CHST 174
Final Essay
Politics in the United States have gone through many phases since the countries inception. Regardless of the many political theories that have influenced politicians, the end result has been the same; the white majority has taken advantage of people of color. In the last 40 years, Neoliberalism has risen and along with capitalism has brought much destruction and racism through legislation to people of color in the United States and in other countries throughout Latin America. Neoliberalism instead of being the great new western way of thinking and doing politics has become the root of a lot of the social problems, pumping xenophobia throughout the United States.
Neoliberalism is the cause of much of the migration and displacement of the people of Latin America to the United States. For the purpose of this essay I will define neoliberalism as the funneling of public funds for private use for a profit. According the documentary “Paradoxes of Neoliberalism” created by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, neoliberalism is an upward redistribution of resources from the poor and the working class to the elite that never gets redistributed back down”. Although these two definitions might not seem the same, the basic idea is the taking of money from the public (poor) and handing it over the private (rich). With this being said, from a macroeconomic standpoint, rich countries along with banks like the IMF have made a fortune off of funneling money from poor countries. Countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico have all become victims of the United States and its policies. Neoliberals argue that it creating an “equal playing field” but what these people fail to understand is that when everything is “equal” and countries can do what ever they want, weaker countries are taken advantage of because they have less power. The United States helped fund a political war that eventually created economic refugees in El Salvador, all so that the United States could make sure they had access to their commodities at a cheap price. The United States has exercised its power and has coerced weaker countries to act in certain ways and has been the main beneficiary of all the funneling of money.
Neoliberalism has hyper-politicized the discourse of United States immigration. The United States was founded as a nation of immigrants and has always had a history of ethnic projects that have pushed immigrants in and out of its borders. In the last four decades the United States has had a mass influx of Latinos coming into its boarders. Since then there has been an increasing hatred towards people of Latin American decent and they have come in many form, most effectively through legislation. If carefully analyzed there is sense hypocrisy in this hate towards Latinos in the United States because a lot of the people who have migrated to the United States from these countries did so because of problems that United States, through neoliberal policies caused. Neoliberal legislation sucked large amounts of money and resources out of these countries and left local economies in ruin. With no other alternatives most have claimed economic refugee status and have turned to the United States for a better life but they have been met with rejection. United States neoliberal policies decimated their countries economy and forced these Latinos to migrate. Alfonso Gonzalez in his work Reform Without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State, does a great job at explaining why there have been such an influx of Latinos, as well as what policies have been employed to keep Latino immigrants down once in the United States. Gonzalez argues that SB 1070, a bill passed in Arizona criminalizes immigrants that are undocumented, it “prevents day laborers from finding work and undocumented migrants from renting homes. This ostensibly nonracial strategy translates into the racial harassment and policing of Latino families and other
