LibertadLatina
Immigration and Women's Human Rights
I fully
agree with journalist Sonia Nazario's views on the plight of Latin American
women and children, and the realities of why women migrate from Latin America to
the U.S. and elsewhere.
For 22
years I have been the stepfather of two now-adult children who at the ages of 9
and 11 (before I came into their lives) began a period of 5 years without
their mother, because she had gone to 'El Norte."
- Chuck
Goolsby
What drives loving and responsible mothers, from tight-knit
families to leave their children behind while they seek a better live in the
United States?
Severe poverty is widespread in Latin America. Parts of Central America
experience ongoing and ever-increasing hunger. People migrate to escape
these realities. Today, many have no other choice but to do so or perish.
Starting 500 years ago, Europeans from England, Ireland, Spain, France and other
nations began to make a similar migration to the Americas, over a period of
several centuries, to escape hunger and poverty. Africans today die by the
hundreds as they attempt to reach Europe by sea, for similar reasons.
Eastern Europeans and people from Asian nations also make risky migrations.
Poverty and hunger-driven migration is a growing global reality.
What
is missing in discussions of the Latin America to U.S. migration debate is any
mention of the fact that women also migrate to escape the "gender
hostile" environment of lawless impunity in sexual harassment, rape and sexual
slavery that has taken over Mexico and much of the rest of Latin America.
Contributing to women's forced dependence on men is
the fact that Institutional sexism in the Latin American region
has lead to centuries of the
intentional denial of education, equal access to health care and equal
protection before the law.
As a result of these social policies and customs,
millions of women have only a primary school education, if that.
Throughout Latin America, women continue to have
limited control over their own reproductive life. As my wife's aunt in
South America once put it, "I had ten children because contraception was
illegal."
Men are acculturated to believe that they 'own'
women's childbearing rights. Under the code of machismo, leaving many women
pregnant is a highly valued badge of honor. Under this code, a man who
completely walks away from supporting his one or multiple families is also
honorable. There is no such thing as enforced alimony payment.
Most
importantly, gender prejudice, racism, elitism, corruption and poor
national economies combine to prohibit the creation of any real social safety
net for women and children. In Latin America, there simply is no welfare,
nor are there food stamps, nor does social security exist to support you in
later life.
This
fact makes life especially difficult for millions of women who have been left to
support large numbers of young children by themselves, with little access to the
education and jobs needed to do so.
If
you cannot work, and do not have a family to provide for you, you will literally
die, or end up selling your body to survive.
The
desperation caused by Latin America's economic crisis also motivates criminal
men and male youth to kidnap and sell tens of thousands of women and children
into sexual slavery as a source of illegal income. The billionaire drug
cartels and their human trafficking subsidiaries are more than happy to buy and
ship this 'merchandise' (enslaved women and children) for resale overseas as sex
slaves in Los Angeles, New York, Madrid, Amsterdam and Tokyo.
All
of these realities, as well as the 'permission' that
machismo
gives to men to abuse and abandon their wives and children at will, contribute
to the fact that poor and lower middle class women cannot support their families
and must therefore migrate.
That
migration invariably involves rape at some time (or multiple times) by bandits
and even policemen, during the journey, and a risk of being sold into sexual
slavery, leading to an early death from more rape, torture and HIV/AIDS.
Social Justice
and Overpopulation
The population of Latin America and the Caribbean grew from
166 million people in 1950 to 513 million in 2000, and is expected to increase
to over 800 million by 2050.
To a large
extent, cultural traditions that encourage large families have resulted in this
rapid population growth. The debates and concerns about limiting
population to sustainable levels that took place in the U.S. and Europe did not
occur in the Latin American region.
Currently,
rapid population growth, social injustices, corruption, a lack of the proper
distribution of basic necessities for survival and economic bad times have
rendered Latin America incapable of supporting its vast population.
At what point
will Latin America's religious institutions take responsibility not just for a
lack of population control, but also for providing the social infrastructure to
support the huge population growth that has resulted from those policies?
The region
now has an estimated 40 million children and youth who live abandoned on the
streets. They have no social safety net to help them. Some starve.
Almost all of them engage in street prostitution to survive.
That means
that Latin America has 40 million prostitutes just among the underage
homeless population.
Every
individual rightly wants to survive, so those who can do so migrate to a place
where they can live in peace and with dignity.
Migration and
Job Competition in the U.S.
Not everyone can migrate to the
United States, which now has a population of 295 million people.
A survey
conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center and published in August of 2005 found that
40% of Mexican adults [in a nation of 103 million people]
want to migrate to the U.S. That statistic includes large numbers of
well-off middle class and elite Mexicans.
And that is
just Mexico's story. People in every nation in Africa, Asia, eastern
Europe and the rest of Latin America probably want to migrate to the U.S. in
equal or greater numbers.
Unlimited jobs do not exist in
the U.S., creating stiff competition between low-income U.S. residents and new
immigrants.
U.S. firms often prefer to hire
immigrant workers, who more often than not work harder, for longer hours, for
lower wages, and under more dangerous working conditions than U.S. workers are
willing to accept. Such firms typically exploit all poor workers and
sometimes play different ethnicities off against each other to their profit.
The existence
of the immigrant labor pool also allows decades of progress in racial equality
to be rolled back as many racially prejudiced employers replace African American
workers with new immigrants.
In
Washington, DC, for example, employees of office cleaning firms went from being
80% African American to being 80% Latin American in a period of just a few
years.
Immigrants
cannot justifiably offer themselves as more 'efficient' replacements for poor
and blue collar U.S. citizens. People are not disposable components that
can be treated like old car batteries and thrown away because the boss wants a
new model.
The approach
to immigrant employment cannot be based on a model of replacing poor and
blue collar U.S. citizens who are only recently coming out of centuries of
fighting abusive labor practices, and in the case of low-income African
Americans, combating open and blatant racial discrimination. That is not
morally right.
What
immigrants bring to the U.S. labor market must be based on a concept other than
"we can do it better and cheaper than 'them,' so hire me and get rid of
'them.'"
That
non-exploitive role for immigrant workers has yet to be defined in a way that
allows affected U.S. citizens to also survive in dignity and experience the
gains of decades of activism to achieve hard-won labor and civil rights.
If a solution
to this conflict is not found, competing ethnic groups of the poor and middle
class will continue to be reduced to acting like shipwreck victims, each
trying to push the other off of the U.S. economic 'lifeboat.'
Things do not
have to be that way!
Currently,
50% of U.S. workers in the construction and hospitality industries are
undocumented. There are many unemployed U.S. men and women who have been
laid off because immigrant labor offers a cheap, docile and easy to exploit
resource to employers. Those laid-off U.S. workers get to 'sit at home'
waiting to get the next job, a gig that probably will not pay very well.
The solutions
to the immigration debate must take these tough realities into account.
A balance must be struck between
the needs of the existing working poor and other working people in the U.S. and
the urgent need of newly arrived immigrants (especially women) to find a safe
place where they and their families can survive and thrive.
Working
Towards Reform
While many among the Latin
American immigrant public clamor for the U.S. to grant open borders and amnesty,
we must also realize that the solution to poverty in Latin America is not going
to be found in a mass exodus to the United States.
Latin America has a land mass and
a natural resources base roughly equivalent to that of North America. If
economic and social justice, and access to economic resources are opened up
throughout the region, social conditions will likely improve over time.
Let's all work to end the
corruption, the impunity and the marginalization of the poor that today plagues
Latin America!
After centuries of Latin America
being run by feudal strongmen (caudillos),
and with the centralization of power and wealth in the hands of a privileged
few, it will be very hard to arrive at true equality for the poor anytime soon.
The U.S. and other world leaders must do their part to pressure Latin America to
reform its government and business institutions.
Because the
U.S. and other western powers have supported Latin American strongmen and elites
so forcefully during the last 100 years (including through the use of 'dirty
wars' in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico,
Nicaragua and Peru) those elites feel entitled and empowered to continue running
Latin America by the use of corrupt, unjust practices that impoverish the poor
and enrich only themselves.
That elite
'privilege' carries over into the realm of women's rights, and justifies sexual
exploitation with impunity.
It is no
coincidence that the countries on the above list, where human rights were
violently abused (especially in regard to women) to enforce the maintenance of
elite power by U.S. supported military force, are today, in the post-war period,
the places where human trafficking and sexist impunity are at their worst.
In Guatemala,
for example, 200,000 mostly Mayan people were murdered by government soldiers
during the 1980's civil war. An estimated 50,000 women were murdered, and
most surviving girls and women were raped with complete impunity. Nobody
ever went to prison for those crimes against humanity.
The United
States' support for wealthy elites and dictators in the recent past stands in
stark contract with the now-stated U.S. goal of ending human trafficking.
The U.S. will have to demand that such elites give up power and allow women and
children to survive, while the elites loose some of their vaunted social
privilege.
Such feudal
traditions as having tens of thousands of underage girls working as unpaid,
live-in servants, girls who are also subject to being raped at-will by any male
member of the family, are among the Roman feudal 'customs' that the elite
and middle class of Latin America will have to give up.
Will they do
so willingly? No.
Will economic
sanctions from the U.S. help create change? Probably.
Elitist,
Roman Empire era feudal practices still exist in many areas of life across Latin
America.
As one
example, in the South American town where my wife grew up, the local mayor and
priest would riffle through poverty relief packages sent by CARE and other
agencies, taking the best of the goods for themselves.
That metaphor
applies across all of Latin America. Poor women and children are excluded
from accessing the basic resources needed to survive while those in positions of
power grow stronger.
Because there
is "no remorse for slavery" in Latin America, few elite people feel any sense of
guilt when they marginalize poor women and children and deny them even the basic
necessities of food and a place to live.
These women
often face only two real choices, prostitution or starvation for themselves and
their beloved children. So they do what they have to do to survive.
The fact that
35,000 Colombian women are trafficked abroad each year, and the fact that the
Dominican Republic (a very small nation) has an estimated 100,000 women in
prostitution overseas, are two accurate indicators of the gravity of this harsh
reality.
In effect,
the wealthy U.S. backed elites in Latin America deny the poor the very right to
survive, and then expect the U.S. to take up the slack by being a never-ending
'escape valve' that provides the social services support for their
nation's poor, while they, the local holders of power do little to nothing to
take on that responsibility within their own national borders.
If Latin American countries open
up real economic opportunities and true social equality for women, children and
men who now live in poverty, living conditions will begin to change for the
better. Such social change will not happen voluntarily. The world
community will have to demand it.
If Latin America's nations do
this, not only will pressures for out-migration be less severe, but women and
girls, especially from indigenous, African descendant and other long-targeted
poor communities, will no longer find prostitution, migration and being sold
into sexual slavery abroad to be 'thinkable' options for providing food
and a roof for themselves and their children.
-
LibertadLatina
Chuck Goolsby
April 7, 2006
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