Reconquista

Some deep background on California's "burrito antifada"

Image from Oakland, 2006

First, a hat-tip to Sohrab Ahmari for the term “burrito antifada.”

In what follows, my premise is that the ICE raids are only the proximate trigger of the current unrest. In this post, I will merely reproduce a few points made by others that emphasize material interests and larger political forces that are in play. By way of throat-clearing, let me say that I share some of the suspicion of centrists such as Andrew Sullivan and Leighton Wodehouse that the Trump administration’s deportation circus is less than serious, at least thus far — that it is more about perp-walks and showy raids than real change on a large scale. And that there is a further theatrical element, intended to thrill the MAGA base, in the administration’s contempt of procedure and of longstanding demarcations between state and federal power. (But let’s acknowledge also that the issue has been forced by California’s quasi-secession from federal authority as a de facto sanctuary state, and this is the main thing). In any case, the arguments I find most compelling for making sense of the riots themselves are coming from the Right.

A year ago, NS Lyons took a deep dive into the history of the Ford Foundation’s efforts to gin up a grievance mindset in American Hispanics, beginning in the 1960s. At the time, they did not

want to be seen as a distinct, let alone oppressed, minority in the United States. Many insisted to disappointed academic pollsters that they considered themselves white.

This was the discovery of “The Mexican-American People: The Nation’s Second Largest Minority,” a massive 1966 study conducted by UCLA researchers who interviewed more than 1,550 residents of the American Southwest. The researchers found that bringing up “prejudice” with their subjects had consistently proved “a loaded topic of conversation,” since “merely calling Mexican-Americans a ‘minority’ and implying that the population is the victim of prejudice and discrimination has caused irritation among many who prefer to believe themselves indistinguishable [from] white Americans.” As the study’s title suggested, this was not the result that the academics sought, since, in their own words, their ultimate objective was to convince Mexican Americans that they “share with Negroes the disadvantages of poverty, economic insecurity and discrimination.”

The UCLA study concluded that, in practice, it was “not yet easy to merge [the Mexican Americans] with the other large minorities in political coalition” through a shared sense of victimhood.

To remedy this absence of a victim mindset, the Ford Foundation invented La Raza and poured billions of dollars into it and similar efforts to create a racialized political landscape. “Within two decades,” Lyons writes, Hispanics “had become not only an official minority group but a key organized client base for the Democratic Party.”

Over at Coffee and Covid, Jeff Childers has a somewhat inflammatory take on the riots that will strike some as too conspiratorial, and it may be that. But given the determination in high places to engineer social unrest for political gain, and the highly developed arts of astroturfing “grass roots” movements (see Lyons above), one shouldn’t be too squeamish. Resisting explanations that invoke shadowy elites is a good procedure to follow in general, as a matter of epistemic hygiene, but precisely because conspiracy thinking is so déclassé, status anxiety can lead one to avert one’s gaze from important factors. And in fact there is nothing shadowy here, just little-noticed.

The factor that Childers invokes is remittance payments that flow from the US to Mexico. He notes that the LA riots began shortly after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum called on Mexicans in the US to “mobilize” in response to a provision in the Big, Beautiful Bill that would impose a 5% tax on remittance payments by non-citizens. Citing the Spanish newspaper Expansión, Childers writes,

remittances from the United States are one of Mexico’s largest …income sources, more than cars, food, or oil. In 2024, the total swelled to $64.7 billion— 3.5% of Mexico’s entire GDP. That’s just Mexico. Remittances to India exceed $165 billion.

For context, in both cases (Mexico and India), the amount of remittance revenue exceeds those nations’ entire trade surplus with the US.

More:

In 2023 alone, over $155 billion was wired from the U.S. to Latin America and the Caribbean alone — a 9.5% spike from the year before…

These aren’t pocket-change wire transfers to Grandma.

This is foreign aid without congressional approval, tax-free, off-budget, and off-the-books. A quiet economic lifeline— funded by us.

It is “funded by us” in the indirect sense that the monies sent abroad are removed from circulation in the US, and do not contribute to consumer demand. If the money was earned under the table, then it is also removed from the US tax base.

The various players involved have clear incentives to keep the current arrangement going:

the cartels rake it in on both ends—first smuggling bodies, then skimming their remittances through extortion and “protection” rackets that prey on families back home.

Foreign governments love it. Remittances are a direct revenue source and a pressure-release valve for their own broken economies.

Childer’s idea, then, is that the Mexican government was sending political signals to Hispanic activist cadres in the US: time to activate the street. Is this far-fetched? Certainly it would be if invoked as the single cause of the protests, but as a contributing element, I don’t think so. The power of the cartels in Mexico, their deep investment in people-moving (both as fentanyl mules and as human cargo), and their extensive penetration into California, make all this quite sinister. And in fact, the ICE raid that precipitated the current burrito antifada was at the garment factory Alliance Ambiance Apparel [in the original post, I mis-identified the name of the company. It is Ambiance, not Alliance Apparel. The latter has no criminal history], a company that largely employs people from Zapotec Indigenous communities. According to the LA Times, the firm has a history of federal prosecution for money laundering going back to 2014. In a 2021 sentencing memo, prosecutors said its founder “was cheating the United States and facilitating money laundering, he ... bought luxury cars and squirreled away bundles of cash worth $35 million in shoeboxes and garbage bags.” In other words, the raid wasn’t a matter of “rounding up random brown people,” as Andrew Sullivan put it. Rather, it seems to have targeted the alliance between illegal immigration and crime. One has to wonder if, or to what extent, the NGO-plex that is pushing the current protests on moralistic grounds, is captured by the cartels. Certainly it would be good policy on the part of the cartels to form alliances with the activists.

Finally, in this article from March in the Salisbury Review, the French-Moroccan historian Driss Ghali details the political utility of the “remittance racket” as it plays out more broadly in relations between the “global South” and the “North”.

Each year, immigrants send over $600 billion to their home countries. Africa alone gets $100 billion…. Morocco, my home country, gets more money from its remittances than it does from tourism – more than $11 billion last year. This is more than half of the revenues it gets from agriculture, an activity that employs over a third of its workforce…. It is as if Morocco had discovered a vast new reserve of oil and gold combined. No need to drill or to refine; just convince your population to leave the country – which is super easy, as a cocktail of incompetence and despair already drives millions of young people from their homeland. Provoking the required emigration requires no effort and no investment: bad governance does the job.

…Why reform institutions, why improve productivity, why improve the quality of leadership, when bad governance delivers vast and unconditional international money transfers, free of auditing by the IMF or the World Bank?

…As for the South’s lumpenproletariat, youngsters full of rage and testosterone head north every day. Instead of raiding the presidential palaces in Algiers and Conakry, hordes of young males raid the city centres of Milan, Cologne and Nantes. Sending their masses dangereuses overseas is a blessing for the South’s ruling elites.

To my mind, this point about the political and economic utility of mass migration for the political establishments of the Global South is an important consideration to throw into the explanatory mix. It is more straightforward — easier to understand — than the baffling behavior of our own establishment, to explain which requires positing perverse motives that are never fully convincing.