Neoliberalism Stirs Conflicts Larger than Ourselves

It just so happens that every once in a while, the Middlebury community misses out on the opportunity to hear fantastic visiting speakers due to the distraction of spectacular glorious skiing conditions. This past weekend was one such opportunity.

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs sponsored the 1st Annual Student-Led Global Conference titled “Immigration in the Neoliberal Age.” This year’s leaders featured Molly Stuart ’15.5 and Fernando Sandoval Jimenez ’15.

Last year, a competition, open to all students who wish to lead the events, invited applicants to share their visions of the future conference. Jimenez, who studies Environmental Studies and Geography, shares how it all began: “Molly was the one to have the idea. At the time, I was in Lebanon, taking a semester off, and Molly was abroad, studying neoliberalism in Mexico from the perspective of the Southern Mexican Zapatistas.”

A professor emailed Stuart, asking her to submit a proposal into the contest. Inspired by her surroundings, she formed an idea based on neoliberalism’s effect on migrants and immediately reached out to Jimenez, a friend and previous project collaborator.

One year later, Jimenez and Stuart found themselves facing their original ideas in the flesh — that is to say, they found themselves leading discussions and introducing speakers, among other organizational responsibilities.

The conference kicked off Jan. 16 with a panel discussion of the Mexican-US border, continued into Friday with a workshop presenting “Neoliberal Globalization” and a film screening of the documentary Last Train Home, and finished off on Saturday with four lectures by visiting speakers.

“I think that the lectures themselves were all fantastic and they brought a perspective to Middlebury that we usually do hear about or we read about and we study and dissect and analyze and we write papers about, but we don’t care much about [it when] down to actually connecting to the people that this is happening to,” Jimenez said. “The people that came to talk about that reality spoke in a very close up way, so you could actually feel it.”

Neoliberalism, as Jimenez admits, is a concept both simple and complex. He explains it simply.

“It’s a vision of capitalism in which the entire world needs to be connected for everything, but in general it doesn’t really work, at least not for everyone,” he said. “It facilitates a lot the accumulation of capital by some people, and it allows such people to have capital and markets everywhere. But that doesn’t mean that commonplace people have access to the global economy. They are part of it, but they are not necessarily the players. They’re not playing, they’re being played.”

By way of this capitalist endeavor, neoliberalism exploits the masses in favor of the few, often overtaking local industry and creating a huge economic gap, all of which displaces people from their homes in various ways. Thus, immigration, as Colin Rajah, International Coordinator of the Global Coalition on Migration and one of Saturday’s speakers, puts it, is one “symptom” of these global problems — as, he argues, is climate change.

“I thought that [Rajah] was going to say that the environment affects people, etc., and that we need to fight the environmental degradation, etcetera,” Jimenez said. “But he actually came to the idea that what we need to fight is the imbalance of power and that that’s what’s causing both climate change and the displacement of people. That is, people are being displaced not just because of climate change but also because of the balance of power. And I cannot do justice to the way he explained it; he put it very powerfully.”

The call to fight neoliberalism and free trades agreements was Rajah’s response when Jimenez asked what we could do to help the problem. The answer, Jimenez said, took him aback in its immensity.

When realizing the full extent of these huge issues, Jimenez confesses to feeling overwhelmed.

“Partly because, when I was away in Lebanon, I saw very closely that difference between having a lot of power and not having any power at all. I’ve always been sensitive to that topic; Lebanon made me even more so.”

“And I do feel powerless, I guess, but I also feel really angry because then we’re all here like “Oh, but what can we do about this?” And it’s like, well, could we start to live a bit of a more simple life? Like do we really need to have the library be extremely hot in winter and extremely cold in winter, you know, is that necessary? Do we really need to have lights on all night?” Jimenez said. “Coming from Mexico and having been also to places where the vast majority of people live in more modest situations, being in Middlebury does make me feel uncomfortable about all the things that we have that we don’t have to have.”

To the few who attended the events, the conference was doubtless as enriching and provocative as Jimenez describes it. The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs is currently in the process of preparing for next year’s continuation of this lecture series, which will become an annual event committed to engaging our community on global issues and, if it is anything like this year’s discussion, humble us in the process.