American Arrivals: Anthropology Engages the New Immigration

2. Right Moves? Immigration, Globalization, Utopia, and Dystopia

Over the past decade, globalization has intensified worldwide economic , social, and cultural transformations. Globalization is structured by three powerful, interrelated formations: (1) the postnationalization of production and distribution of goods and services, fueled by growing levels of international trade, foreign direct investment, and capital market flows, (2) the emergence of new information and communication technologies that place a premium on knowledge-intensive work, and (3) unprecedented levels of worldwide migration that generate significant demographic and cultural changes in most regions of the world. Globalization’s puzzle is that although many applaud it as the royal road for development (for example, Friedman 2000; Micklethwait and Wooldrige 2000; Rubin 2002), it is generating strong currents of discontent . In large regions of the world, globalization has become a deeply disorienting and threatening process of change (Bauman 1998; Soros 2002; Stiglitz 2002). Globalization has generated the most hostilities where it has placed local cultural identities—including local meaning systems, religious identities, and systems of livelihood—under siege. Argentina is a case in point. After a decade of cutting-edge free 45 2 Right Moves? Immigration, Globalization, Utopia, and Dystopia Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco 45 market policies, the economy of the country that was once the darling of such embodiments of globalization as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank imploded. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Argentina was one of the ten wealthiest countries in the world, yet it ended the century in default, with more than 40 percent of the population at poverty level. By early 2003, an estimated 50,000 cartoneros were living off the cartons they gathered every night from trash cans in Buenos Aires, one of the world’s most elegant cities. First and foremost, globalization is about movement. Its emerging regime—mobile capital, mobile production and distribution, mobile populations, and mobile cultures—is generating deep paradoxes. Regions of the world such as East Asia seem to have prospered immensely under globalization’s regime (see Table 2.1, World Bank 2001). Yet, in the Argentinas of the world, the forces of globalization have conspired to intensify patterns of inequality and human suffering (Dussel 2000; Mittelman 2000; Nader 1993). The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed vast economic growth in the rich nations, especially the United States, but roughly 25 percent of the population of the developing world continued to live in desperate poverty, on less than a dollar a day (refer to Table 1.1). China’s meteoric integration into the global economy has significantly reduced poverty, but, as in much of Latin America, globalization has also increased inequality (World Bank 2001:1). There is a strong and somewhat amorphous, eclectic anti-globalization ethos, ubiquitously named, articulated, and performed in varied contexts, from Seattle to Genoa and Buenos Aires. Its message seems structured by a common grammar: The global project is destabilizing, disorienting, and threatening to large numbers of people the world over. Yet, even though many hate what they see in globalization, others are seduced by its promise. Here is another paradox of globalization: As it continues to penetrate the local cultural imaginaries of poor developing countries, even if it destabilizes local economies and livelihoods , globalization generates structures of desire and consumption fantasies that local economies cannot fulfill. These twin factors, globalization ’s uneven effects on the world economy and the emergence of a global imaginary of consumption, are behind the largest wave of immigration in human history. Globalization’s paradoxical power lies in its Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco 46 manufacture of both despair and hope. Millions of people, though, must realize their hope elsewhere, as migrants. Globalization’s discontent also visits the “other half,” the wealthy, advanced, postindustrial democracies, which have, arguably, benefited the most under its reign. In the advanced, postindustrial democracies, the unprecedented, growing, and seemingly uncontainable migratory flows generated by globalization over the past decade are, alas, experienced as threatening and disorienting to local cultural identities and sensibilities. This is the case in most of western Europe, the United States, and Australia, where anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia have emerged as potentially explosive political and social concerns. The general move to the political right in Europe over the past few years can be linked to the fears and anxieties generated by globalization, immigration , and crime. Somewhat monomaniacal anti-immigrant parties in western Europe have gained momentum over the past decade: the Vlams Bloc in...