Change Immigrants and Labor Can Believe In
By David Bacon
The Nation, web edition, November 26, 2008
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081215/bacon?rel=hp_picks
Since 2001 the Bush administration has deported more than a million
people--including 349,041 individuals in the fiscal year ending just
prior to the election. It has resurrected the discredited community
sweeps and factory raids of earlier eras, and started sending waves
of migrants to privately run jails for crimes like inventing a Social
Security number to get a job. Every day in Tucson 70 young people,
including many teenagers, are brought before a federal judge in heavy
chains and sentenced to prison because they walked across the border.
It's no wonder that Latinos, Asians and other communities with large
immigrant populations voted for Barack Obama by huge margins. People
want and expect a change. Ending the administration's failed program
of raids, jail time and deportations is at the top of the list.
National demonstrations have called for a moratorium on raids since
the summer, and one big reason why Los Angeles turned out so heavily
for Obama was the anti-raid encampment and hunger strike in the
Placita Olvera, which electrified the city.
But the raids program has been rejected by more than immigrants
alone. The election took place as millions of people were losing
their jobs and homes. Yet while Lou Dobbs and the talk show
hysteria-mongers tried to scapegoat immigrants for this crisis ("What
about illegal don't you understand?"), most voters did not drink the
Kool-Aid. In fact, every poll shows that a big majority reject raids
and want basic rights and fair treatment for everyone, immigrants
included. The political coalition that put Obama into
office--African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, women and union
families, expects change.
The country needs not just an end to raids but a move away from the
policies they've been intended to promote. From the beginning, the
administration's enforcement program has been cynically designed to
pressure Congress into re-establishing discredited guest worker
schemes called "close to slavery" by the Southern Poverty Law Center,
being reminiscent of the old bracero program. Homeland Security
Secretary Michael Chertoff called these raids "closing the back door
and opening the front door."
At least Chertoff was honest about his intentions. His underlings at
Homeland Security, like Julie Myers, head of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE), tried to pretend that the imprisonment and
deportation of abused workers was a form of labor standards
enforcement. Meanwhile, actual protection for US wages, working
conditions and union rights has been in free fall for eight years.
Other Homeland Security officials mendaciously claimed immigrants
were a threat to national security, as though imprisoning hungry
teenagers or terrorized workers would help a fearful public to sleep
at night.
No one whose eyes are open to the terrible human suffering caused by
these draconian policies will be very sorry to see Chertoff go. But
what policies will take their place, and who will enforce them? So
far, the choice of Janet Napolitano is not encouraging. The Tucson
"Operation Streamline" court convenes in her home state every day,
and the situation of immigrants in Arizona is worse than almost
anywhere else. Napolitano herself has publicly supported most of the
worst ideas of the Bush administration, including guest worker
programs with no amnesty for the currently undocumented, and brutal
enforcement schemes like E-Verify and workplace raids.
But Obama does not have to be imprisoned by the failure of Napolitano
to imagine a more progressive alternative. In fact, his new
administration's need to respond to the economic crisis, and to
strengthen the political coalition that won the election, can open
new possibilities for a just and fair immigration policy.
Economic crisis does not have to pit working people against each
other, or lead to the further demonization of immigrants. In fact,
there is common ground between immigrants, communities of color,
unions, churches, civil rights organizations, and working families.
Legalization and immigrant rights can be tied to guaranteeing jobs
for anyone who wants to work, and unions to raise wages and win
better conditions for everyone in the workplace.
These are not revolutionary demands. In fact, they're what the
Democratic Party used to stand for. Nor is the idea of combining them
into a common program just pie-in-the-sky. For two sessions of
Congress, the Black Caucus and leaders like Sheila Jackson Lee and
Barbara Lee have proposed legislation to create jobs, at the same
time offering rights and legal status to immigrants without papers.
The AFL-CIO's campaign for the Employee Free Choice Act supports the
surest means of ending the low-wage, second-class status of immigrant
workers-- organizing unions. And repealing unfair trade agreements
and ending structural adjustment policies would raise the standard of
living and reduce the pressure for migration in Oaxaca or El
Salvador, while making jobs more secure in working-class communities
in the US.
Justice for immigrants does not have to be the third rail of US
politics, as Rahm Emmanuel has called it. Instead, immigrant rights
is the demand of one part of a broad coalition that seeks fundamental
social change. Immigrants can't achieve justice on their own, but
then no element of this coalition can win its demands in isolation.
Only a common-ground strategy can actually achieve the changes people
hoped for when they went to the polls. Stopping the raids is the
first step in a process that will help to end the nightmare of the
past few years, and at the same time can help the administration
begin to address the larger issues of immigration reform, jobs and
workplace rights.
Something is clearly wrong with immigration enforcement. Desperate
workers get fired and deported, families get terrorized and divided,
while the government protects employers and seeks to turn a
family-based immigration system into a managed labor supply for
business. Even before presenting a reform plan to Congress, the Obama
administration has the power to change some of the worst elements of
the Bush program by administrative and executive action. What Bush
put in place by fiat can be changed by the same process. In its first
100 days, a new administration could take simple steps to protect
human and workplace rights, instead of allowing the abuse to continue:
* Stop ICE from seeking serious federal criminal charges, with
incarceration in privately run prisons, when a worker lacks papers or
has a bad Social Security numbers.
* Stop raiding workplaces, especially where workers are trying to
organize unions or enforce wage and hour laws. This would help all
workers, not just immigrants.
* Halt community sweeps, checkpoints and roadblocks, where agents
use warrants for one or two people to detain and deport dozens of
others. End the government's campaign to repeal local sanctuary
ordinances and drag local law enforcement into immigration raids.
* Double the paltry 742 federal inspectors responsible for all US
wage and hour violations and focus on industries where immigrants are
concentrated. The National Labor Relations Board could target
employers who use immigration threats to violate union rights.
* Allow all workers to apply for a Social Security number and pay
legally into a system that benefits everyone. Social Security numbers
should be used for their true purpose--paying retirement and
disability benefits--not to fire immigrants from their jobs and send
them to prison.
* Re-establish worker protections, ended under Bush, connected
with existing guest worker programs; force employers to hire
domestically first and decertify any contractor guilty of labor
violations.
* Restore human rights in border communities, stop construction
of the border wall between the US and Mexico, and disband the
Operation Streamline federal court, where scores of young border
crossers are sent to prison in chains every day.
Democrats still have to decide what reforms to bring before Congress,
and when. Some would delay action for a year or more. But the US
Chamber of Commerce and dozens of trade groups have been pushing for
years for big guestworker programs. They are more than willing to
accept raids and enforcement as a price, and are already working to
bring back the "comprehensive" bills that would give them what they
want. Instead of arguing over "what's politically possible" in
Congress, immigrant and labor rights activists need a movement for a
progressive alternative.
That alternative has to strengthen human rights on both sides of the
global divide. In countries like Mexico and the Philippines, the
families of migrants are fighting for real development instead of
poverty, forced migration and a remittance-based economy. Here in the
US movements in immigrant communities have brought millions of people
into the streets on May Day, and continue to fight the raids and
deportations. We need proposals that address both the situation of
immigrants here and the conditions in their countries that force them
to migrate.
To move towards equality and rights in the US:
* A law to give permanent residence (green-card) visas to the
undocumented, and clear up the backlog of people already waiting for
them abroad. If visas were more easily available, people wouldn't
have to cross the border without them. Employer sanctions that make
it a crime for immigrants to hold a job should be repealed.
Guestworker programs with a record of abuse should be ended, as they
were in 1964.
To end the displacement at the root of most forced migration:
* A new approach to trade policy, including renegotiation of the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and rejection of
potential new trade agreements with countries like Colombia.
Protecting corporate access to markets and low wages leads to rising
poverty and the displacement of communities. We need to concentrate
on the welfare of people at the bottom rather than the top, help
grassroots communities of farmers stay on their land, and boost wages
and employment for urban workers. Instead of subsidizing war and
displacement, US tax dollars could expand rural credit, education and
health care abroad, easing the pressure behind migration.
A new administration that has raised such high expectations should
look for new ideas in the areas of immigration reform and trade
policy, not recycle the bad ones of the last few years. The
constituency that won the election will support a change in
direction, and in fact is demanding it. The Obama administration owes
its victory to that constituency, and its promises of change that
brought it to the polls. Now it needs to deliver.
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David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
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