UTAH'S IMMIGRATION BILLS - A BLAST FROM THE PAST By David Bacon In These Times, web edition http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/7098/utahs_immigration_bills_a_blast_from_the_past
OAKLAND, CA (3/17/11) -- Last week the Utah legislature passed three new laws that have been hailed in the media as a new, more reasonable, approach to immigration policy. Reasonable, that is, compared to Arizona's SB1070, which would allow police to stop anyone, demand immigration papers, and hold her or him for deportation. The Utah bills were signed by Republican Governor Gary Herbert on Tuesday, March 15. Arizona's SB 1070 is currently being challenged in court. Utah's bills were called "the anti-Arizona" by Frank Sharry, head of America's Voice, a Washington DC immigration lobbying firm. According to Lee Hockstader, on the Washington Post's editorial staff, the laws are "the nation's most liberal - and most reality-based - policy on illegal immigration." The Utah laws, however, are not new. And they're certainly not liberal, at least towards immigrants and workers. Labor supply programs for employers, with deportations and diminished rights for immigrants, have marked U.S. immigration policy for more than a hundred years. One bill would establish a state system to allow employers to bring people from the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon as "guest workers." Under this program, workers would have to remain employed to stay in the country. They would not have the same set of labor and social rights as people living in the communities around them. Another bill would give undocumented workers now living in Utah a similar guest worker status, lasting two years. The National Immigration Law Center (NILC) says the third bill, the Arizona look-alike, "requires police to interrogate individuals and verify their immigration status in a wide array of situations, promoting harmful and costly incentives for law enforcement to racially profile." Utah, like most states in the west and Midwest, has been down this road before. From 1930 to 1935, 345,839 Mexicans were deported from the U.S. Last year alone, the Federal government deported almost 400,000. Even given the growth in population, this is greater than that Depression-era wave. In those years "the climate of scathing anti-Mexican sentiment created intense polarization, producing a sweeping suspicion of foreigners ... which linked housing congestion, strained relief services and social ills to the large presence of Mexicans," recounts Zaragosa Vargas, professor at the University of North Carolina. Most immigrants in Utah were farm workers, many laboring in sugar beet fields for the Mormon-backed Utah-Idaho Sugar Company. Their wages were so low that families went hungry even when they were working. When beet workers in nearby Colorado tried to organize a union and went on strike, Vargas says their communities were targeted with deportations. Then World War Two created a labor shortage. To supply workers to growers at low wages, the government started the bracero contract labor program, bringing immigrants first into the beet fields of Stockton, California, and then into the rest of the country in 1942. Braceros were treated as disposable, dirty and cheap. Herminio Quezada DurĂ¡n, who came to Utah from Chihuahua, says ranchers often had agreements between each other to exchange or trade braceros as necessary for work. Jose Ezequiel Acevedo Perez, who came from Jerez, Zacatecas, remembers the humiliation of physical exams that treated Mexicans as louse-ridden. "We were stripped naked in front of everyone," he remembers, and sprayed with DDT, now an outlawed pesticide. Men in some camps were victims of criminals and pimps. Juan Contreras, from Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas, tactfully recalls that "in Utah, women often went to the camps, and they were rumored to be especially fond of Mexican men." During the war, Utah-Idaho Sugar first used labor from the Japanese internment camps in Minidoka, Idaho; Topaz, Utah; and Heart Mountain, Wyoming. When that wasn't enough, they brought in braceros. In the 1950s, at the height of the cold war that followed, the combination of enforcement and contract labor reached a peak. In 1954 1,075,168 Mexicans were deported from the U.S. And from 1956 to 1959, between 432,491 and 445,197 braceros were brought in each year. The civil rights movement ended the bracero program, and created an alternative to the deportation regime. Chicano activists of the 1960s - Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chavez, Bert Corona, Dolores Huerta and others - convinced Congress in 1964 to repeal Public Law 78, the law authorizing the bracero program. Farm workers went on strike the year after in Delano, California, and the United Farm Workers was born. They also helped to convince Congress in 1965 to pass immigration legislation that established new pathways for legal immigration - the family preference system. People could reunite their families in the U.S. Migrants received permanent residency visas, allowing them to live normal lives, and enjoy basic human and labor rights. Essentially, a family- and community-oriented system replaced the old labor supply/deportation program. Today Congress, and now the states, are sliding back into those cold war ideas. That slide didn't start in Salt Lake City. For five years Congress has debated, and almost passed, bills that would have done the same thing -- vastly increase immigration enforcement and set up huge new guest worker programs. Some undocumented people might have been able to gain legal status with those bills, but most proposals would have forced them into a temporary status, a la Utah. This combination was defended by Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security under President Bush. "There's an obvious solution to the problem of illegal work," he said, "which is you open the front door and you shut the back door." "Opening the front door" refers to guest worker programs, and "closing the back door" means heavy immigration enforcement. The Council on Foreign Relations proposed the same goals when President Obama took office. "We should reform the legal immigration system," its 2009 report advocated, "so that it operates more efficiently, responds more accurately to labor market needs, and enhances U.S. competitiveness." At the same time, "we should restore the integrity of immigration laws through an enforcement regime that strongly discourages employers and employees from operating outside that legal system." This again couples labor at competitive, or low, wages, with an enforcement regime of raids and firings. Sound like Utah? Congress never passed those "comprehensive immigration reform" bills of the last few years, but that is increasingly irrelevant. The guest worker and enforcement provisions provisions those bills contained are becoming the reality on the ground -- despite Congress' inaction. Today the number of deportations is rising. Thousands of undocumented workers are being fired from their jobs as part of the same enforcement policy. And in California, for instance, where only one grower historically used the federal H2-A guest worker program for farm workers, dozens are now using it today. Utah's bills simply follow the same pattern. Its guest worker bill was written by a dairy farmer. "The root of this discussion is productivity," according to the bill's sponsor, State Rep. Bill Wright. To this conservative Republican, no one, including citizens, have a right to a job. "People think because you're born here ... 'I have a right to that job, I'm going to charge what I want for my labor even if I'm not productive.' Wrong." But those immigrants don't have any rights to jobs either. And they better not try to organize and get more expensive. If they do, or they're just lazy and don't work, he warns, they "need to go." The Utah bills were the product of negotiations, called the Utah Compact, between the Salt Lake Chamber, a statewide business group; and the Salt Lake City Police Department and mayor's office. The Mormon Church of Latter Day Saints and the Catholic Church signed off on it, as did some local immigrant advocates. Other immigrant rights groups, however, warn the laws violate the Constitution. NILC's Marielena Hincapie calls the Utah laws "fundamentally unconstitutional. Taken together, the laws signify an even more sweeping state takeover of federal immigration regulation." NILC supports legislation legalizing undocumented people, and believes it must pass at a Federal level. Some anti-immigrant nativists agree about the bills' unconstitutionality, but for different reasons. Dan Stein, president of the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform, says, "States do not have the constitutional authority to write their own immigration policies." FAIR wants the Federal government to stop virtually all immigration and deport the 12 million undocumented people living in the U.S. It sees the Utah bills as a weak distraction, but supports Arizona's SB 1070, despite the fact it's a state law. One prominent Washington DC immigration think tank, the Immigration Policy Center, also questions the constitutionality of state immigration bills. The IPC, however, supported the labor supply/enforcement tradeoff when it was contained in the Federal bills of the last few years. According to the IPC, "Enforcement strategies must be coupled with reform of our legal system of immigration in order to meet legitimate labor force needs." This declaration, by one of the most powerful voices in Washington, goes beyond questioning the right of states to set immigration policy. It restates the purpose of immigration pollicy itself, tying enforcement (firings and deportations) to labor supply schemes (work visa programs).. This idea, it believes, should guide all immigration reform. The problem of the Utah bills, therefore, is not that they run counter to that purpose. It is simply that they are state bills, not Federal ones. Some immigration reformers, however, bellieve that the purpose iteself is wrong whether it's stated by the IPC, the Council on Foreign Relations, Michael Chertoff or Utah legislators. They argue for a different system, as Chicano and Asian activists did in the 1960s. For them, the purpose of immigration policy should be to give immigrants a way to come to the U.S with social equality and rights. Among these groups are the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations in California and Oaxaca, Derechos Humanos in Tucson, Arizona, the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, and the AFL-CIO's constituency group for Latino workers, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement. They've agreed on the basic principles of what they call the Dignity Campaign. People coming to the U.S. would have access to permanent residence, rather than being forced into guest worker programs. The current wave of deportations and mass firings would be halted, while protections for labor and human rights would be strengthened. To diminish job competition in an era of high unemployment, the Federal government would establish programs guaranteeing a job for anyone wanting to work. And U.S. trade policy in countries like Mexico would stop promoting unemployment and poverty, which boost corporate profits but create the pressure for migration. Some argue that these principles are not politically realistic - that today's Congress would never pass such a bill. But Utah's laws are no closer to enactment on a Federal level than are the Dignity Campaign. In reality, political movement towards immigration reform is deadlocked in Washington DC. No legislation in Salt Lake City will change that. But that's not really the purpose of the Utah bills. The state's legislators want to popularize an immigration policy that has strong corporate support and deep historical roots, in one of the most conservative, Republican states in the country. And they are well on the road toward accomplishing that. For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org See also Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008) Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008 http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002 See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575 See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004) http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html -- __________________________________ David Bacon, Photographs and Stories http://dbacon.igc.org __________________________________ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:laamn-unsubscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:laamn-subscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:laamn-dig...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:laamn-ow...@egroups.com?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:la...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/laamn@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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