What do these French folks:
have to say to these American folks?
How do you say "Si, se puede!" in French? In English, we say "Yes we can, dammit!"
The new civil rights movement continues to effectively pressure the US Congress to provide basic human dignity and a path to citizenship for the millions of people who drive our economy. There are some similarities and some differences between this wave of activism in the US and the stunningly successful student and labor movement in France.
The French protestors just won a cancellation of laws that would have made firing young people as easy as firing off an email. These protests, which attracted media attention even here in the US, were born of the relatively vibrant labor and student movement in France. They didn't appear from nowhere, and they aren't going anywhere. Since French President Jacques Chirac announced the cancellation of part of the new law that punishes workers, activists in France have vowed to push for more worker's rights.
Similarly, the wave of activism across the US did not come from nowhere. A network of migrant's rights groups has been building for several years here in the US. The latest protests have sprung out of this largely (until now) ignored network of people who have worked to provide the huge immigrant population with basic services. After the US Congress announced plans to make all 11 million undocumented people and the people who come into contact with them a fugitive class, a focused movement erupted, demanding an end to this draconian idea. It's working. The Congress has begun to back away from criminalizing these hard working people who drive our economy, and they've begun negotiations for crafting a sensible and realistic immigration policy.
The next step is integrating the ideas behind these two successful movements. Migrant rights and worker's rights are one and the same, in most respects. The way forward for immigration policy is an effective enforcement of worker's protections against poverty wages, against summary dismissals, against inadequate health and child care, and against discrimination. The right for workers to work in safe conditions, to unionize, to bargain collectively, and to have job security as well as a pension must be maintained if we are to protect citizen and non-citizen workers alike.
As Louis Uchitelle argues in his new book, Disposable Americans, the new economy has been particularly devastating for workers in the United States. The middle class is dissolving as work disappears. This system is not sustainable.
The way forward is a movement which combines migrant and worker's rights. Let's get to work.
what i like the best is how you just start saying "new civil rights movement" as if because you said it, then the rest of us must simply accept it and therefore it is.
i agree with carlos in that it's great that people are mobilizing for a good reason, but to call it a full blown movement, i think the social movements people might have a problem with that. i.e. there have been organized protests for the war since it started, on some days, the organizing is international thanks to the internets...why isn't that a new civil rights movement? after all, they too are fighting to rectify an injustice, no?
i'm not saying it's not a civil rights movement, but i just think we should define just what that is supposed to mean, before we say it is the same thing that happened in the sixties...besides in the sixties, they had way cooler protest songs and better acid than the immigration people do.