Borderless

The May Day marches are coming again. Let me explain just exactly how I view this issue of immigration in the U.S.

Immigration in the US is a symptom of globalization. It is just one example of a global phenomenonof people migrating from poorer countries to richer ones. Mexico is particularly affected because of NAFTA policies.

So what is Globalization? It has a myriad of definitions but the one I go by is: a global economy and its effects on the world. The Internet and jet engines have increased its effects. Companies can hire from a global job market pool. Business transactions happen through the ether of the Internet. Communication bounces across the world from satellites. Thousands of corporations are transnational. This is the end of the nation-state. Globalization and unrestrained capitalism are rendering borders meaningless, or it is reorganizing global communities in ways not relating to pre-existing borders. That said, I find all the nativist reaction against recent immigration in the U.S. as pangs of the nation-state trying to defend itself from an economic force it helped create. This is more or less what economists were saying 14 years ago, neo-prophets.

What is NAFTA? It is a trade agreement between Canada, America, and Mexico eliminating tariffs on companies that wanted to operate in any of the three countries. It's effects? American companies shutting down U.S. factories to build them just across the border in Mexico, pulling the Mexican workforce away from local economies to get paid less than an American doing the same job and without a union. Many of these factories (maquiladoras) are on the U.S.-Mexico border. Just north of that border these same workers could get paid up to 10 times what they make in a day. NAFTA has destroyed local economies in both the U.S. and in Mexico. Unemployment in Mexico has risen steadily since NAFTA. So did anyone benefit from this trade deal? Yes, but only people who were already really wealthy.

Today, when the wait for the INS to look at a petition for naturalization is up to 13 years; when young people who've grown up their entire lives, gone to school and graduated in this country are deported because as a baby, they were not born in the U.S.; when people are forced to live in shadows because of an economic situation they did not create; then yes I am for comprehensive immigration reform. Put the people already here on a path to citizenship and overhaul the INS.

Here are the official Points of Unity for the marches:

1. No to anti-immigrant legislation, and the criminalization of the immigrant communities.
2. No to militarization of the border.
3. No to the immigrant detention and deportation.
4. No to the guest worker program.
5. No to employer sanction and “no match” letters.
6. Yes to a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
7. Yes to speedy family reunification.
8. Yes to civil rights and humane immigration law.
9. Yes to labor rights and living wages for all workers.
10. Yes to the education and LGBT immigrant legislation. (via VivirLatino)

I am for open borders because soon they'll be meaningless anyway.

Feminist Art Project

I like Nylon because I identify with the fashion. I like reading women's magazines in Spanish because the people in their magazines look more like me and my family. So I thought, why do the two have to be mutually exclusive? So I'm going through page by page and replacing the face of every white model with the face of a Hispanic model or celebrity from Spanish language fashion magazines, remaking it more in my own image I guess. This is in reponse to posts like these:

A man was sentenced to two years in jail for driving his wife to suicide by calling her "black." This was in India, where, as previously reported, fair skin is highly deisired, and where being called dark is "worse than physical torture," according to the court. In the case, Syed Fathima was so distressed after two months of marriage to Farook Batcha (two months of constant fighting, and of him calling her too dark) that she put an end to the marriage — and her life — by pouring kerosene over her head and setting herself on fire. Just a note to the people who don't think it's a big deal when fashion designers refuse to use black models: It's all related, and it's global. (Jezebel)

And like this one: Whose Fault Is It That The Ethnic Women In Magazines Are Whitewashed?

Misogynist Media

No matter who you support, this year's election coverage has been misogynist. Fact. This video is really moving, and yeah it made me cry. (stick around til the end, it gets better)

say hello to A T W

Aubrey Third Wave will now be posting at this blog. She's awesome. She was at the very first feminist meeting I ever went to and explained to me what second wave meant. Now we can double-team feminist issues, hence the name.

Coincidences

This is one of the books I'm reading. So far, what I've learned is that the first time dieting became widespread in America was in the 1920's, after a french designer came up with the new slender flapper silhouette to replace the voluptuous Victorian hourglass figure. Then I saw this from The-F-Word:

My graduate thesis focuses on the evolution of beauty and aesthetic standards for women as they evolve in tandem with the women’s rights movement. As I shared in a snippet of a recent paper, weight control and standards act as a form of social control, filling women’s time and attention, keeping them busy and hence distracted from activities that risk disrupting an established gender order. “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty,” writes Naomi Wolf. It is “an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

What else happened around the 1920's? Oh yeah, women gained the right to vote.