FEDERAL RAIDS AGAINST IMMIGRANT WORKERS ON THE RISE
By David Bacon
Race, Poverty & the Environment | Fall 2010
http://urbanhabitat.org/node/5826
While the criminalization of undocumented
people in Arizona continues to draw headlines,
the actual punishment of workers because of their
immigration status has become an increasingly
bitter fact of life across the country. The
number of workplace raids carried out by the
Obama administration is staggering. Tens, maybe
even hundreds of thousands of workers have been
fired for not having papers.
According to public records obtained by
Syracuse University, the latest available data
from the Justice Department show that criminal
immigration enforcement by the two largest
investigative agencies within the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) has increased to levels
comparable to the highest seen during the Bush
Administration. Homeland Secretary Janet
Napolitano announced that almost 400,000 people
were deported last year, the highest number in
the country's history.
But deportations are only part of the
story. Much less visible is the other arm of
current immigration enforcement policy -- the
firing of workers. The justification is brutal
-- if immigrant workers can't work, and therefore
can't eat, pay rent, or provide for their
families, they'll have no alternative but to
leave the country.
In a recent action DHS pressured one of
San Francisco's major building service companies,
ABM, into firing hundreds of its own workers.
Some 475 janitors have been told that unless they
can show legal immigration status, they will lose
their jobs in the near future.
ABM has been a union company for decades,
and many of the workers have been there for
years. "They've been working in this industry for
15, 20, some as many as 27 years in the buildings
downtown," says Olga Miranda, president of
Service Employees Local 87. "They've built
homes. They've provided for their families.
They've sent their kids to college. They're not
new workers. They didn't just get here a year
ago."
Those workers are now faced with an
agonizing dilemma. Should they turn themselves
in to Homeland Security, who might charge them
with providing a bad Social Security number to
their employer, and even hold them for
deportation? For workers with families, homes,
and deep roots in a community, it's not possible
to just walk away and disappear. "I have a lot of
members who are single mothers whose children
were born here," Miranda says. "I have a member
whose child has leukemia. What are they supposed
to do? Leave their children here and go back to
Mexico and wait? And wait for what?"
Miranda's question reflects not just the
dilemma facing individual workers, but of 12
million undocu- mented people living in the
United States. Since 2005, successive
Congressmen, Senators, and administrations have
dangled the prospect of gaining legal status in
front of those who lack it. In exchange, their
various schemes for immigration reform have
proposed huge new guest worker programs, and a
big increase in exactly the kind of enforcement
directed at 475 San Francisco janitors.
Rhetoric vs. Policy
President Obama condemned Arizona's law
that tries to make being undocumented a state
crime, saying it would "undermine basic notions
of fairness that we cherish as Americans." But
then he called for legislation with guest worker
programs and increased enforcement.
While the country is no closer to
legalization of the undocumented than it was 10
years ago, the enforce- ment provisions of the
comprehensive immigration reform proposals have
already been implemented on the ground. The Bush
administration conducted a high- profile series
of raids in which it sent heavily armed agents
into meatpacking plants and factories, holding
workers for deportation, and sending hundreds to
federal prison for using bad Social Security
numbers. It set up a new Federal court in
Tucson, Arizona, called Operation Streamline,
where dozens of people are sen- tenced to prison
every day for walking across the border.
After Obama was elected President,
immigration authorities said they would follow a
softer policy, using an electronic system to find
undocumented people in work- places. People
working with bad Social Security numbers would be
fired. As a result, last September, 2000
seamstresses in the Los Angeles garment factory
of American Apparel were fired, followed by a
month later by 1200 janitors working for ABM in
Minneapolis. In November, over 100 janitors
working for Seattle Building Maintenance lost
their jobs.
Ironically, the Bush administration
proposed a regulation that would have required
employers to fire any worker who provided an
employer with a Social Security number that did
not match the SSA database. That regulation was
then stopped in court by unions, the ACLU, and
the National Immigration Law Center. The new
administration, however, is implementing what
amounts to the same requirement, with the same
consequence of thousands of fired workers. Mean-
while, the Operation Streamline court is still in
session every day in Arizona.
"Homeland Security is going after
employers that are union," Miranda charges.
"They're going after employers that give ben-
efits and are paying above the average." While
American Apparel had no union, it paid better
than most Los Angeles garment sweat- shops.
Minneapolis janitors belong to SEIU Local 26,
Seattle janitors to Local 6 and San Francisco
jani- tors to Local 87.
President Obama says sanctions
enforcement targets employers "who are using
illegal workers in order to drive down wages-and
oftentimes mistreat those workers." An ICE
Worksite Enforcement Advi- sory claims
"unscrupulous employers are likely to 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 despite Obama's 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. Javier Murillo,
president of SEIU Local 26, says, "The promise
made during the audit is that if the company
cooperates and complies, they won't be fined. So
this kind of enforcement really only hurts
workers."
ICE director John Morton says the agency
is auditing the records of 1,654 companies
nationwide. "What kind of economic recovery goes
with firing thousands of workers?" Miranda asks.
"Why don't they target employers who are not
paying taxes, who are not obeying safety or labor
laws?"
Union leaders like Miranda see a conflict
between the rhetoric used by the President and
other Washington, D.C. politicians and lobbyists
in condemning the Arizona law, and the
immigration proposals they make in Congress.
"There's a huge contradiction here," she says.
"You can't tell one state that what they're doing
is criminalizing people, and at the same time go
after employers paying more than a living wage
and the workers who have fought for that wage."
Renee Saucedo, attorney for La Raza
Centro Legal and former director of the San
Francisco Day Labor Program, is even more
critical. "Those bills in Con- gress, which are
presented as ones that will help some people get
legal status, will actually make things much
worse," she charges. "We'll see many more
firings like the janitors here, and more
punishments for people who are just working and
trying to support their families."
Increasingly, however, the Washington
proposals have even less promise of legalization
and more emphasis on punishment. The newest
Democratic Party scheme virtually abandons the
legalization program promised by the "bipartisan"
Schumer/Graham proposal, saying that heavy
enforcement at the border and in the workplace
must come before any consideration of giving 12
million people legal status.
"We have to look at the whole picture,"
Saucedo urges. "So long as we have trade
agreements like NAFTA that create poverty in
countries like Mexico, people will continue to
come here, no matter how many walls we build.
Instead of turning people into guest workers, as
these bills in Washington would do, while firing
and even jailing those who don't have papers, we
need to help people get legal status, and repeal
the laws that are making work a crime."
What Do We Want?
First, we want legalization, giving 12
mil- lion 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, fright- ened that they
will 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 let- ters, 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 are not re- ally
advocating for low wages. That the de-
cision-makers of Washington, D.C. will not plunge
families in Mexico, El Salvador, or Colombia into
poverty, or force a new gen- eration of workers
to leave home and go through the doors of
furniture factories and laundries, office
buildings and packing plants, onto construction
sites, or into the gardens and nurseries of the
rich.
Families in Mexico, Guatemala, El Sal-
vador, 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
healthcare. 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 has. 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 do not fight at the same time
for these other basic needs: jobs, edu- cation,
housing, healthcare, 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 non-immigrant alike.
Is this possible?
In 1955, at the height of the cold war,
braceros and farm workers did not think change
would ever come. Growers had all the power and
farm workers none. Ten years later we had a new
immigration law protect- ing 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 depor-
tations. We can win security for working families
on both sides of our borders.
Yes, it's possible. ¡Si se puede!
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization
Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
(Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California,
2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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