Should Labor Defend Undocumented Workers?

by David Bacon

David Bacon

One winter morning in 1996, Border Patrol agents charged into a 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 a needle for drawing the blood. As agents of the migra ran across the street and sidewalk, Sierra jumped up, 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:

I’m going to sing you a story, friends
that will make you cry,
how one day in front of K-Mart
the migra came down on us,sent by the sheriff
of this very same place . . .
We don’t understand why,
we don’t know the reason,
why there is so much
discrimination against us.
In the end we’ll wind up
all the same in the grave.
With this verse I leave you,
I’m tired of singing,
hoping the migra
won’t come after us again,
because in the end, we all have to work.

This was long ago, but since then it’s gotten worse. In Los Angeles, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents (“the migra”) arrived a year ago at Micro Solutions, a circuit board assembly plant in the San Fernando Valley. After the workers were herded into the cafeteria, the immigration agents first told workers who were citizens to go to one side of the room. Then they told the workers who had green cards to go over. Finally, as one worker said, “It just left us.” The remaining workers were put into vans, and taken off to the migra jail. Some women were released to care for their kids, but had to wear ankle bracelets and couldn’t work. How were they supposed to pay rent? Where would they get money to buy food?

On May 12, ICE agents went to the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant. They sent 388 Guatemalan young people to prison for five months. The workers were deported immediately afterwards. 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. Here also women were released to care for their children, but again with the ankle bracelet. Their husbands or brothers were in prison or deported, and they were held up to ostracism in this tiny town of 2000 people.

They say it’s just “illegals” – that makes this politically acceptable. 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’ efforts when they organize and protest those very same conditions. At the big Smithfield plant in North Carolina, where the workers spent 16 years trying to join the union, the company tried to fire 300, 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 their temporary reinstatement. But then the migra conducted two raids, and 21 workers went to prison for using social security numbers that belonged to someone else. The fear the raids created was compared by one organizer to “a neutron bomb.” It took two years for the campaign to recover. The Agriprocessors 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.

Why is this happening?

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. And 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, or working outside of this contract labor system, a crime punished not just by deportation, but by prison. E-Verify, the high-tech immigration database endorsed by both the Bush and Obama administrations, is only the latest idea for enforcing this kind of criminalization. Behind E-Verify, behind the raids, and behind every other kind of workplace immigration enforcement, is the basic criminalization of work. Since 1986, federal law has said that 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 and the people who depend on you. This is a crime too.

How many criminals like this are there? Experts on immigration statistics say 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 “illegals” got together in one place there would be enough people for ten Mexico Cities or fifteen 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 is anyone going home? No one is leaving because there’s no job to go home to. 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.

All over the world people are moving, from poor countries to rich ones. The largest Salvadoran city in the world is Los Angeles. More than half the world’s sailors come from the Philippines. More migrants go from the country to the city in China than cross borders in all the rest of the world combined. So many people from Guatemala are living in the U.S. that one neighborhood in Los Angeles is now called Little San Miguel Acatan. San Miguel was the site of the worst massacre of indigenous people by the U.S.-armed Guatemalan Army in that country’s civil war. Now more San Migueleños live in Los Angeles than in San Miguel.

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, Najuatl. Why are so many people being displaced? NAFTA is just one element of those 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. This was not the creation of a “level playing field,” despite all the propaganda.

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. If miles north.

If you were a miner with a busted union and no job to support your family, where would you go? No wonder they’ve been on strike for two years in Cananea. They’re fighting to stay home – in Mexico. NAFTA, and 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. But that’s why it is so hard for families to survive now. Low wages. Can’t farm any more. Laid off to cut costs. Your factory privatized. Your 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, and 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 on the border have lost their jobs because when the recession began in the U.S., people stopped buying the products made in border factories. Even while they’re working, the wages of workers are so low that it takes half a day’s pay to buy a gallon of milk. Most maquiladora workers 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 they will go? If it was your family, if you had no food or job, what would you do?

And when people protest, the government and the companies bring in the police and the army. 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 President Manuel Zelaya tried to point Honduras in a different direction, just raising the minimum wage so that families could have a better future, not as migrants but in Honduras itself, what happened? The U.S.-trained military, acting for the country’s wealthy elite, kidnapped him in his pajamas, put him on an airplane and flew him out of the country. Now how many people will leave Honduras, because the door to a future at home has been closed?

The lack of human rights is itself a factor contributing to migration, since it makes it more difficult, even impossible, to organize for change.

Migration is not an accident.

The economic system in the U.S. and wealthy countries depends on migration. It depends on the labor provided by a constant flow of migrants. About 12 million people live in the U.S. without immigration documents. Another 26-28 million were born elsewhere, and are citizens or visaholders. 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 and Chicano families who have contributed their labor for hundreds of years. The vast majority of white people – the descendents of European immigrants – are historically workers, too. We all work. We all need to work, to put bread on the table for our families. But without the labor of immigrant people, the system would stop.

Those companies using that labor, however – the grape growers in Delano or the owners of office buildings in Century City, or the giant Blackstone group that owns hotels across the country – do not pay the actual cost of producing the workforce they rely on. Who pays for the needs of workers’ families in the towns and countries from which they come? Who builds the schools in the tiny Oaxacan villages that send their young people into California’s fields? Who builds the homes for the families of the meatpacking workers of Nebraska? Who pays for the doctor when the child of a Salvadoran janitor working in Los Angeles gets sick? 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. For employers, it’s a very cheap system.

Here in the U.S., it’s cheap, too. Workers without papers pay taxes and Social Security but are barred from the benefits. For them there’s no unemployment insurance, no disability pay if they get sick, and no retirement benefits. Workers fought for these social benefits and won them in the New Deal. For people without papers, the New Deal never happened. Even legal residents with green cards can’t get many Social Security benefits. If they take these benefits away from immigrants, it won’t be long before they come after people born here. Why can’t everyone get a Social Security number? After all, we want people to be part of the system. All workers, the undocumented included, get old and injured. Should they 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 witchhunts, firings, and deportations for workers without it.

Wages for most immigrants are so low that people can hardly live on them. There’s a big difference in wages between a day laborer and a longshoreman – $8.25/hour in San Francisco, where a dockworker gets over $25, plus benefits. If employers had to pay low-wage workers, including immigrants, the wages of longshoremen, the lives of working families would improve immeasurably. And it can happen. Before people on the waterfront organized the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, they were like day laborers, hired every morning in a humiliating shapeup where each person competed for a job with dozens of others. Dockworkers were considered bums. Now they own apartment houses. It’s the union that did it.

But if employers had to raise the wages of immigrants to the level of longshoremen, it would cost them a lot. Just the difference between the minimum wage received by 12 million undocumented workers and the average U.S. wage might well be over $80 billion a year. No wonder organizing efforts among immigrant workers meet such fierce opposition. 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 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 simply by working, how will they use the rights that EFCA is designed to protect? Unions and workers need both labor law reform and immigration reform that decriminalize work. Employers and the wealthy love immigrants and hate them. They want and need people’s labor, but they don’t want to pay. And what better way not to pay than to turn workers into criminals?

This is an old story – what they’ve always done with immigrants.

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. But those Filipinos fought to stay. They had to fight, just for the right to have a family.

During the bracero program from 1942 to 1964, growers recruited workers from Mexico who could come only under contract and had to leave the country at the end of the harvest. They said the braceros were legal, but what kind of legality is it where people had to live behind barbed wire in campsand go only where the growers wanted? If braceros went on strike, they were deported. Part of their wages were withheld, supposedly to guarantee their return to Mexico.

Half a century later, they’re still fighting to recover it. The braceros fought to stay. Some just walked out of the labor camps, and kept living and working underground for 30 years, until they could get the amnesty in 1986. Then, in 1964, heroes of the Chicano civil rights 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 Coachella and Delano, and the United Farm Workers was born. That year, in 1965, they 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 the 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 and father, or 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, and not just against those who hate immigrants. 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, D.C., 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 just into the gardens and nurseries of the rich.

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 immigrants criminals and working a crime. No more detention centers, no more ankle bracelets, no more firings and no-match letters, and no more raids. We need equality and rights. All people in our communities should have the same rights and status. Families in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, or the Philippines deserve a decent life, too. They have a right to survive, a right not to 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 use of trade and economic policy that causes poverty and displacement.

Those people who do choose to come here to work deserve the same things that every other worker does. We all have the same rights and the same needs – jobs, schools, medical care, a decent place to live, and the right to walk the streets or drive our cars without fear.

Is this possible?

Major changes in immigration policy are not possible if we don’t fight at the same time for these other basic needs: jobs, education, housing, health care, justice. But these are things that everyone needs, not just immigrants. And if we fight together, we can stop raids and at the same time create a more just society for everyone, immigrant and nonimmigrant alike.

Is this possible?

In 1955, at the height of the Cold War, braceros and farm workers didn’t think change would ever come. Growers had all the power, and farm workers none. Ten years later, we had a new immigration law protecting families, and the bracero program was over. A new union for farm workers was on strike in Delano.

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. Is it possible? Si se puede!

David Bacon is associate editor at Pacific How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants; and a reporter and documentary photographer for 18 years whose work has appeared in such publications as  The Nation, The American Prospect, The Progressive, and the San Francisco Chronicle.  His writings and photographs can be viewed online at his website.

This article originally appeared in the fall issue of Democratic Left, the newsletter of Democratic Socialists of America.