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Immigrants and Racial/Ethnic Tensions

This section focuses mainly on tensions that arise at the community level between immigrants and U.S.-born communities of color. The section entitled “Understanding Anti-Immigrant Movements,” explores how anti-immigrant racism is manifested in organized anti-immigrant movements based primarily in the white community.

Photo from: Echando Raices/
Taking Root
Fifth Ward Enrichment Program
in Houston.

Immigrants and U.S.-born people of color face many common obstacles, including very similar forms of oppression and discrimination. Often, however, it is difficult to build and sustain multi-racial coalitions that can challenge the dynamics of oppression. Tensions may arise between African Americans and immigrants of color or between recent immigrants and established residents in Latino or Asian American communities. There are also many different types of conflicts and tensions within and among the various racial and ethnic groups. In many communities, efforts to build relationships by communicating about cultural, social, and economic issues are having an impact.

Changing Populations

With the 2000 census, [Houston’s Fifth Ward is] … no longer a Black community in that sense, more like a 65-35 split, with African Americans and Latinos being the major populations living here. We do have a very small Asian population, hardly any Anglos…

Now we have new immigrants coming from Central America and Mexico… I think the wars in Central America … have produced people who fled their country, so we find … a newer community of immigrants. That’s really new for our community.

— Ernest McMillan, Fifth Ward Enrichment Program

(All quotes on this page are from interviews recording during the taping of AFSC’s video documentary Echando Raices/Taking Root.)

The results of the 2000 census paint a picture of a rapidly changing country. Eighty-five percent of today’s immigrants are people of color, from every part of the globe. The Latino population of the United States (which includes nonimmigrants as well as immigrants) has grown by nearly 60 percent since 1990. Over the next decade Latinos will probably become the nation's largest minority group, surpassing African Americans. Immigration from Asian countries such as China, Vietnam, or India has increased substantially since 1990.

In many parts of the country, the changing composition of local communities has brought new and sometimes uneasy cultural politics. As new immigrants typically settle in low-income urban areas, they often live side by side with immigrants from other countries and U.S.-born people of color, changing the nature of the community as they move in. In many cities, traditionally African American neighborhoods, like Houston’s Fifth Ward, have transformed into multi-ethnic or primarily Latino areas.

In major cities around the country, including Dallas, Miami, Chicago, New York, and Los Angles, there have been high-profile political conflicts between U.S.-born communities of color and immigrant groups, which at times have turned violent. This rising tension, widely reported in the media, was explored in a 1999 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which reviewed conflicts over such issues as jobs, schools, housing, and representation in leadership positions.

Sources of Tension

In some communities there is a …shortage in low-income housing. So, when you have low-income groups and they’re all [competing] for the same house, they start working against each other instead of looking at the problem of availability of low-income housing.

- Ada Edwards, Public Affairs Director, KMJQ/KBXX Radio

You find people in the Latino community feeling a little underrepresented as far as leadership of the school system … they demand, and I think righteously so, more representation of their kind in those positions.

— Ernest McMillan, Fifth Ward Enrichment Program

What are some of the reasons for this tension?

The mainstream media floods the airwaves with negative stereotypes and damaging images of immigrants as well as U.S.-born people of color, negatively influencing how whites see people of color and how different communities of color see one another. Racial and ethnic stereotypes, coupled with a lack of dialogue or opportunities for meaningful interaction, lead to fears and prejudices.

Whether in news or entertainment programming, the media rarely acknowledge white racism as a factor in community tensions. Conflicts involving tensions between communities of color are often sensationalized, while accounts of conflicts involving the white community are less frequent and more restrained. Whites are often shown as neutral mediators in community conflicts. When white racism is depicted, most often it is attributed to working class or poor whites. Such images obscure the complex social, cultural, and economic realities of institutional racism and white privilege in the United States.

Racial and ethnic hostilities in U.S. culture reflect racialized power relationships as much as stereotypes and negative attitudes. For this reason, approaches that affirm cultural diversity without exploring economic and political power relations are more limited in their ability to defuse racial and ethnic tensions and dismantle the structures of racism. (Although the focus of this section is on communities of color, it’s important to emphasize that racial and ethnic tensions are not just a “people-of-color problem”; white people must also take responsibility for becoming allies in exposing the realities and the social costs of institutionalized racism and working to build multi-racial trust and cooperation at the community level.)

Low-income people must struggle to survive in a world that is hostile to their needs. As individuals and communities compete for scarce and inadequate resources, they are encouraged to see themselves as working against one another, rather than seeing injustice as the common root of their suffering. Mainstream “common sense” about how to succeed furthers this mentality of competition. Conventional images of “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps” and other notions of individual success promote the idea that anyone can succeed in the United States if only they try hard enough. While individuals who succeed “against the odds” are held up as models, the communities they come from remain poor — and the structures that maintain a grossly unjust distribution of wealth and resources do not change.

A commonly cited source of tension is the perception that immigrants are taking jobs away from U.S.-born residents. Researchers and policy analysts have advanced arguments on both sides of this issue, citing examples of economic displacement in particular industries or localities on the one hand, and cases where immigrant entrepreneurship has fueled job creation and economic development on the other. Most discussions of the issue, especially in the media, ignore the dynamic complexity of economic life, presenting simplistic stereotypes that mainly serve to bolster political agendas.

Political factors underlying the lack of investment or access to credit, especially in African American communities, are seldom discussed. For example, contemporary joblessness is most severe in “rust-belt” cities with a strong tradition of unionization. In recent decades, public policies have favored the growth of unstable, low-wage employment rather than job creation and community development. Here again, ethnic hostility and competition help to obscure the invisible and unquestioned structures of economic inequality and institutionalized racism.

Class differences within and between communities are also a source of tension. Landlords and tenants, employers and employees, merchants and customers — such relationships are frequently a site of conflict, regardless of the race of those involved. When these relationships are intercultural or interracial, some aspects of conflict may also be culturally based. Some of the most explosive conflicts have occurred in low-income communities of color between African American residents and Asian immigrant merchants who own convenience stores or other small businesses. In many communities, Pakistani, Vietnamese, or Korean merchants have become the new “middle minority,” moving into the economic niche once occupied by earlier immigrant groups. In such conflicts, cultural and language differences may come to stand for the unacknowledged social forces that lead to joblessness, capital flight, social disintegration, and racialized barriers to economic opportunity.

Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants from many ethnic and national backgrounds face a widespread and growing problem of hate violence — a problem that also extends to U.S.-born generations in many Asian American and Arab American communities. Racial and ethnic stereotypes often function as an incitement to violence, especially for frustrated and alienated young men.

Some immigrants also bring class and cultural differences that originate in their home countries. For example, while “Asians” are often described as a single ethnic group, there are in fact many ethnic groups and ethnic divisions within each country and between countries. In many parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, people of African descent face discrimination at the hands of people of European descent. Indigenous people in much of Latin America also experience extensive social and economic discrimination. Sometimes such relationships shift as new immigrant communities are formed, and sometimes they are perpetuated in a new environment. The idea that the world’s countries each have a single “native” population is largely a myth; most of the world is and historically has been multi-lingual, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural.

Finding Common Ground

When you look at the rise of the KKK in this country, a lot of people think that was poor white folk who didn’t like Black people. The Klan was started by the business community, which was upset at the strides that African Americans were making, and further upset about the coalition of the poor whites and Blacks in the south. There was an allegiance being formed that they had no power over. They used the KKK to divide that along race lines. “The reason you are poor and white is all these Blacks over here are taking all your stuff.”

— Ada Edwards, Public Affairs Director, KMJQ/KBXX Radio

There have been some instances where communities have come together … We have some examples — the campaign against the death penalty, police brutality … The leadership has come together because they see we’re oppressed and have common battles to fight.

— Ernest McMillan, Fifth Ward Enrichment Program

In Houston, Texas, African-American community organizer Ernest McMillan looks to the youth as the solution. “The youth get along better than the older persons,” he says. McMillan works to bring African American and Latino youth together, giving them opportunities to join together on projects such as a citywide conference on violence prevention. They also have time to socialize together. “The music, the food, gives a concrete way of understanding and a way of breaking barriers between them,” McMillan says. He strives to promote what he calls a “people culture rather than a racial culture.” When the Fifth Ward Enrichment Program began in 1985, “it was more Black heritage. Now, we want to promote people’s heritage — not just Booker T. Washington, but also Cesar Chavez. We want other youth to learn about that and the culture of the Aztec, Mayan, and the Incas; we celebrate those as well as the Ashanti and Zulu culture. We want a blurred line between cultures and a cross-pollination of these views from different cultures.”

Ada Edwards, a Houston community leader and radio personality (in Nov. 2001, Edwards was elected to Houston’s City Council) emphasizes the need for dialogue. Edwards has worked to create opportunities for people from all sectors of the community to hear and understand each other’s perspectives. Dialogue is the key, according to Edwards, because when communities see their problems in isolation, they don’t take the opportunity to come together and work to overcome the root causes of the problems. “As long as we keep our problems in isolation and …[compare] who has the worst stories, tragedies, … we’re not getting to the crux of the matter: driving while Black, prison issues, health issues. … We’re blaming each other, we’re not looking at the system that does not provide adequate health care to urban communities.”

Once people begin to talk to each other and hear each other’s stories, they may see the commonalities in their experiences. “We had a discussion about ‘driving while Black’ and we had a number of Hispanics saying hey, wait a minute, the same thing happens to me when I’m ‘driving while Hispanic.’ And a lot of Asians say the same thing, ‘driving while Asian’.”

Edwards calls on the leadership of U.S.-born communities of color and immigrant groups to work together to foster this dialogue and work towards solutions: “It’s incumbent upon leadership in both communities to look and see what is going on here. We may still disagree, but at least we’ll understand why we disagree and how we can move forward with it.”

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