The Liberation of Immigrants, and Children of Immigrants, of the Global Majority
By Cheng Imm Tan, Information Coordinator for Immigrants of the Global Majority
Who are immigrants? They are anyone who has left their country for another country. They are refugees from dangerous or life-threatening situations. They are asylees fleeing political persecution. They are migrants who came seeking work and stayed. They are students seeking better education and better work. They are people who moved for love, marriage, or other personal reasons.
Immigrants are diverse. They come from all the world’s cultures, languages, and religions. In the last quarter of a century, movement from the Global South and East to the richer Global North and West has been on the rise. This is because colonization, Western economic dominance, and imperialism have impoverished immigrants’ countries of origin and created untenable living conditions there.
COLONIALISM, CAPITALISM, RACISM
To understand immigrant oppression requires understanding it against the backdrop of the colonialism, capitalism, and racism that exploited, and continue to exploit, countries of the Global Majority; that have displaced people from jobs and spawned wars and unrest, forcing people to move in search of safety and the means of making a living.
European colonization, fueled by patterns of greed, racism, and hunger for power and domination, began around the year 1500. Colonialism is about making profits by exploiting and dominating land and Peoples of the Global Majority. Western powers conquered, subjugated, and extracted resources from much of the Global South and East—Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Central America, and South America. Colonial powers set up elaborate systems to subjugate “their” colonies, maintain superiority, and control resources, people, labor, and lands. They imposed white colonial language, culture, religion, education, and control with the barrel of a gun. They pitted against each other people who had formerly lived side by side.
Even after the colonies attained independence, the effects of colonialism remained. Much wealth continues to be transferred out of former colonies. In our age of “globalism,” privatization and rural poverty displace people in the “developing” countries. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, when they lend money, impose “structural adjustment programs,” which force the countries to privatize, end subsidies and controls, liberalize trade, reduce worker protections, and discourage environmental protection. Ideologies of Western supremacy continue to dominate people’s minds. Colonialism was the foundation upon which modern imperialist globalism was built, and it continues to cause widespread suffering, war, and large-scale immigration.
THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE
Immigration is challenging. Most people won’t leave homelands, friends, and family unless life has become unsustainable. Refugees, asylees, and economic migrants all leave under pressure. Their journey north or west is at best complex and confusing, and often treacherous.
Most immigrants of the Global Majority come with little. They have few connections and often don’t speak the language of the country they immigrate to. Establishing themselves in their unfamiliar new home is hard and stressful.
Immigrants and refugees are often unwelcome and regarded as “different.” The United States did not welcome its early French, German, Irish, and Italian immigrants. Over time, however, these groups assimilated, becoming indistinguishable from the broader white society. Immigrants of the Global Majority, on the other hand, have been treated as too different, too alien, to assimilate—no matter for how many generations they have been in their adopted country. Their culture, language, way of life, perspectives, and darker skin make them stand apart, no matter how hard they try to assimilate. They remain unwelcome.
IMMIGRANT OPPRESSION
The oppression of immigrants—marginalization, discrimination, targeting, and demonization—ebbs and flows in history. The increasingly intense immigrant oppression worldwide these days correlates directly with the increased number of immigrants of the Global Majority moving to Western and Northern countries. Racism cranks up the oppression, winds it tighter and tighter.
Immigrant oppression is not subtle; it is overt, virulent, loud, and pervasive. Anti-immigrant rhetoric accuses immigrants of the Global Majority of being criminals, rapists, and undocumented law breakers who take jobs from the native born, drive down wages, use public resources disproportionately, and threaten the way of life of the established society.
Immigrant oppression serves to increase wealth for the wealthy and distract people from taking a good look at the oppressive and collapsing capitalist system. Immigrants provide cheap labor to national and international corporations that depend on that river of labor to ensure profits, especially during good economic times. In times of economic recession, when the need for labor decreases, anti-immigrant rhetoric proliferates, and immigration policies become less and less humane. In those times, the symptoms and suffering of the collapsing society are often blamed on immigrants of the Global Majority.
Employers gain control by separating out immigrants of the Global Majority as undesirable. Anti-immigrant rhetoric makes immigrant labor cheaper and more vulnerable to exploitation. (The pool of low-paid immigrants serves, in turn, to rein in the wage demands of all workers.)
Demonizing undocumented immigrant labor is especially profitable. Undocumented labor is a vital part of the corporate profit formula and indispensable for ensuring big profits for many corporations. Undocumented workers, because they are separated from the rest of society and socially isolated, and can’t organize or protest for fear of deportation, are easy to control and exploit.
ASSIMILATION AS A MECHANISM OF IMMIGRANT OPPRESSION
All immigrants are under pressure to become assimilated into the broader society. Assimilation is the systematic process by which new immigrants, in order to be accepted, are required (or forced) to adopt the dominant society’s ideologies, perspectives, values, standards, dress, behavior, language, and so on. Assimilation involves giving up one’s unique culture, language, traditions, and perspectives and one’s connections to one’s country of origin.
Assimilation has not only separated immigrants from who they were but also forced them to accept and adopt the dominant culture’s racist, anti-immigrant ideologies and oppressive distress patterns. Each wave of white immigrants that blended into the dominant society adopted anti-immigrant attitudes toward other newer immigrants. For all immigrants, assimilation has meant consenting to oppression, taking on [adopting] oppressive attitudes toward other immigrant groups, and also internalizing oppressive attitudes toward themselves and members of their community of origin.
For us immigrants of the Global Majority, assimilation is racism. It is the conditioning of us to accept the white picture and meet the white expectations of who we are supposed to be. Immigrants of the Global Majority are like square pegs being forced into round holes. As we shave off pieces of ourselves—our culture, traditions, history, perspectives, connection to our community, and language—and as we separate and disconnect more and more from ourselves and our people, we begin to believe the misinformation that the dominant racist culture puts out and believes about us. Assimilation also induces us to accept and believe misinformation about other groups of color, to accept negative and scary images of them as true.
Immigrants of the Global Majority are easily pitted against African Americans and scapegoated as the people who take away their jobs. Asians, the perpetual foreigners, are rendered invisible on one hand and held up as the “model minority” on the other, creating divisions between Asians and African Americans and other groups of color. Latin Americans are widely, and inaccurately, portrayed as undocumented foreigners, to keep them marginalized and powerless. Arabs and others from Western Asia are portrayed as “terrorists” to be feared and removed. The African heritage of African immigrants is used to justify the racism leveled at them. Seen as indistinguishable from African Americans, they are subjected to the same ugly anti-Black racism. Coming from different cultures and histories, they find this situation confusing.
The assimilation process is subtle, but it is pervasive and relentless. As immigrants give up “big parts” of themselves and absorb dominant oppressive beliefs and viewpoints, they assimilate without even noticing it. Assimilation is, in fact, most “successful” when there is no awareness of it and it encounters no resistance.
EFFECTS OF IMMIGRANT OPPRESSION
Immigrant oppression effectively keeps immigrants of the Global Majority in the shadows. It makes us “go invisible” and be reluctant to draw attention to our immigrant status for fear of being targeted. Even in RC, working on being an immigrant or a child of immigrants can feel scary, as though we could make ourselves a target by talking about the subject.
Immigrant oppression has left immigrants of the Global Majority with many of the following feelings and patterns:
- We often feel targeted, insecure, and terrified. Our existence feels threatened. We constantly prepare ourselves for the expected or unexpected anti-immigrant attack, which could come from any direction. Hence, we feel isolated, urgent, worried, and defended.
- We do not easily trust. Not knowing when or where the next “attack” is coming from makes it difficult for us to know who we can count on [rely on] or trust.
- We find it hard to realize that help is possible or available. We have worked hard, often working two or three jobs to keep our families alive. We are used to doing things on our own [alone]. We don’t depend on handouts. Many of us have few, if any, extended family connections in the new homeland. We have scraped together what we have and have done all we could to give our children a better life. We have counted on our own resources and hard work to build what we have.
- We feel insignificant, powerless, and incapable of changing things. Many of us struggle to figure out how the “new” system works and do so with little help, no “guide,” no orientations, no course of instruction on “How to Live in the New Country 101.” Most of us, afraid to ask, figured things out by trial and error. (Many of us have “funny” stories about how we learned to cope with simple, everyday challenges.) We were often humiliated and criticized for our mistakes. We were left out because we lacked information. Consequently, we can feel like we don’t always know what’s going on [happening] and thus don’t know enough to take significant leadership to change things.
- Isolation is a struggle. For many of us, the circumstances that forced us to emigrate, and the journeys themselves, were intensely isolating. Many of us, on arrival, had no connections. Racism and immigrant oppression reinforced feelings of isolation, of having no one to trust or rely on, and of hopelessness about remedying the isolation.
- We feel like outsiders. The oppression tells us that we don’t ever fit in, anywhere; that we are “less than”; that we are unwelcome; that we are undesirable and no one wants us; that we don’t belong, and don’t deserve to belong, in our adopted country or even in the RC Community. The oppression says that there is nothing we can do about being outsiders, that no matter how much we might try, we would be too different. As a result, many of us stay on the periphery, struggling to feel significant and avoiding being visible or central.
- We are unaware of our significance because the oppression makes us feel that we have to be grateful to be here. The reality is that we are the inheritors of the earth and that our contributions have helped to build our adopted nation. If not for the oppressor patterns toward immigrants that the oppressive society has encrusted people with, we would be welcomed everywhere with open arms and open hearts.
- Because we feel we don’t know enough, we struggle to use our voice and share our thoughts. And not only did we have to figure out on our own how things work, making “mistakes” along the way, but also many of us had to learn the dominant language and were often treated as stupid and inadequate because we or our parents could not speak it well or spoke it with an accent.
- Our non-dominant languages have been treated as lesser and often mocked. Although being bilingual or multilingual is in reality wonderful, racist and nativist messages paint our languages as making us “different.” (Some dominant-language-only speakers can even feel threatened by our languages.)
- Because of oppression, we are separated from our culture and our language. We can find it hard to maintain our cultural practices and traditions (unless we have a community in the new country). Many of us have been forced to lose our language, which is a big loss. These separations separate us from ourselves.
- Immigrants are hopeful people. Vision and the hope for a better life propelled us to overcome all kinds of barriers to make it to [arrive in] the new country. However, the weight of immigrant oppression and racism leaves many of us feeling defeated and hopeless.
CONTRADICTIONS [TO DISTRESS]
Despite how we feel, the reality is that we are good and just right. There is nothing wrong with us, nothing to adjust. We get to proudly claim who we are and not settle for anything less than absolutely our whole mind and power.
We get to start by reclaiming all that we have been forced to hide or shave away in order to assimilate. We get to reconnect with those parts of ourselves. We get to tell each other our stories—why we left, what our journeys were like—and discharge. We get to reach for, and learn about, our parents’ and grandparents’ stories, our culture, and our people’s history of struggles, successes, beauty, and irrationalities.
We can learn and understand how our people’s histories, cultures, and traditions have helped shape both our thinking and our distresses. Cultures include adaptations to oppression as well as elements of genius and beautiful expressions of benign reality. We can discharge about our people’s culture and our adopted culture. We can appreciate the best and rational parts and understand and discard the irrational parts of both cultures.
We cannot understand ourselves without knowing our people’s history. To understand the patterns we have inherited, we can learn what our people experienced, what they had to overcome. We can see how patterns that seemed useful and relevant for survival, such as criticism, distrust, urgency, and terror, got passed on. We can decide to discharge them and not pass them on.
It’s helpful to learn what patterns colonialism imposed on our people and to discharge those that got passed on to us. Since the colonizers’ perspective pervades most history books written in the Global South and East, some research may be necessary; although increasingly, local sources are writing from a people’s perspective.
It is equally important to understand the history of our people in our adopted country. It provides a context for and clarity on how the oppression works and is maintained. However, such histories have traditionally been hidden or presented only from the perspective of the dominant culture. In the United States, for example, it wasn’t until the 1960s civil rights movement that “ethnic studies,” with histories told from the perspective of peoples themselves, were instituted.
Reclaiming our language is important in taking a stand against oppression and reclaiming our whole minds. Losing our language is a major way we get separated from ourselves. Language is not just a different way of saying the same thing. It represents a whole way of looking at, experiencing, relating to, and making sense of the world; of seeing and articulating our reality; of experiencing life; of communicating. Each of the world’s many languages offers a different set of perspectives and experiences, and that is good. We understand and experience life differently when we speak in different languages. Reclaiming a language is not easy (the dominant culture offers no support), and, especially if we have not had much opportunity to learn it, we may need a lot of discharge.
Reclaiming the parts of ourselves we had to shave off gives us a sense of rootedness, of knowing who we are. When we’re in touch with our goodness, strength, and dignity, we can undo the internalized oppression that says we are inferior. We can fight oppression better. We are less susceptible to acquiring oppressor material [distress]. We can claim the center instead of settling for the periphery. We can reclaim power and significance.
Understanding colonial history helps us to disentangle the web of divisions among groups that the colonizers installed and to discharge the resultant lies we have internalized about other groups.
Assimilation, also, has us believing distorted images of other immigrants and People of the Global Majority. Systematic misinformation encourages us to believe racist stereotypes and inhibits connections, closeness, and alliances among diverse groups against the oppressive system. As described earlier, racism affects each Global Majority group differently, but the core goal of each version of racism is the same: to separate individuals from themselves, and groups from each other; to demonize and blame each group and pit each against the others; to make us believe we are in competition with other Global Majority groups for the “crumbs.” It is designed to keep us all marginal and exploited and from understanding that all our groups are in the fight against oppression together.
We need to discharge on the specific misinformation we have internalized about other groups of immigrants. We can reach out to better understand how oppression affects each of our communities and how we have been separated. We can learn about the history and circumstances of the other groups. What forced them to leave their countries? How have they fought to survive and thrive? What have they faced in the new country? How have they been separated from and pitted against other Global Majority groups? Although the patterns of racism operating in the dominant society would like groups of color to compare our oppressions and compete vigorously for attention and resources, we can instead reach across the divide imposed by racism and build understanding, get close, and be the best of allies to each other.
Our work to end racism and reach for our re-emergence must include keeping anti-Black racism central and opposing the oppression and continued attempted genocide of Native people all over the world. These specific oppressions are the foundations upon which racism toward all others is scaffolded, the oxygen that fuels racism’s different iterations. The attempted genocide of Native people and the enslavement of Native and African-heritage people have been integral to the greedy extraction of resources, subjugation of people, and exploitation of people and labor from colonial times up through the present.
Reclaiming our minds, power, and human connections, and ending the irrationalities that fuel patterns of oppression and exploitation, is more urgent than ever. The collapsing society and the threats to our continued survival on the planet require us to work on all the places we feel small, powerless, hopeless, insignificant, or separate and to take our place, at the center, to build a rational and caring world. Living in a rational, connected, and human world without patterns or oppression or exploitation is the better life that we and our immigrant parents were seeking, whether or not we or they were able to articulate it then. But we can now.
Penang, Malaysia
(Present Time 202, January 2021)