THE DIGNITY CAMPAIGN'S ALTERNATIVE VISION FOR IMMIGRATION REFORM
By David Bacon
OAKLAND, CA (2/6/13)
The Nation - web edition
http://www.thenation.com/article/172711/dignity-campaigns-alternative-vision-immigration-reform
For some immigrant rights organizations, President Obama's
principles for comprehensive immigration reform sound very familiar.
"The idea of the three-part tradeoff, that is, that we get some
legalization in trade for guest worker programs and increased
immigration enforcement, has been around for a long time," says
Lillian Galedo, executive director of Filipino Advocates for Justice
in the San Francisco Bay Area. "We need a new alternative, based on
much more progressive ideas. I don't think the Dignity Campaign is
the only alternative, but it's an effort to get us to talk about what
we actually want, not just what politicians in Washington DC tell us
is politically possible or necessary."
The Dignity Campaign is a loose network of over 40 immigrant
rights and community organizations, unions and churches that has
crafted an immigration reform proposal "based on human and labor
rights." (Full disclosure: I am an active supporter of the Dignity
Campaign.) But it is more than a network and a particular proposal.
It is an alternative to the political strategy behind the tradeoff.
And the campaign's member organizations support it because of what
they call the bitter impact of earlier tradeoffs over the last 30
years.
In Tucson, Arizona, the Coalicion de Derechos Humanos calls
comprehensive immigration reform, the shorthand name for the tradeoff
strategy, "primarily a vague promise used to attract immigrant and
Latino voters, [while] border communities have suffered the costs of
irresponsible and brutal enforcement-only policies, resulting in
death and violence." A recent study found the federal government
spends more today on border and immigration enforcement than on all
other law enforcement agencies combined.
When the first discussions of the Dignity Campaign proposal
began four years ago, Derechos Humanos formulated the demands about
border enforcement. Instead of even more immigration agents, walls
and now drones, they calls for dismantling the high tech wall,
removing the National Guard, closing private mass detention centers,
and restoring civil rights to people living in border communities.
Garcia is a public defender, and every day her fellow lawyers
defend dozens of young people brought into Tucson's Operation
Streamline courtroom in chains, where they're sentenced to prison
terms for border crossing. "That courtroom should be closed," she
says, "and the money redirected to healthcare and education, which
our state is now busy cutting." Derechos Humanos wrote that demand
into the Dignity Campaign proposal too.
Galedo and Garcia first saw the tradeoff in 1986, in the
Immigration Reform and Control Act. That law, signed by President
Ronald Reagan, set up an amnesty that gave legal status relatively
quickly to almost four million people. Nevertheless, they and other
immigration activists of the day, including Bert Corona -- widely
recognized as the father of the modern immigrant rights movement --
campaigned against it. The bill also contained employer sanctions, a
provision that made it illegal for employers to hire undocumented
workers, and expanded a limited guest worker program into today's
H2-A visa scheme.
"We've lived with the consequences ever since," Galedo says.
"That's why, when we look at Obama's principles, or the CIR bills of
the last decade, we think not just about our need for legalization,
but that we'll have another 25 years of enforcement and more guest
workers. Because we've lived with those costs we believe the best
starting point for immigration reform is a discussion of what
immigrant communities actually need and want, and what we know will
actually solve the social problems around migration. That's the
source of the Dignity Campaign."
In San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley, Local 5 of the
United Food and Commercial Workers has been fighting the use of
employer sanctions against workers at the Mi Pueblo market chain,
where they've been organizing a union for three years. The community
coalition supporting the union declared in a letter to Janet
Napolitano "It is clear that Mi Pueblo is using an I-9 audit [an
administration enforcement tactic for employer sanctions] to
terrorize workers because the workers are exercising their right to
end labor violations and organize a union."
Local 5 is a member of the Dignity Campaign, and, together
with the Laborers Union, brought it to the South Bay Labor Council,
which voted to support it. One important reason is that the campaign
advocates the repeal of employer sanctions, while every CIR proposal
from 1986 on has called for even greater measures to criminalize work
for the undocumented.
Anoop Prasad, staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus in San
Francisco, worries that President Obama's plan for mandatory national
use of the E-Verify database [another tactic for enforcing employer
sanctions] "would in effect compel employers to act as immigration
agents, responsible for verifying employees' immigration status. This
approach has not only proven ineffective in deterring people from
coming to the U.S., it inhibits workers from exercising their basic
workplace rights and protections." Another leg of the tradeoff,
expanded guest worker programs, are also hotly opposed by Dignity
Campaign organizations. Some wanted them abolished immediately
because of a long record of employer abuse, while others favored an
approach based on ensuring that workers in those programs have
rights. In the end, the proposal called for their abolition after
five years, and increased enforcement of worker rights during that
period.
A resolution passed in 2011 by the Labor Council for Latin
American Advancement (the AFL-CIO's constituency group for Latino
union members), and by labor councils and local unions "supports the
proposal for an alternative immigration reform bill made by the
Dignity Campaign, because it is based on protecting the labor and
human rights for all people," and notes that guest worker programs
treat migrants "as low wage workers with no rights, in conditions
described as 'Close to Slavery' by the Southern Poverty Law Center,"
Even among the labor leaders surrounding President Obama as
he announced his principles, some clearly did not agree with his call
for expanding guest worker programs. Communications Workers
President Larry Cohen warned "CWA will monitor any proposed changes
to visa programs like the H-1B visa, which are sought after by
business but have cost U.S. technicians and other workers tens of
thousands of jobs."
Changing trade policy especially separates the Dignity
Campaign and other grassroots proposals from beltway CIR programs,
which depend on support from corporate employers. The Dignity
Campaign proposal was modeled on the Trade Act, introduced by
Congressman Mike Michaud (D-ME), and calls for renegotiating all
trade agreements to eliminate provisions that increase poverty abroad
and displace workers and farmers, or lower their living standards.
"Massive migration caused by poverty can only be addressed by
changing those policies that cause poverty in the first place," says
Bill Chandler, executive director of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights
Alliance. "President Obama promised to renegotiate NAFTA before his
first election, and that promise must now be kept as part of a humane
immigration policy."
The Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations is an
organization of Mexican indigenous communities with a base in Oaxaca,
and chapters in California and Baja California where Oaxacans travel
as migrant workers. For Jose Gonzalez, its binational
vice-coordinator in San Diego, "the economic policies of the U.S.
must be changed, because they are an enormous factor displacing
people from our communities, forcing us to leave as our only way to
survive. Instead of trade policies causing displacement, new ways of
dealing with the future flows of migrants should guarantee us rights
and equality."
FIOB held a long series of meetings among its chapters and at
its binational assembly, and adopted its own program for progressive
immigration reform. It joined the Dignity Campaign at the beginning,
and in addition called for protecting indigenous culture among
migrants, and language rights. FIOB also opposes guest worker
programs
"As a binational organization, our members know migration
because we experience it in our own lives," it said on International
Migrants Day last December. "The Dignity Campaign makes a clear
demand for a broad immigration reform, and deals directly with the
situation in which we live in our communities of origin."
Finally, the Dignity Campaign calls for legal status for the
undocumented, in a rapid and inclusive process, without excessive
fees, fines, waiting periods or a preliminary temporary status. At
the same time, it also calls for protecting the family reunification
system. and eliminating the current huge backlog by issuing all
pending visas within a short period.
The Obama proposal, like most CIR bills of the last decade,
pits people applying for family visas against those needing
legalization. It proposes that the undocumented, "must wait until
the existing legal immigration backlogs are cleared before getting in
line to apply for lawful permanent residency (i.e. a 'green card'),
and ultimately United States citizenship." Today some applicants in
Mexico City receiving family reunification visas applied over twenty
years ago. In Manila the line is even longer. But no CIR proposal
would issue more family visas to clear that backlog, while on the
other hand they increase visas for guest workers.
"The only way to resolve this is by eliminating the
backlogs," Galedo says. "In our community we have people who have
been waiting for years, and according to the federal government,
280,000 undocumented Filipinos as well. We need common ground here,
not a fight."
The Dignity Campaign is more than just a set of principles.
It is a critique of the politics and strategy of CIR, especially over
process. Garcia and others believe the CIR bills are products of
Washington DC insiders, not the result of consultation with
grassroots immigrant communities, unions and churches. "Now that
there finally appears to be the political will to address
immigration, it is critical that the voices of these communities be
central in the debate," she urges.
Over the past few years, especially since the failure of the
last big reform bills, this kind of process has taken place in many
parts of the country. In addition to the FIOB consultations, in
Washington State, Community2Community and Pueblo Unido por la
Dignidad organized over 30 Dignity Dialogues to get input from
immigrant communities. The Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance
talked about an alternative to the CIR bills at its annual
Black/Brown conferences of African American and immigrant community
leaders.
Even before the Dignity Campaign started, the American
Friends Service Committee had extensive community meetings that
resulted in a plan called "A New Path." The Dignity Campaign
proposal drew extensively on its ideas. There are others as well,
but almost all have basic elements in common.
Campaign participants warn that the CIR proposals will move
to the right as they go through Congress. Political insiders in the
nation's capitol already say President Obama's proposal will be the
"left pole" in negotiations over immigration reform. In other words,
Republicans, employer groups and immigration restrictionists will
bend it to the right. This is what happened in the effort to pass
the succession CIR billss over the last decade, and one reason why
they died. It is an important reason many groups outside of
Washington have called for an alternative.
In the battles over those earlier bills, advocates for more
progressive ideas were criticized for "making the perfect the enemy
of the good," discrediting what was "politically possible," and
dividing the base of support for CIR. Yet with weak progressive
pressure on Congress, every new restriction, enforcement measure or
"labor shortage" program peeled away supporters. They also lost some
support on the right because they weren't restrictive enough.
Eventually CIR had too little support to pass.
Yet immigration reform resonated when it was linked to a
fight for greater rights in general, and for jobs. Many of the
organizations that developed the Dignity Campaign supported a bill
introduced by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee that tied legalization
to job training and creation programs, and bolstered workplace rights
instead of increasing enforcement. "Finding common ground between
African Americans and immigrants is a key to winning immigration
reform," according to Bill Chandler. "Fighting for jobs and rights
is a much better way to do that than anti-immigrant enforcement and
guest worker programs."
MIRA's base among immigrants and African American political
leaders has a history of successfully defeating anti-immigrant bills
in the state legislature. Chandler says a movement-building strategy
is necessary to produce real change. "It was the civil rights
movement that ended the old bracero guest worker program, and won the
1965 immigration reform that repealed discriminatory quotas and set
up the family reunification system," he emphasizes.
Whether the Dignity Campaign proposal, and others like it,
become the basis of an alternative bill in Congress depends on the
willingness of progressive members to act independently. In the face
of pressure to line up behind the President, it is unclear whether
that will happen. But Jackson Lee did introduce her alternative at
the height of the last debate. John Conyers sponsored a "Medicare
for All" bill that many credit with keeping pressure on the President
from the left during the health care debate.
The Dignity Campaign says, "We need to raise our aspirations,
rather than simply criticize Congressional proposals." Its
supporters argue that a progressive alternative gives the movement a
goal and a vision to organize and educate the community. Instead of
being "the enemy of the good," Rosalinda Guillen of
Community2Community says, "A good proposal will rescue immigration
reform from bad ones."
Coming in 2013 from Beacon Press:
The Right to Stay Home: Ending Forced Migration and the
Criminalization of Immigrants
DISPLACED, UNEQUAL AND CRIMINALIZED - A Report by David Bacon for the
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation on the political economy of immigration
http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/displaced-unequal-and-criminalized/
David Bacon and Anoop Prasad on what's wrong with the current
immigration reform proposals in Washington DC
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/88447
David Bacon talks with Solange Echevarria of KWMR about growers push
for guest worker programs. Advance to 88 minutes for the interview.
http://kwmr.org/blog/show/4156
David Bacon at the Gandhi-King Youth and Community Conference, Memphis 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1PXka-Sbq4&feature=player_embedded
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
Entrevista de David Bacon con activistas de #yosoy132 en UNAM
Interview of David Bacon by activists of #yosoy132 at UNAM (in Spanish)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyF6AJQa9po&feature=relmfu
Two lectures on the political economy of migration by David Bacon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GgDWf9eefE&feature=youtu.be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd4OLdaoxvg&feature=related
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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