RAILROADING IMMIGRANTS
By David Bacon
The Nation, October 6, 2008
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/bacon
Research support for this article was provided by
the Puffin Foundation Investigative Fund at The
Nation
TUCSON, AZ (9-17-08) -- A special Federal
District court convenes every day at one PM in
Tucson. All the benches, even the jury box, are
filled with young people whose dark brown skin,
black hair and indigenous features are common in
a hundred tiny towns in Oaxaca or Guatemala.
Their jeans, tee shirts and cheap tennis shoes
show the dirt and wear from the long trek through
north Mexico, three days walking across the
desert, and nights sleeping at the immigration
detention center on the Davis Monthan Air Base.
Presiding over one court session in June,
Judge Jennifer Guerin called these defendants
before her in groups of eight. They walked up in
tiny waddling steps, heavy chains binding their
ankles and wrists to their waists. Judge Guerin
recited a litany of questions, translated into
Spanish through headphones. "You've been charged
with illegal entry, a criminal offense...at trial
you would have the subpoena power of the
court...you have certain rights," she intones.
At the end she asks anyone who doesn't understand
to stand up. No one does. She asks if they
plead guilty. After a moment in which her
question is translated, seventy voices mumble
"Si."
Leaving the courtroom a young woman
stumbles, eyes streaked with tears. A public
defender tells the judge her feet are covered
with blisters from walking through the
wilderness. A boy looking no older than 13 or 14
searches the room with his eyes as he's led away,
perhaps seeking a friend or relative. No one
seems older than 30, and most are much younger.
They are today's border crossers - the
mostly-indigenous youth of southern Mexico and
Central America.
They all plead guilty to a Federal
criminal charge. Sentences run from time served
to six months in a Federal lockup run by
Corrections Corporation of America.
According to the Spanish news agency EFE,
this new court process, dubbed Operation
Streamline, convicted 5187 migrants from January
14 to June 10 of this year. Isabel Garcia, who
heads Derechos Humanos, a leading immigrant
rights organization in southern Arizona, says the
current daily quota of 70 chained defendants will
soon be raised to 100 - 50 tried on one shift,
and 50 on another. Twenty-one new federal
prosecutors will handle the surge, with CCA
detention facilities to house it.
A new bureaucracy is growing rapidly,
thanks to drastic changes in immigration
enforcement. In past decades, migrants were
treated very differently when caught without
papers. They were allowed to leave voluntarily,
or deported after being found guilty of an
administrative infraction, the equivalent of a
parking ticket.
Today's migrants have become criminals.
The features pioneered in Tucson's courtroom -
serious Federal criminal charges, mass trials of
defendants in chains, and incarceration - are
becoming standard features of immigration raids
from Postville, Iowa, to Los Angeles, California.
State laws now supplement Federal statutes, and
Federal, state and local authorities cooperate
closely to bring a large variety of criminal
charges against migrants.
Working without papers has become the
most serious crime of all. The vast increase in
workplace raids under the Bush administration,
however, is motivated by more than a zeal for
enforcing the law, or even placating the nativist
wing of the Republican Party. Enforcement is
part of a pressure campaign designed to win
passage of immigration reform centered on guest
worker programs.
In November, 2006, 1282 workers were
detained by hundreds of heavily armed ICE agents
in military garb at six Swift and Co.
packinghouses. Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff then told reporters that raids
would show Congress the need for "stronger border
security, effective interior enforcement and a
temporary-worker program.'' Bush wants, he said,
"a program that would allow businesses that need
foreign workers, because they can't otherwise
satisfy their labor needs, to be able to get
those workers in a regulated program."
This spring, in a New York Times
interview, Chertoff elaborated: "We are not going
to be able to satisfy the American people on a
legal temporary worker program until they are
convinced that we will have a stick as well as a
carrot." His carrot is the prospect of massive
contract labor programs for business. The sticks
are the chains in the Tucson courtroom.
According to Garcia, each day's
defendants are less than 10 percent of those
picked up on the Arizona border. "They're making
an example of them to create a climate of fear,"
she charges. "We are a laboratory. The model
they're developing in Arizona is coming
everywhere."
Garcia's warnings have made her a target
of rightwing talk radio hosts, who routinely urge
listeners to call the county executive to get her
fired from her job as a public defender. But in
Postville, Iowa, where Tucson's assembly-line
justice was transplanted virtually intact, her
warning was accurate.
On May 12 Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agents swooped down on workers
at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant. Twenty
minutes after the shift started, Maria Rosala
Mejia Marroquin saw people running past the line
where she stood cutting up chicken breasts,
shouting that the migra was in the plant. She
ran too, and in a dark warehouse tried to squeeze
between huge boxes. "Men came in with
flashlights. One pointed a gun in my face,
shouting 'No one will escape!'" she remembered.
When she was interrogated, she told agents she
had a daughter in childcare, but lied to keep
them from knowing where the babysitter lived,
fearing she'd be picked up as well. Agents
finally strapped an electronic monitoring device
onto her ankle, telling her she had to wait for a
hearing.
Her brother Luz Eduardo was taken with
388 others to the National Cattle Congress, a
livestock showground in Waterloo, two hours away.
In a makeshift courtroom they went in chains
before a judge who'd helped prosecutors design
Tucson-style plea agreements five months before
the raid even took place. In order to get a job
at Agriprocessors, workers had given the company
Social Security numbers that were either
invented, or belonged to someone else. The judge
and prosecutor told workers they'd be charged
with aggravated identity theft, which carries a
two-year prison jolt, and held without bail. If
they pleaded guilty to misusing a Social Security
number, however, they would serve just five
months, and be deported immediately afterwards.
"They told [my brother] if he signed the
papers they'd deport him, but it was a lie,"
Mejia says. "He didn't know he was agreeing to
criminal charges, and now he's been in prison in
Kansas for months." Translation into Spanish was
provided, but according to Elida Tuchan, who was
also arrested, about half the detainees speak
only Cachiquel, an indigenous language from San
Miguel Dueñas, their Guatemalan hometown. "They
felt terrorized, that everything was against
them. They didn't understand anything about the
process or their rights."
To the workers, deportation became
desirable. Anacleta Tajtaj was also braceleted,
while her husband was deported and three brothers
went to prison. "Our family in Guatemala was
eating because of us. Now they'll go hungry,"
she lamented. It cost them each 33,000
quetazales (about $4000) to get to the U.S., a
huge sum in San Miguel Dueñas, requiring them to
mortgage homes and farms. "Now we just want to
go back. Everything here is a crime - all the
normal things like working." Tajtaj and the
other women can't go home yet, however. Three
months after the raid they didn't even have dates
for their first hearing.
"They can't work, they have no way to
pay rent or buy food, their husbands or brothers
are in prison or deported, and they're being held
up to ostracism in this tiny town," says Luz
Maria Hernandez, who heads the support network
for 48 braceleted women at Postville's St.
Bridget's Catholic Church. "This is a form of
psychological punishment."
Ostracism has become a common element of
workplace raids. Women released for so-called
humanitarian reasons to care for children become
isolated and dependent on friends and relatives.
In Los Angeles,, women braceleted after a raid at
the Micro Solutions electronics plant on February
7 were shunned by their own roommates, who left
them and their children facing eviction. A
challenge by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant
Rights in Los Angeles finally won removal of the
bracelets after three months, but the support
network of immigrant rights groups is not as
strong in northern Iowa.
Workplace raids are sweeping the country.
According to Secretary Chertoff, "arrests in
worksite cases have jumped from a total of 850 in
2004 to 4,940 last year, including 863 arrests
based on criminal charges." From January 1 to
May 31, 2008 alone, ICE had arrested 3000 people
for immigration violations, and 875 more on
criminal charges.
In June among those arrested were 160
workers at Action Rags in Houston, 32 farm
workers for Boss 4 Packing in Heber, California,
and nine workers at water parks in Arizona. In
May "cops and guns and badges and everything"
were used to detain 16 workers at San Diego's
French Gourmet bakery, according to Rod Coon,
company vice-president. The same month, 25
construction laborers were picked up in Florida
working on the Lee County Jail. April saw raids
detaining 28 landscapers in El Paso, 24
construction workers in Little Rock, 63 taco
makers at El Balazo restaurants in the San
Francisco Bay area, 22 restaurant workers on
Maui, 33 laborers on the federal courthouse
project in Richmond, Virginia, 20 workers at
Shipley's Do-Nuts in Texas, and 45 workers at a
Mexican restaurant chain in several states.
This two-month snapshot is an incomplete
count of smaller worksite enforcement actions,
which go on constantly, along with frequent raids
on street-corner day laborers. But in addition
to Postville, large raids have also become much
more frequent.
Worksite enforcement, in turn, is used to
dramatize Bush reform proposals that come from
some of the country's largest corporations. In
1999 a group of corporate trade associations, in
industries employing large numbers of immigrant
workers, formed the Essential Worker Immigration
Coalition because U.S. industry, it said, faced a
huge labor shortage. "Part of the solution,"
EWIC announced, "involves allowing companies to
hire foreign workers to fill the essential worker
shortages."
The group, headed by the US Chamber of
Commerce, includes the American Meat Institute,
the National Association of Chain Drug Stores
(Wal Mart, among others), the National Council of
Chain Restaurants, and other industry
associations. While EWIC doesn't contribute money
directly to political campaigns, any politician
its lobbyists visit know EWIC member industries
give plenty. In the 2000 election cycle, for
instance, the meat processing industry gave
$1,292,877 -- $145,520 to Democrats and
$1,143,107 to Republicans. So far in 2008, the
restaurant industry has already given $7,361,945
($2,918,797 / $4,427,704).
In an August 2001 letter to Bush, EWIC
argued for "a temporary worker framework that
provides a role for such workers whose labor is
needed in the US." A 2002 Cato Institute report,
authored by Daniel T. Griswold, said "the
experience of the bracero program demonstrates
that workers prefer the legal channel." A huge
temporary visa program "should be created that
would allow Mexican nationals to remain in the
United States to work for a limited period."
EWIC and its member associations immediately
greeted the report. The National Restaurant
Association warned that restaurants faced "a
worker shortage of 1.5 million jobs," and said
the plan "would give employers greater
opportunities to fill these jobs."
The Bush administration issued its own
proposals a year and a half later, and they were
identical to those in the report. Cato's ties to
the media helped guest worker proposals achieve
greater legitimacy. When the Institute asserted
that industries face a tremendous labor shortage,
rather than a corporate unwillingness to pay
higher wages to attract workers, much of the
media treated it as fact. Cato and EWIC members
shared an aversion to minimum wages. Rob Rosado,
director of legislative affairs for the American
Meat Institute, said "We don't want the
government setting wages [in guest worker
programs.] The market determines wages."
EWIC's ideas were embraced by Democrats
as well as Republicans. The McCain/Kennedy,
Hegel/Martinez and STRIVE bills all shared a
similar architecture. They established large
guest worker programs, allowing corporations and
contractors to recruit hundreds of thousands of
workers a year outside the country, on temporary
visas that would force them to leave if they
became unemployed. To force workers to come only
as guest workers, and to stay in the program once
they were in the U.S., the bills all mandated a
tighter border to make crossing without papers
more difficult, and beefed-up employer sanctions
to make it impossible to hold a job without a
guest worker visa.
In the bracero program of the 1950s and
early 1960s, many workers simply remained in the
U.S., working under the table until they found a
way to get a permanent visa. Many workers in
current guest worker programs also stay in the
country as undocumented immigrants, even though
getting permanent status has become almost
impossible. The enforcement provisions sought to
cut off that option.
"Enforcement is not an issue you can
separate from guest worker programs," says Mary
Bauer, director of the Immigrant Justice Project
at the Southern Poverty Law Center. An SPLC
report, Close to Slavery, documents extensive
abuse of workers in current programs, and the
benefit to employers of a workforce with few
rights, whose vulnerable status makes organizing
to raise wages difficult. "Immigration
enforcement is structurally necessary for these
programs," she explains.
Most comprehensive bills also contained
legalization provisions for currently
undocumented people, but would have imposed fines
and long waiting periods from 11 to 18 years,
during which time applicants would be as
vulnerable as ever. Employers, however, would be
immune to employer sanctions for employing them,
while recruiting new workers through guest worker
programs.
A much more liberal immigration bill
sponsored by Congress member Sheila Jackson Lee
and members of the Congressional Black Caucus was
dismissed as "politically unrealistic" because it
contained no guest worker program. EWIC
anchored an alliance with immigration lawyers,
establishment civil rights organizations and
several unions. John Gay, representing the
National Restaurant Association in EWIC, became
board chair of the National Immigration Forum, a
powerful mainstream immigration lobbying group in
Washington. Tamar Jacoby, former staffer at the
rightwing Manhattan Institute, was one of the
coalition's most prominent spokespeople. Today
she has organized a new corporate lobby,
ImmigrationWorks, that includes EWIC, National
Council of La Raza, the National Restaurant
Association, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
One key affiliate, the Federation of Employers
and Workers of America, calls itself "the
national voice of the existing legal guest worker
programs," and represents industry associations
that push for them.
After Congress failed to pass a guest
worker/enforcement/legalization package, the
administration began to implement its enforcement
proposals through increased raids. "But we would
have had raids with those bills too, because of
their enforcement and funding provisions," says
Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the
National Immigration Law Center.
The administration also used the bills'
failure as a pretext for relaxing restrictions on
current guest worker programs. ICE Director
Julie Myers told the Detroit Economic Club in
April that "the administration has both
streamlined the H2-A [agricultural guest worker
visa] application process and has given U.S.
employers more flexibility... These changes will
make it easier for agricultural employers to hire
foreign temporary or seasonal labor to harvest
crops." It also allowed employers seeking H2-B
guest workers to simply "attest" that they'd
tried to find local workers, rather than have the
Department of Labor certify that they'd made a
real effort.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, the
AFL-CIO and immigrant rights groups have bitterly
opposed these changes. Employers have generally
supported them. "We see employers on the Hill
all the time, saying they have to have guest
workers. At one hearing they had to open extra
rooms to accommodate all the lobbyists," Bauer
fumes. "And support is coming, not just from
Republicans, but from Democrats like Barbara
Mikulski, Zoe Lofgren, Ted Kennedy and even John
Conyers."
Making it a crime for an undocumented
person to hold a job is made possible by the
Immigration Reform and Control Act, passed in
1986. Prior to that, workers could be deported
for being in the U.S. without a visa, but working
itself was not a crime. The then-Immigration and
Naturalization Service conducted some workplace
raids, but immigrants were either forced to leave
the country voluntarily, or held for deportation
hearings. They could make bail.
In the late 1970s, the INS and others
began seeking laws to make it illegal for people
without papers to work, and for employers to hire
them. They argued that if people could not work
legally, they would leave. The INS campaigned
for passage of IRCA (then the Simpson-Mazzoli and
Simpson-Rodino bills), with a wave of raids
called Operation Jobs. Agents would arrest
workers in a factory, and go to the local
unemployment office to hold a press conference.
With reporters and unemployed workers in tow,
they'd return to the raided factory, claiming
they'd "created" jobs. They would then demand
that Congress pass sanctions.
Raids became more difficult after the INS
was sued by Molders Union Local 164 and the
Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund
in the early 1980s. After the suit was won,
agents had to stop their practice of locking
workers in a factory, interrogating
foreign-looking people about their legal status,
and instead were required to have warrants naming
specific individuals.
Then IRCA's passage made it a federal
offense for an employer to hire someone without
immigration papers, and for that person to hold a
job. Job applicants now have to provide two
pieces of identification to show their status,
and a Social Security number. By inspecting
employer hiring records, INS agents can come up
with the names of workers to put on warrants for
a raid.
Immigrants didn't go home, however.
Defenders of sanctions ignored the ongoing
displacement of people by structural adjustment
programs in Mexico and other developing
countries, reinforced by the passage of the North
American Free Trade Agreement. In the NAFTA
years, over six million Mexicans came to live in
the U.S. Since relatively few visas are
available for legal immigration, most came
without them.
Although Bush officials claim worksite
enforcement hardly existed before the present
administration, the current wave actually started
in the Clinton era. The Social Security
Administration began sending letters to employers
listing employees' names and numbers that didn't
match SSA records. Employers were then left free
(and often encouraged) to assume that the reason
for the mismatch was that the workers were
undocumented. After numerous employers used the
letters to fire activist workers during union
campaigns, unions and immigrant advocates
convinced SSA to include language in the letters
warning employers not to construe a mismatch as
evidence of lack of immigration status.
Nevertheless, although no count has ever been
made, thousands of undocumented workers have lost
their jobs because of the letters.
In 1999, using Social Security numbers in
Operation Vanguard, INS agents sifted through the
names of 24,310 workers in 40 meatpacking plants
throughout Nebraska. They then sent letters to
4,762, demanding they report to INS agents at
their jobs. A thousand did, of whom 34 were
arrested and deported. The rest, over 3500
people, were forced to find new jobs. One of
Operation Vanguard's architects, INS Dallas
District Director Mark Reed, claimed success,
saying the operation was really intended to
pressure Congress and employer groups to support
guest worker legislation. "We depend on foreign
labor," he declared. "If we don't have illegal
immigration anymore, we'll have the political
support for guest workers." Reed and the INS also
conducted more traditional raids during those
years, seizing workers for deportation at
Nebraska Beef, Montfort Packing, Tyson Foods, and
other plants.
Social Security grew so uncomfortable
with the use of its database for immigration
enforcement that after Operation Vanguard the
agency refused to make it available for similar
operations in other states. Today, however, ICE
seems to have regained access to the files, and
now uses mismatches to identify workers for
raids, and to charge them with criminal offenses.
Meanwhile, the money paid by undocumented workers
under bad numbers reached $586 billion in 2006.
Since those workers may never collect benefits
based on those earnings (which go into the
Earnings Suspense File), they are contributing a
huge subsidy to the retirement of all Social
Security recipients.
Worksite enforcement actions accelerated
enormously after George W. Bush took office.
Following the 9/11 attacks, raids dubbed
Operation Tarmac targeted airports around the
country, leading to the firing and deportation of
hundreds of mostly food service workers. After
the creation of the Department of Homeland
Security, the new Bureau of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) took over from the old
Immigration and Naturalization Service, and more
raids followed.
The administration used worksite
enforcement actions to dramatize its call for
comprehensive immigration reform (the shorthand
name given by Washington groups to the bills
combining guest workers, increased enforcement
and legalization). On April 10, 2006, the first
huge immigrant rights march took place in Los
Angeles, protesting House passage of the
Sensenbrenner bill (HR 4437) the previous
December, which would have made undocumented
status a federal felony. On April 19, 1187
workers were arrested at plants of IFCO Systems
North America, Inc. in New York, Texas, Wisconsin
and Massachusetts. Then in December, after the
Senate passed an immigration bill more in line
with administration proposals, ICE mounted
probably the largest workplace raid in U.S.
history, detaining 1282 workers at six Swift and
Co. packinghouses.
The administration's drive was dramatized
by other large-scale, highly publicized worksite
sweeps. They included the arrest of 81 plastics
workers at Iridium Industries in Poconos,
Pennsylvania, 136 chicken workers at George's
Processing in Missouri, 165 workers at Portland's
Fresh Del Monte produce plant, 327 workers at the
Michael Bianco leather factory in New Bedford,
and 200 janitors for Rosenbaum-Cunningham
International in 17 states.
Once the comprehensive reform proposals
died in Congress in 2007, more major raids
followed, including two at the Smithfield pork
slaughterhouse in Tarheel, North Carolina, which
took place in the middle of one of the country's
longest and hardest-fought union organizing
campaigns. In addition, 130 immigrants were
arrested at Micro Solutions in Van Nuys, dozens
at a Fresh Direct produce warehouse in New York
City, and 161 poultry workers at Koch Foods in
Ohio. Just before the Postville raid, 311
workers were detained at Pilgrim's Pride plants
where they cut up chickens for KFC.
As early as the IFCO raid, some workers
and low-level supervisors were charged with
criminal violations, not just being in the
country illegally. At Swift the administration
began to shape its new strategy of substituting
criminal charges for status violations. Some 65
of the workers arrested there were charged with
identity theft or other criminal offenses, as
were the workers picked up at Smithfield.
Barbara Gonzalez, an ICE spokesperson, told
reporters outside one Swift slaughterhouse that
"we have been investigating a large identity
theft scheme that has victimized many U.S.
citizens and lawful residents." ICE head Julie
Myers told other reporters in Washington, D.C.
that "those who steal identities of U.S. citizens
will not escape enforcement."
Dramatic identity-theft charges were
intended to gain public support for the raids and
the bills in Congress, but ICE was also
announcing a new strategy for criminalizing work.
ICE claims that raids and sanctions
protect wages against employers' use of
undocumented labor. A week after the Postville
raid, ICE Director Myers claimed enforcement
targeted "unscrupulous criminals who use illegal
workers to cut costs and gain a competitive
advantage." An ICE Worksite Enforcement Advisory
claims "unscrupulous employers are likely to pay
illegal workers substandard wages or force them
to endure intolerable working conditions. ...
ICE's Worksite Enforcement Unit also helps
employers improve worksite enforcement of
employment regulations."
Actual enforcement of labor standards,
however, is in freefall. On July 15 the
Government Accountability Office charged that
Department of Labor inspectors routinely fail to
investigate complaints, and close half of them
after short calls to employers.. From 1997 to
2007, the number of inspectors dropped from 942
to 732, and the number of cases went from 47,000
to 30,000, the lowest since World War Two.
Meanwhile, the budget for the Border Patrol has
climbed to $1.6 billion, while 15,000 agents make
ICE the second-largest investigative agency in
the Federal government.
The affidavit supporting ICE's search
warrant for the Postville plant stated a source
saw a supervisor "duct-tape the eyes of an
undocumented Guatemalan worker shut and hit the
Guatemalan with a meat hook, apparently not
causing serious injuries. The Guatemalan did not
want to report the incident because 'it would not
do any good and could jeopardize his job.'"
Although ICE would not identify the beaten worker
or confirm his detention, it is probable that
after the raid he was in Federal prison, while
the supervisor continued working. The Iowa Labor
Commissioner documented 57 cases of child labor
at Agriprocessors and filed 9000 child labor
charges against the company. Some of the 57 young
people are now undoubtedly in prison or wearing
electronic ankle bracelets. Although some may
get temporary visas as witnesses, all will
eventually be deported.
Despite ICE claims that raids protect
labor standards, enforcement often helps
employers attack efforts by undocumented workers
to better conditions. The two raids at
Smithfield's Tarheel, North Carolina,
packinghouse created a climate of terror during
the union organizing drive, according to
organizers. When housekeepers at the Woodfin
Suites in Emeryville, California, tried to
enforce a new municipal living wage law, ICE
investigated them at the request of Congressman
Brian Bilbray (R-San Diego), and company
president Samuel Hardage. According to Mejia,
supervisors often used immigration status to
threaten workers in a union drive at
Agriprocessors a year before the raid. And at
Pilgrim's Pride packing plants ICE and employers
cooperated to arrest employees this spring.
After the first Smithfield raid in
January, 2007, Mark Lauritsen, UFCW packinghouse
director, said the Department of Homeland
Security and the company "were worried about
people organizing a union, and the government
said, 'here are the tools to take care of them.'"
Scott Frotman, spokesperson for the United Food
and Commercial Workers, says "raids let companies
drive down wages and working conditions." To
NILC's Marielena Hincapie, raids show the
employers' power: "Enforcement intimidates even
citizens and legal residents. The employer
brings in another batch of workers and continues
business as usual. People who protest get
targeted and deported."
Employers, while complaining about the
inconvenience of raids, have been very willing to
accept greater enforcement. American Meat
Institute chair and Tyson Foods CEO Dick Bondhas
supported the Bush plan "because it included some
of the provisions that AMI and the industry
really want: a path to legalization, a guest
worker program and a better employee verification
program."
Nan Walden, a former Democratic
Congressional aide who owns a large pecan ranch
near Tucson, and helped organize Arizona
Employers for Immigration Reform, worries that
"removing 9-12% of the workforce will be a
disaster." She advocates a "humane" guest worker
program, a verifiable identification system, a
path to citizenship for undocumented people, and
"market-based quotas" for future migration. She
criticizes Arizona's sanctions law, however, for
its "piecemeal approach." While she's "disturbed
by the hatred stirred up by opponents of
immigration," Walden warns that without a reform
like the one she describes, employers will move
operations out of the state and country.
"Raising wages isn't the answer, because our
costs are all going up, and we still have to be
competitive."
Criminalizing work has helped ICE gain
the involvement of state and local authorities.
Last year Arizona passed bills requiring state
employers to use the E-Verify system to ensure
they were not hiring the undocumented. Employers
must verify an applicant's immigration status
with a database, that DHS said in 2006 "is still
not sufficiently up to date to meet the ...
requirements for accurate verification." The
original bill would have punished any employer
with an undocumented employee, but after
employers protested, the law was changed so that
they would be fined only for future hiring.
E-Verify makes undocumented workers more
vulnerable. One woman employed in a Tucson
bakery, who withheld her name, explained she was
getting only $10/hour for tending the oven, while
legal residents were getting $16 for the same
job. "If I leave or get fired, how will I find
another job with a bad Social Security number?"
she wondered. A Tucson union organizer, also
afraid to be identified, added that construction
workers told her that contractors lowered wages
from $18 to $10/hour after the law passed, and
told them to bring their own tools to the job.
She described rising unemployment, with workers
leaving for other states. "It's not going to
stop us from organizing the union," she said,
"but it will certainly make it harder."
In March Arizona state police arrested 14
employees at a Tucson Panda Express restaurant
for mismatching Social Security numbers. After
the state prosecutor threatened felony identity
theft charges, carrying long prison sentences,
workers pleaded guilty to lesser charges and were
sentenced to time served. Nevertheless, in June
they were still in jail, four months after the
raid. As in Postville, deportation became a
desirable outcome that would free them from
incarceration. Francisco Mondaca, the only one
able to get bail, pleaded guilty to
"impersonating a Panda worker." He says "I
didn't hurt anyone. I filed W-2s and paid taxes.
All I did was go to work."
After the raid Panda Express fired all
its Arizona workers, according to one terminated
employee, and brought in a new workforce. "The
company knew we didn't have papers," he said.
"Managers would talk about it." No action was
taken against company management.
Over a dozen states now have some version
of employer sanctions, and Colombia County in
Oregon has put a local sanctions ordinance on the
ballot. On March 17, Mississippi Governor Haley
Barbour signed SB 2988, which requires employers
to use E-Verify, and gives them immunity for
hiring undocumented workers if they do. An
undocumented worker holding a job faces felony
charges carrying one to five years in prison, and
fines up to $10,000. Workers are ineligible for
bail.
Then, on August 25, ICE agents raided a
Howard Industries plant in Laurel, Mississippi,
sending 481 workers to a privately-run detention
center in Jena, Louisiana, and releasing 106
women for "humanitarian reasons," most in ankle
bracelets. While workers taken to Jena weren't
immediately hustled before a judge, as in
Postville, they were incarcerated with no idea of
where they were being held, and weren't charged
or provided lawyers for days. ICE spokesperson
Barbara Gonzalez declined to say how long
detention would last. Federal prosecutors
charged eight with felony identity theft, and
Gonzalez said criminal charges might be brought
against the others.
Patricia Ice, attorney for the
Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA),
called the raid political. "They want a mass
exodus of immigrants out of the state, the kind
we've seen in Arizona and Oklahoma," she
declared. "The political establishment here is
threatened by Mississippi's changing
demographics, and what the electorate might look
like in 20 years." In the last two decades, the
percentage of African Americans in the state's
population has increased to over 35%.
Immigrants, who were statistically insignificant
until recently, are expected to reach 10% in the
next decade. And workers have been joining
Mississippi unions in catfish and poultry plants,
casinos and shipyards.
Raids and sanctions come on top of
day-to-day harassment. At roadblocks near local
chicken plants in Laurel, police stop workers and
confiscate the cars of those who can't get
drivers' licenses because they don't have papers.
"They take us away in handcuffs and we have to
pay over $1000 to get out of jail and get our
cars back," according to one worker who asked
that her name be withheld. Similar roadblocks
and auto confiscations are common now in many
states.
Jim Evans, state AFL-CIO staffer, leader
of the legislature's Black Caucus, and MIRA board
chair, says the state sanctions law and the raid
serve the same objective. "They are efforts to
drive a wedge between immigrants, African
Americans, white people and unions - all those
who want political change here." At the same
time, he says, "they make it easier to exploit
workers. The people who profit from
Mississippi's low wage system want to keep it the
way it is." He points to the fact that while
workers without papers now risk fines, prison
time and deportation, Mississippi employers have
hired thousands of guest workers in the state's
packinghouses, shipyards and casinos. At the
Signal International shipyard, workers contracted
in India paid thousands of dollars for temporary
visas, and were then been fired and threatened
with deportation when they protested bad
conditions. Guest workers are welcome in
Mississippi, so long as they don't settle down
with families, organize unions, or push for
political change.
Two weeks before the Laurel raid Homeland
Security Secretary Chertoff made the same
connection. "We tried very hard last year to get
a guest worker program which I continue to
believe is not only necessary for the economy but
it is actually a way of enabling the
enforcement," he said. "There's obviously a
straightforward solution to the problem of
illegal work, which is you open the front door
and you shut the back door...Congress wasn't
willing to open the front door ... In the
interim, to be honest, we're closing the back
door." Closing the back door is a euphemism for
immigration raids. Opening the front door means
guest worker programs.
Immigrant rights organizations and
unions, however, have challenged this enforcement
program with demonstrations and lawsuits. In
Phoenix, county sheriff Joe Arpaio became a hero
to nativist groups for invading immigrant
communities with deputies, busses and
helicopters, picking up people on the street and
holding them for ICE. But when Pruitt's
Furniture Store hired off-duty deputies to arrest
day laborers, and Arpaio brought in the
Minutemen, huge picket lines of workers, churches
and immigrant rights groups grew to over a
thousand people. "Even the Phoenix Police
Department came out to protect us from him," says
Pablo Alvarado, director of the National Day
Laborer Organizing Network. "The mayor called
for an FBI investigation, and the governor took
$1.8 million from Arpaio's budget."
The United Food and Commercial Workers
organized five hearings to investigate raids, and
filed a lawsuit to stop ICE from conducting the
kind of mass detentions it made at Swift. The
union also organized a National Commission on ICE
Misconduct and Violations of Fourth Amendment
Rights. "Showing up for work should not subject
workers to being detained," says UFCW President
Joe Hansen. "Work is not a crime. Workers are
not criminals. We do not leave our
constitutional rights at the plant gate."
In California the AFL-CIO, two central
labor councils and one building trades council,
the NILC and the ACLU filed suit in 2007 to stop
ICE from issuing a new no-match regulation.
Under Chertoff's proposal Social Security would
have sent letters to over 160,000 employers,
listing the names of at least eight million
workers with mismatched numbers. Employers would
have had to fire all who could not produce
numbers SSA could verify. The order was blocked
by U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney, and is
still on hold.
And just three days after the Mississippi
raid, while many immigrants hid in their homes in
fear, MIRA organizer Vicky Cintra and over a
hundred raid victims and family members marched
down to the Howard Industries plant in Laurel to
demand withheld paychecks. When company managers
called the police, who tried to arrest Cintra,
immigrants began shouting "Let her go!" As news
reporters arrived on the scene, the police backed
off. Seventy families got paychecks to keep them
eating, while their men were in immigration jail
and their women were braceleted and unable to
work. More protests in the following days forced
the company to pay hundreds of other families as
well.
Newspaper reports had highlighted an
incident in which some workers applauded as
immigrants were led from the plant in handcuffs
during the original raid. But when Cintra and
the braceleted women protested on the grass
outside the gate, African American workers
leaving at shift change crossed the street,
embraced them, and offered to find them food and
to support their protest.
Implementing its program by executive
action, the administration is using immigration
raids to create a large bureaucracy, with rich
contracts and high-paying jobs. It hopes to give
it an unstoppable political momentum that will
tie the hands of any new administration.
Should John McCain be elected President,
he is likely to embrace that program, and
continue the quest in Congress to weld that
system into place. McCain cosponsored the
Kennedy-McCain bill, helping set the terms for
Washington's immigration debate. As Arizona
Senator he belongs to the political establishment
that made his state an enforcement testing ground.
Barack Obama has the chance to stop this
juggernaut. At the AFL-CIO, Anna Avendaño,
director of immigration programs, is drafting
ideas for an Obama administration's first 100
days. "At the very least, it could change the
regulations and terms of enforcement," she says,
ending, for instance, the practice of charging
undocumented immigrants with federal crimes like
identity theft.
The larger question, however, is whether
Obama would challenge the mushrooming enforcement
bureaucracy and the raids it feeds on, advocating
a more humane immigration policy. Organizations
like the National Network for Immigrant and
Refugee Rights urge that instead of the
enforcement/guest worker/legalization triad,
Congress should legalize people without papers,
and make more visas available for legal
migration, without setting up guest worker
programs. The AFL-CIO, the Network, and many
others want much greater enforcement of labor
standards and union rights, and call for
repealing employer sanctions. Congress member
Jackson Lee advocates combining jobs programs
with legalization and organizing rights, to bring
workers together instead of pitting them against
each other.
If an Obama administration and a
Democratic-controlled Congress move in this
direction, immigration policy would no longer be
the "third rail of American politics," in the
words of party strategist Rahm Emmanuel.
Instead, it would protect the rights and living
standards of immigrants, and workers generally.
For more articles and images on immigration, see
http://dbacon.igc.org/Imgrants/imgrants.htm
Just out from Beacon Press:
Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates
Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
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
This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc.
www.surfcontrol.com
_______________________________________________
Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
[email protected]
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
