elements of internationalism involved. Most of the international incidents involved groups with leftist ideologies, although there were attacks by other types of groups as well. There were also campaigns of domestic terrorism in his era that unfortunately could not be included due to limitations in the data base, but most of the major domestic groups such as the Montoneros and ERP in Argentina, the Tupemaros in Uruguay, various leftist groups in Colombia and Venezuela, and Shining Path in Peru targeted both domestic groups and foreign interests. In the case of foreign direct investment, it was anticipated that higher levels of terrorism should be associated with reductions in investment. Prudent investors might be tempted to look elsewhere for opportunities. As a consequence, changes in the levels of FDI flowing into the Latin American countries will be calculated and correlated with previous levels of terrorist activity. One indication of such effects is that overall FDI in 2001 was down compared to 2000 for the world in general. 1 The percentage drop was 50.7% (United Nations Conference on Trade and Investment 2003, p. 303), and most of the industrialized countries had declines in both inflows and outflows. This major drop in investment from all countries reflected a decrease in confidence in the safety of foreign operations that would appear to be a direct result of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the case of foreign direct investment, the total annual FDI flows were standardized by national GNP to reflect the absorptive capacity of national economies 2. Larger or richer countries would have the capacity to attract more foreign investment than smaller or poorer countries. The change in flows was the measure utilized, but with a control of economic size. Terrorism was also correlated with measures of tourist revenues. If tourism were negatively affected by terrorism, revenues would fall off in subsequent years. No attempt was made to place the revenues on a per capita or other relative basis. Tourist revenues are affected by existing amenities and natural attractions. 3 Standardization was present in one 1 FDI dropped from $1,491.9 billion to $735.1 billion between 2000 and 2001 (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2003). 2 The levels of FDI in each of the countries are calculated from World Investment Report (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, various issues). 3 Tourist revenues were available from the UN Statistical Yearbook (United Nations, various The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

7 International Terrorism, Foreign Investment and Tourism in Latin America 327 sense, since it was the changes in total tourist revenues that were used as the dependent variable. As was the expectation with FDI, terrorism, all other things being equal, would lead to declines (or perhaps slower increases) in revenues if the sector were being affected by the violence. The data on terrorism comes from the MIPT database, which details acts of terror in individual countries from 1969 to From 1968 to 1997 the database only includes such international incidents, and the data for 1968 appear to be incomplete. From 1969 forward, the data are much more complete. International incidents were considered to be attacks where: (1) the terrorist groups were from outside the country but chose targets inside another country (e.g., September 11 th in the United States or the London transit bombings); (2) a domestic terrorist group attacked a foreign corporation, official or tourists in their own country (e.g., the attacks by Egyptian terrorists against tourists, or the assassination of the CIA section chief in Athens by the 17 November Organization); or (3) when groups used the soil of a third country to attack their government or some other foreign government (Kurdish attacks on Turkish diplomats or businesses in Europe or attacks against Cuban embassies by anti-castro groups). From 1998 to the present, there are data on both domestic and international incidents in the database providing a measure of overall terrorist violence in various countries. It might not make a difference whether the terrorist incidents are domestic or international in scope, but it is somewhat more likely that international incidents would have more of an impact of foreign investors, especially if foreign operations become the targets for the dissidents, or perhaps even more of an effect on potential tourists. For the current analysis, data from 1969 to 1988 were used. This time-period represents one of high terrorist activity in many Latin American countries. While the data only includes international incidents, these attacks, as noted, would probably be more pertinent to foreign observers. The MIPT database provided three variables that could be used in the analyses to follow. The total number of international incidents per year could be ascertained for each country 5, as well as the number of years). 4 The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) database is available on line, providing information on incidents by country and by region beginning in 1968 (with the limitations noted above in the text). The database incorporates the data collected earlier by St. Andrews University. 5 For those years in which a country had no incidents or no casualties, the totals were recorded as Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

8 328 James M. and Brenda J. Lutz people killed and the number of people injured per year. Most terrorist attacks in the world actually do not cause deaths or injuries, since the violence involves property rather than people (Stohl, 2003, p. 86). Fatal incidents or incidents with large numbers of wounded are rarer, but then these attacks could have greater impacts. As a consequence, the total number of attacks per capita, the total number of deaths per capita, and the total number of wounded per capita were recorded for use in the analyses. In the case of tourism, one study discovered that campaigns of attacks have more negative effects than a smaller number of major attacks (Pizam and Fleischer 2002). A similar situation could have been present in the case of terrorism in Latin America in general or more deadly attacks could have had greater effects. The measures of terrorist violence in a given year were correlated with FDI flows and tourist revenues for each of the following three years. Thus, the per capita measures of terrorism in 1969 were correlated with changes in FDI flows between 1969 and 1970 (t + 1), 1969 and 1971 (t + 2), and 1969 and 1972 (t + 3). Changes in tourism receipts were also correlated with the terrorism measures for t + 1, t + 2, and t + 3 time periods. Terrorist incidents could reasonably be expected to have short-term effects on tourism and perhaps some longer-term ones, as well. In the case of FDI, any effects might take longer to appear. Although there were checks for potential effects over time, there remain a variety of potentially confounding factors that could influence tourist revenues and FDI (in addition to the occurrence of terrorist attacks). The analysis to follow, however, should indicate whether this particular form of political violence influenced these international economic activities and to what extent. Results The first test for the effects of terrorism included the correlation of the three per capita variables of terrorism (incidents, injuries, and deaths) with the changes in flows of FDI standardized by the size of the economies of the twenty-three countries for the subsequent three years. While the economic size of the various countries could be affected by flows of FDI (which could in turn be affected by terrorist violence in a feedback loop), such effects would be likely to require a number of years before they would show up in the national economies. The results of the correlations can be seen in Table 1. The results 0.1 instead of zero to take into account the fact that no incidents in a large country such as Mexico or Brazil would be more meaningful than no incidents in a small country such as Panama or Guyana. The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

9 International Terrorism, Foreign Investment and Tourism in Latin America 329 from the 20 sets of correlations are clearly inconsistent. Only about one in six of the correlations were significant in the predicted direction, not an especially large percentage. The early 1980s were the one period where there was a cluster of such predicted associations, suggesting that this era was one in which the effects on FDI from terrorists actions was the greatest. It is possible that there was greater investor sensitivity in this period, perhaps reflecting activities of terrorist groups around the world with fallout that reduced investor confidence in those areas of Latin America where international incidents had occurred. It was at the beginning of the 1980s that the Red Brigades were extremely active in Italy, the Red Army Faction was operating in West Germany, and there were other leftist groups mounting occasional attacks in Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, and elsewhere. Of the three measures of terrorist activities that were used, the per capita fatalities had some of the strongest negative correlations (1975 and 1983), providing limited evidence that the more violent attacks in this period had the greatest effects on investment flows. There was no evidence that the number of incidents or overall level of terrorism was more important in deterring foreign investors as compared to the severity of the attacks that occurred. Interestingly enough in Table 1, the associations in the predicted direction were somewhat more likely to occur in the first year after the incident, indicating that if the investors responded to terrorism, it was as an initial response rather than as a long-term one. A number of other measures of foreign investment were used with the three terrorists measures in addition to the annual FDI flows to determine if different types of foreign investment were more sensitive to terrorist activities. The level of terrorism in earlier years was correlated with total foreign investment, all long-term investment, and all shortterm investment. None of these additional analyses had results that matched the modest findings in Table 1. What was perhaps the most surprising with these additional analyses was the absence of negative associations between terrorist attacks and the short-term investment measure. It was logical to expect that it would be the short-term investments that would be more sensitive to terrorist incidents, since long-term investors would have had greater sunk costs. It is possible, on the other hand, that short-term investors would have less at stake in particular countries in many cases and, therefore, might be willing to let higher rates of return compensate for the problems caused by terrorism. Short-term investors are also less likely to be present themselves or to have company personnel on the scene in foreign countries, since much Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

10 330 James M. and Brenda J. Lutz of the investment activity can be at arm s length, further limiting the potential effects of terrorist violence. In any event, it was the FDI investment that was most affected by episodes of international terrorism. The three measures of terrorist activity were correlated with changes in tourist receipts for the following three years for the timeperiod in question. The results contained in Table 2 for these analyses are much stronger than the corresponding results for FDI flows (see Table 2). There were approximately three times as many significantly negative correlations for the same period of time as was the case for foreign investment. These negative associations were strongest in 1969 and 1970, 1978 and 1979, and in For whatever reason, in some years tourist plans were more sensitive than in others. The differences could relate to the groups involved in the attacks or to the types of targets that were chosen. 7 These years were also not the same years where the effects on FDI were the greatest, suggesting different reactions to terrorism in different economic sectors, perhaps because of the targets. The negative effects on tourist flows were strongest in the year following the incidents (t + 1) and the year after that (t + 2) than in the third year, indicating that the negative influences tended to be more immediate (much as was the case for the effects on FDI flows). In the case of tourism, some of the strongest of the negative associations were between the number of incidents per capita and receipts, indicating that for the tourism sector the number of attacks rather than their severity was indeed more important in at least some cases, in keeping with evidence from other studies. The results indicate that for Latin America in this period tourism was more vulnerable to economic disruption than foreign investment activity. The vulnerability of the tourist sector seems to have become obvious to many terrorist groups in recent years, as indicated in the discussions above; but it is a bit surprising that the effects were present in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. Targets were frequently foreign businessmen or foreign plant managers, but tourists were more affected than the investors who were the intended target audience. The 6 These measures of total investment were available through 1988, so the analyses could not be carried through quite as far in terms of effects three years later. The way in which foreign investment totals were reported in the UN Statistical Yearbook (United Nations, various years) changed beginning in 1989 making the calculation of investment flows impossible for the years at the end of the period. 7 Unfortunately, the groups launching the attacks could not always be identified, and it also is difficult to classify targets in all cases; therefore, analyses for differences due to these factors were not possible. The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

11 International Terrorism, Foreign Investment and Tourism in Latin America 331 damage to levels of tourist receipts was a by-product of attacks on other types of international targets in the countries in question. The strength of the above findings, however, would strongly confirm the serious consequences that the targeting of tourists as primary targets can have in economic terms, since even international terrorist attacks in other areas had negative effects. Many terrorist organizations are very much aware of the vulnerability both of tourists as the immediate targets of violence and the tourism sector as an economic target (Lutz and Lutz 2006, pp ). The Latin American terrorists may not have intended these consequences, but the results of the attacks indicates that such effects were present for a number of years in this period. Implications and Conclusions It was somewhat surprising that the correlations for tourism provided so much more evidence for the negative effect of terrorist incidents on economic targets than was the case for FDI (or other measures of investment). The period under analysis was not one in which tourists or tourism were the intended targets in Latin America. Investment was the obvious target, but the spillover into the tourist sector proved to be important. There are a number of possible reasons why terrorist attacks were more important for tourism than for investment. First, it is likely that the influences on foreign investment decisions are more complex than those for tourists. While investors will no doubt take terrorist activity into account, they will weigh the attacks in the context of other considerations. The costs of the terrorist actions for multinational corporations, for example, might have been bearable. Violent activity may even lead to premiums in the rate of return on certain kinds of investment as local businessmen or governments make concession to foreign investors due to increased risk. It is also possible that the foreign investment in Latin America had been present for such a long time that the terrorist incidents had less effect. It is also possible that the levels of international terrorism would perhaps have to rise above a particular threshold, either in Latin America or in general, in order for the direct effects on FDI to become obvious. More limited attacks could perhaps have a greater effect in regions of the world with less foreign investment history. It was suggested early on that terrorism did not greatly affect foreign investment in general, although it did have significant localized impacts in places such as the Basque region in Spain or in Northern Ireland (Crenshaw 1983, p. 6n.) The effects of violent attacks on FDI Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

12 332 James M. and Brenda J. Lutz might have been obscured by the absence of data on domestic incidents and casualties. Most terrorism can be classified as domestic; thus, only a small portion of terrorist attacks are considered international (Wilkinson 2000, p. 45). There would be no reason, however, to expect investment to be more sensitive to domestic terrorism than was the case for tourism or that investors would be more sensitive to domestic terrorism than to international terrorism. Also, the fact that domestic and international terrorism were linked in most countries would have meant that international incidents were a reasonable surrogate for domestic ones. The international attacks were, after all, usually extensions of domestic conflicts. Potential tourists might have responded more negatively to the international terrorist incidents for two reasons. First, tourists generally have more flexibility in terms of changing destinations with limited notice. Foreign investors building a plant or an integrated assembly line over the course of five years may feel compelled to continue the investment flow already undertaken. If the investment is in the natural resource sector, the alternatives may be limited for a particular company. Further, if the investment is intended as a means around barriers to imports, then choosing another country is not really a viable option in many cases (absent some sort of customs union). The second reason the above analyses found that tourism was more affected could be related to the data source. The MIPT data compilation relies on information on media accounts for the incidents and casualties. While media accounts in all likelihood will imperfectly represent the actual levels of violence present, potential tourists, as well as the tourist sector in countries of origin of the tourists, are more likely to be aware of or rely on these media accounts. Companies with significant foreign investment funds are able, however, to undertake a more sophisticated political risk analysis of the potential host countries. Such analyses would surely consider terrorist incidents in more depth than media reports and would take into account other factors as well. Political risk analysis would also clearly distinguish between an isolated international attack representing a target of opportunity (the US embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998) as opposed to a series of incidents over a period of years. Since the data base itself draws upon information that is most likely to be the major source of information available to tourists, it is perhaps not surprising that the results were as strong as they were for this form of international economic activity. Overall, the analyses for Latin America did indicate that terrorism The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

13 International Terrorism, Foreign Investment and Tourism in Latin America 333 can have negative economic impacts. The evidence was not overwhelming for FDI, but at least in some circumstances investment was negatively affected. Since foreign investment responds to a variety of push and pull factors, no one variable will explain all changes in such activity. Terrorism, however, should be added to the list of important concerns, at least for the present time. The tourist sector, even in Latin America and even in this time-period, was more vulnerable. A variety of terrorist groups in other parts of the world have realized this, as indicated by attacks in Bali and Egypt and elsewhere, but the effects were present even earlier. There was already reason to expect attacks on tourists to increase, and the results from this analysis would reinforce that conclusion. It is also possible that there is some threshold level of terrorist violence that has to be in play to affect foreign investment. How effective targeting economic activities has been, and will be, will depend upon additional studies for other regions and other time periods. There is much research to be done. Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

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15 International Terrorism, Foreign Investment and Tourism in Latin America 335 Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

16 336 James M. and Brenda J. Lutz References Abuza, Zachary 2003 Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner). Alam, Anwar 2003 The Sociology and Political Economy of Islamic Terrorism in Egypt, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp Beckett, Ian F. W Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Guerrillas and Their Opponents since 1750 (London: Routledge). Bell, J. Browyer 1991 Terrorist Fundraising, in Martha Crenshaw and John Pimlott (eds.), Encyclopedia of World Terrorism, Vol. 1 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe), pp Bjorgo, Tore 1997 Racist and Right-Wing Violence in Scandinavia: Patterns, Perpetrators, and Responses (Oslo: Tano Aschehoug). Brannan, David W Left- and Right-Wing Political Terrorism, in Andrew T. H. Tan (ed.), The Politics of Terrorism: A Survey (London: Routledge), pp Butler, R. E Terrorism in Latin America, in Yonah Alexander (ed.), International Terrorism: National, Regional, and Global Perspectives (New York: Praeger), pp Chalk, Peter 1996 West European Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: The Evolving Dynamic (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Macmillan). 1998a The Response to Terrorism as a Threat to Liberal Democracy, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 44, No. 3, pp b Political Terrorism in South-East Asia, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp Crenshaw, Martha 1983 Introduction: Reflections on the Effects of Terrorism, in Martha Crenshaw (ed.), Terrorism, Legitimacy, and Power: The Consequences of Political Violence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), pp Drake, C. J. M The Role of Ideology in Terrorists Target Selection, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp Drakos, Konstantinos, and Ali M. Kutan 2003 Regional Effects of Terrorism on Tourism in Three Mediterranean Countries, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 47, No. 5, pp Enders, Walter, and Todd Sandler 1991 Causality between Transnational Terrorism and Tourism: The Case of Spain, Terrorism, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp Terrorism and Foreign Direct Investment in Spain and Greece, Kyklos, Vol. 49, No. 3, pp Gaucher, Roland 1968 The Terrorists: From Tsarist Russia to the O.A.S., trans. Paula Spurlin (London: Secker & Warburg). The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

17 International Terrorism, Foreign Investment and Tourism in Latin America 337 Gurr, Nadine, and Benjamin Cole 2000 The New Face of Terrorism: Threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction (London: I. B. Tauris). Hoffman, Bruce 2002 The Emergence of the New Terrorism, in Andrew Tan and Kumar Ramakrishna (eds.), The New Terrorism: Anatomy, Trends and Counter- Strategies (Singapore: Eastern University Press), pp Laqueur, Walter 1977 Terrorism (Boston: Little Brown). Lutz, James M., and Brenda J. Lutz 2004 Global Terrorism (London: Routledge) Terrorism as Economic Warfare, Global Economy Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp Terrorism: Origins and Evolution (New York: Palgrave). Nedoroscik, Jeffrey A Extremist Groups in Egypt, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp Nitsch, Volker, and Dieter Schumacher 2004 Terrorism and International Trade: An Empirical Investigation, European Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp Pizam, Abraham, and Aliza Fleischer 2002 Severity versus Frequency of Acts of Terrorism: Which Has a Larger Impact on Tourism Demand?, Journal of Travel Research, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp Putra, I. Nyoman Darma, and Michael Hitchcock 2006 The Bali Bombs and the Tourism Development Cycle, Progress in Development Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp Rapoport, David C Modern Terror: History and Special Features, in Andrew T. H. Tan (ed.), The Politics of Terrorism: A Survey (London: Routledge), pp Schofield, Victoria 2003 Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War (London: I. B. Taurus). Schulze, Kirsten E The Struggle for an Independent Aceh: The Ideology, Capacity, and Strategy of GAM, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp Stohl, Michael 2003 The Mystery of the New Global Terrorism: Old Myths, New Realities, in Charles W. Kegley, Jr. (ed.), The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall), pp Tan, Andrew 2000 Armed Muslim Separatist Rebellion in Southeast Asia: Persistence, Prospects, and Implications, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp Thayer, Carlyle 2005 Al-Qaeda and Political Terrorism in Southeast Asia, in Paul J. Smith (ed.), Terrorism and Violence in Southeast Asia: Transnational Challenges to States and Regional Stability (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe), pp United Nations Various Statistical Yearbooks (New York: United Nations Statistical Office). Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

18 338 James M. and Brenda J. Lutz United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Various World Investment Reports (New York: United Nations). Waldmann, Peter 2005 Social-Revolutionary Terrorism in Latin America and Europe, in Tore Bjorgo (ed.), Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Reality, and Ways Forward (London: Routledge), pp Willkinson, Paul 2000 Terrorism versus Democracy: The Liberal State Response (London: Frank Cass) Why Modern Terrorism? Differentiating Types and Distinguishing Ideological Motivations, in Charles W. Kegley, Jr. (ed.), The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall), pp Willis, Michael 1997 The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political History (New York: New York State University Press). The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

19 339 If Past is Prologue: Americans Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor Dwight D. Murphey 1 Wichita State University One of the major arguments made by those who support today s massive immigration from Mexico and the Third World into the United States is that the immigrants, and especially those who come in illegally, are doing work Americans won t do. What is not realized is that there is already an extensive literature, written mainly by activists for the immigrant ethnic groups themselves, that charges that the widespread use of low-pay labor from an impoverished immigrant underclass is exploitation. The point of this article is that if precedents such as the widespread elevation of Cesar Chavez to hero status are any guide to the forces at work within the United States, the day will almost certainly come when mainstream American society will be caused by its opinion-makers in academia and the media to look back upon the current use of immigrant labor as reason for shame rather than self-congratulation, much as Americans have already been caused, through similar alienation, to reevaluate much of their country s history as carrying a heavy legacy of guilt. Key Words: Immigration; Immigrant labor; Low-pay labor; Exploitation concept; Americans feelings of guilt; Cesar Chavez; Japanese-American relocation. In the United States, the debate over immigration is now as heated as it has ever been. Vast numbers of immigrants have come into the country, some legally and millions of others illegally, since the 1965 legislation that took away the preference for Europeans and opened the doors to the Third World. Although it is correct to think that much of this immigration has come from Mexico, the river has been fed by many streams. Some of the immigration has been to fill high-pay jobs in, for example, engineering and the computer industry. Most of it, however, has been to find employment in minimum wage, or even sub-minimum wage, jobs in primarily the agricultural, construction, manufacturing, hospitality and domestic-work sectors. Although garment industry workers have been supplanted by outsourcing in most of the United States, such work has become a major part of the economy in Los Angeles, where tens of thousands of Latinos, many of them illegal 1 Dwight D. Murphey is now retired as a professor of business law at Wichita State University. He is Associate Editor of this journal. Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

20 340 Dwight D. Murphey immigrants, work for sub-contractors, mostly Asian, who in turn produce garments for apparel manufacturers of many nationalities. 2 As one Latino columnist has said about low-pay work, There s always a job waiting for those who will do the dirtiest jobs under the worst conditions for the lowest pay and the most paltry of benefits. 3 The debate over whether the influx should be stopped, and over what to do about the illegal immigrants already in the country, has many facets. One of the more persuasive arguments made by those who look on the immigration favorably is economic: that the newcomers are doing work Americans won t do (or don t want to do ). Many employers and individuals seeking domestic help welcome the presence of a vast pool of inexpensive workers. In so doing, they are by no means exceptional, given the history of economic systems. Low-pay labor has been typical, not atypical, in human societies from time immemorial. Until the beginning of the anti-slavery movement in England in the late eighteenth century, slavery was an accepted institution almost everywhere; and the equivalent of slavery has come in many forms, such as peonage in Mexico and serfdom in Russia. It is doubtful, however, that today s Americans who use low-pay immigrant labor see themselves as part of this tradition. Rather, the statement that immigrants are doing what Americans won t do is usually said in the most upbeat fashion, with the intimation that it is a happy fact for which the society can be thankful. This is a felicity enjoyed in both the pocketbook and psyche of those benefiting, but it comes by way of ignoring several realities and storm clouds. The benefits are indeed widespread to businesses and consumers, who are able to produce and consume cheaply. But there are costs, some severe. Because the purpose of this article will be to focus on certain aspects that are seldom thought of, we will for the most part leave to others an examination of the more frequently discussed negative effects, such as the offsetting social and infrastructure costs (such as to the health care, welfare and judicial systems) and the impact on indigenous labor, which is either displaced or sees its remuneration brought down to the level determined by the immigrant competition. Neither will we discuss here the vitally important issues of balkanization and loss of national identity. The focus in the present article will, rather, be on the moral and 2 Rodolfo Torres and George Katsiaficas (ed.), Latino Social Movements: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives (New York: Routledge 1999), pp Article by Edna Bonacich. 3 Op-ed column by Ruben Navarette, Wichita Eagle, January 9, The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

21 American s Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor 341 ideological costs. These have received little attention. We have just mentioned how most Americans, whose mental world is preoccupied with the practicalities of daily life and who have little historical awareness, don t see their contemporary conduct in a long-term context. If one were to ask them about slavery, peonage or serfdom, they would unanimously express their abhorrence. There is a mental disconnect, of sorts. But this disconnect is at least debatable, since anyone who argues that today s hiring of immigrants in low-pay jobs in the United States is equivalent to slavery, peonage or serfdom will find reasonable people who will dispute his premise. What is clearer as a moral or ideological cost is something that will surprise most Americans, but that should be apparent if precedents are any indication. The precedents point to forces that are still at work in American society. The surprising cost is this: that most Americans will in a few years come to see the conduct of today s Americans as deeply shameful. The mainstream of Americans themselves of whatever ethnicity will perceive the present period as having been racist and exploitive. They will then consider the argument about jobs that Americans won t do contemptible. The happy gloss will be off. Americans are already given to feel guilt over the pre-civil War history of the United States, as having been deeply stained by slavery; and there is a similar repudiation of the post-civil War period up to the advent of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s, as having embodied white supremacy. As an example, we see that major league baseball before the Jackie Robinson era (when in the late 1940s blacks were integrated into the sport) is often looked upon today as having been perversely incomplete and unrepresentative, with the thought that perhaps the exploits of Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig should be marked with an asterisk. The sense of guilt stems from a dramatic shift in point of view. Americans before the Civil War would hardly have thought their society defined by slavery; rather, they tended to see it as a great experiment in liberty to which slavery was a regrettable exception. Thomas Paine boasted optimistically that we have it in our power to start the world over again. Later, white post-civil War Americans thought of blacks as peripheral to what seemed to them a satisfactory, albeit not perfect, social order. Blacks lived in pockets that had little to do with the country s self-perception. To understand these tectonic shifts in perception, including the shift that will condemn what is today accepted as so natural about the Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

22 342 Dwight D. Murphey employment of low-pay immigrant labor, it is essential of grasp certain features in the dynamic that has so long propelled American society toward rapid social and ideological change. This dynamic has had several components, most particularly: (1) the long-term presence of an alienated intellectual and artistic subculture, which since early in the nineteenth century has found much to criticize (or, quite commonly, to excoriate) about American life; (2) that subculture s long-standing search for allies to give it weight in its cultural, political and economic struggle, a search that at one time caused its members to provide ideological support for what they hoped would be a militant working class; (3) the subculture s gradual disillusionment with the working class as an ally, and its shift after World War II to seeking allies among racial and ethnic minorities instead; (4) the post-1965 influx into the United States of a very sizeable Third World immigrant population that is not easily assimilable with the population of overwhelmingly European origin that existed before; and (5) at the same time, the relative absence of an unalienated intellectual, academic, literary and artistic subculture that would champion the mainstream (even as perhaps it would criticize and seek to uplift it). Because of the relative absence of an intellectual culture appropriate to itself, the silent majority has long been a principal fact in American life; (6) because of the presence of the alienated intellectual subculture and the absence of an appreciable unalienated one, the moral and intellectual weakness of the average middle-class American, who readily adopts the attitudes and intellectual fashions that are given to him to believe. One result of these factors has been a reinterpretation of American history through a perspective that has combined (1) the intelligentsia s alienation with (2) seeing the world through the eyes of the minorities, now called the peoples of color. This change in point of view has been acquiesced in by the erstwhile mainstream, which has accepted the premises of the new point of view and has not found it within itself to defend and to defend precisely as moral its earlier beliefs. In the face of each social change, its spokesmen have largely vanished, and those remaining have been marginalized and ignored to the point of The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

23 American s Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor 343 irrelevance. Because these elements in the dynamic of American social change are still present, and are being added to by the continuing growth of ethnic minorities through immigration and their high birth rate, there is reason to expect that the present will undergo a similar interpretation that will reflect both the alienation and the minorities own perspectives and, remarkably enough, that the erstwhile majority will itself quickly adopt that interpretation. It is to be expected that, as with the past shifts in outlook, there will be a great many people (who today see nothing to object to about the argument that low-pay immigrants are doing work Americans won t do ) who will, in fact, take personal pride in their new enlightenment. They will then look back and declare with vigor that they have a real moral stake in condemning the present period and anyone who would have the temerity to defend it. Two precedents best illustrate the dynamic elements and their culmination in American guilt. They are (1) the near-universal pride and sense of moral superiority Americans feel today in acknowledging American guilt for what they generally are convinced they know about the so-called internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and (2) the widespread elevation of Cesar Chavez to hero status and especially as an ethnic hero for having led a movement against the exploitation of mostly-mexican immigrant workers in the grape industry a few years ago. We will note the facts about each, but will pay particular attention to the Chavez episode. These precedents will be discussed as part of exploring the specifics that underlie the central point of this article. These specifics relate to: 1. Some illustrations of the satisfaction expressed today over immigrants performing work Americans won t do. 2. Examples of the current literature, much of it Latino, that already asserts that the United States is exploiting its immigrant labor. In this context, we will take time to discuss the concept of exploitation. 3. The principal facts about the number and composition of post-1965 immigrants into the United States, with some grasp of the economic situation and living conditions of the recent immigrants, examining the conditions under which they live. 4. Illustrations of the on-going change in point of view from that of the American mainstream to that of the peoples of color. 5. The Cesar Chavez precedent. Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

24 344 Dwight D. Murphey 6. The Japanese-American precedent. Satisfaction Over Immigrants Performance of Jobs Americans Won t Do The point that illegal immigrants are doing work Americans won t do is heard many times in conversation today, and just as often appears in print. So common is it that one of the most succinct statements of it appeared in a letter-to-the-editor of the Wichita Eagle in early 2006: These immigrants take jobs that nobody else wants to do. They repair your roads, fix your roofs, do your landscaping and are the lifeblood of the service sector. I doubt that a teenager or a senior citizen would work 12 to 16 hours a day in these jobs for minimum wage and no benefits. If these immigrants were not in the country, you would pay more for goods and services. 4 An op-ed columnist, Mary Sanchez, also expresses it in favorable terms: The United States has a growing need for more low-wage, young workers than exist in our population. 5 This is consistent with an editorial in the same newspaper that argued that Hispanic workers help fill labor needs in construction, agriculture and other industries. 6 The point has been made for a long time. In a book published in 1970, the authors cite the argument and at the same time tell the economic reality that underlies it, referring to the effects of the guestworker bracero program that was in existence from 1942 to 1964: Clearly, it was not farm work, as such, that Americans just won t do. Equally clearly, the change was in wages. Eighteen to twenty-five cents a box had been the rate in 1950, with most of the picking done by domestic workers. Eight years later, eleven cents a box was the prevailing rate, with virtually all the picking done by braceros. Cantaloupe pickers wages were cut in 1951; and since Mexican nationals could survive on this, while American citizens could not, local workers were rapidly being forced out of the area. 7 The Already-Existing Literature Asserting Exploitation The thesis of this article is that a pervasive sense of American guilt will before long come into being about what will by that time be 4 The Wichita Eagle, letter-to-the-editor by Estalin Valentin, March 22, Op-ed column by Mary Sanchez, The Wichita Eagle, February 10, Editorial written by Randy Scholfield in The Wichita Eagle, August 25, Joan London and Henry Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970), pp. 103, 119. The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

25 American s Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor 345 considered to have been today s exploitation of immigrant labor. It is worth noting that as a prelude to this there is already in existence a vast outpouring of angry ethnic rhetoric claiming precisely that. If they were to explore the existing literature, the advocates of virtually any mainstream American political or social viewpoint would be consumed with envy at the quantity of activist ethnic literature as compared to their own. Within academia and the university presses, an enraged ethnic viewpoint occupies something of a privileged position. In a review of Victor Davis Hanson s Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, Roger McGrath cites Hanson s observations about the abundance of ethnic studies courses at the University of California, Santa Barbara: He notes 62 listed under Chicano Studies, including Methodology of the Oppressed, Barrio Popular Culture, Chicana Feminism Meanwhile, the history department offers another 13 classes focusing of Chicanos and several on race and oppression. 8 So common has this become that we barely notice that there is nothing comparable for, say, classical liberal studies or Burkean conservative studies. The few American Studies departments are swamped by the others. The literature emanating from these programs and their publishers expresses a persistent sense of racial struggle, resentment and alienation. Seldom, if ever, does it voice gratitude toward the host American society. The editors of Latino Poverty in the New Century: Inequalities, Challenges and Barriers say in their Preface that the Latino presence is felt in many ways, not the least of which is their status as an oppressed and exploited group. 9 Jose Luis Morin attributes the mass immigration of Latinos into the United States to the powerful forces of globalization, which more often than not promote poverty and unfair treatment of Latin American workers, peasants, and indigenous peoples. The result, he says, is that Latin Americans will continue to try to migrate to the United States, where in turn, they are susceptible to exploitation as low-wage factory or agricultural workers. 10 Joan London and Henry Anderson write about a century-long process in California of opening up one pool after another of low-wage, semicaptive labor, 8 Book review by Roger D. McGrath, Chronicles, December 2003, p Maria Vidal de Haymes, Keith M. Kilty, Elizabeth A. Segal (ed.s), Latino Poverty in the New Century: Inequalities, Challenges and Barriers (New York: The Haworth Press, Inc., 2000), p. xiii. 10 Jose Luis Morin, Latino/a Rights and Justice in the United States: Perspectives and Approaches (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), p. 39. Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

26 346 Dwight D. Murphey usually foreign, pigmented, and non-english speaking. 11 And an article by the United Food and Commercial Union says employers ruthlessly exploit immigrant workers, who often have no understanding of workplace rights and who live in constant fear of deportation. 12 We are correctly inclined to take for granted the fact that this activist literature is hostile, as we have just seen, to the host American culture. But that is itself a remarkable fact. One would think that those coming to the United States for a better life would have great affinity for the country they have adopted. What has happened is that the activism has imbibed the outlook of the Left, just as more than a century ago the revolutionaries in Russia drank deeply at the well of Marxist alienation. The immigrant ethnic literature, as well as the attitudes promulgated internationally on behalf of the peoples of color, are profoundly influenced by the continuing phenomenon of what has long been an international alienated intellectual subculture. We have given just a few examples of an immensely large literature. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the literature is homogeneous. As with the Left historically, it is subject to many factional splits. One of the authors believes, for example, as a Marxist, that a common class identity should be the thing that unites the immigrants and that it was a wrong turn for the Left to adopt racial struggle in place of class struggle. We are told that nationalist Chicano ideology considered Marxism a Eurocentric ideology that had no bearing on the Chicano/Latino struggle. Another division is between Latinos and blacks: The Pan-African Student Union and Chicano organizations [at San Francisco State] did not have a good relationship with each other because of mutual racial prejudice. In addition, Chicano nationalist ideology on one side and the Nation of Islam ideology among African Americans separated these potential allies. There has also been the rise of a separate Chicana feminist movement which sees itself as something quite different from a generalized Latino consciousness. Further, Martha Gimenez points to a lack of common origin: This population is divided by class, socioeconomic status, language (not everyone speaks Spanish, and many who do don t speak English), and race/ethnicity. Hispanic /Latinos could be of any race and many are multiracial, from Native American, European, Asian, or African ancestry. Just the same, the editors of Latino Social Movements, 11 London and Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap, p Article, Doing the Work of America: Food and Commercial Workers Mobilize for Immigrant Worker Rights, (12/15/2005). The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

27 American s Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor 347 published in 1999, reported that over the past twenty years, we have witnessed a remarkable blending of what were formerly separate identities into a Latino consciousness. 13 The exploitation concept. We said earlier that in this section we would discuss the concept of exploitation. It is a concept that has long been central to socialist thought s critique of a market economy. At the same time, it is thought fallacious by classical liberal thought. The author of this article has discussed it at length elsewhere, 14 and so won t attempt going into such detail here. The Left s concept of exploitation (which has been absorbed by most, if not all, Latino activists and spokesmen) arises from the perception that great masses of people are helpless in the face of entrapping circumstances, and accordingly need help from outside themselves in dealing with the exigencies of life and with those who would take advantage of their plight. Classical liberalism s denial arises from a perception that in a free society people cannot properly be seen as entrapped, but rather have a de facto ability to handle their own lives and at the same time a moral imperative to make themselves fit for that purpose. (This ideology has long served as the underpinning of traditional American attitudes. It would be naïve, though, to suggest that philosophy controls everything. Economics propels much of what the business community does today vis a vis immigrants.) In what we have quoted from the activist literature, we saw that the immigrants are perceived as victims of forces beyond their own control in Latin America (laid by the author we quoted at the doorstep of globalization ), and then as victims of exploitation after they arrive in the United States. On the other hand, those who dispute that the immigrants are being exploited by working at low-pay jobs in the United States see them as coming voluntarily, frequently even in a rather audacious violation of American immigration law, and as then subject to the supply-and-demand determiners of their remuneration. They are seen correctly as better off than they were in their countries of origin. The question is asked, how can a migration that is made of their own volition and that improves their condition properly be said to be exploitative? 13 Torres and Katsiaficas (ed.s), Latino Social Movements, pp. 177, 94, 168, His discussions of the concept can be found on his collected writings web site: See particularly Chapters 12 and 13 of his book Socialist Thought (which is listed as B4 on the site) and Chapter 7 of his book Modern Social and Political Philosophies: Burkean Conservatism and Classical Liberalism (listed as B2). Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

28 348 Dwight D. Murphey The interesting thing is that both views are right about the facts. There is indeed the pressure of poverty in the immigrants own countries, making the United States a magnet in the individuals understandable desire for a better life; they are caught in (or, more accurately, create by their presence) a situation of over-supply of labor (if we define over-supply as a labor market featuring near-subsistence pay and no contracted-for benefits); they did, in fact, come into the United States voluntarily, being desperately eager to do so; and they are considerably better off even in their straitened circumstances than they were in their native countries. The difference in interpretation of these facts stems in part from the long-running argument over entrapment as a part of the human condition, and in part from opposing points of view about whether massive immigration is appropriate for American society, particularly if it invalidates the fundamental premise of individual self-sufficiency which those holding to traditional American norms have long considered vital. The Left has always believed entrapment a given in the United States. It is an easy extrapolation of this belief for it to see entrapment and exploitation in the lives of the immigrants. Those outside the Left do not believe in exploitation under typical American circumstances and see what appears to be exploitation as entirely the creation of circumstances brought on by the mass immigration itself. They would be inclined to deny that the low-pay labor is exploitive if it is seen by the immigrants themselves as bettering their condition; and they are inclined to add to this the feeling, in effect, that it is intolerable that millions of people have come into our country uninvited and have created a pool of people for whom it can be claimed that they are trapped and taken advantage of. If in fact that is true of them, they (and those who have encouraged their immigration) have created a circumstance incompatible with the basic assumptions of the American way of life, and Americans have no occasion to blame themselves for it by applying such a concept as exploitation to it. This latter perception, we should note, is based on a point of view that voices the perspective of what has been the American mainstream. When we say that the average American will, before long, come to embrace the Left s own alienated perception and acknowledge guilt over exploitation, we are predicting that the average American in the future will have surrendered his present point of view and have adopted that of the newcomers and their spokesmen, including their ideological champions on the Left. The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

29 American s Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor 349 The difference over exploitation is central of our thesis, but it would be a mistake to see the difference as anything other than a sub-set of what is in essence an existential conflict over what the United States is to be. Who are the American people? Do those of overwhelmingly European descent who have heretofore formed the center of American gravity have a right, or the will, to continue to have a country of their own? Or is that society to pass into history, to be supplanted by another, though the name and institutional structures may stay the same? If the latter is to prevail, as it appears it very well may, the point of view will change to reflect it. In fact, the orientation has already shifted sufficiently to allow the mass immigration to happen. The Number and Composition of the Immigrant Population Steven A. Camarota tells of an analysis made by the Center for Immigration Studies of the U.S. Census Bureau s March 2000 Current Population Survey. 15 (Camarota was Director of Research for the Center.) It tells that: * More than 1.2 million legal and illegal immigrants combined now settle in the United States each year. * The number of immigrants living in the United States has more than tripled since 1970, from 9.6 million to 28.4 million. * The poverty rate for immigrants is 50 percent higher than that of natives, with immigrants and their U.S.-born children (under age 21) accounting for 22 percent of all persons living in poverty. * The proportion of immigrant households using welfare programs is 30 to 50 percent higher than that of native households. * One-third of immigrants do not have health insurance two and one-half times the rate for natives. In December 2005, the Knight Ridder Newspapers reported that an estimated 6.3 million Mexicans are thought to be living illegally in the United States, part of a larger illegal immigrant population in excess of 11 million Although illegal Mexican immigrants draw a median income [in the United States] of only $300 a week less than half that of U.S. workers those earnings easily surpass the $100 to $120 average weekly salaries they draw at home At least two-thirds find jobs in four 15 Report, Immigrants in the United States 2000: A Snapshot of America s Foreign-Born Population, by Steven A. Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies Backgrounder, January Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

30 350 Dwight D. Murphey industries that traditionally are dependent on migrant labor: agriculture, construction, manufacturing and hospitality. 16 The uncertainty as to the number of illegal Mexican immigrants is reflected in the fact that a Wichita Eagle editorial just three months earlier had said an estimated 10 million undocumented Mexicans already live in the United States. 17 This, of course, would be considerably more than the 6.3 million estimated in the Knight Ridder article. The truth is that nobody knows with certainty how many there are. The typical condition of the illegal immigrants from Mexico is described by Victor Davis Hanson, author of Mexifornia, as follows: The tragedy unfolds like this: Kids in their teens, at great peril, sneak into America from Oaxaca. They work hard for 30 years at roofing, picking, mowing, cleaning or cooking, and then often turn to state agencies when their backs give out or jobs dry up. Meanwhile, their children too often grow up in the barrios, not with the stern family ethic of Mexico, but instead resenting that their poorly paid and uneducated parents won no security during the decades of hard work. Despite this resentment, large numbers of these children don t pursue an education: four out of ten U.S. resident students of Mexican heritage are not graduating from California high schools, and less than one in ten are graduates from college. 18 Many of the needs of the immigrants are picked up through socialwelfare services paid for by the American public through taxes or increased health insurance premiums. We are told that in 2002 alone Los Angeles County spent about $350 million providing health care for illegal immigrants. It is estimated that the state of California spends nearly $6 billion per year on services for illegal aliens. 19 Illustrations of the Drive to Shift the Point of View The Latino ethnic literature, taking a Third World view of American society, is already in place and should be understood as the forerunner of a more pervasively held change in point of view within American society if the immigration continues. Consider the following not so much in terms of its content as in terms of its point of view, which stands outside the attitudes of the 16 The Wichita Eagle, December 7, 2005, report by Dave Montgomery of Knight Ridder Newspapers. 17 Editorial, Control, The Wichita Eagle, August 28, Victor Hanson Davis, Imprimus, November 2003, p The Proposition (a publication of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy), March 2004, p. 1. The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

31 American s Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor 351 erstwhile American mainstream, seeing it unfavorably: This new immigration has coincided with a surge of nativism and exclusionary efforts in the United States. The contemporary anti-immigrant climate, however, is nothing new Anxieties about who belongs here and what the American self-image ought to be have cropped up throughout the history of this country Throughout the existence of the United States, the dominant white population has used nativist and racist beliefs to support exclusion. 20 An underlying premise during the centuries of the Age of Exploration, of conquest in places like Peru and Mexico, and of colonization around the world was that European civilization was, indeed, at a higher level than that of the world s other peoples. Americans of European extraction, as they spread across the North American continent displacing the American Indians, took it for granted that farms, schoolhouses and villages were a morally defensible replacement for what they saw as primarily a pre-neolithic huntergatherer society. It is politically correct now to assert that that claim of European and American superiority was unjustified; and this politically correct perception is itself a seismic shift in point of view. It is a shift very much embraced by the ethnic literature. 21 We notice that the change in point of view has come so far as to deny that white Americans have a right to have, and to seek to maintain, their own identity or a country of their own. This denial is basic to the quotation we cited two paragraphs ago pointing with disgust at nativism and exclusion. If Past is Prologue : The Cesar Chavez Precedent Cesar Chavez has come to be honored as a hero of ethnic struggle, with virtually no dissent from that perception articulated anywhere in the United States today. We are told that in California, only three birthdays are official state holidays: Jesus Christ s, Martin Luther King s, and Cesar Chavez s. 22 Sacramento has a Cesar Chavez Park ; San Francisco State University a Cesar Chavez Institute for Public Policy ; UCLA a Cesar E. Chavez Center for Chicana/o Studies ; and at a White House ceremony on August 8, 1994, Chavez s widow accepted from President William Clinton a Medal of Freedom on behalf of her 20 Chapter by Keith M. Kilty and Maria Vidal de Haymes, in Latino Poverty, pp. 4, See, for example, the discussion on page 21 of Jose Luis Morin s Latino/a Rights and Justice. 22 Steve Sailer, Cesar Chavez, Minuteman, The American Conservative, February 27, 2006, p. 11. Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

32 352 Dwight D. Murphey deceased husband. One can walk into the lobby of a major hotel in downtown El Paso and immediately come upon a large framed portrait of Cesar Chavez, along with others of Martin Luther King, Jr., Pancho Villa and Che Guevara. The importance of Cesar Chavez s career in the context of this article is that he is seen as a champion in the fight against the exploitation of immigrant labor and that now, after a few years, his elevation to hero status is acquiesced in by the majority society. Here we have an example from the 1960s and 1970s that exemplifies perfectly the point we are making: that over time the majority American society comes to accept its guilt and the point of view held in common by the Left and ethnicity s alienated spokesmen. We will recount some of the detail of Chavez s career to provide readers with a more complete realization of what his precedent consists of, but the essence of his career and his symbolism today can be stated very simply: His grandparents entered the United States illegally; the Chavez family survived on a marginal basis for a number of years; in the third generation, Cesar became an activist as part of Saul Alinsky s militant conflict movement; beginning in 1961, he headed a crusade claiming the exploitation of immigrant grape pickers in California, featuring a strike and several national grape boycotts; his activities were either genuine, with him as a saint-like persona, or were fakery backed by much propaganda and leftist puffery, depending on whose account you read; he received fervent support from the New Left at its height, and from the opinion-forming elite in the United States and the world even long after his death; and as a result he is now a universallyacclaimed ethnic hero. His origins. Peons in Mexico in the 1880s were paid low wages and lived in tiny shacks, in a condition where the owners treated them like slaves. 23 One source says the elder Cesar (the grandfather) took his family across the border into what was known as the Territory of Arizona in 1899, going a few miles north of Yuma to build a home and raise livestock. 24 Elsewhere, however, we are informed that the Chavez clan, headed by Cesar s grandparents, came to the United States as refugees from the Mexican revolution [that began in 1910]. 25 (Which is 23 Doreen Gonzales, Cesar Chavez: Leader for Migrant Farm Workers (Springfield, N.J.: Enslow Publishers, Inc., 1996), p Jean Maddern Pitrone, Chavez: Man of the Migrants (Staten Island, NY: alba house, 1971), p London and Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap, p The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

33 American s Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor 353 correct is of little significance to us here.) The Cesar Chavez we know was born in Yuma on July 31, After his father lost his 160-acre farm in the Depression, the family didn t return to Mexico, but instead remained in the United States to become part of the migrant labor force. The young Cesar attended school only into the eighth grade (dropping out after his father was hurt in an automobile accident), but he is said to have achieved further education through self-study. He married Helen Favila, daughter of a zapatista hero of the Mexican revolution, and in 1949, the first of eight children was born. 26 They settled in San Jose, California, with Cesar making $150 a week as a farm worker in apricots and other crops. [Those who question the charge of exploitation will wonder about the choice of having eight children while making so low an income. Others will counter that for the downtrodden to have a large number of children isn t a consciously made choice.] His years as a Saul Alinsky activist. Chavez s life took a fateful turn in 1952 when a priest brought him into contact with Fred Ross, who Ralph de Toledano says was a graduate of Saul Alinsky s school for professional revolutionists in Chicago, the Industrial Areas Foundation. Toledano describes Alinsky accurately when he says that Alinsky, though a hard-core Marxist-Leninist, was not a Communist Party member. In fact, he despised the Communists because of their lack of flexibility. Alinsky s goal was to establish peoples organizations that were to precipitate the social crisis by action, by using power. 27 In his 1946 book Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky had explained that a People s Organization is a conflict group. This must be openly and fully recognized. Its sole reason for coming into being is to wage war against all evils which cause suffering and unhappiness A war is not an intellectual debate, and in the war against social evils there are no rules of fair play [M]any well-meaning Liberals look askance and with horror at the viciousness with which a People s Organization will attack or counteratack in its battles. 28 Alinsky had dispatched Ross to southern California to set up a community service organization (CSO). In 1952, the CSO hired Chavez, who worked for it for ten years. By 1958, Chavez was the national General Director, with a headquarters in Los Angeles. He London and Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap, p Ralph de Toledano, Little Cesar (An Anthem Book, 1971), pp Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), pp Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

34 354 Dwight D. Murphey resigned, however, in 1962, giving as his reason that they got pretty middle class, didn t want to go into the fields. 29 This reflected frustration over the fact that for two years he had tried to get the CSO executive board to support an organizing project among Mexican- American farm workers but had been turned down. 30 Chavez s leadership of the farm-labor movement a timetable. Having left the CSO, Chavez created and led a farm-labor movement of his own. A capsule-summary of the movement that gave him the heroic status he enjoys today is best given as a timetable. Although this will be bare-bones, it will be followed by a discussion of several aspects of his career that will flesh out more of its substance. The reader will notice that the movement went under a variety of names and organizational formats as it developed In The Politics of Insurgency, J. Craig Jenkins tells how in the spring of 1961 a young community organizer named Cesar Estrada Chavez set out to build an organization of Mexican-American form workers under the name National Farm Workers Association [NFWA] NFWA joined in a strike called by a Filipino farm workers organization, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee [AWOC]. With financial support from labor leader Walter Reuther, Chavez initiated an international consumer grape boycott in December. This was the first of the Chavez grape boycotts That spring, Chavez led his famous March on Sacramento, called the Peregrinacion (Spanish for pilgrimage ). London and Anderson give this description: At high noon on Easter Sunday, the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe extending a benediction over all, more than ten thousand persons stood on the steps and adjacent lawns of the state capitol. 31 AWOC and NFWA merged in August, affiliated with the AFL-CIO, and became the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee [UFWOC], with Chavez as the director. In time, 29 Pitrone, Chavez, p J. Craig Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency: The Farm Worker Movement in the 1960s (NY: Columbia University Press, 1985), p London and Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap, p The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

35 American s Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor 355 we are told, this new union would become known as the UFW [United Farm Workers Union] The grape boycott for which Chavez is most known began in August as a boycott against one main vineyard, but was extended to include all California table grapes (with one exception where a vineyard had signed a contract with UFWOC). The activity this year included picketing the vineyards, conducting secondary boycotts against supermarkets that refused to join the boycott, and using barricades to prevent San Francisco longshoremen from loading grapes on ships In February, Chavez announced a Lenten fast, and on March 10, Chavez [after 25 days] ended his fast by breaking bread with Robert Kennedy and thousands of workers in Delano s Memorial Park. 34 His movement was by now receiving enthusiastic encouragement and support from the American Left during the time when the New Left was at its height. At one point, Chavez toured several cities to garner support for the boycott, starting in Washington, D.C., with a speech to 2,000 supporters in the Washington National Cathedral This was the year the growers finally either conceded to Chavez s boycott and signed agreements with him, or signed contracts with the competing Teamster s union. Chavez declared the Teamster s competition an act of treason against the legitimate aspirations of farm workers, and called for allout war between the Chicanos and Filipinos together against the Teamsters and the bosses. 36 In October, a grower obtained an injunction against the nationwide boycott. In December, Chavez spent twenty days in jail for contempt of court after refusing to terminate it. 37 Mid to late 1970s. The Teamsters led the competition during the early 1970s, but eventually gave way to the NFWU. 32 Gonzales, Cesar Chavez, p Pitrone, Chavez, pp. 117, 130, Winthrop Yinger, Cesar Chavez: The Rhetoric of Nonviolence (Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1975), p Pitrone, Chavez: Man of the Migrants, p Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, p Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, p Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

36 356 Dwight D. Murphey Toledano says George Meany put pressure on the national officers of the Teamsters to call off their organizers in California. 38 The result was, as Jenkins tells us, that in March 1977, the Teamsters announced that they would no longer contest elections and would allow their existing contracts to expire. 39 A peace pact was entered into between the two unions. 1980s. Gonzalez explains that after the pact expired in the early 1980s the Teamsters again began recruiting field workers Throughout the 1980s, the Teamsters number grew while UFW membership declined. By the early 1990s, about twenty thousand people belonged to the UFW, a dramatic decrease from the 1972 peak of nearly one hundred thousand. 40 It is perhaps not coincidental that Chavez s movement prospered most while the New Left was burning with intensity, and went into eclipse with the decline of support from large numbers of student radicals, celebrities and leftliberal politicians. Despite this decline, Chavez in 1987 called another boycott, this time against grapes sprayed with pesticides declared harmful by the Environmental Protection Agency. He dramatized this cause the next year with a 36-day fast s. California state flags were lowered to half-mast after Chavez died in his sleep on April 23, Aspects of Chavez s Crusade: 1. Support from the American Left. Jenkins explains that the UFW made extraordinarily effective use of that distinctive ruse de guerre of the sixties movements protest actions designed to mobilize external support and push forward the development of generalized political turmoil. Chavez was able to do this even though farm workers are a relatively advantaged segment of the American underclass. 43 When the Delano grape strike made the headlines, student activists at Berkeley who had been involved in the Free Speech Movement and the civil rights organizing in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 immediately 38 Toledano, Little Cesar, p Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, p Gonzales, Cesar Chavez, p Gonzales, Cesar Chavez, p Gonzales, Cesar Chavez, p Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, p. xi. The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

37 American s Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor 357 flocked to Delano In short, the external support was unprecedented. The union was able to continually add new staff and simultaneously launch a nationwide boycott, all without the luxuries of union contracts and, at least initially, a stable mass membership. 44 Support came from the National Council of Churches National Migrant Ministry, from the federal government s Office of Economic Opportunity, and from several private foundations, the Catholic Church, liberal politicians, and several other social movements of the period. The March on Sacramento started with 75 marchers carrying U.S., Mexican and the black eagle union flags, headed by a staff bearing the Virgin of Guadalupe The 300-mile march gave sympathizers a rallying point. Priests, Protestant clergy, students, and radical unionists flocked to the closing days. As the procession advanced on Sacramento, it swelled from seventy-five originales to over 5,000. [We were told 10,000 by London and Anderson; see the entry for 1966 in the time-line above.] The Franciscan Brotherhood provided a $150,000 loan. In December 1970, Chavez was visited in jail by Coretta Scott King and Ethel Kennedy. 45 The media amplified Chavez s message while blacking out news about his opposition. Toledano tells of an opposition meeting of 3,000 pickers and their families on June 9, 1968, and says that the national press and the TV networks, although they had been informed days before, ignored the meeting. Then, he says, on July 14, an estimated 5,000 pickers congregated in Bakersfield s Hart Park, but none of the national media were there. 46 Pitrone reports that the boycott was supported by people prominent in the entertainment and society world as several major fundraising bazaars for the benefit of the grapestrikers were held in the New York area. Alan King and Peter, Paul and Mary entertained at one such program that was attended by numbers of celebrities. 47 And there was much, much more. A book could be filled describing the support. The backing even came internationally, with British dock workers refusing to unload more than 70,000 pounds of California grapes, the World Council of Churches declaring its support, 48 and Chavez in 1974 even receiving an audience with Pope Paul VI. 44 Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, pp. 143, Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, pp. 137, 140, 154, 180, Toledano, Little Cesar, pp Pitrone, Chavez, p London and Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap, pp. 97, 98. Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

38 358 Dwight D. Murphey It shouldn t be overlooked that Chavez not only received the support of the Left, but was himself a creature of it, fully in tune with it. He was active on behalf first of Robert Kennedy and then of Hubert Humphrey as candidates for president. 49 He added his name to the Vietnam Moratorium. 50 And when the New Left turned away from mass protest and toward inward quasi-religious introspection in the early seventies, Chavez was a part of that: Gonzales tells how he experimented with yoga, personal encounter programs, holistic medicine, and meditation Chavez s use of theater. The New Left was noted for its use of fanciful theatrical devices in the Dadaist mode, for which the inspiration was most likely gleaned from earlier leftist movements in Europe. Cesar Chavez was a master at such devices, and it is this that most explains his ability to amplify his activities through an enthusiastic media and the omnipresent radical fervor of that period. The key, Jenkins says, was staging dramatic protest events that captured media attention. 52 (And, of course, having a media that was eagerly disposed to amplify the drama.) Thus, Jenkins reports, Chavez s 25-day fast in 1968 became a mass media event, capturing national political attention. Chavez went on fasts, led religious pilgrimages, and staged arrests to protest repression. The spirit of Chavez s Alinsky-like methods is told by Jenkins, who, despite the revelations his book contains, is not one of Chavez s enemies: After an injunction was entered against the strike, 44 pickets set out on a caravan to violate the court order. As they chanted in unison: Huelga! [ Strike ] Huelga! Huelga!, cameramen scrambled around, taking every conceivable shot. The pickets were then arrested, and the arrests gave Chavez the needed ammunition. Speaking that afternoon on the steps of Sproul Hall at Berkeley, he described the arrests and appealed for contributions and volunteers That weekend carloads of students showed up in Delano to volunteer for the new cause. 53 Similar theater occurred during Chavez s 20-day incarceration in October Pitrone recounts how the strikers conducted a 24-hour Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, p. 166; London and Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap, p. 50 London and Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap, p Gonzales, Cesar Chavez, p Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, p Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, p The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

39 American s Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor 359 vigil. Setting up an altar on the back of a truck, they draped the altar with a black cloth, then with the flags of the United States and Mexico and with the UFWOC black eagle, adding daisies, red geraniums, votive candles and a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Photographers took pictures of the prayer vigils in the parking lot, and took more pictures as two widows, Ethel Kennedy and Coretta King, joined some 2,000 supporters for a candlelight mass in the parking lot A genuine hero or was it smoke and mirrors? There is much reason to suppose that Chavez s reputation is a construct formed out of repetitive leftist rhetoric, media hype, a fervent ideological alienation against business and the American mainstream in general, and racial tribalism. He is a hero of the Left, and the fact that he is accepted as such by American society today illustrates the point we are making in this article that over time the American people come to embrace the symbols, concepts and heroes of the alienation, adopting the point of view of their harshest critics, even though much of the basis for denunciation has been manufactured. The presidential citation when Chavez was awarded the Medal of Freedom said he was for his own people a Moses figure. This captures the degree to which he has been elevated to being virtually a religious icon, and how much he is seen as a racial hero. Although his use of Mexican symbols such as the Mexican flag and the Virgin of Guadalupe gave his crusade a strong ethnic dimension from the beginning, his role was actually more complex. It was consistent with his identification with Saul Alinsky and with his place within the American Left that he saw himself as a crusader not just for immigrants from Mexico, but against exploitation throughout American society: We are concerned, he said, that our victories be of the kind that can be the foundation for future victories for others who are oppressed in other parts of our nation. 55 And during the first years of his union crusade he positioned himself more as a labor advocate than an ethnic one. Since the main cause of low wages was an over-abundance of labor, Chavez for quite a long time was a determined opponent of continued immigration from Mexico It was the Left itself that campaigned against the bracero guest-worker program, highlighting its exploitation ; 56 and when illegal 54 Pitrone, Chavez, pp. 162, Yinger, Cesar Chavez, p Steven Sailer, Cesar Chavez, Minuteman, The American Conservative, February 27, 2006, p. 12: The famous 1960 Harvest of Shame documentary by CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow inspired liberal Democrats in Congress to abolish the bracero guest-worker program in Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

40 360 Dwight D. Murphey immigration began to overwhelm the labor pool, it was Chavez who in 1969 led a march to the Mexican border to protest illegal immigration. As late as 1979, Chavez complained in Congressional testimony that employers go to Mexico and have unlimited, unrestricted use of illegal alien strikebreakers. 57 Chavez s change toward a more unmixed ethnic posture came in the 1980s, when, as Steven Sailer explains, losing interest in the gritty work of organizing, the aging Chavez began to back mass immigration as he became a symbol of Latino identity politics. 58 The UFWU even began openly organizing sindocumentos [i.e., undocumented illegal immigrants]. 59 Chavez s shift on the issue of illegal immigration coincides with the Left s own shift. We have mentioned how one Marxist author decries this move from class struggle to ethnic struggle. There is thus some subtlety to the question of just what sort of hero Chavez was. But a hero he clearly is, at least within today s conventional wisdom. Let s look now at some of the points made (by both friend and foe) that would raise the question of whether it is not a matter of smoke and mirrors with his status being an artifact of propaganda. The image is that Chavez conducted his campaign in a location where workers were impoverished and beaten down. Accordingly, we are surprised when we find London and Anderson, who though strongly pro-chavez are also honest scholars, saying that the farm labor movement has its own countermyths. One is that conditions are particularly intolerable in California If the comparison is with industrialized agriculture in other parts of the United States, the myth cannot be sustained. Farm labor conditions in California are, in that perspective, unusually good. They go on to explain that the oftenoverlooked truth [is] that most farm work in California is highly skilled and that contrary to popular assumption, relatively few California farm workers were migrants. 60 Pitrone, also pro-chavez, acknowledges that most of the field workers in the Delano area were not migrants, and their average yearly earnings of $2400 were much higher than the earnings of the average migrant in other places. 61 We have reason, then, to credit what Toledano (a foe) tells us when he says about Delano Sailer, ibid, p Sailer, ibid, pp Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, p London and Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap, pp. 18, 20, Pitrone, Chavez, p. 60. The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

41 American s Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor 361 that almost ninety percent of its work force lived there permanently owning or renting, driving their own cars, and enjoying the highest farm pay in California, which in turn earns the highest in the continental United States according to the Agricultural Department. He says their relations with their employers were amicable. And they knew that, year after year, they could get reasonable wage increases. 62 He refers to the Chavez propaganda line that the Delano workers were making only $1.20 an hour, whereas this ran strangely counter to the certified figures from Schenley [one of the growers] which had paid no more than the rest of the grape growing industry of an average wage for pickers on $2.77 an hour for men, $2.54 for women. 63 There is reason to question how much support Chavez actually received from the grape pickers. We have noted that the media ignored large anti-chavez meetings held by pickers and their families. Toledano says that when the March on Sacramento started on March 17, 1966, the media seemed to outnumber the 66 marchers that Chavez had been able to gather. He says that between 1,000 and 1,500 students and other sympathizers descended in busloads on the state capital for the end of the march on April 10. It was this crowd which TV commentators hailed as striking grape pickers who had walked from Delano. He adds that even had all 66 of the strikers from Delano been able to make it, their numbers would have been pitifully small compared to the many thousands who continued to work. 64 Jenkins (a friend, but who doesn t hesitate to point out facts that contradict Chavez s image) corroborates the main features of Toledano s account, although he says, as we have seen, the beginning number of marchers was 75 and that priests, Protestant clergy, students and radical unionists swelled the final crowd to 5, London and Anderson, as we ve also seen, put the final crowd at 10,000.What is clear is that few were grape pickers. Toledano says that when AWOC and Chavez s NFWA joined forces in 1965 to call a strike in Delano, Chavez followed the advice, given in Saul Alinsky s manual, to import pickets. What amounted to a shuttle service between San Francisco and Delano was set up, bringing busloads of students, some professors, and others ready to pose as strikers Toledano, Little Cesar, pp. 15, Toledano, Little Cesar, p Toledano, Little Cesar, pp. 46, Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, p Toledano, Little Cesar, pp. 26, 27. Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

42 362 Dwight D. Murphey [Our emphasis.] What Chavez essentially did was to bypass the workers and force compulsory unionization by a campaign directed at the growers who employed them. Years of boycotts, secondary boycotts, marches and massive publicity caused the employers to capitulate, and it was that that brought in the workers, who then had no other choice. This is Toledano s thesis, and it seems supported by the facts we have recited. Chavez wanted all hiring to be done through hiring halls, Toledano says. He called for a closed shop. This, of course, is what the boycott was all about. The strike having failed, as Chavez readily admitted, it was necessary to by-pass the workers by putting unbearable economic pressures on the growers. 67 There were various ways a fraud was worked on the American public through massive propaganda. The media were complicit when they represented thousands of New Left student protestors as grape pickers. This, of course, made the March on Sacramento a spectacular charade. When Chavez and the media depicted the workers in Delano as impoverished migrants, that too was a fraud. Toledano tells how at 5:30 on a Sunday morning, Cesar Chavez stood before CBS television cameras in front of a shockingly decrepit hovel, to expose the condition of life in Delano. He pointed to the deserted streets to show the effectiveness of his strike There were two main catches. To begin with, the hovel was a condemned building and no one had lived in it for many years. And, of course, the streets were empty of traffic as they always were and always will be on that day and hour. 68 Toledano even finds reason to suspect that Chavez s fasts were dishonest: He goes on a twenty-five day fast, and the nation holds its breath; he emerges in perfect health, and no one asks embarrassing questions. He says the grape pickers of Delano insist that Chavez never fasted and even some of the union volunteers claim that it was a fraud. A reporter who had covered the fast told me, I saw Chavez in January and I saw him in March. He hadn t lost weight. In fact, he hadn t been on a fast because I saw him eating. 69 Chavez is said to have been deeply committed to the non-violent policies of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 70 Yinger speaks of 67 Toledano, Little Cesar, p Toledano, Little Cesar, p Toledano, Little Cesar, pp. 17, Pitrone, Chavez, p. 69. The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

43 American s Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor 363 Chavez s appeal for militant nonviolence. 71 This would put Chavez on a higher moral plane, and a more publicly palatable one, than if he had resorted to bombings, kidnappings, and insurgent methods of that sort. But, short of that, there is reason to think the nonviolence position was more a posture than a reality. Again, Jenkins, though friendly to Chavez, doesn t hesitate to report a contradiction: In the late 1970s, he says, the union revised its action strategy, relaxing the restrictions on strike violence. Although nothing was ever said officially, personal attacks as well as property damage became more frequent while Chavez looked the other way. He points out that by that time external support was not as critical. 72 Coercion and sabotage of various kinds were used. Jenkins tells of grapes that were caused to rot on the loading docks; of grapes rotting on picketed trains; of union representatives [having] notified shipping firms that shipments of scab products would endanger labor relations. 73 He reports how during the boycott, teams [would fill] baskets with expensive frozen foods, mashing grapes and peaches underneath cans, and then abandon the baskets in the back corner of the store. Several hours later the manager received an anonymous phone call, alerting him to the dripping baskets and recommending that he get nonunion grapes off the shelves. 74 Delores Huerta worked with Chavez for many years. Jenkins relates how at one house, Delores Huerta, convinced that the workers were planning to work, blocked off the driveway. For two days the workers stayed home. 75 Toledano says about Chavez that to the press, and to the California clergy, he preached the doctrine of non-violence. On the picket line, it was something else One Chavez organizer bought several thousand marbles from a Delano shop which were distributed to pickets. With slingshots, the marbles proved to be a maddening weapon, and a punishing one, when used against women and men in the fields. From time to time, there was.22 caliber rifle fire, carelessly aimed to frighten rather than to wound. 76 It is a matter of semantics whether such things amount to militancy rather than to violence. One thing is clear: they were highly coercive. Although the crusade was for the exploited, they weren t to be allowed free judgment. 71 Yinger, Cesar Chavez, p Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, p Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, pp. 151, 153, Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, p Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, p Toledano, Little Cesar, pp. 30, 31. Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

44 364 Dwight D. Murphey Nor would it be correct to think that Chavez was democratic in his operation of the union. Jack Angell, the American Farm Bureau s staff labor director at the time of the Chavez boycott, writes that Chavez fought proposals to bring agriculture under the wing of the National Labor Relations Act and provide secret-ballot elections for farm workers. 77 Jenkins says that despite a constitution guaranteeing open elections, Chavez has closely controlled nominations to the Executive Board, filling positions with family members and close friends. After the narrow victory [in March 1979], Chavez purged the board of directors at the next annual convention. 78 If Past is Prologue : The Japanese-American Relocation Precedent Another significant precedent that shows the dynamics in American society that lead to a reevaluation of the past in response to alienated ideology and propaganda, causing most Americans to condemn their own past and even have a vested personal interest in taking pride in their own moral awareness in doing so, is the transmutation of the World War II relocation of the Japanese-Americans from the U.S. west coast into a concentration camp experience. A good illustration of today s condemnatory consensus is found in one of the Latino books we have been citing: In So Shall Ye Reap, London and Anderson give a capsule summary of what most people think was done to the Japanese- Americans when they say that during World War II, 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry over two-thirds of whom were U. S. citizens were stripped of all rights and possessions and interned in harsh detention camps for the duration of the war. 79 Just a few days ago, the author of this article had a conversation with a friend in which the friend insisted on the truth of the nowconventional view. It made no difference when I pointed out that thousands of people had left the centers during the war to resettle anywhere in the United States except the west coast; or that 4,300 college-age students attended more than 300 American universities during the war. So there is little hope that in a brief discussion here it will be possible to persuade any reader who is convinced otherwise that the internment account is a massive hoax first concocted by New Left activists in the 1960s and then perpetuated by a stacked presidential 77 Jack Angell, letter to The American Conservative, March 13, 2006, p Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency, p London and Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap, p The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

45 American s Future Guilt About Today s Use of Low-Pay Immigrant Labor 365 commission (during the hearings of which pro-american witnesses were hooted down) 80 and by the politics of competing over the critical Japanese-American vote in important states like California. There can be no realistic expectation of denying anyone the satisfaction of the moral preening that comes from embracing the hoax. Other readers those who aren t totally convinced that they know all there is to know about the relocation will find this author s study of the issue useful. It can be found in past issues of this Journal and on the author s collected writings web site. 81 Conclusion Does it make any difference that Americans in a few years will most likely condemn what Americans are doing today in hiring illegal immigrants to do what Americans don t want to do? It is possible to be indifferent about what people will think in the future. To be indifferent, however, would be to show the same moral lethargy and lack of loyalty to ones own society that the analysis here has shown to be a part of the ideological dynamic in contemporary America. To those who feel that loyalty, there is a societal cost in Americans setting themselves up for their own future condemnation. 80 See Roger D. Daniels et. al., ed.s, Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986), p. 140; and the September 12, 1984, hearings before the Subcommittee on Administrative Law and Governmental Relations of the Committee on the Judiciary, U. S. House of Representatives, testimony of John J. McCloy, p Since the web site will be the most readily available source for most readers, we ll refer to it first. As given before, it is See the second chapter of the book ( B7 ) The Dispossession of the American Indian And Other Key Issues in American History; or see the same material in article form as Article 48 ( A48 ), reprinted from the Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Spring 1993, pp Those who have that issue of the Journal may, of course, read it in hard-copy there. Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 2006

46 Understanding the United States: Illusions that Guide Contemporary America A collection of articles published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies by Dwight D. Murphey JSPES Monograph No. 30 ISBN , 181 pages, paperback $25.00 plus Postage $3.50 (USA) $5.50 (foreign) Visa and MasterCard Welcome Council for Social and Economic Studies P.O. Box 34070, N.W., Washington, D.C socecon@aol.com, TEL:(202) FAX:(202) and why not visit