Should We Defend Undocumented Workers?

One winter morning in 1996, Border Patrol agents charged into a Los Angeles street-corner clinic where 40 day laborers had lined up to be tested for AIDS. One worker, Omar Sierra, had just taken his seat and a nurse had inserted the needle for drawing the blood. As agents of the migra ran across the street and sidewalk, Sierra jumped up, tore off the tourniquet, pulled the needle out of his vein and ran. Sierra escaped and made it home. Shaken by his experience and determined never to forget his friends who were deported, he wrote a song:

 
Working, A Criminal Act 

Sierra states an obvious truth about people in the U.S. without immigration papers: "We all have to work." Yet work has become a crime for the undocumented. That Hollywood raid took place 13 years ago, but since then immigration enforcement against workers has grown much more widespread. In the last eight years of the Bush administration in particular, a succession of raids treated undocumented workers as criminals.

A year ago in Los Angeles, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents ("the migra") arrived at Micro Solutions, a circuit board assembly plant in the San Fernando Valley. Unsuspecting workers were herded into the plant's cafeteria. Then immigration agents told those who were citizens to line up on one side of the room and workers who had green cards to go over to the same side. Finally, as one worker said, "it just left us." The remaining workers—those who were neither citizens nor visa holders—were put into vans and taken off to the migra jail. Some women were later released to care for their kids, but had to wear ankle bracelets and couldn't work.

On May 12, 2008, ICE agents raided the Agri-processors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. They sent 388 Guatemalan young people to the National Cattle Congress, a livestock showground in Waterloo, two hours away. In a makeshift courtroom, workers went in chains before a judge who'd helped prosecutors design plea agreements five months before the raid even took place. The 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 sentence, and be held without bail. If they pleaded guilty to misusing a Social Security number, however, they would serve five months and be deported immediately afterwards.

Many of these young people spoke only Mam or Qanjobal, the indigenous language of their regions in Guatemala, so even with Spanish translation they understood little of the process. They had no real options anyway and agreed to the five months in a federal lockup and were then expelled from the country. One of them was a young worker who'd been beaten with a meat hook by a supervisor. Lacking papers, he was afraid to complain. After the raid, he went to prison with the others. The supervisor stayed working on the line.

As in Los Angeles, women released to care for their children couldn't work. They had no way to pay rent or buy food—their husbands or brothers were in prison or deported and they were held up to ostracism in their town. Had it not been for St. Brigida's Catholic Church and local activists, they would have been left hungry and homeless as they waited months for their own hearings and deportations.

A year ago, 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 in ankle bracelets. Workers were incarcerated with no idea of where they were being held and weren't charged or provided with lawyers for days. They slept on concrete floors and went on a hunger strike after a week of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

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 political establishment here is threatened by Mississippi's changing demographics and what the electorate might look like in 20 years." She meant that African Americans were moving back to Mississippi and now make up over 35 percent of the population. In ten years, immigrants will make up another 10 percent. MIRA and the state's legislative black caucus have a plan—combine those votes with unions and progressive whites, and Mississippi can finally get rid of the power structure that's governed in Jackson since post-Civil War Reconstruction.

The Howard Industries raid was intended to drive a wedge into the heart of that political coalition—to stop any possibility for change. ICE says these raids protect U.S. citizens and legal residents against employers who hire undocumented workers in order to lower wages and working conditions. But very often immigration raids are used against workers' who organize and protest against those same conditions. At the Smithfield plant in Tarheel, North Carolina, where workers spent 16 years trying to join the union, the company tried to fire 300 people, including the immigrant union leadership, saying it had discovered that their Social Security numbers were no good. Workers stopped the lines for three days and won temporary reinstatement for those who were fired. But then the migra conducted 2 raids and 21 workers went to prison for using numbers that belonged to someone else. It took two years for the union campaign to recover.

 
Softer Policy? 

Since the end of the Bush administration, immigration authorities say they will follow a softer policy—instead of raids, they'll implement a system for checking the legal status of workers—an electronic database called E-Verify. People working with bad Social Security numbers will be fired. In October, 2,000 young women in the Los Angeles garment factory of American Apparel were fired. In November, 1,200 janitors were fired in Minneapolis.

The Department of Homeland Security says it's auditing the records of 654 companies nationwide to find the names of undocumented workers. Workplace raids, firings, and E-verify are all means to enforce employer sanctions—the part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 that says, for the first time, that employers have to check the immigration status of workers. The law essentially made it a federal crime for an undocumented person to work. Those who call for stricter enforcement say sanctions were never implemented and point out that only a handful of employers were ever fined. But tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of workers have been fired for not having papers. No one keeps track of the number.

ICE says sanctions enforcement targets employers "who are using illegal workers to drive down wages"—those who pay illegal workers substandard wages or force them to endure intolerable working conditions. Curing intolerable conditions by firing or deporting workers doesn't help the workers or change the conditions, however, and that's not who ICE targets anyway. American Apparel pays better than most garment factories, although workers have to work fast and hard to earn that pay. In Minneapolis, the 1,200 fired janitors at ABM belong to SEIU Local 26, got a higher wage than non-union workers, and had to strike and fight to win it.

ICE is still targeting the same set of employers the Bush raids went after—union companies like Howard Industries or plants facing organizing drives like those at Smithfield. The Agri-processors raid came less than a year after workers there tried to organize. At Howard Industries in Mississippi, the migra conducted the biggest raid of all in the middle of union contract negotiations. ICE is punishing undocumented workers who earn too much or who become too visible by demanding higher wages and organizing unions. Despite the notion that sanctions enforcement will punish those employers who exploit immigrants, at American Apparel and ABM employers were rewarded for cooperation by being immunized from prosecution.

What purpose does criminalization serve? In part it serves a huge bureaucracy. With 15,000 agents, ICE has become the second largest enforcement arm of the federal government. Private detention centers have been built across the country, operated by companies like Geo Corporation, formerly called Wackenhut—before that, Pinkertons. Janet Napolitano, DHS secretary, recently announced plans to build two new detention supercenters. About 350,000 people were detained for immigration violations last year and at any one time about 35,000 people were in detention. Nevertheless the driving force behind enforcement is deeper than contracts and jobs.

 
Open the Front Door, Close the Back Door

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said, "There's an obvious solution to the problem of illegal work, which is you open the front door and you shut the back door." Chertoff means by "opening the front door" that he wants people to come to the U.S. as contract workers, recruited by employers using visas that say a worker can only come to work. This is the logic and requirement for every guest worker program, going back to the braceros. To make people come only through this employment-based system, he'll "close the back door," by making walking through the desert across the border—working outside of this contract labor system, a crime punished not just by deportation, but by detention and prison.

People coming as contract labor never become citizens, vote, or hold power. That's very convenient in Mississippi, for instance, where employers need the labor of immigrants, but are afraid of what will happen if they vote. By no coincidence, the state employs more guest workers per capita than any other. Mississippi recently passed a state employer sanctions law, with a $10,000 fine and five years in jail for working without being "authorized."

The purpose of E-Verify, raids, firings, and every other kind of workplace immigration enforcement is the basic criminalization of work. If you have no papers, it is a crime to have a job. So you stand on the street corner, a truck stops to pick up laborers, and you get in. You work all day in the sun until you're so tired you can hardly go back to your room. This is a crime. You do it to send money home to your family. This is a crime too.

Immigrants and their supporters march through the small agricultural town of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania May 1, 2007

How many "criminals" like this are there? The Pew Hispanic Trust says there are 12 million people without papers here in the U.S. But it's not just here. Manu Chao wrote a whole CD of songs about this: Clandestino. He sings about people going from Morocco to Spain, Turkey to Germany, Jamaica to London. There are over 200 million people, all over the world, living outside the countries where they were born. If all the world's "illegal workers" got together in one place there would be enough people for 10 Mexico Cities or 15 Los Angeleses.

If working is a crime, then workers are criminals. And if workers become criminals, proponents of this system say, they'll go home. That's the basic justification for all workplace immigration enforcement. But no one is leaving because there are no jobs to go home to.

 
Why Are So Many People Displaced? 

Since 1994, six million Mexicans have come to live in the U.S. Millions came without visas because it wasn't possible for them to get one. The economic pressures causing displacement and migration are reaching into the most remote towns and villages in Mexico, where people still speak languages that were old when Columbus arrived in the Americas—Mixteco, Zapoteco, Triqui, Chatino, Purepecha, Nahuatl. There is no community in Mexico that does not have family members in the U.S. NAFTA is just one element of the changes that have transformed the Mexican economy in the interests of foreign investors and wealthy Mexican partners. The treaty let huge U.S. companies like Archer Daniels Midland sell corn in Mexico for a price lower than what it cost small farmers in Oaxaca to grow it. Big U.S. companies get huge subsidies from Congress—$2 billion in the last farm bill. But the World Bank and NAFTA's rules dictated that subsidies for Mexican farmers had to end.

In Cananea, a small town in the Sonora Mountains and site of one of the world's largest copper mines, miners have been on strike for two years. Grupo Mexico—a multinational corporation that was virtually given the mine in one of the infamous privatizations of former President Carlos Salinas—wants to cut labor costs by eliminating hundreds of jobs, busting the miners' union, and blacklisting its leaders. When Cananea miners lost the last strike against job cuts in 1998, over 800 were blacklisted and many wound up working in Tucson, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. The current strike has been going on for over two years. Miners are fighting to stay home.

The Mexican government just sent in the army to occupy all the power plants in Mexico City, dissolved the state-owned Power and Light Company (Luz y Fuerza), and fired its 44,000 employees. This act threatens to destroy the union there, one of the country's oldest and most democratic. This is a step towards selling off Mexico's electrical grid to foreign, private investors—just as the telephones, airlines, ports, railroads, and factories have all been privatized over the last two decades. Where will the fired electrical workers go? If they don't win their current battle with the government, many will follow their predecessors north.

NAFTA, and the economic "reforms" promoted by the U.S. and Mexican governments, helped big companies get rich by keeping wages low, by giving them subsidies and letting them push farmers into bankruptcy, by privatizing state enterprises and allowing cuts in the workforce and working conditions. Those are the changes that make it hard for families to survive: low wages, can't farm any more, laid off to cut costs, factory privatized and union busted. Salinas promised Mexicans cheap food if NAFTA was approved and corn imports flooded the country. Now the price of tortillas is three times what it was when the treaty passed. That's great for Grupo Maseca, Mexico's monopoly tortilla producer (Archer Daniels Midland sits on its board). And it's great for Walmart, now Mexico's largest retailer. But if you can't afford to buy those tortillas, then you go where you can buy them.

The advocates of economic liberalization said an economy of maquiladoras and low wages would produce jobs on the border. But today, hundreds of thousands of workers there have lost their jobs. When the recession began in the U.S., people stopped buying the products made in border factories. Even while they're working—with the wages of maquiladora at $4-6/day—it takes half a day's pay to buy a gallon of milk. Most live in cardboard houses on streets with no pavement or sewer system. When they lose their jobs and the border is a few blocks away, where do you think will they go? If you had no job or food for your family, what would you do?

When people protest, the government brings in the police and the army to protect order and investment. People are beaten, as the teachers were in Oaxaca in 2006. After the army filled Oaxaca's jails, how many more people had to leave?

When Honduran President Manuel Zelaya raised the minimum wage to give families a better future—not as migrants, but in Honduras—the U.S.-trained military kidnapped him in his pajamas, put him on an airplane, and flew him out of the country. How many people will leave Honduras because the door to a sustainable future at home has been closed?

Congress and the Administration aren't trying to stop migration. Nothing can, not with trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA and the economic policies they represent. Immigration enforcement does not keep people from crossing the border or prevent them from working. Instead, immigration policy determines the status of people once they're here. It enforces inequality among workers in rights and in economic and social status. That inequality then produces lower wages and higher profits.

 
To Employers, This System Works Well 

About 12 million people live in the U.S. without immigration documents. Another 26-28 million were born elsewhere, and are citizens or visa-holders. That's almost 40 million people. If everyone went home tomorrow, would there be fruit and vegetables on the shelves at Safeway? Who would cut up the cows and pigs in meatpacking plants? Who would clean the offices of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Chicago? Immigrants are not the only workers in our workforce, the only people willing to work, or the only people who need jobs. Our workforce includes African American, Native American, Asian American, and Chicano families who have contributed their labor for hundreds of years. The vast majority of white people—descendents of European immigrants—are workers too. We all work. We all need to work. But without the labor of immigrants, the system would stop.

Those companies using that labor, however, do not pay the actual cost of producing the workforce they rely on. The growers and the meatpackers and the building owners pay for nothing. They don't even pay taxes in the countries from which their workers come and some don't pay taxes here either. So who pays the cost of producing and maintaining their workforce? The workers pay for everything with the money they send home. Structural adjustment policies require countries like Mexico or the Philippines to cut the government budget for social services, so remittances pay for whatever social services those communities now get. For employers, that's a very cheap system.

In the U.S. workers without papers pay taxes and Social Security, but are barred from the benefits. For them, there's no unemployment insurance, disability pay if they get sick, and retirement benefits. For people without papers, the New Deal never happened. Even legal residents with green cards can't get many Social Security benefits.

Why can't everyone get a Social Security number? After all, we want people as part of the system. All workers, the undocumented included, get old and injured. Should people live on dog food after a lifetime of work? The purpose of Social Security is to assure dignity and income to the old and injured. The system should not be misused to determine immigration status and facilitate witch-hunts, firings, and deportations for workers without it.

But immigrants are fighters. In 1992, undocumented drywallers stopped Southern California residential construction for a year from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. They've gone on strike at factories, office buildings, laundries, hotels, and in fields. Those unions today that are growing are often those that have made an alliance with immigrant workers and know that they will fight for better conditions. In fact, the battles fought by immigrants over the last 20 years made the unions of Los Angeles strong today and changed the politics of the city. In city after city, a similar transformation is possible or already underway.

So unions should make a commitment, too. In 1999, the AFL-CIO held an historic convention in Los Angeles and there unions said they would fight to get rid of the law that makes work a crime. Unions said they'd fight to protect the right of all workers to organize, immigrants included. Labor should live up to that promise. Today unions are fighting for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), intended to make it easier and quicker for workers to organize. That would help all workers, immigrants included. But if 12 million people have no right to their jobs at all and are breaking the law by working, how will they use the rights that EFCA is designed to protect?

  
Creating Inequality

Some of the nation's first laws defined who could be enslaved and who couldn't. The "drop of African blood" defined who was legal and who wasn't. When Illinois and Indiana came into the Union, as free states, their first laws said a person of African descent couldn't reside there. That concept of illegality was then applied to other people, for the same purpose. Chinese immigrants were brought from Toishan under contract to work on the railroad and drain the Sacramento/San Joaquin River delta. Then the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act forbade their continued immigration, because under U.S. nationality law, they could never become citizens. At the time the law said the Chinese had no right to be here, there were already thousands of Chinese migrants in California and even Idaho.

In the early 1900s, California's grower-dominated legislature made it a crime for Filipinos to marry women who were not Filipinas. At the same time, immigration of women from the Philippines to the mainland was very difficult. For the Filipino farm workers of the 1930s and 40s and 50s, it was virtually a crime to have a family. Many men stayed single until their 50s or 60s, living in labor camps, moving and working wherever the growers needed their labor.

During the bracero program from 1942 to 1964, growers recruited workers from Mexico, who could only come under contract and had to leave the country at the end of the harvest. They called the braceros legal, but what kind of legality has people living behind barbed wire in camps, traveling and working only where the growers wanted? If braceros went on strike, they were deported. Part of their wages was withheld, supposedly to guarantee their return to Mexico. Half a century later they're still fighting to recover the lost money. But everyone fought to stay. The Chinese endured the burning of Chinatowns in Salinas and San Francisco. Filipinos had to fight just for the right to have a family. Many braceros walked out of the labor camps and kept living and working underground for 30 years, until they could get legal status from the amnesty of 1986.

Today, there is a corporate agenda on migration promoted by powerful voices in Washington, DC, like the Council on Foreign Relations and the employers' lobby the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (think Wal-Mart, Marriott, and Tyson Foods). They propose managing the flow of migration with guest worker programs and increased penalties against those who try to work outside this system. Some of their proposals also contain a truncated legalization for the undocumented, but one that would disqualify most people or have them wait for years for visas, while removing employer liability for the undocumented workers they've already hired.

But, Washington lobbyists ask, wouldn't guest worker programs be preferable to what we have now? The Southern Poverty Law Center's report, "Close to Slavery," documents that today's braceros are routinely cheated of wages and overtime. Workers recruited from India to work in a Mississippi shipyard paid $15,000-20,000 for each visa. The company cut their promised wages and fired their leader, Joseph Jacobs, when workers protested. If workers do protest, they're put on a blacklist. The Department of Labor under Bush never decertified a guest worker contractor for labor violations and said the blacklist was legal. When Rafael Santiago was sent by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee to Monterrey to monitor hiring by the North Carolina Growers Association, to eliminate the blacklist and end contractor corruption, his office was broken into, he was tied up, tortured, and killed. No employer hires guest workers in order to pay more. They hire them to keep wages low.

 
Undoing Inquality

In 1964, heroes of the Chicano movement like Bert Corona, Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chavez, and Dolores Huerta forced Congress to end the bracero program. The next year, Mexicans and Filipinos went out on strike in the fields of Coachella and Delano and the United Farm Workers was born.

Thousands march in San Francisco in 2006, protesting bills in the U.S. Congress which would criminalize immigrant status and limit their rights

In 1965, those leaders, together with many others, went back to Congress. Give us a law, they said, that doesn't make workers into braceros or criminals behind barbed wire into slaves for growers. Give us a law that says our families are what's important, our communities. That was how we won the family preference system. That's why, once you have a green card, you can petition for your mother, father, and your children to join you in the U.S. We didn't have that before. The civil rights movement won that law.

That fight is not over. In fact, we have to fight harder now than ever. But we don't have to assume that fear is hardwired into us or that we can't overcome it. Mainstream newspapers said people applauded in the Laurel plant when the immigrants were arrested and taken out in handcuffs. But after the arrests, Black workers came out of the gate and embraced the immigrant women sitting outside in their ankle bracelets, demanding their unpaid wages. African American women offered to bring food to Mexican mothers, and supported their demand for back wages.

At Smithfield in North Carolina, 2 immigration raids and 300 firings scared workers so badly that their union drive stopped. But then Mexicans and African Americans together brought the union in. They found a common cause by saying to each other that they all needed better wages and conditions, that they all had a right to work, and that the union would fight for the job of anyone, immigrant or native-born.

Immigrants, including the undocumented, have gone on strike at factories, office buildings, laundries, hotels, and in fields. Some unions today are growing because they know immigrant workers will fight for better wages and conditions. The battles fought by immigrants over the last 20 years are helping to create political power in cities like Los Angeles.

 
So What Do We Want?

First, we want legalization, giving 12 million people residence rights and green cards so they can live like normal human beings. We do not want immigration used as a cheap labor supply system, with workers paying off recruiters and, once here, frightened that they'll be deported if they lose their jobs.

We need to get rid of the laws that make working a crime and immigrants criminals. No more detention centers, no more ankle bracelets, no more firings and no-match letters, and no more raids. All people in our communities should have the same rights and status.

We have to make sure that those who say they advocate for immigrants aren't really advocating for low wages. That the decision-makers of Washington won't plunge families in Mexico, El Salvador, or Colombia into poverty, to force a new generation of workers to leave home and go through the doors of furniture factories and laundries, office buildings, and packing plants, onto construction sites or into the gardens and nurseries of the rich.

Families have a right to survive, a right to not migrate. To make that right a reality, they need jobs and productive farms, good schools, and health care. Our government must stop negotiating trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA—and instead prohibit the trade and economic policy that causes poverty and displacement.

In 1955, at the height of the cold war, braceros and farm workers didn't think change would ever come. Ten years later we had a new immigration law protecting families and the bracero program was over. We can have an immigration system that respects human rights. We can stop deportations. We can win security for working families on both sides of our borders. Yes, it's possible. Si se puede.

Z

David Bacon is a freelance photographer and author of Illegal People, Communities Without Borders, and The Children of NAFTA. Photos in this piece are by Bacon, whose website, dbacon.igc.org, contains more stories and photos.