The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

334 critical reflections
cess to schools, colleges, and universities. Although not all referenda have been successfully
implemented, they have in some cases drastically limited social services
to children, including their access to food. 8 The 1998 California proposition to ban
bilingual education for documented and undocumented alike was at least in part
a reflection of anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiment. “If they want to live here,
they should become more like ‘real’ Americans” is the general tenor of any number
of letters to the editor that appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union,
and other Southern California newspapers during the months preceding that election.
Thus the media can both promote and undercut basic fairness. These events
and processes have been augmented by further limitations on immigrants’ and migrants’
civil rights. On February 24, 1999, the Supreme Court limited the First
Amendment rights of illegal immigrants by ruling that people who are in the
United States without papers cannot avoid deportation by claiming that they are
targeted for their political views. This ruling, which was the result of a case against
several Palestinians and a Kenyan, is unlikely to affect most of the undocumented
people in the United States since few actually claim that they have been deported
or marked in some way because of their politics. Nonetheless, it is a chilling exception
to what was once a general rule in the United States that “aliens” enjoy
civil rights more or less equal to those of citizens (Nagengast et al. 1992). Further,
it effectively discourages the undocumented from speaking out publicly about any
matter that might be interpreted as political. Finally, it may endanger the rights of
those who are awaiting either asylum hearings or are in the United States legally
(Biskupic and Branigin 1999:A1). It certainly flies in the face of Kuper’s stipulation
that nongenocidal societies guarantee the legal rights of minorities.
Latino citizen activism following Ezequiel Hernandez’s killing in Redford, Texas,
did contribute to the defeat of a 1998 congressional bill to put an additional ten
thousand soldiers on the border and to remove those already there, an encouraging
outcome that suggests the power of oppositional politics. Further, the 2000 AFL-
CIO call for a new amnesty for illegal immigrants and an end to employer sanctions,
which it has supported since the mid-1980s, surprised many. The Los Angeles
Times attributed the large turnout at a Los Angeles rally in support of the AFL-
CIO to the end of the recession in California. 9 Indeed, the extremely low unemployment
rate in California in 2000 meant that the lowest-paying jobs were going
begging. Labor shortages rather than a concern with immigrant rights per se may
motivate the AFL-CIO, an illustration of Falk’s point about interest-based rather
than morality-based advocacy.
In mid-2001, President George W. Bush indicated that he favors a new amnesty
policy to possibly legalize millions of Mexicans already in the United States, but he
immediately retreated from his position in the face of scathing criticism from Congress
and much of the public. Nonetheless, a new immigration policy of some kind
is in the air. In spite of mildly hopeful signs of a shift in public opinion, the military
continues to provide assistance to the INS in a variety of areas along or close
to the border, including the building and upgrading of helicopter pads and roads