by Julian Do

Ethnic Media Services

LOS ANGELES –  For generations, millions of Americans whose roots lie in the Middle East and North Africa — MENA — have essentially become invisible people because the Census Bureau has denied requests for their own racial category.

“Legally, in America, I’m classified as white,” says Dr. Hamoud Salhi, associate dean of the College of Natural and Behavioral Sciences, CSU-Dominguez Hills. “I was born in Algeria, which is part of Africa, so technically I could declare myself as African American, but I can’t.”

Palestinian-American Loubna Qutami, a President’s postdoctoral fellow at U.C. Berkeley specializing in ethnic studies, says that since MENA doesn’t have a classification of its own, it legally falls under the white category.

MENA populations have their own specific needs for health care, education, language assistance and civil rights protection, but they have no way to advocate for themselves because numerically they are folded into the category of white Americans.

To change this, Dr. Salhi, Dr. Qutami and other MENA leaders have been mobilizing their communities to participate in the 2020 census, encouraging people to write in their ethnicity. They spoke 10 other experts and activists on a May 13 two-hour video conference organized by Ethnic Media Services on the historical, linguistic and political challenges  that make the MENA population among the hardest to count in California.

Geographically, MENA populations live on three continents — from the border of Afghanistan south to the tip of Africa — and in 22 nations in the Middle East alone, with numerous subgroups such as Kurds, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Armenians.

“North Africa is actually a concept that the French gave to Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, which they colonized,” says Dr. Salhi. The neighboring countries of Egypt and Libya were added later.

Because of their shared Arabic language and Islamic religion, people in the United States from North Africa were lumped together with people of the Middle East to form the MENA acronym.

For decades, the Census Bureau has turned down requests to add MENA to the official category of races, currently white, black or African American, American Indian, Alaska Native, Asian American and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander.

The result, says Dr. Qutami, artificially props up the white population count, which has been in decline, while suppressing the count of MENA residents who don’t identify themselves as white. According to the 2015 Census Bureau’s “National Content Test – Race and Ethnicity Report, “As expected, the percent reporting as White is significantly lower with the inclusion of a distinct MENA category when compared to treatments with no MENA category.”

California mirrors the challenge to the MENA population of geographic size and diversity, says Emilio Vaca, deputy director of the state’s Complete Count Committee, which directs census outreach. The Census Bureau’s 2017 American Community Survey reported that 11 million of California’s 40 million residents, about 27 percent, are immigrants.

“That’s equivalent to the entire state of Georgia,” Vaca emphasized. At home, most of those immigrants speak one or more of 200 languages other than English.

Homarya Yusufi, from the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, broke down the face of diversity in just one San Diego neighborhood that her organization serves: “We have 45 different national origins — from MENA, Asia and Latin America — who speak more than 100 languages in the 6.5-mile City Heights district, a distinct community of refugees and immigrants.” Educating and motivating these groups to participate in the census is a way to engage them in the civic life of the wider city.

Historical necessity — what specific immigrant groups have done to survive — also plays a role in the MENA undercount. Up until the mid-20th century, only whites could own property, and only “free white immigrants” could become American citizens.

To survive and advance, Middle Eastern immigrants successfully petitioned the federal courts to be allowed to identify themselves as white in 1920. North African immigrants, as members of the MENA population, got pulled along and found themselves legally classified as white as well.

The discriminatory policy for citizenship and property ownership favoring whites only ended with passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.  But even then, MENA communities found it difficult to raise funds and mobilize calls for action to address their needs. They didn’t know where their fellow compatriots were located and couldn’t raise official numbers to request funds and resources.

“We were helpless. In many instances, we had to generate our own data,” says Dr. Qutami.

Over the years, the Census Bureau has never clearly answered why they’ve refused to include the MENA classification, despite concluding, in a 2017 report, that “the inclusion of a MENA category helps MENA Respondents to more accurately report their MENA identities.”

The bureau again turned down the 2018 request for the 2020 census. Karen Battle, chief of the bureau’s population division, announced in a public meeting on census preparations that “We do feel that more research and testing is needed.”

MENA advocates believe filling out the 2020 census is the only way to avoid another undercount. Without doing this, Yusui says, “our communities will continue to be invisible and left in the margins because data really matters.”

Gaining services customized to MENA’s needs is only part of what’s at stake. So, too, argues Yusufi, is building power. MENA populations then can elect individuals “who reflect the needs of our communities and hold lawmakers accountable” when they stigmatize MENA communities.

Kathay Feng of the nonpartisan watchdog Common Cause emphasized that participation in the census is the first step to representation. In America, resources and rights are accorded by representation based on the number of residents at all levels, from the state down to the municipality, in proportion to the total population.

“Everyone is counted, regardless of immigration status or whether they are registered voters or not,” Feng said, “because all residents pay taxes in one way or another, and most immigrants would eventually become citizens in the long run.”

Every 10 years, immediately after the decennial census submits population data, electoral districts are redrawn. In California, which has been at the forefront of redistricting reforms, the old practice of allowing legislators to draw district lines based on which populations are sure to vote them back into office — known as gerrymandering — was replaced in 2009 by independently selected commissioners. Nine other states have followed California’s lead.

The 2020 census form doesn’t include the MENA racial category, but Question 9 allows respondents to write in “MENA” and their specific ethnicities such as Lebanese, Palestinian, Algerian or Kurd.

Being visible in the 2020 census, the speakers agreed, will lay the foundation for the next few MENA generations to build on what this generation has started.

by Kent Ian Paterson

Ethnic Media Services and Americas.org

Editor’s Note: Kent Paterson is a veteran reporter on U.S.-Mexico border issues. This article appeared first in Americas.org

Wildcat strikes by assembly plant workers concerned about their health and their futures rippled across Mexico as the Covid-19 coronavirus began walloping the country.

Mexican media outlets and social media postings reported March and April work stoppages in at least 60 maquiladoras – plants belonging mainly to foreign-owned companies that produce materials for export to the United States and other nations.

Job actions were reported in Tijuana, Mexicali, Tecate, Rosarito, Ciudad Juárez, Reynosa, Metamoros, Ciudad Juárez, Nogales and Gómez Palacio. Workers there demanded that companies send them home with 100 percent pay, in accordance with a March 30 federal emergency health decree ordering nonessential industries to close.

Besides wage demands, workers cited the lack of protective gear and crowded shop-floor conditions.

Elizabeth Flores, longtime Ciudad Juárez labor attorney and rights advocate with the Americas Program, likened the maquiladoras to “virus greenhouses.” The rickety private busses that transport workers to the plants add to workers’ health risks, Flores says.

Worker protests are concentrated in the electronics, telecommunications, automotive and aerospace sectors, including at Honeywell, Lear Corporation, Electrical Components International, Hyundai, Skyworks and Tridonex.

At the U.S.-based Lear Corporation’s operations in Juárez, at least 14 production-line workers and mid-level supervisors have died of Covid-19. Lear had shuttered its Juarez factories by the end of March, but the true number of Covid-19-caused worker deaths and illnesses there is not known because maquiladora workers and family members who might be infected have not been tested.

“I don’t know anyone who has been tested,” Flores said.

Tests costing more than $100 are available from privately owned labs in Juarez but are unaffordable for the typical Juárez maquiladora production worker.

A Covid-19 mortality undercount is likely, Flores added, because hospitals have recorded recent deaths as due to pneumonia or respiratory ailment complications.

With an estimated 314,824 workers employed in 914 plants, Baja California has been another hot spot for both Covid-19 infections and wildcat strikes, especially in the border cities of Tijuana and Mexicali. Baja California currently ranks third in the number of Covid-19 cases reported in Mexico.

Even as the numbers of death and illness crept upward, and despite the state labor department’s closure of 141 plants employing 75,621 workers, the newspaper La Jornada reported that 68 percent of Baja’s maquiladoras were still operating in late April.

Jesus Casillas, representative of the Organization of the People and Workers-Baja California (OPT-BC by its Spanish initials), a labor advocacy group with roots in the Mexican Electrical Workers Union, estimated that worried workers had spontaneously staged wildcat strikes at 20 Mexicali factories in April, though few were reported in the press.

Workers charged that some companies closed their front door only to slip employees through the back door, Casillas said. And with some plants employing between 3,000-5,000 workers, the factories represent “enormous focal points of contagion,” he stressed.

As in Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican media has reported several maquiladora worker deaths in Baja California. The number is likely higher since deaths at hospitals classified as pneumonia-related could well be from the effects of Covid-19.

An April report compiled by the Border Committee of Women Workers (CFO) and translated by the Canada-based Maquiladora Solidarity Network documented complaints of health-endangering shop-floor conditions, a lack of in-plant sanitary supplies, and companies skirting compliance with the federal health emergency.

“Many factories have put business and their profits ahead of the health of their workers,” according to the CFO report. Maquiladoras began suspending operations in mid-March, but “this was only because they were supplying large auto plants in the United States, such as Ford and others, that had already halted work in previous weeks.”

The clash between worker health and private profit has played out in the definition of “essential production.” The March 30 Mexican federal health decree details essential activities, including the production of medical goods that some maquiladoras churn out, but excludes other products manufactured by the export-oriented factories.

Although President Andrés López Obrador’s government issued the federal decree, state governments wield the principal authority to enforce emergency health measures and some have promulgated their own differing orders.

In Baja California, Governor Jaime Bonilla was initially outspoken about the need to temporarily close plants dedicated to nonessential production, but many continued working secretly. By the end of April, pressure from U.S. interests had ramped up, and the Baja California press was reporting that scores of plants – renamed essential – had reopened.

As talk of rebooting the U.S. economy gains steam, U.S. leaders argue that the maquiladoras are a vital link in integrated product supply chains and that the rhythm of maquiladora production is inextricably linked to that of the U.S. economy.

U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Christopher Landau, the U.S. National Association of Manufacturers, and the Pentagon all issued statements in April urging Lopez Obrador’s government to keep the maquiladoras running.

On April 29, a group of 11 U.S. senators led by Democrat Diane Feinstein and Republican Senator John Cornyn sent U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a letter urging the State Department “to coordinate with the Mexican government to clarify Mexico’s definition of essential businesses to avoid disruption in the U.S. supply chain.” It noted Mexico’s “integral role” in the U.S. supply chain and its strategic position in “the functioning of essential American businesses, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Meanwhile, the immediate outcomes of the Covid-19 wildcat strikes vary. Some workers have won demands for 100 percent of wages during the health closure, while others have settled for a smaller percentage. In response to bonus offers by some companies hoping to keep the workers on the assembly line, the OPT-Baja California posted a statement from a worker that captures the reality of working in a maquiladora during the era of Covid-19.

“My life and health have a price for the maquiladora that I’ve worked for during the last 10 years. It’s a bonus that runs between $12 and $42, plus two packets of supplies. They want me to work during Phase 3 of the pandemic in Baja California, 3^rd place in. the number of infected.”