“A Nation Takes Flight” read the headline in Puerto Rico’s largest circulating newspaper—a massive flight of over half a million Puerto Ricans during the first half of the 2000 decade. The result has been a threefold increase in the growth of the Puerto Rican population in the United States as compared to the Island’s.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of families from Mexico and other countries in Central and South America take flight in their own way, jumping capital’s border fences of illegality.
In either case, flight in the form of mass migration is not new. For a growing number of Latin Americans and people from the Caribbean, it remains a way of taking hold of the uncertainty imposed by capitalist exploitation within the narrow confines of North American imperialism.
The exploitation of labor is a chain, and Puerto Ricans are a link in that chain. Puerto Rico serves as a reserve army of labor in which more than half the population lies outside the formal labor market, per capita income is lower than in Mississippi, and the vast majority of the population is drowning in debt. On top of all this, coming out of the merger of the struggle for survival and the growth of narco-capitalism, there’s the warlike climate of a free-for-all. This is the fundamental cause of the flight of those who still qualify for exploitation under supposedly better and more tolerable conditions.
Even if Puerto Rican colonial citizens were to gain the advantage of the full rights of citizenship when they move to the U.S., it remains elusive. Relative to the rest of the Latino population in the United States, Puerto Ricans vote more, speak more English, and have a higher level of education, but they also have higher rates of poverty and unemployment.
A smoke screen has been put up to blind us to the links binding us all as workers and human beings in the struggle for a better life. They have made us think—and we believe it—that Puerto Ricans, as U.S. citizens, have a special privilege. According to the myth perpetuated by officials representing the ruling class and its colonial underlings in Puerto Rico and the states, Puerto Ricans aren’t migrants. We are U.S. citizens who move from state to state within the Union according to our needs and desires.
If we keep buying into this fairy tale, we’ll be condemned to intensifying the war of each against all in which a growing number of our children pay the deadly price.
Puerto Rican flight should not be seen as the arrival of enemies in the competition to join the market of exploitation of capitalist labor. On their part, recent Puerto Rican arrivals should not see undocumented Latin American workers as inferior rivals. Committing this error would be the same as all of us running headlong over the same precipice.
Our common flight should take us to jointly breaking the chain of exploitation that binds us together, even as it divides us. Our unity means the weakening of big capital, responsible for the oppression of us all.
