Abstract
Since 2016, topics pertaining to Latin America have frequently appeared in the headlines. Sadly, this is not because of a newfound journalistic interest in the lives of Latin American people or the dynamics of the region’s politics. It is because of the openly white supremacist agenda of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The latest in several waves of racist nativism that has long haunted this country, the current mania to build a border wall, to separate children from their families, to place people in concentration camps, to deport as many immigrants as possible, and to let immigrants die untreated in detention centers is rightly considered a national shame by liberals and leftists alike.
However, it is not as if the American left has a consistently strong history of support for Latin America. Both the labor and the environmental movements have complicated pasts when it comes to immigration, to put it mildly. Since the 1980s, the plight of Latin Americans and immigrants has been important to many on the broader left, but support has been uneven at best, with activists careening from crisis to crisis rather than developing a sustained political project seeking to confront U.S. empire.
Two excellent new books examine the complex and problematic relationships the United States has with its southern neighbors. Steve Striffler’s Solidarity: Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights and Daniel Denvir’s All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It both provide much for liberals and leftists to consider as we attempt to figure out both how to resist the racism of the Trump era and how to rebuild an internationalist left in the United States. Although both authors are concerned with the effects of U.S. policy abroad, their principal concern is the condition of the left and liberalism at home.
Striffler examines the tenuous history of solidarity efforts between the U.S. left and Latin America. The left uses the term “solidarity” all the time, but it often exists more at the rhetorical than the functional level. Striffler’s book sheds light on just how limited solidarity efforts have remained over the last century.
Striffler begins the book by examining the Haitian Revolution and continues with a discussion of the black internationalism of the early twentieth century. But his focus is on the most robust solidarity effort in recent decades—that between American activists and those fighting the Reagan administration–supported repression in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala in the 1980s. The Central American struggle morphed into the anti-sweatshop, fair trade, and pro-Zapatista movements of the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century. But despite some long-lasting efforts, real solidarity programs have been fleeting. One important reason for this, Striffler argues convincingly, has been changes in the way leftists’ analysis of society began to decenter the state as a central agent of change.
Striffler is particularly interested in how human rights has emerged as the organizing principle for internationalist efforts based in the United States. He demonstrates that this is an inherently apolitical starting point, one that prevents us from understanding the forces causing repression and developing a strategy for fighting to transform them. Instead, human rights–based activism is a response to a specific crisis that empowers non-governmental organizations (NGOs) abroad over anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist organizations at home. Even the impressive Central American solidarity efforts of the 1980s, Striffler observes, resulted in part because American leftists found the domestic scene so hopeless that it was overseas where they felt they could make a real difference.
Striffler’s most important insight is that the left’s turn away from structural solutions to political problems ultimately led to its own neoliberal-influenced activism, one that emphasized individual autonomy more than large-scale state action. The Zapatistas, perhaps the most popular group among activists in the Global North during the late 1990s and early 2000s, sought not to transform Mexico and create justice for all but rather to withdraw from state control and run their own autonomous communities. The fair trade movement has had at best a mixed record of actually improving the lives of artisans and workers in Latin America—but it has enabled privileged consumers to feel good about themselves. And even where fair trade fights were successful, they operated within a human rights framework that did little to challenge the structural basis of the atrocious working conditions that they were right to condemn.
The key political takeaway from Striffler’s book, then, is to refocus our work with Latin America back on to the American state. Nowhere is the centrality of the American state more visible these days than immigration. Migration from the region has skyrocketed since 1965, drastically transforming American racial demographics, not only around the U.S.-Mexican border, but in states ranging from Georgia to Nebraska. And yet despite the nation reopening its borders to large-scale immigration in the Johnson administration, most of the half-century since has seen a politics of growing racial exclusion, with great discomfort by many Americans over the linguistic, cultural, and racial changes to this nation.
Daniel Denvir’s All-American Nativism is a valuable primer into this immigration history and the politics of exclusion that have proved all too effective for both Republicans and Democrats. Naturally, the book begins with Donald Trump and his racist agenda that has demonized non-white people both inside and outside the nation’s borders. Denvir is as revolted by that as any liberal who seemingly discovered the policies of deportation on January 20, 2017. But more important for Denvir is how politicians on both sides of the aisle have defined immigration as a problem. In his mind, the moderate immigration position for Democrats has become deporting undocumented immigrants in order to protect legal immigration. But while this approach has been politically expedient for Democrats from Dianne Feinstein to Barack Obama, it has failed miserably on both moral and strategic grounds, helping to shift the broader immigration politics of the nation to the right and contributing to the militarization of the border.
One of Obama’s greatest failings as president was believing that if he combined a strong deportation agenda with a path to citizenship for many undocumented Americans, then Republicans would play along and pass a comprehensive immigration bill. Instead, they took the deportation and pulled the football away on doing anything to keep immigrants in this nation. Obama’s embrace of the so-called “Dreamers,” the young undocumented migrants brought to the United States as children, through the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program is a prime example of this approach. By creating the idea of a “good” immigrant and then offering Republicans increased deportations of other undocumented immigrants along with money for border security, Obama managed to move the entire debate on immigration to the right.
The horrors of the Trump immigration crackdown, most notably locking babies in cages, has at least gotten the attention of many liberals in a way that previous immigration crackdowns, including that of Obama, did not. If this outrage can be channeled into a durable political program, we may have an opportunity to reverse the long rightward drift in the Democratic Party’s approach to immigration. There are two strong reasons for this. First is the growing Latinx population in the nation, which is overwhelmingly Democratic, especially among young voters. While far more diverse than usually portrayed, what Latin American immigration did for California politics is a sign of what could happen more nationally over the next two decades. Second, the leftist resurgence of the last decade has largely taken immigrant rights seriously and has no reluctance to openly embrace undocumented Americans’ right to live in this country. Rhetoric around opening the nation’s borders has grown, an unthinkable position in American politics ten years ago.
There are reasons to believe this is possible, and some of it has to do with Denvir himself. All-American Nativism is part of the Jacobin series at Verso. I have often been critical of Jacobin due to its turning the revival of American socialism into a one-magazine rooting squad for Bernie Sanders, often at the expense of a more structural analysis of American politics and the long-term strategies needed on the left. Yet Jacobin has helped to move attention on the left back to the need to influence and control the state. Denvir, an occasional contributor to the site and host of a Jacobin-sponsored podcast, helps this newly state-centered left by refusing to engage in simplistic “both sides do it” rhetoric, but instead by pursuing a nuanced discussion of immigration policy and racism that urges us to fight to make the state an agency that defends immigrants.
Building a mass movement for solidarity with Latin America will require doing this on a larger scale—forthrightly challenging the reality of U.S. empire and the domestic politics that enable it in a sustained way. There are no shortage of issues around which such campaigns can be conducted. U.S. interventions in Latin American nations have contributed to their political destabilization—and they should be opposed in Venezuela, Bolivia, and anywhere else. Free trade agreements allow the United States to dump agricultural products on Latin America and undercut the ability of rural Latin Americans to maintain even their low standard of living. Struggles for a trade policy that serves the interests of workers in the United States and Latin America can illuminate just how much the overwhelming majority of people in this hemisphere have in common.
Accomplishing this will take a left-liberal internationalism that sets its sights on the state as the means by which any positive change will take place. And that left-liberal internationalism must start by articulating policy solutions that both open our borders and help people in the Global South stay at home if they wish. We need to demand international trade regulations that open American courts to prosecute violations of human and labor rights by American companies and throughout their supply chains. We need global pacts that create criminal violations for employers that violate the human rights of their employees. We need to create agricultural policies that do not drive farmers off their land. We need to expand asylum policy and make the United States the leader in offering a new home to those suffering overseas. And we need relatively open borders that together with a federal jobs guarantee provide political and economic security for people wherever they are from.
More than anything, we need serious conversations about what real solidarity means and what it will take to build. Both Steve Striffler and Daniel Denvir have contributed vitally important books to this project.
