DEMANDS RISE ON CONGRESS TO GUARANTEE IMMIGRANT RIGHTS
By David Bacon
TruthOut (4/15/13)
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/15788-demands-rise-on-congress-to-guarantee-immigrant-rights
In San Diego, California, nine activists
completed six days of a hunger strike outside the
Mission Valley Hilton Hotel on April 10 -- the
day demonstrations took place across the U.S.
demanding immigration reform. Hunger strikers
were protesting the firing of 14 of the hotel's
workers, after Evolution Hospitality, the company
operating the Hilton franchise, told them that it
had used the government's E-Verify database to
determine that they didn't have legal immigration
status.
"The company says that E-Verify is making
them do this, even though many of the workers
have been working here for years," said Sara
Garcia, a supporter and hunger striker from House
of Organized Neighbors, a local community
organization. "But they started firing them when
the workers were organizing a union."
"I clean 16 to 18 rooms a day, and they
pay me $8.65 an hour. No one can live on that,"
explained Leticia Nava, a fired worker. " I'm a
widow with three children who depend on me. What
is happening is not just. We are immigrant
workers, and the only thing we're asking is to
work. That's not hurting anyone."
Garcia and Nava accuse the company of
using the government system for immigration
enforcement in the workplace, a database called
E-Verify, in order to retaliate against 14 women
for their union support. But they also say that
the E-Verify system is used much more
extensively, to fire workers even where no union
organizing is taking place.
San Francisco demonstrators call for an end to immigration-based firings.
"Many companies are doing the same thing.
They're manipulating the system because what
they're really interested in is low wages," Nava
charged. "This isn't the first time this
happened to me. I was fired the same way two
years ago. Now my children are all scared
because they see it's harder for me every day.
Tomorrow I'll have to go out and find another
job, and E-Verify makes that more and more
difficult. The impact on us is not just money -
it affects all aspects of my life."
Nava and Garcia joined the tens of
thousands of immigrants and immigrant rights
activists who demonstrated on April 10, calling
for the reform of U.S. immigration laws. Yet on
the same day, legislators drafting reform
proposals in the U.S. Senate proposed changes
that would make Nava's experience more widespread
than ever, which were then contained in a bill
they introduced a week later.
Both Garcia and Nava agreed that getting
rid of E-Verify should be part of immigration
reform. "This part of the law is inhumane and
unjust," Garcia says. "It has economic,
psychological and even moral effects. Instead of
children worrying about schoolwork they're
worried about how they'll survive or even just
eat." Nava declared simply, "This part of the
law should be eliminated."
Congress, however, proposes to exact a
price for the legalization of undocumented
immigrants. The "Gang of Eight" Senators
drafting the reform bill announced they intend to
expand the E-Verify system to cover all
employers, and make its use mandatory. This was
only one of a number of measures that would
increase the severity of many of the
anti-immigrant measures already part of U.S. law.
Lorena Reyes, who was fired from her job as a
housekeeper at the San Jose Hyatt Hotel because
she supports the union and protested sexual
harassment, marched for immigrant rights.
The Hilton workers and their supporters,
as well as the union helping them, UniteHere, all
believe that immigration reform should include a
legalization process. They want one that would
give the 11-12 million undocumented people living
in the United States a quick and accessible way
to gain legal status. That demand ran through
all of the hundreds of demonstrations around the
country, from the 30,000 people on the mall in
front of the Capitol Building in Washington DC to
the thousand marchers in downtown San Francisco.
It was a demand voiced by hundreds of janitors
and security guards in Silicon Valley, and by
teachers and elementary school students in
Berkeley, California.
The Senators, however, are proposing a
plan that would require undocumented people to
spend a decade in a provisional status before
even being able to apply for permanent legal
residence. Then they would have to maintain that
status for another three years before they could
apply to become citizens, and gain basic
political rights. The citizenship process is so
overloaded that processing applications now takes
months, even years. And instead of anticipating
the logistical bottleneck of millions of people
applying for citizenship at the same time, the
Senators declared that legalization applicants
would get no dedicated process.
People seeking legal status would have to
"get in the back of the line" - their visa
applications would be processed only after all
other pending applications. That could have
people waiting even more years. Today the
government is still processing visa applications
for some relatives of U.S. citizens and residents
that were filed over two decades ago. The
undocumented would only become eligible for
residence if they learned English, and were
continuously employed for 10 years, or were
family members of someone who was.
Silicon Valley janitors and security guards marching for immigrant rights.
The Senators further announced they would
charge each applicant a penalty of $500 to file
an application, another $500 six years later, and
a further $1000 before they could apply for
residence, on top of fees to cover the costs of
the program. Leticia Nava, for instance, would
have to raise $2000 right away for herself and
her children, and would acquire an additional
obligation of $6000 plus fees. At $8.65 an hour,
paying it would be hard. The idea of long
waiting periods and obstacles was criticized by
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who warned,
"Families, including siblings and children must
not pay the price of our broken policies."
An even greater shift in U.S. immigration
policy is in the works, however. The Senators
chipped away at the family preference system
itself. They announced that there would no
longer be a category allowing visa applications
for the brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens.
At the same time their bill would create a new
program eventually giving 120,000 visas a year to
people with the work skills demanded by U.S.
employers, rated on a point system. The
undocumented could apply for these "merit-based"
visas, but would compete against others.
This moves U.S. immigration policy
backwards in time. Through the cold war it was
structured to allow employers to bring workers,
called braceros, to labor on the railroads and in
the fields. At the same time, ferocious
immigration enforcement led to the deportation of
as many as a million immigrants a year -- called
"wetbacks" -- who tried to work outside of that
guest worker program. The civil rights movement
abolished the bracero program, and with the 1965
Immigration and Naturalization Act, a family
based system replaced it.
A Silicon Valley student in the April 10 demonstration.
"Even before the braceros we had contract
labor, like the system that brought my ancestors,
Chinese farmers, to build the railroads and set
up irrigated agriculture here," explained Rev.
Deborah Lee of the Interfaith Coalition for
Immigrant Rights in Oakland, California. "Whether
we were Chinese migrants or braceros, we were
just labor. Companies could spit you out and
send you back home. They still can - we still
have programs like that. We need to recognize
the humanity of people. We're not just workers
-- we're human beings. We need a system in which
we can create families, have our spouses come,
raise our children and be part of society. So
the Senators are really changing the definition."
Even more direct labor supply schemes
will be part of the Senators' bill. Currently
the three main official guest worker visa
programs, H1B, H2A and H2B, allow employers to
recruit about 250,000 workers outside the country
every year, and bring them with visas that
require them to work in order to stay. Some
allow workers to change jobs (H1B), while others
require them to remain with the employer who
contracted them (H2A and H2B). Some, but not
all, visa programs require employers to recruit
locally first (H2A), and allow workers to
eventually apply for residence (H1B).
In parallel with the Senators'
deliberations, the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce announced agreement on yet another
such program, called the W visa. It would allow
employers to recruit workers to fill labor
shortages documented by a new Federal
commissioner, require them to recruit locally
first, and peg wages of guest workers to an
employer's existing wage scale or to prevailing
wages in the industry in which they're recruited.
Workers would be able to change jobs, but could
not remain out of work for longer than 60 days or
they'd have to leave the country.
Ana Avendaño, assistant to AFL-CIO
President Trumka and director of immigration and
community action for the AFL-CIO, wrote that
under this proposal "employers have the comfort
of knowing that, as the economy picks up,
workers-foreign or domestic-will be available to
fill jobs that will fuel economic growth.
Workers have the comfort of knowing that local
workers will have the chance to apply for those
jobs."
In San Francisco, the march included activists
from the Chinese and Filipino communities.
Making a deal on a new guest worker
program is a means to win over Republican
Senators and Representatives who respond to
employer lobbying. In its mobilization efforts
around the country, the AFL-CIO and other
Washington DC-based lobbying groups have
announced their central priority is a "pathway to
citizenship" - that is, a legalization program
for the undocumented.
This goal is painted in broad strokes.
"There is absolutely no distinction," said
President Trumka at an event kicking off an April
10 rally, "between workers who were born in this
country and those who came here to build a better
life. We're all in the same boat, every one of
us who works for a living. We rise or fall
together."
Other organizations, however, have been
critical of those aspects of the Senators' plan
that will increase enforcement and expand labor
supply programs. Communications Workers of
America 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." The Senate
bill would raise the numerical limit on those
visas. Columbia professor and former labor
organizer Mae Ngai noted in the New York Times
"From the agricultural 'Bracero Program' of the
1940s and '50s to the current H-2 visa for
temporary unskilled labor, these programs are
notorious for employer abuse."
In Washington State, Rosalinda Guillen,
director of Community2Community, a farm worker
group that organizes cooperatives and advocates
for immigrant rights, worried that once
undocumented agricultural laborers gained legal
status they would face competition from guest
workers brought into the country by growers. She
noted that the state's agricultural lobby is
pushing intensely for guest workers. The Senate
bill transforms the existing H2A agricultural
guest worker program into two new ones -- W2 and
W3, and sets up a special legalization process
for farm workers in exhcange for making the
programs more attractive to groweres.
The San Francisco marchers included a contingent
from the Progressive Workers Alliance, a group of
organizing projects among low wage workers.
"Farm workers deserve an opportunity to
begin building healthy sustainable careers in the
food system," she explained. "As long as
corporate agriculture is allowed to legally bring
in an exploitable workforce our food system will
continue to decline and farm worker families will
continue to be the lowest paid workers in the
country, working one of the most dangerous jobs,
so consumers can eat cheap food and corporations
can continue to get richer!"
Many of the April 10 rallies highlighted
other problems with U.S. immigration law. In
Berkeley, California, a group organized by
teachers and the Alameda Central Labor Council
lined a pedestrian bridge across the freeway.
They were led by children from Jefferson
Elementary School, who spoke to the crowd. One,
Kyle Kuwahara, read a letter he'd written to
President Barack Obama, protesting the decision
by U.S. immigration authorities to refuse to
allow fourth-grade student Rodrigo Mendoza, along
with his family, to return home to Berkeley after
a vacation in Mexico.
"He has been in our school for five years
and he is a friend of mine," Kuwahara wrote.
"Rodrigo is not free to come back. In school we
are learning about all these important people
like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks who fought
for people's civil rights and freedom. So what
about Rodrigo's freedom? Who is fighting for his
freedom?"
The Mendoza family's crisis higlighted
the massive enforcement wave of the last four
years, in which over 2 million people have been
detained and deported. Almost all the April 10
rallies demanded a moratorium on mass
deportations while Congress debates reform
proposals. Some even demanded that the huge
system of privately run immigrant detention
centers be dismantled.
Jefferson Elementary School students called on
President Obama to allow the Mendoza family to
come back to Berkeley.
Many in the Berkeley crowd had also
engaged in a long fight to save the jobs workers
at a local foundry, Pacific Steel Castings. In
December and January a year ago, 214 undocumented
workers were fired after the Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency examined company
records in a process called an I-9 audit. After
identifying workers who had no legal immigration
status, or "work authorization," ICE then sent
the company a letter demanding it fire them. The
same process has led to the firing of hundreds of
thousand of workers across the country during the
Obama administration.
City councils throughout the East Bay
sent letters to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano
pointing out that the firings would not only be a
disaster for the families involved, but would
damage local communities. Political pressure
succeeded in delaying the firings, but couldn't
stop them. Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin
accused ICE of undermining her city's
already-devastated economy in the middle of a
recession. "Their firing is a violation of their
human rights," she said at the time. "When they
say that [immigration] raids are targeting
criminals, it's not true. People who are just
trying to make a living are being targeted big
time."
The company and the workers' union,
Molders Union Local 164, released a joint
statement, in which Pacific Steel declared,
"These terminations were not only devastating to
the workers and their families, but also to the
workforce at PSC ... [We] implore the protestors
to direct their attention to the Department of
Homeland Security and federal policy makers."
The union also criticized "the broken and unfair
laws used by the government to disrupt and
destroy the lives of many of our friends and
colleagues."
A month before the April 10
demonstrations, one union even went on strike
against the firing of three workers in an
E-Verify check. The workers lost their jobs when
Waste Management, Inc., fired them for lacking
"work authorization." The company sent them the
notice in the middle of a bitter conflict over
the union contract with Local 6 of the
International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
Berkeley teachers and the Alameda County Labor
Council organized the students to come to the
immigrant rights demonstration.
"I believe the company is trying to
intimidate workers," said ILWU organizer Agustin
Ramirez. "For a long time workers didn't fight
with this company. But recently they decided to
terminate the contract, which expired years ago.
The company was threatening their jobs, and by
terminating the contract they could go on strike.
So WMI used this way to try to stop them. It was
like WMI was telling the workers, 'since you dare
to question what we do, then we'll question your
documents.'"
The ILWU filed an unfair labor practice
charge, accusing the company of "unilaterally
implementing the E-Verify employment eligibility
verification program" and "terminating employees
for alleged lack of authorization to work in the
United States," among other charges. Then the
workers struck for a day over the company's legal
violations.
"While the company is using immigration
law for retaliation," Ramirez said, "the real
problem is the law itself, because it makes
firing the punishment for lacking legal status.
The reality is that all the workers have families
here, and are trying to stabilize their
situation. One even came to the U.S. when she
was only three, and has an application for the
Dream Act program [which defers deportation for
students for two years and gives them work
authorization]. The company fired her anyway."
Fights against the use of E-Verify have
grown over the last two years -- at Hilton and
Waste Management, at the Mi Pueblo Supermarkets
and at many other worksites. Immigrant workers
have organized marches and demonstrations against
the I-9 audits, which have hit not only union
molders at Pacific Steel, but union janitors in
Los Angeles, Sacramento, Minneapolis, Seattle and
other cities, and non-union workers at Chipotle
restaurants and the American Apparel clothing
factory.
San Francisco marchers.
In the 1990s a similar wave of firings
directed against unions and organizing drives
gave political weight to immigrant activists
inside the AFL-CIO, as they fought for a
pro-immigrant policy. They argued that "employer
sanctions," the law that provides the legal basis
for E-Verify and I-9 audits, was an inherent
violation of workers' rights - to organize, and
to work and support their families. At the
AFL-CIO convention in 1999, they were able to
convince the federation to call for repealing the
law.
In 2009, however, the AFL-CIO Executive
Council adopted "The Labor Movement's Principles
for Comprehensive Immigration Reform." Point two
calls for "A secure and effective worker
authorization mechanism." Yet the massive wave
of immigration-related firings is the way work
authorization is actually enforced. Local fights
against firings inevitably question support for
sanctions in Washington DC. They suggest that
instead of treating increased enforcement as
something to be traded for legalization, that
ending it should be part of labor's immigration
reform program.
Rev. Deborah Lee of the Interfaith
Coalition predicts that unions and immigrant
rights organizations may eventually be divided
over whether to support Congressional reform
proposals, since they call for vastly increased
enforcement. "A lot of families are suffering
now because of earlier immigration deals trading
legalization for enforcement. We need to think
long term -- if the deals today are going to
create more problems for families in the future."
In some communities anger against
previous tradeoff deals is palpable. The
Coalicion de Derechos Humanos in Tucson called
comprehensive immigration reform "primarily a
vague promise used to attract immigrant and
Latino voters, [while] border communities have
suffered the costs of irresponsible and brutal
enforcement policies, resulting in death and
violence." Increased border enforcement was part
of the tradeoff for immigration amnesty in 1986,
and was beefed up again in the Clinton
administration immigration reform package of 1996.
A member of United Service Workers West in the Silicon Valley march.
A recent study found the federal
government spends more on border and immigration
enforcement than on all other law enforcement
agencies combined. The bill drafted by the
Senate "Gang of Eight" would spend at least
another $3.5 billion immediately on border
enforcement,, with the possibility of $2 billion
more later. It would include building more
walls, and using drones and other means of
electronic surveillance. Moving forward with
some aspects of legalization would only come
after the government made plans for the
surveillance and cutting down undocumented
migration, and showed efforts to implement them.
The special court in Tucson that tries 70 young
migrants, brought before judges in chains and
sentenced to time in a federal lockup for border
crossing, would be expanded to process 210 per
day.
Derechos Humanos also called for the
repeal of employer sanctions and the E-Verify
system. It advocates ending guest worker
programs because they increase job competition
and pit resident workers against those brought to
the U.S. by employers. Instead "job creation and
training programs should be implemented for all
unemployed workers, ensuring a healthy and robust
workforce," according to a recent statement
responding to the Gang of Eight proposal.
Rising demands for a more rights-based
reform than the one on the table in Washington
will certainly make negotiations more difficult.
In the past, those calling for one have been
accused of undermining efforts to achieve what's
"politically possible," at least according to the
beltway calculations. But these voices won't be
easily shut out of the national debate.
Jon Pedigo, a priest at Our Lady of
Guadalupe Church in San Jose, organized a
breakfast for people of faith as part of the
April 10 actions in the heart of Silicon Valley.
In his homily the Sunday before, he told
parishioners, "The authorities will try to
silence these voices by dismissing them as
irrelevant. We have learned through these 50
years of organizing campesinos, low wage workers,
and immigrant families that you cannot shut down
the conversation. You cannot SILENCE the truth of
our woundedness. We must confront authorities
with stories of children's fearing that their
parents might be taken away from them and
deported. The voices of mothers whose children
have been torn from their arms cannot be ignored."
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
for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation on the
political economy of immigration
http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/displaced-unequal-and-criminalized/
Radio interview with Leticia Nava, fired Hilton
worker, and Sara Garcia, Casa de Vecinos
Organizados, about the impact of E-Verify firings
and immigration reform
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/90718
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
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 con activistas de #yosoy132 en UNAM
Interview 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
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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