| | |  Editorials | Issues | November 2009 
Should We Defend Undocumented Workers?
 David Bacon - t r u t h o u t
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November 24, 2009
| | (Lance Page/t r u t h o u t) | |
One winter morning in 1996, Border Patrol agents charged into a Los Angeles street-corner clinic where 40 day laborers had lined up to be tested for AIDS. One worker, Omar Sierra, had just taken his seat, and a nurse had inserted the needle for drawing the blood. As agents of the migra ran across the street and sidewalk, Sierra jumped up, tore off the tourniquet, pulled the needle out of his vein and ran.
Sierra escaped and made it home. Shaken by his experience and determined never to forget his friends who were deported, he wrote a song.
I'm going to sing you a story, friends
that will make you cry,
how one day in front of K-Mart
the migra came down on us,
sent by the sheriff
of this very same place ...
We don't understand why,
we don't know the reason,
why there is so much
discrimination against us.
In the end we'll wind up
all the same in the grave.
With this verse I leave you,
I'm tired of singing,
hoping the migra
won't come after us again,
because in the end, we all have to work.
Working - A Criminal Act
Sierra states an obvious truth about people in the US without immigration papers: "We all have to work." Yet, work has become a crime for the undocumented. That Hollywood raid took place 13 years ago, but since then immigration enforcement against workers has grown much more widespread, with catastrophic consequences. In the last eight years of the Bush administration in particular, a succession of raids treated undocumented workers as criminals.
A year ago in Los Angeles, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents ("the migra") arrived at Micro Solutions, a circuit board assembly plant in the San Fernando Valley. Unsuspecting workers were first herded into the plant's cafeteria. Then, immigration agents told those who were citizens to line up on one side of the room. Then they told the workers who had green cards to go over to the same side. Finally, as one worker said, "it just left us." The remaining workers - those who were neither citizens nor visa holders - were put into vans, and taken off to the migra jail.
Some women were later released to care for their kids, but had to wear ankle bracelets, and couldn't work. How were they supposed to pay rent? Where would they get money to buy food?
On May 12, 2008, ICE agents raided the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. They sent 388 Guatemalan young people to the National Cattle Congress, a livestock showground in Waterloo, two hours away. In a makeshift courtroom, workers in chains came before a judge who'd helped prosecutors design plea agreements five months before the raid even took place. The workers had given the company Social Security numbers that were either invented, or belonged to someone else. The judge and prosecutor told workers they'd be charged with aggravated identity theft, which carries a two-year prison jolt, and held without bail. If they pleaded guilty to misusing a Social Security number, however, they would serve just five months, and be deported immediately afterwards.
Many of these young people spoke only Mam or Qanjobal, the indigenous languages of the region of Guatemala from which they came, so even with Spanish translation, they understood little of the skewed process. They had no real options anyway, and agreed to the five months in a federal lockup and were then expelled from the country. One of them was a young worker who'd been beaten with a meat hook by a supervisor. Lacking papers, he was afraid to complain. After the raid, he went to prison with the others. The supervisor stayed working on the line.
As in Los Angeles, women released to care for their children couldn't work; they had no way to pay rent or buy food; their husbands or brothers were in prison or deported, and they were held up to ostracism in this tiny town. Had it not been for St. Brigida's Catholic Church and local activists, the women and children would have been left hungry and homeless as they waited months for their own hearings and deportations.
They say it's just "illegals" - that's what makes this politically acceptable.
A year ago, ICE agents raided a Howard Industries plant in Laurel, Mississippi, sending 481 workers to a privately-run detention center in Jena, Louisiana, and releasing 106 women in ankle bracelets. Workers were incarcerated with no idea of where they were being held, and weren't charged or provided lawyers for days. They slept on concrete floors, and went on a hunger strike after a week of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Patricia Ice, attorney for the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), called the raid political. "They want a mass exodus of immigrants out of the state," she declared. "The political establishment here is threatened by Mississippi's changing demographics, and what the electorate might look like in 20 years."
She means that African-Americans are moving back to Mississippi, and now make up over 35 percent of the population. In ten years, immigrants will make up another ten percent. MIRA and the state's legislative black caucus have a plan - combine those votes with unions and progressive whites, and Mississippi can finally get rid of the power structure that's governed in Jackson since Reconstruction.
The Howard Industries raid was intended to drive a wedge into the heart of that political coalition - to stop any possibility for change.
ICE says these raids protect US citizens and legal residents against employers who hire undocumented workers in order to lower wages and working conditions. But very often immigration raids are used against workers' efforts when they organize and protest those same conditions.
At the big Smithfield plant in Tarheel, North Carolina, where workers spent 16 years trying to join the union, the company tried to fire 300 people, including the immigrant union leadership, saying it had discovered that their Social Security numbers were no good. Workers stopped the lines for three days, and won temporary reinstatement for those who were fired. But then the migra conducted two raids, and 21 workers went to prison for using numbers that belonged to someone else.
The fear the raids created was compared by one organizer to a neutron bomb. It took two years for the union campaign to recover.
Since the end of the Bush administration, immigration authorities say they will follow a softer policy. Instead of raids, they say they'll implement a system for checking the legal status of workers - an electronic database called E-Verify. People working with bad Social Security numbers will be fired.
In October, 2,000 young women in the Los Angeles garment factory of American Apparel were fired. And in November, 1,200 janitors were fired in Minneapolis.
The Department of Homeland Security says it's auditing the records of 654 companies nationwide to find the names of undocumented workers. Will hundreds of thousands more get fired? What kind of economic recovery goes with firing thousands of workers?
Workplace raids, firings and E-verify are all means to enforce employer sanctions - the part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 that said, for the first time, that employers had to check the immigration status of workers. The law essentially made it a federal crime for an undocumented person to work. Those who call for stricter enforcement say sanctions were never implemented, and point out that only a handful of employers were ever fined.
But tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of workers have been fired for not having papers. No one keeps track of the number - these people don't count.
ICE says sanctions enforcement targets employers "who are using illegal workers to drive down wages," - those who pay illegal workers substandard wages or force them to endure intolerable working conditions.
Curing intolerable conditions by firing or deporting workers who endure them doesn't help the workers or change the conditions, however.
And that's not who ICE targets anyway.
American Apparel pays better than most garment factories, although workers had to work fast and hard to earn that pay.
In Minneapolis, the 1,200 fired janitors at ABM belong to SEIU Local 26 and get a higher wage than nonunion workers - and had to strike and fight to win it.
ICE is still targeting the same set of employers the Bush raids went after - union companies like Howard Industries, or organizing drives like those at Smithfield.
The Agriprocessors raid came less than a year after workers there tried to organize.
At Howard Industries in Mississippi, the migra conducted the biggest raid of all in the middle of union contract negotiations.
ICE is punishing undocumented workers who earn too much, or who become too visible, when they demand higher wages and organize unions. And despite the notion that sanctions enforcement will punish those employers who exploit immigrants, at American Apparel and ABM the employers were rewarded for cooperation by being immunized from prosecution.
So, this policy really only hurts workers.
What purpose does criminalization serve? In part, it serves a huge bureaucracy. With 15,000 agents, ICE has become the second largest enforcement arm of the federal government. Private detention centers have been built across the country, operated by companies like Geo Corporation, formerly called Wackenhut, and before that, Pinkertons. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano recently announced plans to build two new detention super centers. About 350,000 people were detained for immigration violations last year and, at any one time, about 35,000 people were in detention (that is: prison).
But the driving force behind enforcement is deeper than contracts and jobs.
Open the Front Door, Close the Back Door
Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said, "There's an obvious solution to the problem of illegal work, which is you open the front door and you shut the back door." For Chertoff "opening the front door" means that he wants people to come to the US as contract workers, recruited by employers using visas that say a worker can only come to work. This is the logic and requirement for every guest worker program, going back to the braceros. And to make people come only through this employment-based system, he'd "close the back door," by making walking through the desert across the border, or working outside of this contract labor system, a crime punished, not just by deportation, but by detention and prison.
People coming as contract labor never become citizens, vote or hold power. That's very convenient in Mississippi, for instance, where employers need the labor of immigrants, but are afraid of what will happen if they vote. And by no coincidence, that state employs more guest workers per capita than any other. Mississippi recently passed a state employer sanctions law, with a $10,000 fine and five years in jail for working without being "authorized."
E-Verify, the high-tech immigration database endorsed by both the Bush and Obama administrations, is only the latest idea for enforcing this kind of criminalization. The purpose of E-Verify, raids, firings and every other kind of workplace immigration enforcement, is, fundamentally, the criminalization of work - if you have no papers, it is a crime to have a job.
So, you stand on the street corner, a truck stops to pick up laborers and you get in. You work all day in the sun until you're so tired you can hardly go back to your room. This is a crime. You do it to send money home to your family and the people who depend on you. This is a crime, too.
How many criminals like this are there? The Pew Hispanic Trust says there are 12 million people without papers here in the US.
But it's not just here. Manu Chao wrote a whole CD of songs about this: "Clandestino." He sings about people going from Morocco to Spain, Turkey to Germany, Jamaica to London. There are over 200 million people, all over the world, living outside the countries where they were born. If all the world's "illegal workers" got together in one place, there would be enough people for ten Mexico Cities or fifteen Los Angeleses.
If working is a crime, then workers are criminals. And if workers become criminals, proponents of this system say, they'll go home. That's the basic justification for all workplace immigration enforcement.
But is anyone going home? No one is leaving, because there's no job to go home to.
No Job to Go Home to
Since 1994, six million Mexicans have come to live in the US. Millions came without visas, because it wasn't possible for them to get one.
All over the world, people are moving from poor countries to rich ones. The largest Salvadoran city in the world is Los Angeles. More than half the world's sailors come from the Philippines. More migrants go from the country to the city in China than cross borders in all the rest of the world combined.
So many people from Guatemala are living in the US, that one neighborhood in Los Angeles is now called Little San Miguel. San Miguel Acatan was the site of the worst massacre of indigenous people by the US-armed Guatemalan army in that country's civil war in 1982. Now more San Migueleños live in Los Angeles than in San Miguel.
The economic pressures causing displacement and migration are reaching into the most remote towns and villages in Mexico, where people still speak languages that were old when Columbus arrived in the Americas - Mixteco, Zapoteco, Triqui, Chatino, Purepecha, Nahuatl. There is no community in Mexico that does not have family members in the US.
Why are so many people displaced?
NAFTA is just one element of the changes that have transformed the Mexican economy in the interests of foreign investors and wealthy Mexican partners. That treaty let huge US companies, like Archer Daniels Midland, sell corn in Mexico for a price lower than what it cost small farmers in Oaxaca to grow it. Big US agribusiness companies get huge subsidies from Congress - $2 billion in the last farm bill. But the World Bank and NAFTA's rules dictated that subsidies for Mexican farmers had to end. This was not the creation of a "level playing field," despite all the propaganda.
In Cananea, a small town in the Sonora Mountains and site of one of the world's largest copper mines, miners have been on strike for two years. Grupo Mexico, a multinational corporation that was virtually given the mine in one of the infamous privatizations of former President Carlos Salinas, wants to cut labor costs by eliminating hundreds of jobs, busting the miners' union and blacklisting its leaders. If miners lose the strike and their jobs, the border is only 50 miles north.
If you were a miner with a busted union and no job to support your family, where would you go? When Cananea miners lost the last strike against job cuts in 1998, over 800 were blacklisted and many wound up working in Tucson, Phoenix and Los Angeles. No wonder the current strike has been going on for over two years. Miners are fighting to stay home, in Cananea, in Mexico.
The Mexican government just sent in the army to occupy all the power plants in Mexico City, dissolved the state-owned Power and Light Company (Luz y Fuerza), and fired its 44,000 employees. This act threatens to destroy the union there, one of the country's oldest and most democratic. This is a step toward selling off Mexico's electrical grid to foreign, private investors, just as the telephones, airlines, ports, railroads and factories have all been privatized over the last two decades. Where will the fired electrical workers go? If they don't win their current battle with the government, they'll follow many of their predecessors north.
NAFTA, and the economic reforms promoted by the US and Mexican governments, helped big companies get rich by keeping wages low, by giving them subsidies and letting them push farmers into bankruptcy, by privatizing state enterprises and allowing cuts in the workforce and working conditions. But those are the changes that make it hard for families to survive: Low wages, can't farm any more, laid off to cut costs. Factory privatized and union busted.
Salinas promised Mexicans cheap food if NAFTA was approved and corn imports flooded the country. Now, the price of tortillas is three times what it was when the treaty passed. That's great for Grupo Maseca, Mexico's monopoly tortilla producer (and Archer Daniels Midland sits on its board.) And it's great for Wal-Mart, now Mexico's largest retailer. But if you can't afford to buy those tortillas, then you go where you can buy them.
The advocates of economic liberalization said an economy of maquiladoras and low wages would produce jobs on the border. But today, hundreds of thousands of workers there have lost their jobs - when the recession began in the US, people stopped buying the products made in border factories. Even when they're working, the wages of maquiladora workers are so low - $4-$6 a day - that it takes half a day's pay to buy a gallon of milk. Most live in cardboard houses on streets with no pavement or sewer system. When they lose their jobs, and the border is a few blocks away, where do you think they will go? If you had no job or food for your family, what would you do? What did most Americans' ancestors do?
And when people protest, the government brings in the police and the army to protect order and investments. People are beaten, as the teachers were in Oaxaca in 2006. After the army filled Oaxaca's jails, how many more people had to leave?
When Honduran President Manuel Zelaya simply raised the minimum wage to give families a better future, not as migrants, but in Honduras, the US-trained military kidnapped him in his pajamas, put him on an airplane and flew him out of the country. How many people will leave Honduras because the door to a sustainable future at home has been closed?
The lack of human rights itself is a factor contributing to migration, since it makes it more difficult, even impossible, to organize for change. Unequal trade agreements and military intervention don't stop the flow of migrants - they produce it by displacing people - making it impossible for them to survive without leaving home. Immigration laws then regulate this flow of people - making their labor available at a price employers want to pay.
Migration is not an accidental byproduct of free trade. The economies of the US and wealthy countries depend on migration, on the labor provided by a constant flow of migrants. Congress and the administration aren't trying to stop migration. Nothing can, not with trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA and the economic policies they represent. Immigration enforcement does not keep people from crossing the border, or prevent them from working. Instead, immigration policy determines the status of people once they're here. It enforces inequality among workers in rights and economic and social status. That inequality then produces lower wages for all workers and higher profits for all employers.
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