THIS 'IMPACABLE' WAR AGAINST MIGRANTS
Review: The Immigrant War, by Vittorio Longhi - The Policy Press,
c/o the University of Chicago Press, 2013
By David Bacon
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19089-the-implacable-war-against-migrants
The immigration debate in the United States almost always treats the
migration of people into this country as something unique. It is
not. The World Bank estimates the total number of people worldwide
living outside the countries where they were born at 213,316,418 in
2010. A decade earlier it was 178,050,184, and a decade before that,
155,209,721.
The number of people who have become cross-border migrants has
increased by about 58 million people in 20 years. To be sure, the
U.S. has become home to a large number - 42,813,281 in 2010, up from
23,251,026 two decades earlier. This increase coincided, by no
accident, with the period in which the North American Free Trade
Agreement went into effect, and neoliberal economic reforms were
implemented in countries that have been the sources of migration to
the U.S.
Nevertheless, looking at the ways migration has affected other
countries, and especially at the experiences of migrants themselves,
it is clear that U.S. exceptionalism - the idea that this country is
somehow unique and different from the rest of the world -has no basis
in fact.
Why, then, is the debate over this country's immigration policy
conducted with such exceptionalist blinders?
One book that helps to remove them is The Immigrant War by Vittorio
Longhi, published this year by Policy Press at the University of
Chicago. Longhi is an Italian labor and immigrant rights advocate,
and he's looked at his own country, as well as France, the Persian
Gulf states, and the U.S. All are the recipients of large numbers of
migrants.
The United Arab Emirates, for instance, has a migrant population of
3,293,264, almost triple the number, 1,330,324, of two decades
earlier. The UAE began exporting oil in 1962, when its migrant
population was only 65,827. Today the number of UAE citizens is only
slightly more than 1.3 million. Who really produced the oil wealth
of Dubai and Abu Dhabi?
France today, with about 66 million inhabitants, has 8,264,070
migrants, up from 5,897,267 20 years ago. Italy, with almost 61
million people, has 4,463,413 migrants, up from 1,428,219 in 1990.
Not surprisingly, Longhi finds that "even when someone does succeed
in crossing a border, even when they obtain a permit and find a
steady job, they are still faced with this 'implacable war' against
migrants." Migrants do the worst jobs at the lowest pay, he says,
for which they "face xenophobic propaganda that is so functional to
what Michel Foucault would call 'biopower', or the 'subjugation of
bodies and the control of populations.'"
Longhi quotes Foucault because sees anti-immigrant hysteria as part
of a system of control. But what makes Longhi's view more than just
one more litany of abuse are two elements. He sees this control --
the way migrants are employed -- as a system for extracting profits,
not just the bad acts of evil people. And he shows that migrants can
and do resist. "They change from being passive victims to become
new, conscious social agents, capable of fighting for their own
rights and contributing to the revival of a wider protest."
U.S. readers will be startled especially by his examination of the
Persian Gulf, where the system of social control is the most
elaborate, and is based on labor contracting through guest worker
programs. Undocumented migration exists in the Gulf, but at levels
much lower than in the U.S. or Europe.
Longhi describes a brutal system in which "the social exclusion,
terrible living conditions and abuse reserved for migrants are
possible thanks to the entry quota mechanism, to the criterion of
kafala (sponsorship), which binds the migrant to a short-term
contract with a sole employer." As a result, while the average per
capita income of a Qatari citizen is $88.000, a contract construction
worker from Nepal gets $3600, and a Filipina domestic worker $2500.
The point is clear. An elaborate system for contracting labor exists
to produce huge wage differentials, and therefore profits for
employers. The consequences for workers are disastrous, despite the
fact that families and whole towns in countries like the Philippines
or Nepal have become dependent on the money sent home out of those
low wages.
Longhi also describes a reality even less well known - the rebellions
of migrant workers in the Gulf, and the support they've received, not
only from European unions, but from the barely-legal unions in those
countries themselves. Protests in Bahrain, for instance, were
organized with the help of that country's new union federation. Its
leaders were among those demonstrating in the Pearl Square protests
in Manama, put down by its monarchy with bloody violence.
Longhi interviewed Majid Al Alawi, the country's former minister for
employment for a decade, who lost his job when the protests started.
Al Alawi, who's lived in the UK, sought to reduce the gulf between
migrant and citizen workers. "We must start to ask ourselves whether
these are really temporary contracted workers or whether they are
migrant workers and establish what kind of life plan lies behind
their move. These young people are spending the best years of their
life here, continually renewing short-term contracts and putting up
with terrible conditions. How can a situation of this kind really be
considered temporary?"
Good questions for U.S. immigrant rights activists too. Al Alawi's
observations are far in advance of those voiced in the current U.S.
Congressional debate over immigration reform. Instead of considering
Al Alawi's question - how to integrate migrants into the communities
where they live and provide a decent longterm future, the U.S.
Congress is moving in the opposite direction. Its current proposals
would erode the priority give to permanent residence ad the migration
of families, which was a hallmark of the way the U.S. civil rights
movement reformed immigration policy in 1965. Instead, Congress is
crafting an immigration system oriented towards providing a labor
supply for employers, at wages they want to pay.
Longhi then turns to Europe. In France, he describes rising labor
militancy among immigrants similar to that taking place in the U.S.
In one of several examples, "between May and June 2007," he relates,
"more than 50 African waiters and cooks went on strike and occupied
the Buffalo Grill of Viry-Chatillon." These savvy workers gained
leverage by mounting their protest during the presidential election
campaign, (as the Dreamers did in the U.S.) and got the support of
French unions. In the end they forced the employer to give them
permanent jobs.
Raymond Chaveau, coordinator for work among undocumented "sans
papiers" [undocumented] workers for the CGT, the traditional left
labor federation, says employers use the lack of legal status to
create "reserves of low-cost labor," which he describes in the
classical Marxist term as "the industrial reserve army."
By organizing, restaurant workers - "this reserve army in the
kitchen" -- have won increasing numbers of permanent jobs - 6,000 in
2007, 12,000 in 2008, and 13,000 in 2009. Their example has
something important to say to the U.S. labor movement. Instead of
accepting a status in which workers had no rights to their jobs - the
equivalent to the lack of "work authorization" that has led to the
firing of thousands of undocumented workers in the U.S. - the French
unions negotiated with the government to make undocumented
immigrants' jobs permanent. In 2011 a group of eleven union
presented petitions for 4000 workers, and regularized 3000.
In addition, they opposed the "Besson law," touted as a way to stop
work on the "black market," but which imposed new immigration
restrictions and reduced workers' access to legal assistance. The
last measure is similar to the denial of access to legal aid programs
in the U.S. for undocumented workers.
Longhi describes a "war against immigrants" taking place in the
Mediterranean Sea, whose unadmitted effect, not unlike that of the
U.S. wall on the Mexican border, is to make death a penalty for
crossing. From 1994 to 2011, 5,962 people died trying to cross the
channel from North Africa to Sicily alone. Some 4,500 are still
missing, like those who die unnamed in the Sonora desert in southern
Arizona and California.
Longhi asks, "What would happen if the 4.5 million immigrants living
in Italy decided to down tools for a day?" But he then takes his
question an important step further: "And if the millions of Italians
who are tired or racism supported their actions?" In fact, these
were the elements of a manifesto of Italy's "A Day Without Us"
movement of 2010, showing the kind of cross-fertilization that is
taking place among migrants and migrant social movements
internationally.
In one of the books most inspiring passages, Longhi recounts the way
farm workers in Puglia and Calabria defied crew bosses to demand
changes in conditions. One immigrant, Ivan Saignet from Cameroon,
said "The first day I had to sleep on the ground because the tents
were already occupied by my companions. That was a shock. I had
never seen such a thing, not even in Africa."
Even in this conservative area of Italy, unions and progressive
people came out to support the strikers, and forced the employers to
employ workers directly instead of using labor contractors. The
union for farm workers is now trying to spread the system to other
parts of Italy.
Longhi's arguments are most convincing when he makes a strong case
for the way the activity of migrants themselves, especially when it's
supported by unions and progressive social organizations, can win
important improvements. At the end of his examination he goes beyond
these descriptions, first to describe the kind of solutions generally
centered on the enforcement of international agreements, like UN
conventions 97 and 143, which mandate the protection of migrant
rights, and calls for the negotiation of new measures.
From a U.S. perspective this argument raises important questions.
The U.S. has not signed the UN convention on the rights of migrants
and their families, and the attitude of successive administrations,
and even more so Congress, is that international agreements only bind
the government if it agrees with the results. The U.S. immigrant
rights movement is affected by this attitude, to the extent that it
has mounted no major campaign to win ratification of Convention 143
in particular. It makes little effort to examine the impact of trade
agreements, or to look at the danger of the inclusion of new
international guest worker programs as part of the WTO trade
negotiations. U.S. immigrant rights advocates will wake up soon in a
world they will hardly recognize as a result.
But Longhi's perspective raises another question as well. U.S.
immigration reform proposals are based on the premise that employers
should have a ready supply of labor at "competitive" or "market"
wages, and that the purpose of immigration policy is to assure it.
Arguments that the flow of migrants must be managed, even in their
own interest, dovetail uneasily with this perspective.
"There is no other way of providing protection and rights for
migrants in a uniform way on a global level than to combine
principles and supranational reference regulations with building up
consent in individual countries," Longhi says. Yet he also argues
that "the supranational structure under consideration is something
other than the institutions or agencies imposed by the richest
countries, such as the IMF or the World Bank are for the movements of
capital, and the WTO is for the movement of goods and services."
Perhaps it is easier for a European, with an experience of strong
social democratic and left parties and trade unions, to envision an
international structure in which workers have influence. As a result
of that strength, within the European Union labor has great mobility,
and workers can move relatively freely from country to country,
although in the wake of the economic crisis some governments have
sought to erode that. The big barrier is the wall around Europe,
restricting the inflow of workers from North Africa and Asia. And
like U.S. immigration policy, European policy has swung between ideas
of making the movement of people easier, or at least decriminalizing
it, and throwing up new barriers.
The U.S. experience, however, is that the effort to establish systems
for managing the flow of migrants has led to contract labor programs
like the notorious bracero scheme of the 1940s and 50s, or the
equally abusive H2A and H2B guest worker programs of today. And in
fact, in his chapter on the U.S., Longhi summarizes eloquently the
critiques of organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center's
"Close to Slavery." At the same time, however, he says that "the
challenge for the Obama administration today is to get a global
immigration reform soon, centred on an efficient system of permits
for qualified work, granting an amnesty for a large proportion of
illegal jobs, and reinforcing controls on the border."
Progressive U.S. immigrant rights activists have been very critical
of this combination of proposals, called "comprehensive immigration
reform," because of their heavy emphasis on anti-immigrant
enforcement and guest worker schemes, in tradeoff for legalization.
The alternative proposed by many progressive activists is the ending
of guest worker programs entirely, giving migrants residence visas
and protecting their ability to reunite their families, while
renegotiating the trade agreements that lead to the displacement of
communities and the forcible migration of their inhabitants.
This is a long argument in the immigrant rights movement, and Longhi
shows us that it is being debated internationally as well. Further,
he points to some solutions that the U.S. movement hasn't considered
seriously. But this book's greatest virtue, and the places where
Longhi really becomes an eloquent advocate himself, is in the
descriptions of how all over the world migrants are organizing and
fighting for their rights. That's the true hope for the future.
Interviews with David Bacon about his new book, The Right to Stay Home:
KPFK - Uprisings with Sonali Kohatkar
http://uprisingradio.org/home/2013/09/27/the-right-to-stay-home-how-us-policy-drives-mexican-migration/
KPFA - Upfront with Brian Edwards Tiekert
https://soundcloud.com/kpfa-fm-94-1-berkeley/david-bacon-on-upfront-9-20
TruthOut with Mark Karlin
<http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/18937-neo-liberalism-plays-key-role-in-economically-forced-mexican-migration-to-us>http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/18937-neo-liberalism-plays-key-role-in-economically-forced-mexican-migration-to-us
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/18972-mexican-communities-resist-environmentally-destructive-canadian-mining-companies
Books by David Bacon
THE RIGHT TO STAY HOME: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration
Just published by Beacon Press
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
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border
(University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
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David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
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