Capital and State above all else
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Bald writes about the unknown yet remarkable lost histories of the South Asian peddlers and seamen in the US – migrants turned immigrants – who contributed to and settled into multi-ethnic communities and families formed thanks to their working-class networks. Their histories are forgotten for several reasons. They ‘integrated’ into the US by a “different pathway”, forged by Indian Muslims’ networks “embedded in working-class Creole, African American, and Puerto Rican neighbourhoods and entwined with the lives of their residents” (9). They neither formed ethnic enclaves, nor subsequently left them in any striving for upward mobility that would land them in ‘white enclaves’. Most importantly, they were ‘unskilled labour’ from rural areas which lead to their exclusion from US immigration legislation and history, despite representing the majority of South Asian immigrants (the 3000 “estimated to have settled in the United States prior to the Supreme Court decision of 1923”). But to the American state, East Indians were akin to “alcoholics, professional beggars, and the insane; all were undesirable aliens, to be turned away at the borders” (1917 Immigration Act). If they did manage to immigrate under the radar, they were nevertheless prevented from naturalising and all this entailed (2). Eventually, though a naturalisation bill was passed allowing all Indians already residents to apply for citizenship in 1945, and the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, “opened the door to tens of thousands of skilled professionals from the subcontinent,” the latter nevertheless maintained and perpetuated the exclusion of working-class immigrants (5).
Bald fascinatingly points out one of “the United States’ most enduring contradictions: in the very years that the United States became what its leaders would later call a ‘nation of immigrants’ it also became a nation of immigrant exclusion” ( 9). This can for instance be seen today in the ‘indigenous’ working class’ accusation that ‘immigrants are stealing their jobs’.Sivanandan also discusses immigration laws and state reasoning behind them, but in the UK. Just like in the US, though with perhaps differing strategies and focuses, immigrant exclusion laws instrumentalize(d) classism and racism for the ultimate goal of maximising profit, for the sake of capital above all else. The insidious British imperial machinery was (is) deeply embedded into the treatment of ‘black’ Commonwealth workers.
In the UK, the ‘black’ Commonwealth workers were desirable only for the cheap labour they provided, yet on a social level they were undesirable. Sivanandan explains, “the crux of the problem, therefore, was not migration, but settlement and not discrimination but racial discrimination” (352). The British state thus initially articulated immigration and citizenship laws in a way that was meant to profit from foreign labour while keeping these foreign workers from settling in the UK. Eventually however, the immigrants became ghettoized – a phenomenon which Ceri Peach explains as “the geographical expression of complete social rejection” (349). Though the insidious British imperial machinery also worked at ‘integrating’ these people of colour, but only because of the threat they otherwise posed to the survival and thriving of capital.Both Bald and Sivanandan discuss the intersectionality of race and class in a world ruled by capital and state interests at the expense of the working class, but especially the working class of colour. Both Bald and Sivanandan document how Western powers have exploited and kept at bay the very ‘third-world’ they themselves created and led to ‘under-develop’. Rana’s discussion of the labour diaspora and the global racial system addresses just that. The lost histories of the resulting global labour migrants which Bald writes about are a testament to this also. “They were among the many populations of peasants and workers whose traditional means of livelihood had been disrupted by colonization, industrialization, and the mechanization of agriculture, and who traveled across oceans to access the jobs and markets available in the United States” (Bald, 9).
When it comes to Maimouna Youseff’s song, she literally is attempting to create the space for her voice to be heard, for her to tell her story – one of internalised racism, intersectionality and clashing ethnic mixities under the white status quo. She too tells a lost story. What is more, she admits she does want “the fame and the glory”, inscribing herself into one of the very things that thrive at the expense of the immigrant working class, specifically that of colour – capital and the American dream of upward mobility, ‘making it to the top’.