A lot of people really take for granted the class background of immigrants who come to western countries. As a general rule of thumb, if they had the means to immigrate to the west they would’ve been upper class by the standards of their home country. Their views will be shaped accordingly. This is not to say that their opinions aren’t valid by default, more that you should take this into account when evaluating their testimony

Ppl love to group all migrants together too like where I live “migrant workers” can mean anything from working class Ethiopians, Indians, eritreans, etc to filthy rich levantines, North Africans…anything! And the latter group’s testimonies of their experiences and countries are treated as representative of all migrants’ experiences

“as a general rule of thumb” this is an absolutely horrific generalization. ^^ some of the earliest history of immigration in north america is marked by the import of chinese labourers in the u.s. and canada who built railroads. in 2018 i’m living in a canadian city where wine production and produce manufacturing is almost ENTIRELY propped up by migrant labourers from latin america/the carribbean who leave their family for 5 years at a time and get little to no vacation, and such little pay that they can’t even leave even if they wanted to – citizenship is not even guaranteed. imagine working on a legit labour camp for 4 years and still not even qualifying for residency. you are trapped. you have no loved ones near you for support. your whole life is 9-5 (most times more, depending) labour. Right this second in Toronto you can find hundreds of south asian/south east asian “nannies” working as slaves – they’re promised a 9-5 schedule, vacation time, health benefits etc but in so many cases they end up working MORE than 40 hours a week and are given tasks to do that have nothing to do with nannying but are not given over time, just one google search will get you 10 cases of this in the greater toronto area alone. my dad comes from a 100% working class family in pakistan and literally worked at 6 flags in new jersey for years and was paid under the table everywhere else he worked. my entire extended family is still reliant on him, and now me because I’m working while i go to school, for basic income. When my dad can no longer support them, my brother and i will continue to support my extended family, and their families because they literally cannot survive without our support. this was a bad post in general and reinforces completely FALSE stereotypes about immigrants who travel to the western world. SO MANY immigrants come from absolutely nothing and continue to support their impoverished families until the day they die. trust me. so many immigrants aren’t coming here because they “have the means to” they’re doing it because they’re trying to pull their family out of destitution. as someone whose entire extended family, and immediate family, has come from poverty this is a huge slap in the face. 

It’s unfortunate that this post is now in circulation because I was mostly just venting to my small handful of followers about my annoyance with diaspora politics and so I ended up being a bit flippant and produced something that ripped out of its proper context makes it look like I’m just smearing the plight of immigrants. This needs to be read as a post against the homogenization of immigrant narratives and the bad takes produced by diaspora kids about conditions in their homelands. As a disclaimer, I’m the child of Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union and I know the struggles that my parents and others in the community had to go through upon arriving to America. This post should not in any way be read as dismissal of immigrants. That being said, let’s get to the nitty gritty. I will be replying to both this post and zanabism’s other post.

The category of ‘immigrant’ is a fraught one, it’s a term that encompasses many different kinds of people, from wealthy expats to the exploited masses that zanabism refers to. From those who arrive legally with the support of the state to people who arrive on tourist visas and who must then eke out an existence in extreme precarity while getting paid under the counter (my mother got here this way). The context in which I was venting presumed the former category.

As for zanabism’s example of Chinese laborers in the 19th century, it should be noted that I was speaking specifically about contemporary immigrants, this like comparing apples to oranges. A distinction must be made between the waves of immigration of the past, when Canada and the US had relatively porous borders because they needed large quantities of cheap manual labor to build up their industrial capacity to the situation today, when immigrants from (mostly) non-white countries have to jump through hoops and demonstrate advanced skills to get into the country ‘legally’. It was not even a question of assimilating these people into the national body, they were expected to perform backbreaking labor for 12 hours a day, stay here for a few years earning subpar wages, and go back to their country. A similar system is found today in the Gulf countries (look up kafala if you’re unaware of the situation, it’s horrifying.)

To immigrate to the US today, one must demonstrate that their family will not be a ‘burden’ to the state. The process of getting a green card is grueling, you will get grilled on just about every facet of your life, you’re expected to account for yourself and your entire family, show that you’re open to ‘American values’ (itself a nebulous idea, as if there aren’t millions of citizens who hold violent views wrt women, LGBT people etc. who never get hassled by the state). To pass this process, you’re going to need to have an advanced education, something that’s not readily available in many parts of the world unless you’re part of an urban middle class. The child of sustenance farming peasants is unlikely to have the opportunities to immigrate via this route, so they mostly do not fall under this category.

For this category of immigrants, you have a relatively straightforward course of action. Arrive, find a job, pay your taxes, speak good English, stay clear of the law, then when that’s all done, when you’ve shown yourself capable of being a model citizen for about a decade, you may apply for citizenship and receive the rights associated with that. In practice this is much harder than it sounds, but it’s still a cakewalk compared to the other route.

The other route, as I mentioned, involves getting into the country on a tourist visa and staying past the period when you’re allowed to be there legally. These are the people who are unlikely to have a support network, they don’t have the education to do anything but the most undesirable jobs, and they are the most vulnerable, the ones with the least rights, those who are unable to speak up for themselves even when they know that they are being extralegally exploited. They’re also held to much more stringent standards. Because of their situation, they are also the least likely to have their voices heard in discourses on immigrants.

Discourses on immigrants are overwhelmingly dominated by the former category. They’re the good ones, they celebrate the Fourth of July, they speak English to their children, they love our ‘democracy’, they waited for their turn to come here legally. They are the loudest ones, the ones whose voices are most magnified in our society because they’re educated and they know what Americans want to hear. When you hear an immigrant talking about their rags to riches story, how they came here with nothing but the clothes on their back and a desire to improve their lot, and through sheer force of will they were able to make a small business, these are the ones that you’ll generally hear. They will discount the privileges that they had, scoff at the presumption that their success could be attributed to anything other than hard work, as if the nannies and farm workers who bust their asses without rest and who have nothing to show for it are just lazy. 

My point? These people are speaking from a certain class position, and their narratives will reflect that. For every one of them you will find several others who structurally never even had a chance of success. Their children will most likely be raised with this point of view, and they will then peddle their parents’ ideas of what the home country is like as well. So most Americans end up having a very two-dimensional view of what any given country is like, because these voices are the ones whom you’re most likely to hear.

I’d also like to talk a little bit about ‘choice’ but frankly I’m tired and I need to get to bed soon. But briefly, ‘choice’ when it comes to immigration is confined to only the most well-off immigrants. Most people do not want to leave behind their homes and come to an unfamiliar land where they know they’ll probably be looked down upon, they come because the consequences of imperialism live on, because their countries are meddled with and prevented from industrializing so that we may get raw resources and consumer goods cheaply. Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is an excellent look at this. 

Please add on if you feel that I’ve missed something.

It’s bewildering that anyone would find it contentious to consider the class dynamics of a given population—it’s one of the most necessary parts of any meaningful study of transnational migration, and of course varies dramatically over time with changes in the sending and receiving countries. Someone already mentioned above that the term migrants is vague enough that it comprises everything from the forced migration of refugees, to the Kafala system in many of the Gulf states, to those over-staying or otherwise working legally under disparate visa regimes. Diaspora is not much better in this regard (a victim diaspora and a trade diaspora have incredibly different dynamics and relationships with their home countries accordingly). Not to mention the politics of being in diaspora versus being in exile. It’s equally absurd to just gesture at the nationality/ethnicity of migrant populations, as I’ve seen people doing, as though they compose a homogeneous group of people with shared interests and practices—as if people from the Levant are characterized by one particular kind of migration and Somali people another.  Speaking about transnational flows in this kind of way elides the real complexities of the phenomenon and ultimately does nothing for anyone. The ways that migrants form communities, the degree of their participation in existing communal structures, their interactions with other members of the receiving country, and their engagement with practices like remittances (and even remittance utilization) are all things that are heavily shaped by factors including one’s gender, class, and wave. This isn’t even remotely contested in the field, and there are really an endless number of examples that could be used here to illustrate the necessity of considering such factors. It is abundantly clear, for example, in the history and practices of Bangladeshi student-migrants to Japan, who arrive with the intention of working under a student visa in order to send remittances that will both support the family and inevitably secure a particular class position for the migrant upon their return home. In previous decades, earlier waves of Bangladeshi migration to Japan came from the lower socioeconomic strata. These migrants could enter the country with a significantly smaller monetary cost and educational requirement that made the country a possible destination for lower and middle class families. These were people who would largely remain in the country by overstaying visas, and therefore would have to take up jobs outside of metropolitan centers like Tokyo, and instead work on construction sites and in factories doing manual labour. The present situation is very different. Now, one must have completed at least twelve years of education in Bangladesh to even apply. Many arrive having already completed a bachelors degree at home. Additionally, there are costs for the migrant family that range from $15,000-22,000 USD that must be paid prior to entry. These are barriers that obviously preclude the poorest members of society from participating in this form of labour migration. It is instead limited to at least the upper-middle class. Rural Bangladeshi families from the lower and middle classes are now more likely to send their sons (it is a heavily gendered practice) to countries in the Middle East or Malaysia in order to work. Those that do end up in Japan are able to work legally under a student visa for up to 28 hours, and tend to reside in crowded dorms with co-ethnics while working jobs that they consider beneath them (given their class position in Bangladesh), while simultaneously trying to amass enough economic capital to both support family at home and secure their own position on return. That these remittance practices are shaped by one’s class (and that they differ from other Bangladeshi migrants in Japan such as professional labourers and permanent residents) is well documented by scholars like Hasan Mahmud. It’s dishonest to pretend that class doesn’t dramatically shape one’s experience with migration and perceptions about home.

A lot of people really take for granted the class background of immigrants who come to western countries. As a general rule of thumb, if they had the means to immigrate to the west they would’ve been upper class by the standards of their home country. Their views will be shaped accordingly. This is not to say that their opinions aren’t valid by default, more that you should take this into account when evaluating their testimony

Ppl love to group all migrants together too like where I live “migrant workers” can mean anything from working class Ethiopians, Indians, eritreans, etc to filthy rich levantines, North Africans...anything! And the latter group’s testimonies of their experiences and countries are treated as representative of all migrants’ experiences

Doesn’t matter if you wear makeup and pretend it’s feminist or wear makeup and don’t indulge that or write a think piece on how not wearing makeup is inherently liberating or whatever stupid bullshit

Doesn’t matter Bc ppl n the collective will consume you however they please based on various heteropatriarchal capitalist signifiers

Individual liberation literally .. literally does not matter bye

This Memorial Day remember that the United States has Never participated in a worthwhile war. You have been brainwashed since birth into hero worshipping murderers. Face reality.

WW2 was anti fascist in spirit.

Just because the US ended up beating some nazis in the war doesn’t mean it makes sense to call it an antifascist war. They only joined because Japan challenged their imperial dominance over the pacific, not because of some antifascist conviction. They had been trading and cooperating with the fascists right up until the war, and after the war they not only installed their own fascist puppet dictatorship in Korea, they shielded many high-ranking fascists from harm and gave them jobs running the German state. Saying it was “antifascist in spirit” on the American side, or the British or French side for that matter, is ahistorical.

They all attempted to create a world line-up against the Soviet Union with Hitler, and thank G-d that Soviet leadership was smart enough to recognize it and outplay/out-politick all of them. I’ll get you some quotes from this book I’m reading when I wake up.

If you want an account of the imperialist motivations of the Allied powers The Meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel is really good

Suzhou River (2000), dir. Ye Lou

Antique Jewish wedding rings.