The Modern Immigrant Rights Movement
By David Bacon
Americas Program website, Posted on: 14/01/2012
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6080
Editor's Note: This is the third and final
installment of a three-part series on migrant
rights by journalist and immigration activist
David Bacon. This article is taken from the
report "Displaced, Unequal and Criminalized -
Fighting for the Rights of Migrants in the United
States" that examines the origins of the current
migratory labor phenomenon, the mechanisms that
maintain it, and proposals for a more equitable
system. The Americas Program is proud to publish
this series in collaboration with the author.
Development of the Immigrant Rights Movement to 1986
Before the cold war, the defense of the rights of
immigrants in the U.S., especially those from
Mexico, Central America and Asia was mounted
mostly by immigrant working class communities,
and the alliances they built with the left wing
of the U.S. labor movement. At the time when the
left came under attack and was partly destroyed
in the cold war, immigrant rights leaders were
also targeted for deportation. Meanwhile, U.S.
immigration policy became more overtly a labor
supply scheme than at any other time in its
history.
In the 1950s, at the height of the cold war, 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 Mexicans were brought
into the U.S. each year on temporary work visas,
in what was known as the "bracero" program. The
program, begun during World War Two, in 1942, was
finally abolished in 1964.
Los Angeles, California -- Bert Corona, hero of
the U.S. immigrant rights movement.
The civil rights movement ended the bracero
program, and created an alternative to the
deportation regime. Chicano activists of the
1960s - Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chávez, 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.
Then, under pressure from employers in the late
1970s, Congress began to debate the bills that
eventually resulted in the 1986 Immigration
Reform and Control Act. That debate set in place
the basic dividing line in the modern immigrant
rights movement. IRCA contained three elements.
It reinstituted a bracero-like guest worker
program, by setting up the H2-A visa category. It
penalized employers who hired undocumented
workers ("employer sanctions"), and required them
to check the immigration status of every worker.
And it set up an amnesty process for undocumented
workers in the country before 1982.
The main trade union federation to which most
U.S. unions belong, the American Federation of
Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations
(AFL-CIO), supported sanctions, saying they'd
stop undocumented immigration (and therefore,
presumably, job competition with citizen or legal
resident workers). The Catholic Church and other
Washington DC liberal advocates supported amnesty
and were willing to agree to guest workers and
enforcement as a tradeoff. Employers wanted guest
worker programs. The bill was opposed by
immigrant communities and leftwing immigrant
rights advocates, from the Centro de Acción
Social Autónomo (CASA), founded in Los Angeles by
labor and immigrant rights leader Bert Corona, to
the Bay Area Committee Against Simpson Mazzoli in
Northern California, and similar groups around
the country. Local labor activists and leaders
also opposed the bill, but were not strong enough
to change labor's position nationally. The
Washington DC-based coalition produced the votes
in Congress, and Ronald Reagan, one of the
country's most conservative presidents, signed
the bill into law.
Once the bill had passed, many of the local
organizations that had opposed it set up
community-based coalitions to deal with the
bill's impact. In Los Angeles, with the country's
largest concentration of undocumented Mexican and
Central American workers, pro-immigrant labor
activists set up centers to help people apply for
amnesty. That effort, together with earlier,
mostly left-led campaigns to organize
undocumented workers, built the base for the
later upsurge of immigrants that changed the
politics and labor movement of the city.
Elsewhere, local immigrant advocates set up
coalitions to look for ways to defend
undocumented workers against the impact of
employer sanctions. Grass roots coalitions then
began helping workers set up centers for day
laborers, garment workers, domestic workers, and
other groups of immigrants generally ignored by
established unions.
The Movement since IRCA
Over the 27 years since IRCA, a general division
has marked the U.S. immigrant rights movement. On
one side are well-financed advocacy organizations
in Washington DC, with links to the Democratic
Party and large corporations. They formulate and
negotiate over immigration reform proposals that
combine labor supply programs and increased
enforcement against the undocumented. On the
other side are organizations based in immigrant
communities, and among labor and political
activists, who defend undocumented migrants, and
who resist proposals for greater enforcement and
labor programs with diminished rights.
In the late 1990s, when the Clinton
administration acquiesced in efforts to pass
repressive immigration legislation (what
eventually became the Immigration Reform And
Immigrant Responsibility Act), Washington
lobbying groups advocated a strategy to allow
measures directed at increasing deportations of
the undocumented to pass (calling them
"unstoppable") while mounting a defense only of
legal resident immigrants. Many community-based
coalitions withdrew from the Washington lobbying
efforts, refusing to cast the undocumented to the
wolves. The strategy failed, in any case, and the
eventual law includes severe provisions directed
at legal, as well as undocumented immigrants.
Emeryville, California -- Hotel workers were
fired from their jobs after demanding a living
wage, when the hotel said they had no papers.
In the labor movement, the growing strength of
immigrant workers, combined with a commitment to
organize those industries where they were
concentrated, created the base for changing
labor's position. At the 1999 AFL-CIO convention
in Los Angeles, the federation called for the
repeal of employer sanctions, for a new amnesty,
and for defending the labor rights of all
workers. The federation was already opposed to
guest worker programs. That position was
maintained by the AFL-CIO, even after several
unions left to form the rival Change to Win
federation, until 2009. At that time, a
compromise was reached between the two
federations, in which they dropped their previous
opposition to employer sanctions, so long as they
were implemented "fairly."
In the years between 2003 and 2009, a succession
of "comprehensive" immigration reform bills were
introduced into Congress. At their heart are the
guest worker programs proposed by employers. But
while the employer lobbies wrote the first bills,
they've been supported by a political coalition
that includes some unions, beltway immigrant
advocacy groups, and some churches. Except for
the vacillating and divided position of unions,
this is the same political coalition that passed
IRCA in 1986.
Some local immigrant rights coalitions have also
supported the bills, although most have been
unwilling to agree to guest worker programs and
more enforcement. Supporters of the comprehensive
bills have organized a succession of high-profile
lobbying efforts, which received extensive
foundation support. The structure of the bills
has been basically the same from the beginning -
the same three-part structure of IRCA - guest
workers, enforcement and some degree of
legalization.
Over the last decade, however, a loose,
unorganized network of groups has grown that has
generally opposed most CIR bills and their
provisions, and that have also organized the
movements on the ground that have opposed
increased enforcement and repression directed
against immigrant communities. Outside the
Washington beltway, community coalitions, labor
and immigrant rights groups are advocating
alternatives. Some of them are large-scale
counters to the entire CIR framework. Others seek
to win legal status for a part of the
undocumented population, as a step towards larger
change.
The DREAM Act
One of those proposals is the Dream Act. First
introduced in 2003, the bill would allow
undocumented students graduating from a U.S. high
school to apply for permanent residence if they
complete two years of college or serve two years
in the U.S. military. Estimates are that it would
enable over 800,000 young people to gain legal
status, and eventual citizenship. For seven years
thousands of young "sin papeles," or people
without papers, have marched, sat-in, written
letters and mastered every civil rights tactic to
get their bill onto the Washington DC agenda.
Many of them have "come out" - declaring openly
their lack of legal immigration status in media
interviews, defying authorities to detain them.
Three were arrested when they sat-in at the
office of Arizona Senator John McCain, demanding
that he support the bill, while defying
immigration authorities to come get them. The
DREAM Act campaigners did more than get a vote in
Washington. They learned to stop deportations in
an era when more people have been deported than
ever since the days of the Cold War.
When it was originally written, the bill would
have allowed young people to qualify for
legalization with 900 hours of community service,
as an alternative to attending college, which
many can't afford. However, when the bill was
introduced, the Pentagon pressured to substitute
military for community service. Many young
activists were torn by this provision, and
ultimately, the bill did not pass Congress, even
with that change. Nevertheless, many immigrant
rights activists view the DREAM Act as an
important step towards a more basic reform of the
country's immigration laws.
Supporting the Dream Act and other partial
protections for the undocumented are the worker
centers around the country. This movement is
based on organizing centers for contingent
workers, who are mostly undocumented. Some of the
centers have anchored the protests against
repression in Arizona, or fought to pass laws in
California, New York and elsewhere prohibiting
police from turning over people to immigration
agents. They've especially developed grassroots
models for organizing migrants who get jobs on
street corners, and these projects have come
together in the National Day Labor Organizing
Network. The National Domestic Worker Alliance
was organized last year, in part using the
experience of day labor organizing, to win rights
for domestic workers, almost all of whom are
women. It won passage of a bill of rights in New
York, and is working on passing it in California.
On a broader scale, what would be a law that
would liberate people- not turn them into modern
day slaves- today? Many progressive immigrant
rights organizations have sought to formulate an
answer to this question, especially in response
to the CIR proposals in Washington that they
oppose.
Advocating New Policies- Progressive Proposals
The Frente Indigena de Organizaciones
Binacionales (Binational Front of Indigenous
Organizations - FIOB) conducted a series of
organized discussions among its California
chapters to formulate a very progressive position
on immigration reform, with the unique
perspective of an organization of migrants and
migrant-sending communities. Because of its
indigenous membership, FIOB campaigns for the
rights of migrants in the U.S. - for immigration
amnesty and legalization for undocumented
migrants - while also condemning proposals for
guest worker programs. At the same time, "we need
development that makes migration a choice rather
than a necessity - the right to not migrate,"
explains Gaspar Rivera Salgado, FIOB's binational
coordinator. "Both rights are part of the same
solution. We have to change the debate from one
in which immigration is presented as a problem to
a debate over rights. The real problem is
exploitation." This perspective is especially
important in the U.S., where those debating
immigration policy need to hear the voices of
Mexicans, especially on the left, as they discuss
the movement of people back and forth across the
border.
The FIOB proposal on immigration reform is
similar to that advanced by the Dignity Campaign,
a loose coalition of organizations around the
country that have proposed an alternative to the
comprehensive (labor supply plus enforcement)
bills. The constituent organizations have
participated in other earlier coalitions opposing
employer sanctions and guest worker programs. The
Dignity Campaign brings together immigrant rights
and fair trade organizations, to encourage each
to see the global connections between trade
policy, displacement and migration. It also
brings together unions and immigrant rights
organizations to spur the growth of a fight back
against immigration enforcement against workers,
highlighting the need to oppose the
criminalization of work.
Santiago Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, Mexico --
Indigenous farmers in a FIOB assembly protest the
impact of NAFTA.
The Dignity Campaign proposal draws on previous
proposals, particularly one put forward by the
American Friends Service Committee called "A New
Path," - a set of moral principles for changing
U.S. immigration policy. Several other efforts
were also made earlier by the National Network
for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to define an
alternative program and bring together groups
around the country to support it. Important
contributions to the Dignity Campaign were made
by many other organizations, listed on its
website, www.dignitycampaign.org.
The critique shared by all these organizations
contends that the CIR framework ignores trade
agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, which produce
profits for U.S. corporations, but increase
poverty in Mexico and Central America. Without
changing U.S. trade policy and ending structural
adjustment programs and neoliberal economic
reforms, millions of displaced people will
continue to come, no matter how many walls are
built on the border.
Under the "comprehensive immigration reform"
(CIR) proposals, some of which were introduced as
bills into Congress, people working without
papers would continue to be fired and even
imprisoned and raids would increase.
Vulnerability makes it harder for people to
defend their rights, organize unions and raise
wages. That keeps the price of immigrant labor
low. This will not stop people from coming to the
U.S., but it will produce a much larger detention
system. Last year over 350,000 people went
through privately-run prisons for undocumented
immigrants. At the same time, the Washington
DC-based CIR proposals all expand guest worker
programs, in which workers would have few rights,
and no leverage to organize for better
conditions. Finally, the CIR legalization
measures would impose barriers making ineligible
many of the 12 million people who need legal
status. They condition legalization on "securing
the border," which has become a Washington DC
euphemism for a heavy military presence
augmenting 20,000 Border Patrol agents, creating
a climate of wholesale denial of civil and human
rights in border communities.
"The governments of both Mexico and the U.S. are
dependent on the cheap labor of Mexicans. They
don't say so openly, but they are," Rufino
Domínguez concludes. "What would improve our
situation is legal status for the people already
here, and greater availability of visas based on
family reunification. Legalization and more visas
would resolve a lot of problems - not all, but it
would be a big step," he says. "Walls won't stop
migration, but decent wages and investing money
in creating jobs in our countries of origin would
decrease the pressure forcing us to leave home.
Penalizing us by making it illegal for us to work
won't stop migration, since it doesn't deal with
why people come."
Changing corporate trade policy and stopping
neoliberal reforms is as central to immigration
reform as gaining legal status for undocumented
immigrants. It makes no sense to promote more
free trade agreements, and then condemn the
migration of the people they displace. Instead,
Congress must end the use of the free trade
system as a mechanism for producing displaced
workers. That also means delinking immigration
status and employment. If employers are allowed
to recruit contract labor abroad, and those
workers can only stay if they are continuously
employed, then they will never have enforceable
rights.
The root problem with migration in the global
economy is that it's forced migration. A
coalition for reform should fight for the right
of people to choose when and how to migrate.
Freedom of movement is a human right. Even in a
more just world, migration will continue, because
families and communities are now connected over
thousands of miles and many borders. Immigration
policy should therefore make movement easier.
At the same time, workers need basic rights,
regardless of immigration status. It would be
better to devote more resources to enforcing
labor standards for all workers, instead of
penalizing undocumented workers for working, and
employers for hiring them. "Otherwise," Domínguez
says, "wages will be depressed in a race to the
bottom, since if one employer has an advantage,
others will seek the same thing."
To raise the low price of immigrant labor,
immigrant workers have to be able to organize.
Permanent legal status makes it easier to
organize. Guest worker programs, employer
sanctions, enforcement and raids make organizing
much more difficult. Today the section of workers
with no benefits and the lowest wages is
expanding the fastest. Proposals to deny people
rights or benefits because of immigration status
make this process move even faster. A popular
coalition should push back in the other
direction, toward more equal status, which will
help unite diverse communities.
Building a political coalition for a more
pro-worker and pro-immigrant reform has to start
by seeking mutual interest among workers. That
common ground is a struggle for jobs and rights
for everyone. Black unemployment, for instance,
is at catastrophic levels. Very little
unemployment is a result of displacement by
immigrants, and is caused mostly by the decline
in manufacturing and cuts in public employment.
In the 2001 recession 300,000 out of 2,000,000
Black factory workers lost their jobs. But in the
growing service and high tech industries,
displaced African American and Chicano workers
are anathema. Employers think they're too
pro-union. They demand high wages the companies
don't want to pay.
It's not possible to win major changes in
immigration policy without making them part of a
struggle for the goals of African Americans,
unions and working-class communities. To end job
competition, for instance, workers need Congress
to adopt a full-employment policy. To gain
organizing rights for immigrants, all workers
need the Employee Free Choice Act and labor law
reform. Winning those demands requires an
alliance between workers - immigrants and
native-born, Latinos, African Americans, Asian
Americans and whites. An alliance with employers,
giving them new guest worker programs, will
increase job competition, push wages down, and
make affirmative action impossible.
Kennett Square, Pennsylvania - On May Day, 2007,
immigrants and their supporters marched through
the streets of a small town where many labor in
sheds growing mushrooms. Marchers protested
anti-immigrant bills in Congress and local
anti-immigrant initiatives. Many called for
amnesty -- permanent residence visas which would
give the undocumented immediate legal status and
rights.
The Dignity Campaign proposal, therefore, is not
just an alternative program for changing laws and
policies, but an implicit strategy of alliances
among those communities and constituencies based
on their mutual interest. The basic elements of
such an alternative include:
* Giving permanent residence visas, or green
cards, to undocumented people already here, and
expanding the number of green cards available for
new migrants.
* Eliminating the years-long backlog in
processing family reunification visas,
strengthening families and communities.
* Allowing people to apply for green cards, in
the future, after they've been living in the U.S.
for a few years.
* Ending the enforcement that has led to thousands of deportations and firings
* Repealing employer sanctions, and enforcing
labor rights and worker protection laws, for all
workers.
* Ending all guest worker programs
* Dismantling the border wall and demilitarizing
the border, so more people don't die crossing it,
and restoring civil and human rights in border
communities.
* Responding to recession and foreclosures with
jobs programs to guarantee income, and remove the
fear of job competition
* Redirecting the money spent on the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan to rebuilding communities,
refinancing mortgages, and restoring the social
services needed by working families.
* Renegotiating existing trade agreements to
eliminate causes of displacement and prohibiting
new trade agreements that displace people or
lower living standards, including military
intervention intended to enforce neoliberal
reforms.
* Prohibiting local law enforcement agencies from
enforcing immigration law, ending roadblocks,
immigration raids and sweeps, and closing
detention centers
There is no shortage of needed work in the U.S.,
but budget priorities must be changed to redirect
resources to the areas that will produce jobs and
increased well-being. To resolve the dilemmas of
migration and globalization, the U.S. needs a
system that produces security, not insecurity.
Corporations and those who benefit from current
priorities might not support this alternative,
but millions of people will.
A new era of rights and equality for migrants
won't begin from Washington DC, any more than the
civil rights movement did. A human rights reform
will be a product of the social movements of this
country, especially of people on the bottom
outside the beltway. A social movement made
possible advances in 1965 that were called
unrealistic and politically impossible a decade
earlier. The Dignity Campaign proposal may not be
a viable one in a Congress dominated by Tea Party
nativists and corporations seeking guest worker
programs. But just as it took a civil rights
movement to pass the Voting Rights Act, any basic
change to establish the rights of immigrants will
also require a social upheaval and a fundamental
realignment of power.
David Bacon is a writer and photojournalist based
in Oakland and Berkeley, California. He has been
a reporter and documentary photographer for 18
years, shooting for many national publications.
He has exhibited his work nationally, and in
Mexico, the UK and Germany. Bacon covers issues
of labor, immigration and international politics
and is an associate editor at Pacific News
Service and a regular contributor to the Americas
Program.
The report "Displaced, Unequal and Criminalized -
Fighting for the Rights of Migrants in the United
States" was prepared for the Rosa Luxemburg
Foundation.
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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