Race and ìThe New Immigrationî: Outside the Black-White Binary

Race and "The New Immigration": Outside the Black-White Binary

*What Best Fits the Experience of Immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean Latin America, and Africa? The Model of Immigrant Assimilation? Or the Model of Racial Oppression?

*What Divides Us? Is it the Idea of Racial Superiority and Inferiority? Or is it the Process of Assimilation into American Culture and Values?

I. Robert Blauner, a Marxist Sociologist and Social Theorist who was influenced by Black Power and other "nationalist" and "third worldist" movements of the 1960ís, distinguished between Colonized and Immigrant Minorities.

According to Blauner, Colonized Minorities were involuntary migrants (i.e. they were subject to forced labor) or their descendents, who were kept on the economic periphery of society and subject to racial discrimination. Also, Blauner argues, colonized minorities were seen as incapable of becoming fully American-- of fully assimilating American values and practices-- because of their alien cultural traditions and values.

In contrast, Blauner argues, Voluntary Migrants had full access to waged (free) labor markets, full access to industrial centers. Moreover, any discrimination targeted against voluntary migrants was moderated by their access to whiteness, and they were not required to abandon their ënativeí culture in order to assimilate into American society

II. Lisa Lowe and Cultural Studies (Alternative title: How Race Disrupts the American Immigration Narrative)

Lowe raises two Questions in these chapters:

1) What role do racial discrimination, labor exploitation, and cultural exclusion play in the new immigrant experience?

2) Can Cultural Production be a site of resistance to exclusion, marginalization, and assimilation?

In addition, Lowe proposes Cultural Studies as an alternative to the Bifurcation of the "Social Sciences" and "Art" within Academic study and discourse.

Her analysis updates Blauner in the following sense. She sees Globalization (which she describes as modernized (or post-modern) form of the colonial exploitation of non-European labor) as creating new sites for both the exploitation of the labor of People of Color and for Resistance to Oppressions Based on Race, Class, and Gender.

What does Lowe mean by Cultural Production as Resistance? She seeks forms of "performance" (everything from oral histories and folk culture to novels and plays) that give "Voice" to the Voiceless (particularly those at the bottom of globalized structures of industrial production, sweatshops, etc.), that make the Personal experiences of individual not only reflective of a larger, Collective experiences but political as well, and that reveal the Cultural Contradictions inherent in American Notions of Citizenship.

In this sense, Lowe seeks to Redefine the study of Citizenship: "Nam[ing] the contradictions of Asian immigration." P.8

Legal Citizenship: Who is entitled to the legal rights of citizenship? (The Naturalization Act of 1790)

--Cultural Citizenship: Who is REPRESENTED as part of the American nation? Who is marked as "foreign"?

Lowe is a critic of both liberal and Marxist theories of citizenship that emphasis citizenship as an opportunity structure, but ignore the cultural requirement that one abandon claims and memories based on historical wrongs. While legal citizenship is theoretically Universally available to all who fits criteria, Lowe contends, that as a cultural idea, American citizenship requires immigrants to abandon their "original" Identities and embrace, at least publicly American values and practices. Moreover, she argues, at the cultural level, race continued to operate as a barrier to Full Cultural Citizenship for non-European immigrants.

Example I: Lowe's Critique of Asian-American Civil Rights Movement

Civil Rights Movement challenged racialization of Asian-Americans and sought state protections against racial bias.

But it overlooked the state's role in protecting exploitation of new immigrants as unskilled labor.
Thus, citizenship drives reinforce assimilationist impulse to prove Americanness and embrace the "melting pot" narrative.

Example II: The Controversy Created by the Debate over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Can an Asian American Design Represent the American Nation?
Art as Political Debate: The Political Import of Representations of the Nation

Loweís Culturalist Project: Cultural Production Can Serve as a Way to Challenge Historical Forgetting and to Promote Cultural Consciousness as a way to Synthesize the Rights and Privileges of U.S. Citizenship with Ethnic Identities Rooted in Awareness of Oppressions Past and Present.

Lowe's analysis also serves as an Implicit Challenge to the myth of the Model Minority.

Despite a disproportionate presence in institutions of higher learning, most Asian-Americans work in low-wage service and industrial jobs or are clustered at the bottom of middle-class and professional occupations.
Thus, the notion of model minority is an implicit criticism not only of the black and Latino poor, but of low-waged Asian-Americans as well.

III. Key Historical Moments in the New Immigration

The McCarren-Walter Act of 1952: 1790 Naturalization Act is Replaced, opening the naturalization process to all irregardless of race or place of birth. At the same time, this Cold War-era act included provisions allowing the exclusions of "Subversive Aliens", i.e. those whom the Justice Department deemed to be threat to the U.S. Cold War against the Soviet Union.

The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 replaces the Nation-Quota System established by the 1924 Immigration Act with a System that restricts immigration to the U.S. to those who already have family legally in the country or have professional and/or technical skills that would be of use to the nation's economy. A third category of legal immigrants were not part of this act, refugees fleeing Soviet-style repressive regimes (Russians, Cubans, the Chinese, Nicaraguans, etc.).