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.
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
--
Shaun
773.828.4336
917.755.7409
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