Current Issues in Immigration, Indigenous Rights, Workers’ Struggles, and Governance

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18807153
• Author: George Leddy
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Subject Matter: Introduction

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 223, Vol. 45 No. 6, November 2018, 4–6

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18807153

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

4

Introduction

Current Issues in Immigration, Indigenous Rights,

Workers’ Struggles, and Governance

by

George Leddy

This issue covers a number of topics that are very much in the forefront of

political discussion, among them immigration, indigenous rights, workers’

struggles, and governance. The opening article is the Michael Kearney Memorial

Award lecture for outstanding scholarship in migration, human rights, and

transnationalism, delivered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the 75th annual

meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in 2015 by Lynn Stephen.

(Kearney was a founding member of the Latin American Perspectives collective.)

This well-researched essay traces U.S. policy with regard to Latin American

and Caribbean immigrants from the Reagan administration to 2015. It is timely

and valuable for establishing the context for understanding the extreme mea-

sures now being taken against “preemptive suspects,” not just immigrants but

working people with decades of residence in the United States. It closely fol-

lows the Kearney tradition of examining the experience of people affected by

conflict and displacement, and it is prophetic in that its writing preceded the

current wave of repression against immigrants in the United States. Stephen

prefigures the Trumpian promise of a wall with the discourse that preceded it.

Researchers and scholars should not make the mistake of viewing current U.S.

policy as something that has arisen since 2016. For Stephen it was part and

parcel of the Reagan-era interventions in Central America and the Cold War

paradigm that was applied to the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran situations.

Immigration policy is labor policy, she argues. Her firsthand experience in try-

ing to expedite asylum claims makes this article both a powerful critique and a

good piece of fieldwork. At the end we can see how the “war on terror” has fed

the antimigrant posture of both the U.S. government and a wide swath of the

population, with the result that today’s “preemptive suspects” are women and

children. The factors pushing asylum seekers are now gang violence and its

threat to the civilian population.

The commentary on Stephen’s article by María L. Cruz-Torres that follows is

also informed by fieldwork on the U.S.-Mexico border and assistance to

migrants. She expands on the aspects of the remittance economy and the labor

policy inherent in neoliberal economic policy under NAFTA that Stephen out-

lines. Cruz-Torres draws on her field experience in southern Sinaloa (on which

in fact she consulted with Michael Kearney), focused on the gender aspects of

the drug war and U.S. policy.

George Leddy teaches at Los Angeles Valley College and is a coordinating editor of Latin American

Perspectives. The collective thanks him for writing this introduction.

807153LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18807153Leddy / IntroductionLatin American Perspectives

research-article2018