Marc Cooper and undocumented workers

 

Posted to www.marxmail.org on October 10, 2005

 

Marc Cooper is a liberal journalist rapidly shifting rightward who writes for the Nation Magazine, the Los Angeles Weekly (an 'alternative' newspaper that shed its radical politics over a decade ago) and the centrist Atlantic Monthly. Over the past couple of years, he has been poised to break with the left in the same fashion as his colleague Christopher Hitchens. Like Hitchens, Cooper pours vitriol on advocates of immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Unlike Hitchens, Cooper maintains a kind of mainstream opposition to the war in line with Russ Feingold but this hardly compensates for his nonstop redbaiting attacks.

 

For the past couple of years at least, Cooper has been covering the "illegal aliens" beat for the Nation and L.A. Weekly. I hadn't paid much attention to what he was saying until it came up in the context of a discussion on his blog, which is rapidly turning into an American version of left-bashing British blogs like Harry's Place and Norm Geras's.

 

It seems that Cooper was miffed that the American left has not taken the "terrorist threat" seriously enough. While most New Yorkers viewed the terror alert for the subway system as manufactured to shore up Bush's lagging poll ratings, especially since they were timed to coincide with his latest speech on terrorism, Cooper viewed the threat as real: "When ordinary Americans worry that their cities, ports or subways might be bombed by suicidal fanatics, it's laughable and insulting to tell them that if they would just help put an end to U.S. imperialism the whole problem would go away." (http://www.marccooper.com/)

 

Politically, Cooper was trying to pull off the same thing as the British 'decent left' (ie., prowar) bloggers after the subway bombings there. When radical critics of the war in Iraq called attention to the increased risk of terror because of mounting civilian casualties, they deflected the criticisms by stating that the Islamofascists always hated us, no matter what we did.

 

Tim Frasca was head of Pacifica's news department in 1983 at the same time Cooper was managing the LA station. They urged that the network air the bland and centrist NPR news instead of Pacifica's own hard-hitting material--this should give you an idea of where they were going politically. This is how Frasca weighed in on the topic of the terrorist threat in the comments section of Cooper's blog: "I write as a NY subway rider who now sits there wondering if I am going to have my eyes blown out because some bin Ladenite psycho doesn't like me talking to unmarried girls." Yes, indeed, "they" want to kill us because we have conversations with unmarried women. How silly of me to have missed this obvious causality.

 

Now I have heard all this nonsense before so I didn't really pay it much attention. But what really caught my eye is how the "illegal immigrant" question got dragged in. Cooper wrote, "Policy wise, we need real and immediate comprehensive immigration reform. The flow of human traffic across the border must be legalized and regulated…I have always supported more Border Patrol agents." Flow of human traffic? More border agents? Odd formulations from a progressive journalist, to say the least.

 

Although Cooper's dispatches from the Mexican border are filled with muckraking touches about deaths occurring in treks across the desert, the policy he favors is a draconian bill put forward by Senators Kennedy and McCain. In a Nation Magazine article, Cooper enthuses over the legislation, supposedly the product of a right-left consensus over the need to deal with an emergency situation:

 

And Senator John McCain allies with Kennedy to sponsor legislation that has been enthusiastically endorsed by both corporate and working America. "I think we now have the best shot at comprehensive reform since before 9/11," says Medina, who strongly supports the McCain-Kennedy initiative. "It's now part of the national debate, and conditions are such we now might actually get something done.”

 

Full: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050606/cooper

 

Contrary to Marc Cooper, this legislation is hardly anything to cheer about. Growing out of Bush's "guest worker" proposal, it requires a $2,000 fee from anybody who came here without papers, a figure that is simply beyond the reach of the most desperate immigrants. It also requires passing an English language exam, an obvious concession to nativist prejudice. The bill includes an "Essential Worker Visa Program," something that will allow 400,000 workers in each year to take low-skill jobs. They would be able to quit an unsatisfactory job, but would be deported if they don't find another within 60 days. This sounds very much like a way to chain a worker to a shitty job.

 

Contrary to Cooper the real problem in the final analysis is the flow of capital across borders, not the "flow of human traffic." Because of NAFTA and increased multinational penetration of Mexico overall, the country and others to its south are experiencing a massive loss of jobs. A worker given the choice between starving and working will choose work, even without the proper documents. The real problem is imperialism, just as is the case with global terror. As long as the USA and its powerful allies in Europe exploit the 3rd world, you will see people flocking to places where they can work. Nobody wants to leave home and put up with racism and the indignities of low-wage jobs. To make such people the brunt of "reform" reflects a class bias found typically in the rich and the powerful, as well as their whores in the mass media--whatever their "progressive" pretensions.