by David Bacon
Whose fault is it?

Using the phrase “no fault of their own” in discussing undocumented young people does not encourage us to look at the roots of the poverty and violence their families experience.  Blaming undocumented youths’ parents avoids assigning responsibility for their displacement and migration beyond the families themselves.
When President Obama introduced his executive order in 2012 to defer deportation for young people (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA), the White House website said it would “stop punishing innocent young people brought to the country through no fault of their own by their parents.
Last year, in the Republican assault on the President’s next order that would have extended DACA to include other family members (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, DAPA), Jeff Denham, a right-wing Republican Congressman from California’s San Joaquin Valley, used the same phrase. Taking pains to explain that opposing President Obama did not mean he supported deporting young people, he explained, “I have voted repeatedly in Congress to protect children who were brought into this country by their parents or guardians through no fault of their own.
The phrase “no fault of their own” sounds sympathetic. Using it to justify halting deportations implies good intentions towards at least some young people without papers. Yet the idea has other troubling implications as well.
If young people came here “through no fault of their own,” then whose fault was it? Denham and Obama both say, “by their parents [and guardians].” Mothers and fathers made the decision to cross the border without papers. Therefore the parents are responsible for their children’s lack of legal immigration status. The fault is the parents’.
This is also the argument presented by the administration to justify building two new detention centers in Texas to hold mothers and children from Central America. Two summers ago the President warned parents in Guatemala and El Salvador that they were endangering their children by bringing them north. Don’t come, he said. If you do, you will be detained and deported.
Of course, people came despite the warning. The pressures to leave home are much more powerful than even the certain knowledge that imprisonment in a detention center awaits them once they cross the border.
Children are not coming to the United States because they have bad parents. They come because poverty and violence make survival difficult and dangerous in their communities of origin. Many are joining family members who are already here, having fled Central American civil wars or having come to find work and establish a base for reuniting divided families.
Many of the young people who tell their stories in Dreams Deported, a new book edited by Kent Wong and Nancy Guarneros, describe the memory of the experience, as it is retold in their families. Vicky’s family in Mexico “was too poor to pay for her mother’s medication and Vicky couldn’t find a job to support her parents.” Renata Teodoro says, “My father had been working in the United States for many years, and we survived on the money he sent us.
The book paraphrases other accounts. “The Gonzalez family left behind a life that Adrian does not remember. What he does remember is that his parents came to this country with hope for economic security.” The parents of Steve Li “experienced the extreme poverty, violence and corruption of Peru. Conditions for Steve’s family went from bad to worse when their restaurant was vandalized and their family was threatened.
The phrase “no fault of their own” does not encourage us to look at the roots of the poverty and violence these families experience. It especially avoids assigning responsibility for their displacement and migration beyond the families themselves. Yet individual families together make up huge movements of people responding to economic changes over which they have no control.
After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, for instance, the number of Mexican migrants in the U.S. went from 4.5 to 12.5 million in 20 years. The new immigrants were farmers driven off the land after being undercut by cheap U.S.-subsidized corn flooding the Mexican market, or workers suddenly jobless after waves of privatization. Like Renata Teodoro’s father, once they arrived in the United States, they made up the backbone workforce sustaining agriculture, meatpacking, janitorial services and other industries, laboring at the lowest wages.
The companies that dumped the corn in Oaxaca, and those that paid illegally low wages to Oaxacan farmers to pick strawberries in Watsonville, certainly share some of the “fault.” And they definitely reaped most of the benefits. But when Obama and Denham say children came through “no fault of their own,” they are not pointing at the profiteers, much less at the treaties and policies that make displacement and exploitation possible and profitable.
In reading the testimony of the young people in Dreams Deported, it’s clear that parents had little alternative to coming north, and bringing their children with them. Yet they are not victims. They are simply people struggling to survive and make a place in the world for their families. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz says, in the context of Native American genocide in North America, “survival is dynamic, not passive. Surviving genocide, by whatever means, IS resistance.”
Sergio Sosa, a Guatemalan migrant who now directs Omaha’s Heartland Workers’ Center, says the same thing: “Mams and Qanjobales”-two indigenous groups in Guatemala-”face poverty and isolation, even the possible disappearance of their identity. But they didn’t choose this fate. People from Europe and the U.S. crossed our borders to come to Guatemala, and took over our land and economy. Migration is a form of fighting back. Now it’s our turn to cross borders.
Dreams Deported presents migrants as social actors, as resistors rather than victims. The phrase “no fault of their own” casts young people as innocent victims of their parents’ actions. The reality is that the young people who have built the movement of the DREAMers, fighting for the right to go to school, for legal status and for change in immigration policy, are anything but victims. The book recounts the family experiences of migration, life in the U.S., and then the shock of confrontation with immigration authorities leading to deportation. Then it tells stories of resistance, documenting the ways young people pioneered a movement that successfully rescued family and friends from jails and detention centers.
This is the third book in a series produced by activists in the Dreamers movement, published by the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education. The first, Underground Undergrads, was published in 2008, when the possibility of immigration reform with some degree of legalization seemed possible to many people. It was a “coming out” moment, in which the first of the movement’s organizers sought to make visible a generation of undocumented young people who were beginning to assert their rights. It was followed four years later by Undocumented and Unafraid, which profiled the growing movement in the wake of the huge effort to pass the DREAM Act. Now Dreams Deported chronicles the difficult struggle against deportations.
First introduced in 2003, the DREAM Act would have allowed undocumented students graduating from a U.S. high school to apply for permanent residence if they completed two years of college or served two years in the U.S. military. The act would have enabled an estimate 800,000-plus young people to gain legal status and eventual citizenship. In 2010 the Act failed in Congress, but for the seven years before that, undocumented young people marched, sat-in, wrote letters and mastered every civil rights tactic in the book to get their bill onto the Washington DC agenda.

(Due to lack of space we are publishing only part of the story. You may read the full story at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/18568/dreams-deported-undocumented-unafraid-dream-act).

Debate around reparations is threatening because it upends the usual narrative of development. The impact of colonialism cannot be ignored

by Jason Hickel

Colonialism is one of those things you’re not supposed to discuss in polite company – at least not north of the Mediterranean. Most people feel uncomfortable about it, and would rather pretend it didn’t happen.
In fact, that appears to be the official position. In the mainstream narrative of international development peddled by institutions from the World Bank to the UK’s Department of International Development, the history of colonialism is routinely erased. According to the official story, developing countries are poor because of their own internal problems, while western countries are rich because they worked hard, and upheld the right values and policies. And because the west happens to be further ahead, its countries generously reach out across the chasm to give “aid” to the rest – just a little something to help them along.
If colonialism is ever acknowledged, it’s to say that it was not a crime, but rather a benefit to the colonized – a leg up the development ladder.
But the historical record tells a very different story, and that opens up difficult questions about another topic that Europeans prefer to avoid: reparations. No matter how much they try, however, this topic resurfaces over and over again.

Recently, after a debate at the Oxford Union, Indian MP Shashi Tharoor’s powerful case for reparations went viral, attracting more than 3 million views on YouTube. Clearly the issue is hitting a nerve.
The reparations debate is threatening because it completely upends the usual narrative of development. It suggests that poverty in the global south is not a natural phenomenon, but has been actively created. And it casts western countries in the role not of benefactors, but of plunderers.
When it comes to the colonial legacy, some of the facts are almost too shocking to comprehend. When Europeans arrived in what is now Latin America in 1492, the region may have been inhabited by between 50 million and 100 million indigenous people. By the mid 1600s, their population was slashed to about 3.5 million. The vast majority succumbed to foreign disease and many were slaughtered, died of slavery or starved to death after being kicked off their land. It was like the holocaust seven times over.
What were the Europeans after? Silver was a big part of it. Between 1503 and 1660, 16m kilograms of silver were shipped to Europe, amounting to three times the total European reserves of the metal. By the early 1800s, a total of 100m kg of silver had been drained from the veins of Latin America and pumped into the European economy, providing much of the capital for the industrial revolution. To get a sense for the scale of this wealth, consider this thought experiment: if 100m kg of silver was invested in 1800 at 5 percent interest – the historical average – it would amount to £110trn ($165trn) today. An unimaginable sum.
Europeans slaked their need for labor in the colonies – in the mines and on the plantations – not only by enslaving indigenous Americans but also by shipping slaves across the Atlantic from Africa. Up to 15 million of them. In the North American colonies alone, Europeans extracted an estimated 222,505,049 hours of forced labor from African slaves between 1619 and 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that’s worth $97trn – more than the entire global GDP.
Right now, 14 Caribbean nations are in the process of suing Britain for slavery reparations. They point out that when Britain abolished slavery in 1834 it compensated not the slaves but rather the owners of slaves, to the tune of £20m, the equivalent of £200bn today. Perhaps they will demand reparations equivalent to this figure, but it is conservative: it reflects only the price of the slaves, and tells us nothing of the total value they produced during their lifetimes, nor of the trauma they endured, nor of the hundreds of thousands of slaves who worked and died during the centuries before 1834.
These numbers tell only a small part of the story, but they do help us imagine the scale of the value that flowed from the Americas and Africa into European coffers after 1492.
Then there is India. When the British seized control of India, they completely reorganized the agricultural system, destroying traditional subsistence practices to make way for cash crops for export to Europe. As a result of British interventions, up to 29 million Indians died of famine during the last few decades of the 19th century in what historian Mike Davis calls the “late Victorian holocaust”. Laid head to foot, their corpses would stretch the length of England 85 times over. And this happened while India was exporting an unprecedented amount of food, up to 10m tons per year.
British colonizers also set out to transform India into a captive market for British goods. To do that, they had to destroy India’s impressive indigenous industries. Before the British arrived, India commanded 27 percent of the world economy, according to economist Angus Maddison. By the time they left, India’s share had been cut to just 3 percent. The same thing happened to China. After the Opium Wars, when Britain invaded China and forced open its borders to British goods on unequal terms, China’s share of the world economy dwindled from 35 percent to an all-time low of 7 percent.
Meanwhile, Europeans increased their share of global GDP from 20 percent to 60 percent during the colonial period. Europe didn’t develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe.
And we haven’t even begun to touch the scramble for Africa. In the Congo, to cite just one brief example, as historian Adam Hochschild recounts in his haunting book King Leopold’s Ghost, Belgium’s lust for ivory and rubber killed some 10 million Congolese – roughly half the country’s population. The wealth gleaned from that plunder was siphoned back to Belgium to fund beautiful stately architecture and impressive public works, including arches and parks and railway stations – all the markers of development that adorn Brussels today, the bejewelled headquarters of the European Union.
It will take 100 years for the world’s poorest people to earn $1.25 a day
We could go on. It is tempting to see this as just a list of crimes, but it is much more than that. These snippets hint at the contours of a world economic system that was designed over hundreds of years to enrich a small portion of humanity at the expense of the vast majority.
This history makes the narrative of international development seem a bit absurd, and even outright false. Frankie Boyle got it right: “Even our charity is essentially patronizing. Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. Give him a fishing rod and he can feed himself. Alternatively, don’t poison the fishing waters, abduct his great-grandparents into slavery, then turn up 400 years later on your gap year talking a lot of shite about fish.”
We can’t put a price on the suffering wrought by colonialism. And there is not enough money in the world to compensate for the damage it inflicted. We can, however, stop talking about charity, and instead acknowledge the debt that the west owes to the rest of the world. Even more importantly, we can work to quash the colonial instinct whenever it rears its ugly head, as it is doing right now in the form of land grabs, illicit financial extraction, and unfair trade deals.
Shashi Tharoor argued for a reparations payment of only £1 – a token acknowledgement of historical fact. That might not do much to assuage the continued suffering of those whose countries have been ravaged by the colonial encounter. But at least it would set the story straight, and put us on a path towards rebalancing the global economy.
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