| | |  Editorials | Issues | November 2009 
Should We Defend Undocumented Workers? - 2
 David Bacon - t r u t h o u t
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November 24, 2009
 |  | Curing intolerable conditions by firing or deporting workers who endure them doesn't help the workers or change the conditions. |  | | |
US immigration policy has historically been designed to supply labor to employers, at a manageable cost, imposed by employers. And, at its most overt, that labor supply policy has made workers vulnerable to employers, who can withdraw their right to stay in the country by firing them.
This is not an extremist view. Recently, that gang of revolutionaries, the Council on Foreign Relations, proposed two goals for US immigration policy. "We should reform the legal immigration system," it advocated, "so that it operates more efficiently, responds more accurately to labor market needs, and enhances US competitiveness." This essentially calls for using migration to supply labor at competitive, or low, wages.
"We should restore the integrity of immigration laws," the Council went on to say, "through an enforcement regime that strongly discourages employers and employees from operating outside that legal system." This couples an enforcement regime like the one at present - with its raids and firings - to that labor supply system.
For employers, this system is not broken - it works well.
About 12 million people live in the US without immigration documents. Another 26 million-28 million were born elsewhere, and are citizens or visa-holders. That's almost 40 million people. If everyone went home tomorrow, would there be fruit and vegetables on the shelves at Safeway? Who would cut up the cows and pigs in meatpacking plants? Who would clean the offices of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco or Chicago?
Immigrants are not the only workers in our workforce, the only people willing to work or the only people who need jobs. Our workforce includes African-American, Native American, Asian-American and Chicano families, who have contributed their labor for hundreds of years. The vast majority of white people - the descendants of European immigrants - are workers too. We all work. We all need to work to put bread on the table for our families. But without the labor of immigrants, the system would stop.
Those companies using that labor, however - the grape growers in Delano or the owners of office buildings in Century City or the giant Blackstone group that owns hotels across the country - do not pay the actual cost of producing the workforce they rely on. Who pays for the needs of workers' families in the towns and countries from which they come? Who builds the schools in the tiny Oaxacan villages that send their young people into California's fields? Who builds the homes for the families of the meatpacking workers of Nebraska? Who pays for the doctor when the child of a Salvadoran janitor working in Los Angeles gets sick? The growers and the meatpackers and the building owners pay for nothing. They don't even pay taxes in the countries from which their workers come, and some don't pay taxes here either. So, who pays the cost of producing and maintaining their workforce?
The workers pay for everything with the money they send home. Structural adjustment policies require countries like Mexico or the Philippines to cut the government budget for social services, so remittances pay for whatever social services those communities now get. For employers, that's a very cheap system.
Here in the US, it's cheap, too. Workers without papers pay taxes and Social Security, but are barred from the benefits. For them, there's no unemployment insurance, no disability pay if they get sick and no retirement benefits. Workers fought for these social benefits and won them in the New Deal. For people without papers, the New Deal never happened. Even legal residents with green cards can't get many Social Security benefits. I'd replace this last sentence with "Denying these benefits to immigrants has been the first step in denying them for workers born in the USA."
Why can't everyone get a Social Security number? After all, we want people to pay into and to be part of the system. All workers, the undocumented included, get old and injured. Should people live on dog food after a lifetime of work? The purpose of Social Security is to assure dignity and income to the old and injured. The system should not be misused to determine immigration status and facilitate witch-hunts, firings and deportations for workers without it.
Wages for most immigrants are so low, people can hardly live on them. There's a big difference in wages between a day laborer and a longshoreman - $8.25 an hour minimum wage in San Francisco, whereas a dockworker gets over $25 an hour, plus benefits. If employers had to pay low wage workers, including immigrants, the wages of longshoremen, the lives of working families would improve immeasurably. And it can happen. Before people on the waterfront organized the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, they were like day labors. Hired every morning in a humiliating shape up where each person competed for a job with dozens of others. Dockworkers were considered bums. Now, they own apartment houses. It's the union that created that change.
However, if employers had to raise the wages of immigrants to the level of longshoremen, it would cost them a lot. Just the difference between the minimum wage received by 12 million undocumented workers and the average US wage might well be over $80 billion a year. No wonder organizing efforts among immigrant workers meet such fierce opposition.
But immigrants are fighters. In 1992, undocumented drywallers stopped Southern California residential construction for a year from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. They've gone on strike at factories, office buildings, laundries, hotels and fields. Those unions today that are growing are often those that have made an alliance with immigrant workers, and know that they will fight for better conditions. In fact, the battles fought by immigrants over the last 20 years made the unions of Los Angeles strong today, and changed the politics of the city. In city after city, a similar transformation is possible or already underway.
So, unions should make a commitment, too. In 1999, the AFL-CIO held an historic convention in Los Angeles and, there, unions said they would fight to get rid of the law that makes work a crime. Unions said they'd fight to protect the right of all workers to organize, immigrants included. Labor should live up to that promise. Today, unions are fighting for the Employee Free Choice Act, intended to make it easier and quicker for workers to organize. That would help all workers, immigrants included. But if 12 million people have no right to their jobs at all, and are breaking the law simply by working, how will they use the rights that EFCA is designed to protect? Unions and workers need both labor law reform and immigration reform that decriminalizes work.
Employers and the wealthy love immigrants and hate them. They want and need people's labor, but they don't want to pay. And what better way not to pay than to turn workers into criminals?
Creating Illegality
This is an old story. The use of migration as a supply of criminalized low-paid, or even unpaid labor began when this country began. Who were the first "illegals"? They were Africans displaced by the most brutal means, kidnapped, chained and marched to the coast, put on ships and taken across the middle passage to the Americas. And for what purpose? To provide labor on plantations, but not as equal people - not even as people at all.
When the US Constitution was adopted, a slave was counted as three-fifths of a human being, not because planters intended to give them three-fifths of a white person's rights, but so that slave masters could get more representatives in Congress.
Some of the nation's first laws defined who could be enslaved and who couldn't. The "drop of African blood" defined who was legal and who wasn't. When Illinois and Indiana came into the Union as free states, their first laws said a person of African descent couldn't reside there. Were there no free black people living in those territories? Did they not therefore become "illegal"?
That concept of illegality was then applied to other people, for the same purpose. Chinese immigrants
were brought from Toishan under contract to work on the railroad, and drain the Sacramento/San Joaquin River delta. Then, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act forbade their continued immigration, because under US nationality law, they could never become citizens. At the time the law said the Chinese had no right to be here, there were already thousands of Chinese migrants in California and even Idaho.
In the early 1900s, California's grower-dominated legislature made it a crime for Filipinos to marry women who were not Filipinas. At the same time, immigration of women from the Philippines to the mainland was very difficult. For the Filipino farm workers of the 1930s and '40s and '50s, it was virtually a crime to have a family. Many men stayed single until their 50s or 60s, living in labor camps, moving and working wherever the growers needed their labor.
During the bracero program from 1942 to 1964, growers recruited workers from Mexico, who could only come under contract, and had to leave the country at the end of the harvest. They called the braceros legal, but what kind of legality has people living behind barbed wire in camps, traveling and working only where the growers wanted? If braceros went on strike, they were deported. Part of their wages were withheld, supposedly to guarantee their return to Mexico. Half a century later, they're still fighting to recover the lost money.
But everyone fought to stay. The Chinese endured the burning of Chinatowns in Salinas and San Francisco. Filipinos had to fight just for the right to have a family. Many braceros just walked out of the labor camps, and kept living and working underground for 30 years, until they could get legal status from the amnesty of 1986.
Immigration policy based on producing a labor supply for employers always has two consequences. Displacement of communities abroad becomes an unspoken policy, because it produces workers. And inequality becomes an official policy.
Almost 200 years after the Civil War eliminated much of de jure inequality written into law, de facto inequality is still very much with us. But today, immigration law, with its category of illegality, is reinstituting inequality under law. Calling someone an "illegal" doesn't refer to an illegal act. It's not the border that makes people illegal any more than the middle passage made people slaves. Slavery was created on the slave block and in the plantation. Today's illegality is also created within the borders, by a legal system that excludes people from normal rights and social benefits.
Illegal status is created here. All the immigration reform bills in Congress share the assumption that immigrants, even those with visas, shouldn't be the equals of the people in the community around them with the same rights. For those without visas, the exclusion and inequality is even fiercer. And this is not a de facto exclusion or denial of rights. It is de jure denial, written into law, that justifies the raid in Laurel, the firings in Los Angeles, the ankle bracelets in Postville.
Today, the US faces a basic choice in direction for its immigration policy. There is a corporate agenda on migration, promoted by powerful voices in Washington, DC, like the Council on Foreign Relations and the employers' lobby, the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (think Wal-Mart, Marriott, Tyson Foods ...). They propose managing the flow of migration with new guest worker programs, and increased penalties against those who try to migrate and work outside this system. Some of their proposals also contain a truncated legalization for the undocumented, but one that would disqualify most people or have them wait for years for visas, while removing employer liability for the undocumented workers they've already hired.
But, Washington lobbyists ask, wouldn't guest worker programs be preferable to what we have now? The Southern Poverty Law Center's report, "Close to Slavery," documents that today's braceros are routinely cheated of wages and overtime. Workers recruited from India to work in a Mississippi shipyard paid $15,000 to $20,000 for each visa. The company cut their promised wages, and fired their leader, Joseph Jacobs, when workers protested. If workers do protest, they're put on a blacklist. The Department of Labor under Bush never decertified a guest worker contractor for labor violations, and said the blacklist is legal. When Rafael Santiago was sent by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee to Monterrey to monitor hiring by the North Carolina Growers Association on April 9, 2007, to eliminate the blacklist and end contractor corruption, his office was broken into, and he was tied up, tortured and killed.
No employer hires guest workers in order to pay more. They hire them to keep wages low - ultimately for everyone.
That's one possible direction - away from equality and the expansion of rights.
Undoing Inequality
Our own history tells us that a different direction is not only possible, but was partially achieved by the civil rights movement. In 1964, heroes of the Chicano movement like Bert Corona, Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta forced Congress to end the bracero program. The next year, Mexicans and Filipinos went out on strike in the fields of Coachella and Delano, and the United Farm Workers was born.
The following year, in 1965, those leaders, together with many others, went back to Congress. Give us a law, they said, that doesn't make workers into braceros or criminals behind barbed wire into slaves for growers. Give us a law that says our families are what's important, our communities. That was how we won the family preference system. That's why, once you have a green card, you can petition for your mother and father, or your children, to join you in the US. We didn't have that before. The civil rights movement won that law.
That fight is not over. In fact, we have to fight harder now than ever. Native-born workers and settled immigrant communities see the growth of an employment system based on low wages and insecurity as a threat. It fosters competition among workers for jobs, and expands the part of the workforce with the lowest income and the fewest rights. It's not hard for people to see the impact of inequality and growing poverty, even if they get confused about its cause.
But we don't have to assume that fear is hardwired into us, or that we can't overcome it. Mainstream newspapers said people applauded in the Laurel plant when the immigrants were arrested and taken out in handcuffs. But after the arrests, black workers came out of the gate and embraced the immigrant women sitting outside in their ankle bracelets, demanding their unpaid wages. African-American women offered to bring food to Mexican mothers, and supported their demand for back wages.
At Smithfield in North Carolina, two immigration raids and 300 firings scared workers so badly that their union drive stopped. But then Mexicans and African-Americans together brought the union in. They found common cause by saying to each other that they all needed better wages and conditions, that they all had a right to work, and that the union would fight for the job of anyone, immigrant or native born.
Unions know that immigrants can be fighters, like other workers. In 1992, drywallers stopped home construction for a year with a strike that extended from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. Immigrants, including the undocumented, have gone on strike at factories, office buildings, laundries, hotels and fields. Some unions today are growing, and they're often those that know immigrant workers will fight for better wages and conditions. The battles fought by immigrants over the last 20 years are helping to create political power in cities like Los Angeles, and improved job conditions for everyone.
In recognition of that process, and of their own self-interest, unions made a commitment at the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles. They said they would fight to get rid of the law that makes work a crime, and to protect the right of all workers to organize. Labor should live up to that promise.
So, What Do We Want?
First, we want legalization, giving 12 million people residence rights and green cards, so they can live like normal human beings. We do not want immigration used as a cheap labor supply system, with workers paying off recruiters, and, once here, frightened that they'll be deported if they lose their jobs.
We need to get rid of the laws that make immigrants criminals and working a crime. No more detention centers, no more ankle bracelets, no more firings and no-match letters and no more raids. We need equality and rights. All people in our communities should have the same rights and status.
We have to make sure that those who say they advocate for immigrants aren't really advocating for low wages. That the decision-makers of Washington, DC, won't plunge families in Mexico, El Salvador or Colombia into poverty, force a new generation of workers to leave home and go through the doors of furniture factories and laundries, office buildings and packing plants, onto construction sites, or just into the gardens and nurseries of the rich.
Families in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador or the Philippines deserve a decent life, too. They have a right to survive, a right to not migrate. To make that right a reality, they need jobs and productive farms, good schools and health care. Our government must stop negotiating trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA and, instead, prohibit the use of trade and economic policy that causes poverty and displacement.
Those people who do choose to come here to work deserve the same things that every other worker does. We all have the same rights, and the same needs - jobs, schools, medical care, a decent place to live and the right to walk the streets or drive our cars without fear.
Major changes in immigration policy are not possible if we don't fight at the same time for these other basic needs: jobs, education, housing, health care, justice. But these are things that everyone needs, not just immigrants. And if we fight together, we can stop raids and, at the same time, create a more just society for everyone, immigrant and nonimmigrant alike.
Is this possible?
In 1955, at the height of the cold war, braceros and farm workers didn't think change would ever come. Growers had all the power, and farm workers none. Ten years later, we had a new immigration law protecting families, and the bracero program was over. A new union for farm workers was on strike in Delano.
We can have an immigration system that respects human rights. We can stop deportations. We can win security for working families on both sides of our borders.
Yes, it's possible. Si se puede!
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