The first two reviews respond to an earlier review of "Illegal People - How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants" (Beacon Press, 2008)
All three are available on the website for Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org) A Few Bad Apples...Or a Rotten System? Laura Carlsen | December 12, 2008 Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5734 Since President-elect Barack Obama promised to deal with immigration reform in the early part of his presidency, the nation began gearing up for another round in what has been one of the most contentious issues of our time. Faced with a vociferous anti-immigrant right wing, failed reform attempts in Congress, and the human tragedy of criminal raids against immigrants, it's crucial that we get it right this time. The immediate challenge is to build a broad-based movement to pass a fair and humane reform that grants all workers and their families equal rights and protections under the law. David Bacon's book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Immigration and Criminalizes Immigrants provides essential tools to envision and fight for this reform. For that reason, Michele Wucker's biased interpretation and portrayal of the book does this budding movement a disservice. There are two fundamental differences of opinion between Wucker and Bacon that must come to the forefront of the debate on how to frame this reform. The first question is the bad apples one - whether the numerous cases of employer abuse of undocumented workers and guestworkers that Bacon describes are anomalies or corporate labor strategies for reducing costs and increasing profits. Wucker states that Bacon chronicles the misdeeds of "bad-apple employers" while giving short shrift to "employers who would hire workers with papers if the system provided a way to do so" and that Bacon's "cut-and-dried labor-good, corporate-bad message doesn't leave room for such subtleties." The problem isn't one of subtleties - it's a question of how we analyze the real forces opposing legalization for migrant workers and what kind of strategies we build based on that. Bacon's book is devoted to documenting the structural aspects of the use of visa and undocumented workers in the United States and how that has become a major strategy for competition and profits in the age of globalization. He describes a series of corporate-led policies and practices - trade agreements that displace workers in their countries of origin, the criminalization of work, the definition of people as illegal, and the use of migrant labor to erode labor rights - that create a system of abuse. After reading the skilled combination of history, personal testimonies, statistics and logically constructed arguments, it's difficult to see this system as anything less than a widespread corporate strategy based on fundamentally unfair practices. Immigration Myths Debunked Bacon debunks several myths of the immigration debate that have led to dead-ends. One is that employers would hire native workers if they could. Bacon cites many statistical studies showing that the increase in migrant labor has been accompanied by an increase in unemployment among certain sectors of U.S. workers, especially black workers. The reason is not that migrants do work U.S. workers won't do. It's that employers have actively replaced organized workers and workers with exercisable rights with the more easily manipulated migrant workforce. Bacon demonstrates that this is a preference - not an absolute numerical demand - for undocumented and visa workers. The reason is simple and you don't have to be an anti-business conspiracy theorist to see it: they are in general a cheap workforce with no labor rights, bargaining power or job security. This point is central for showing the structural motivations - not "bad apple" behavior - of companies and because it constitutes the groundwork for some of the most innovative and successful labor organizing in the country in recent years. The Mississippi Rights Immigrants Rights Alliance, which brings together black workers and immigrants to fight for jobs and labor rights for all workers, is a shining example of the possibilities of uniting around the message of full, enforceable labor rights for all workers. The other myth of the immigration debate that Bacon takes on is that migrants are opportunistic individuals seeking to take advantage of the American dream. He documents displacement of workers under the North American Free Trade Agreement that led to a sharp increase in migration from Mexico to the United States. He provides examples of companies that supported the agreement, which allowed investment and production to flow to Mexico while blocking the movement of workers displaced by imports and the failure of Mexican farms and small businesses, and went on to replace their workforces with visa or undocumented workers. The availability of these workers drives down labor costs, erodes labor rights and inhibits effective organization. Economic Power The subordinated role of immigrants in the economy carries is, of course, reflected in policy and government practice as well. If cases of corporate abuse were mere anomalies, how do we explain the fact that the justice system has been so uniformly unwilling to prosecute them, while at the same time so avid in prosecuting undocumented workers and union organizers? The economic power of employers is felt not only at the plant, but at the moment of policymaking and enforcement. For all the talk, employer sanctions have been little used and function not to make businesses feel the pain, but to offer a justification for taking immigration violations - formerly just an administrative infraction - into the labor sphere. The second question is whether a guest worker program would be part of the solution or part of the problem. Although Wucker does not elaborate, she takes umbrage with his opposition to guestworker programs, which she views as a compromise measure. Bacon argues that a guestworker program would be part of the problem. By looking at the origins of guestworker programs and analyzing the current H2-A and HI-B visa programs, he documents their chilling effect on organizing for workers' rights and the abuses by employers - again, not as isolated cases but as part of a system that keeps labor costs low. He concludes that a guestworker program without full citizen rights is an enabling mechanism for the same system to continue to function in benefit of powerful economic interests and against workers' rights and wellbeing. Many migrant organizations have taken clear positions on guestworker programs, which they see as harkening back to the bracero program of over 50 years ago. We should pay close attention to their views. It was the pioneers of the migrants' rights in labor movement - Cesar Chavez, Bert Corona, Ernesto Galarza - who finally won the repeal of the bracero act in 1964. This opened the door to the formation of United Farm Workers Union. Bacon quotes Galarza on the origins of the bracero program: "To frustrate the danger (of a strong union), the industry realized that the roots must be cut and perpetual mobility reintroduced as a way of life for harvesters." The security aspects of migrant control today and the entry of migrants into non-seasonal sectors have modified the "perpetual mobility" model, but criminalization means that one is rootless even while staying in the same place. Although many portray it as a legal stable solution, a return to guestworker programs would create ultimate insecurity by combining "living in the shadows," as Obama puts it, and the insecurity and family division of the old model. This means maximum control over the workforce. It's no wonder that President George W. Bush, one of the most pro-corporate presidents in history - was so enamored of the guestworker program and made it a central goal of his administration despite the political cost among the populist right of his base. Labor Rights Finally, Wucker's objection to what she calls the "labor-good, corporate-bad" message of Bacon's book inexplicably introduces a good-and-evil criteria that Bacon avoids. True, a reader will feel moral indignation at the injustices suffered and often recounted by the victims themselves. But his book doesn't moralize; it lays out the conflicting interests in the immigration debate. As long as companies can contract workers at a lower price and stripped of labor rights, why wouldn't they? We learn in Econ 101 that the logic of capitalism is maximization of profits. That's why unions came into being in the first place: because society realized that without a collective counterbalance to the logic of maximum gains you can't have a healthy work environment, and abuses could destroy lives and communities. The pragmatism of politics dictates that tradeoffs must be made to win. Negotiation is and should be a part of any democratic process. Bacon's point is that if we allow basic principles to be undermined by that pragmatism we will not only lose the battle, but also the war. By correctly identifying the offensive against workers and their rights that has characterized globalization, immigrants' rights groups make common cause with other workers and citizens. The equation Bacon lays out at the end of his book is relatively simple and the documentation ample: if workers don't have full rights, labor can't fight back against the loss of rights and living standards that characterizes this point in our history. And if labor can't fight for decent jobs, nondiscrimination and social benefits, our communities suffer. Only a system of full rights for all workers - including the right to find gainful employment in their countries of origin - can begin to correct the current system that has become so dangerously skewed in favor of business. Laura Carlsen (lcarlsen(at)ciponline.org) is director of the Americas Policy Program (www.americaspolicy.org) in Mexico City, where she has been an analyst and writer for two decades. She is also a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist. Review: Illegal People Mary Bauer | December 10, 2008 Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5727 Michele Wucker's review of David Bacon's excellent book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Immigration and Criminalizes Immigrants, misses the mark. Wucker is put off by Bacon's supposed emphasis on "bad apple" employers. In fact, Bacon's book argues compellingly that the problem with the American immigration system isn't bad-apple employers (although there are certainly many of them); the problem is structural. And Bacon's book shows that it's a structure the United States has created that leads directly to the abuses Bacon highlights. Reading this book as merely a condemnation of bad corporations misses the real insights the book has to offer. What Bacon's book does better than anything I have read before is to explain the cycle of that structure and how it leads inevitably to the abuses he catalogues. He starts at the beginning of the cycle - the forces in Mexico and other nations that drive people northward from the homes they love. Bacon often focuses on Oaxaca and the agricultural life, rich in tradition and culture, if not money, that had been possible for many before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He describes the breakdown of that life that NAFTA pushed into place, making small farming in rural Mexico impossible. After the NAFTA "reforms," longtime peasant farmers found that there was literally no market for their product, and there was thus no possibility for earning income in their home communities. Bacon also describes in compelling terms the structures in place in the United States that serve to oppress people as workers once they arrive in the United States, driven from their homes. One of Bacon's most persuasive sections describes the guestworker programs in existence in the United States. He exposes these programs as structurally exploitative - not merely the product of a few bad employers. He also demonstrates the powerful political forces - in government and business - that have used enforcement against vulnerable immigrants in efforts to force the nation to accept that immigration reform must take the shape of large-scale guestworker programs. He shows how enforcement, in the form of large and small-scale immigration raids - is being used for the most nefarious political purposes: to destroy worker-organizing efforts and to move forward a political agenda toward guestworker programs at the expense of a just immigration reform. A reading of this book that contends that Bacon focuses on "bad apple" employers misses the real contributions of this book. There are millions of employers, some better, some worse. But, whether or not they involve bad apple employers, guestworker programs are inherently abusive. Our current immigration system is, too. Bacon's book explains why, from beginning to end. He also points us to a future of hope - where those who do the hard work of living are able to be full participants in our social and political life. Mary Bauer is the Director of the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the author of Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States. She is also a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. Review: Broken Immigration System Michele Wucker | September 25, 2008 Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5557 Immigration reform advocates still disagree over the Senate's failed 2007 attempt to push through legislation that would have provided a path to legalization for the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Unions and big business had briefly allied in supporting a legalization program combined with an increase in visas. But the partnership collapsed after an ill-begotten attempt to secure the bill's passage, which added so many noxious provisions that it lost many of its supporters while failing to win over implacable opponents. David Bacon's new book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Immigration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press), suggests that no reform was better than the half-hearted measure that crashed and burned. His argument could improve the next round of attempts to rationalize America's broken immigration system. A wave of widely publicized crackdowns on employers and family homes has intensified following the Senate bill's demise, fulfilling the worst predictions of the flawed immigration bill's advocates. Nursing mothers were separated from their babies. Thousands of workers were seized at their jobs while their employers went largely unpunished except for a few days' lost work. Such shameful policies have escalated in intensity, but they continue the longer, wider pattern of injustice that Bacon details. Through vivid stories, Illegal People shows how current immigration laws hurt citizens and legal immigrants as well as the undocumented immigrants whom the laws target. "Legalization isn't just important to migrants - it is a basic step in the preservation and extension of democratic rights for all people," Bacon writes. Rotten Apples He convincingly demonstrates how the system in its current form rewards the "bad-apple" employers and hurts workers. He gives only glancing attention to the ways in which the system also hurts the employers who would hire workers with papers if the system provided a way to do so, and who understand that healthy, trained workers who do not constantly fear deportation are more productive. Bacon's cut-and-dried labor-good, corporate-bad message doesn't leave room for such subtleties. This is too bad, because a legalization program with a path to citizenship depends on wide support from labor and "good" businesses with common interests to counter the small but loud nativist minority that believes in delivering death threats to members of Congress. For Bacon the game is simply employer versus worker, as evidenced in his conviction that the guest-worker plan was not merely a compromise but the employers' intended outcome all along. To be sure, President George W. Bush's original proposal in 2005 envisioned a guest-worker program without a path to citizenship. But Senate draft bills in 2006 and 2007 both included provisions for access to permanent residence and citizenship as well as "portability" of work visas that would free workers from dependence on specific employers. Many businesses and their lobbies supported these reforms; they were as disappointed as was labor over the last-minute changes that re-emphasized temporary labor and threw obstacles in the way of a path to citizenship. Still, it's easy to see where Bacon's distrust of all employers is coming from, with bad-apple examples as heinous as the many that he gives. Tales of cheating and abuse-gaming scales so that workers paid by piece rate would get less money, deductions for "equipment rental," 11-hour days with no lunch break or overtime, and wages that didn't cover living expenses charged by the company are on a par with the kinds of practices I've seen in impoverished countries that are regularly accused of slavery. There's a delicious irony when the American Civil Liberties Union and Yale Law School use the labor side accord in the North American Free Trade Agreement to file charges against the Department of Labor and U.S. immigration authorities. Cut-Rate Corn Speaking of apples, it's the agricultural employers who come off looking the worst. Bacon does the movement a great service in showing the financial interests of Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) the heinous HR 4437's lead sponsor. That bill would have penalized churches for aiding undocumented workers, in promoting restrictive immigration policies. With Sensenbrenner's family ties to the company going back a century, the Kimberly-Clark paper conglomerate uses thousands of immigrant workers each year to convert forests into wood pulp and directly benefits when rights remain out of the reach of migrant workers. (Let's hope that Bacon sets sight on the money trail between U.S. lawmakers and the rapidly growing immigrant detention-center industry.) With rich-country agricultural subsidies rightly at the center of the developing world's gripes, Bacon misses an opportunity in the chapter on the North American Free Trade Agreement. He rightly contends that U.S. corn exports under NAFTA have increased migration by driving Mexican farmers and farm workers off the land. Agricultural subsidies - courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer - allow big U.S. corporations to sell Mexico corn at prices far below the price at which Mexican farmers could break even, much less make a living. Bacon doesn't go into anywhere near the kind of specific detail here in which he excels elsewhere in the book, and which would have been far more effective than relying on simple anti-corporate boilerplate. When talking about policy options within the United States, however, Bacon makes an essential point that is too often lost in a political arena with little room for complexity: Political and social rights for immigrants must be an integral part of a broad agenda for change. As long as Americans are insecure about their own jobs, housing, healthcare, education, and workplace rights, they will be vulnerable to the toxic misinformation spread by the anti-immigrant right. Neither immigrants nor Americans will be well served by a reform that provides only, or mainly, temporary visas without allowing guest workers to convert to permanent-resident and eventually citizen status. Will the intensified raids of the past two years wake Americans up to the moral, economic, and societal consequences of our poor policy choices and open the way to changes that protect all worker rights by giving migrant workers a path to legalization and citizenship? If so, then perhaps there will be a silver lining to the failure of attempts to date. Our record so far isn't encouraging. Michele Wucker, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is the executive director of the World Policy Institute in New York City and the author of Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right. -- __________________________________ David Bacon, Photographs and Stories http://dbacon.igc.org __________________________________ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Internet group address: http://groups.google.com/group/ChicagoMayDay To send e-mail: [email protected] To unsuscribe: [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
