UTAH'S IMMIGRATION BILLS - A BLAST FROM THE PAST
By David Bacon
In These Times, web edition
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/7098/utahs_immigration_bills_a_blast_from_the_past
OAKLAND, CA (3/17/11) -- Last week the
Utah legislature passed three new laws that have
been hailed in the media as a new, more
reasonable, approach to immigration policy.
Reasonable, that is, compared to Arizona's
SB1070, which would allow police to stop anyone,
demand immigration papers, and hold her or him
for deportation. The Utah bills were signed by
Republican Governor Gary Herbert on Tuesday,
March 15. Arizona's SB 1070 is currently being
challenged in court.
Utah's bills were called "the
anti-Arizona" by Frank Sharry, head of America's
Voice, a Washington DC immigration lobbying firm.
According to Lee Hockstader, on the Washington
Post's editorial staff, the laws are "the
nation's most liberal - and most reality-based -
policy on illegal immigration."
The Utah laws, however, are not new. And
they're certainly not liberal, at least towards
immigrants and workers. Labor supply programs
for employers, with deportations and diminished
rights for immigrants, have marked U.S.
immigration policy for more than a hundred years.
One bill would establish a state system
to allow employers to bring people from the
Mexican state of Nuevo Leon as "guest workers."
Under this program, workers would have to remain
employed to stay in the country. They would not
have the same set of labor and social rights as
people living in the communities around them.
Another bill would give undocumented workers now
living in Utah a similar guest worker status,
lasting two years. The National Immigration Law
Center (NILC) says the third bill, the Arizona
look-alike, "requires police to interrogate
individuals and verify their immigration status
in a wide array of situations, promoting harmful
and costly incentives for law enforcement to
racially profile."
Utah, like most states in the west and
Midwest, has been down this road before.
From 1930 to 1935, 345,839 Mexicans were
deported from the U.S. Last year alone, the
Federal government deported almost 400,000. Even
given the growth in population, this is greater
than that Depression-era wave.
In those years "the climate of scathing
anti-Mexican sentiment created intense
polarization, producing a sweeping suspicion of
foreigners ... which linked housing congestion,
strained relief services and social ills to the
large presence of Mexicans," recounts Zaragosa
Vargas, professor at the University of North
Carolina. Most immigrants in Utah were farm
workers, many laboring in sugar beet fields for
the Mormon-backed Utah-Idaho Sugar Company.
Their wages were so low that families went hungry
even when they were working. When beet workers
in nearby Colorado tried to organize a union and
went on strike, Vargas says their communities
were targeted with deportations.
Then World War Two created a labor
shortage. To supply workers to growers at low
wages, the government started the bracero
contract labor program, bringing immigrants first
into the beet fields of Stockton, California, and
then into the rest of the country in 1942.
Braceros were treated as disposable,
dirty and cheap. Herminio Quezada Durán, who
came to Utah from Chihuahua, says ranchers often
had agreements between each other to exchange or
trade braceros as necessary for work. Jose
Ezequiel Acevedo Perez, who came from Jerez,
Zacatecas, remembers the humiliation of physical
exams that treated Mexicans as louse-ridden. "We
were stripped naked in front of everyone," he
remembers, and sprayed with DDT, now an outlawed
pesticide. Men in some camps were victims of
criminals and pimps. Juan Contreras, from Tuxtla
Gutierrez, Chiapas, tactfully recalls that "in
Utah, women often went to the camps, and they
were rumored to be especially fond of Mexican
men."
During the war, Utah-Idaho Sugar first
used labor from the Japanese internment camps in
Minidoka, Idaho; Topaz, Utah; and Heart Mountain,
Wyoming. When that wasn't enough, they brought
in braceros.
In the 1950s, at the height of the cold
war that followed, the combination of enforcement
and contract labor reached a peak. In 1954
1,075,168 Mexicans were deported from the U.S.
And from 1956 to 1959, between 432,491 and
445,197 braceros were brought in each year.
The civil rights movement ended the
bracero program, and created an alternative to
the deportation regime. Chicano activists of the
1960s - Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chavez, Bert
Corona, Dolores Huerta and others - convinced
Congress in 1964 to repeal Public Law 78, the law
authorizing the bracero program. Farm workers
went on strike the year after in Delano,
California, and the United Farm Workers was born.
They also helped to convince Congress in 1965 to
pass immigration legislation that established new
pathways for legal immigration - the family
preference system. People could reunite their
families in the U.S. Migrants received permanent
residency visas, allowing them to live normal
lives, and enjoy basic human and labor rights.
Essentially, a family- and community-oriented
system replaced the old labor supply/deportation
program.
Today Congress, and now the states, are
sliding back into those cold war ideas. That
slide didn't start in Salt Lake City. For five
years Congress has debated, and almost passed,
bills that would have done the same thing --
vastly increase immigration enforcement and set
up huge new guest worker programs. Some
undocumented people might have been able to gain
legal status with those bills, but most proposals
would have forced them into a temporary status, a
la Utah.
This combination was defended by Michael
Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security under
President Bush. "There's an obvious solution to
the problem of illegal work," he said, "which is
you open the front door and you shut the back
door." "Opening the front door" refers to guest
worker programs, and "closing the back door"
means heavy immigration enforcement.
The Council on Foreign Relations proposed
the same goals when President Obama took office.
"We should reform the legal immigration system,"
its 2009 report advocated, "so that it operates
more efficiently, responds more accurately to
labor market needs, and enhances U.S.
competitiveness." At the same time, "we should
restore the integrity of immigration laws through
an enforcement regime that strongly discourages
employers and employees from operating outside
that legal system." This again couples labor at
competitive, or low, wages, with an enforcement
regime of raids and firings.
Sound like Utah?
Congress never passed those
"comprehensive immigration reform" bills of the
last few years, but that is increasingly
irrelevant. The guest worker and enforcement
provisions provisions those bills contained are
becoming the reality on the ground -- despite
Congress' inaction. Today the number of
deportations is rising. Thousands of
undocumented workers are being fired from their
jobs as part of the same enforcement policy. And
in California, for instance, where only one
grower historically used the federal H2-A guest
worker program for farm workers, dozens are now
using it today.
Utah's bills simply follow the same pattern.
Its guest worker bill was written by a
dairy farmer. "The root of this discussion is
productivity," according to the bill's sponsor,
State Rep. Bill Wright. To this conservative
Republican, no one, including citizens, have a
right to a job. "People think because you're
born here ... 'I have a right to that job, I'm
going to charge what I want for my labor even if
I'm not productive.' Wrong."
But those immigrants don't have any
rights to jobs either. And they better not try
to organize and get more expensive. If they do,
or they're just lazy and don't work, he warns,
they "need to go."
The Utah bills were the product of
negotiations, called the Utah Compact, between
the Salt Lake Chamber, a statewide business
group; and the Salt Lake City Police Department
and mayor's office. The Mormon Church of Latter
Day Saints and the Catholic Church signed off on
it, as did some local immigrant advocates.
Other immigrant rights groups, however,
warn the laws violate the Constitution. NILC's
Marielena Hincapie calls the Utah laws
"fundamentally unconstitutional. Taken together,
the laws signify an even more sweeping state
takeover of federal immigration regulation."
NILC supports legislation legalizing undocumented
people, and believes it must pass at a Federal
level.
Some anti-immigrant nativists agree about
the bills' unconstitutionality, but for different
reasons. Dan Stein, president of the
anti-immigrant Federation for American
Immigration Reform, says, "States do not have the
constitutional authority to write their own
immigration policies." FAIR wants the Federal
government to stop virtually all immigration and
deport the 12 million undocumented people living
in the U.S. It sees the Utah bills as a weak
distraction, but supports Arizona's SB 1070,
despite the fact it's a state law.
One prominent Washington DC immigration
think tank, the Immigration Policy Center, also
questions the constitutionality of state
immigration bills. The IPC, however, supported
the labor supply/enforcement tradeoff when it was
contained in the Federal bills of the last few
years. According to the IPC, "Enforcement
strategies must be coupled with reform of our
legal system of immigration in order to meet
legitimate labor force needs."
This declaration, by one of the most
powerful voices in Washington, goes beyond
questioning the right of states to set
immigration policy. It restates the purpose of
immigration pollicy itself, tying enforcement
(firings and deportations) to labor supply
schemes (work visa programs).. This idea, it
believes, should guide all immigration reform.
The problem of the Utah bills, therefore, is not
that they run counter to that purpose. It is
simply that they are state bills, not Federal
ones.
Some immigration reformers, however,
bellieve that the purpose iteself is wrong
whether it's stated by the IPC, the Council on
Foreign Relations, Michael Chertoff or Utah
legislators. They argue for a different system,
as Chicano and Asian activists did in the 1960s.
For them, the purpose of immigration policy
should be to give immigrants a way to come to the
U.S with social equality and rights. Among these
groups are the Binational Front of Indigenous
Organizations in California and Oaxaca, Derechos
Humanos in Tucson, Arizona, the Mississippi
Immigrants Rights Alliance, and the AFL-CIO's
constituency group for Latino workers, the Labor
Council for Latin American Advancement.
They've agreed on the basic principles of
what they call the Dignity Campaign. People
coming to the U.S. would have access to permanent
residence, rather than being forced into guest
worker programs. The current wave of
deportations and mass firings would be halted,
while protections for labor and human rights
would be strengthened. To diminish job
competition in an era of high unemployment, the
Federal government would establish programs
guaranteeing a job for anyone wanting to work.
And U.S. trade policy in countries like Mexico
would stop promoting unemployment and poverty,
which boost corporate profits but create the
pressure for migration.
Some argue that these principles are not
politically realistic - that today's Congress
would never pass such a bill. But Utah's laws
are no closer to enactment on a Federal level
than are the Dignity Campaign. In reality,
political movement towards immigration reform is
deadlocked in Washington DC. No legislation in
Salt Lake City will change that.
But that's not really the purpose of the
Utah bills. The state's legislators want to
popularize an immigration policy that has strong
corporate support and deep historical roots, in
one of the most conservative, Republican states
in the country. And they are well on the road
toward accomplishing that.
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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