White supremacy treehouse: who’s in and who’s out?

Demonstrations this past May Day had thinner crowds than in years past. Not surprising: the immigrant-worker upsurge was largely instigated by the actions of the enemies of immigration, or at least moreso than the “benevolence” of so-called friends of immigrants who would bring back second class bracero-labor

Recent unnoticed news proves instructive on how the mainstream immigration debate carries several white supremacist assumptions. Moreover, it demonstrates the role of white privilege in maintaining white supremacy, as a corrosive force that rusts the bonds of solidarity across lines of race and nationality.

Today’s NY Sun carries this story:

Immigrants Riled by Irish Push for Special Status

BY SARAH GARLAND – Staff Reporter of the Sun
May 5, 2008

An effort by the Irish to secure a special immigration deal solely for illegal immigrants from Ireland isn’t sitting well with some of their former partners in the fight for an overhaul of federal immigration policy.

Although immigrant organizations officially have refrained from criticizing the Irish, many rank-and-file Hispanic immigrants — who say their families have been hit hardest by deportations — are saying they are shocked that the Irish are quietly working for a separate pact with federal officials.

[. . .]

[T]he Irish government and Irish immigrant groups in America have been working closely with senators and other lawmakers to push forward a separate deal for the Irish, with the Irish prime minister naming senators Schumer of New York and Kennedy of Massachusetts as the officials with whom he has been working most closely. The prime minister, Bertie Ahern, was in Washington last week to speak to Congress and meet with the Bush administration after assuring the Irish community in America that he was working hard to push through a deal.

Now, first thing’s first: I don’t want to give the false impression that I oppose a deal that would provide undocumented Irish immigrants in the U.S. legalization, per se. I’m familiar with that community, having lived in an area that saw that wave of Irish (particularly from the Northern counties who were in the midst of the Troubles). There were injustices on both sides of the Atlantic: the sectarianism against the Nationalist/Catholic communities in Northern Ireland, then pressures on the community from the feds in the U.S.

Yet it is lamentable that, once again, the Irish in America are employed as a wedge against solidarity. It’s a historical pattern old enough for Frederick Douglass to have used his own form of blogging to denounce. It could be found in the U.S. history textbooks that dare discuss the Civil War-era draft riots that pitted the Irish against African-Americans. I found it, back in the neighborhood of Norwood in the Bronx, when the Irish immigrant community moved on out and Mexican immigrants replaced them in various institutions — and the old sympathy for the plight of the worker became replaced with snickering about wetbacks.

I like to call this phenomenon the “treehouse mentality.” A community in America gets but so many chances to be allowed into the treehouse of Americanism — to have the ladder brought down to them from its heights. There are many criteria to be allowed into the treehouse; but the chief requirement is that as soon as a community is allowed in, it is expected to drag the ladder back into the treehouse.

In other words, it’s the ideology of “fuck you, I got mine,” instilled by capitalism.

Ahern, Schumer, and Kennedy are familiar with this, and are willing to play the game. Having seen that xenophobia is not colorblind — there are no Minutemen protests outside of Irish consulates — they are willing to make a deal for legalized status that flies under the radar for that part of America which cheers for border-walls and the like.

There’s also a sting of international hypocrisy in this as well. The Ahern government having bent over backward to adopt the EU’s own regime of border walls and narrow definition of citizenship, one could say that Ireland itself now subscribes to Western Europe’s own version of “fuck you, I got mine”: having provided the US and UK with immigrants for centuries, Ireland now says it is too beleaguered to allow for the largely non-white, non-Western European immigrant community in Ireland to ever become Irish.

Such is life in the American Empire: ever more twisted logics, leading to ever more twisted policies, just for the sake of preserving the supreme role of whites in society America. When Noel Ignatiev wished to hold a mirror to white America, to see its own evolution, he wrote How the Irish Became White.

(Digression: That book seems to have influenced a certain blog that’s been making the rounds of late. One of those strange moments where you figure, “Wow, the Left made it into the popular consciousness.”)

In an era of the fluidity of capital but ever increasing restrictions on the movement of labor, perhaps it would be appropos to write How the Non-white Became Non-Irish.