By David Bacon
BERKELEY, California — There is an immigration crisis in the United States. But it is not caused by uncontrolled borders or too many immigrants, the stereotyped images used to inflame anti-immigrant hysteria. It is the return of exploitative sweatshop conditions in the workplace reminiscent of a century ago.
The enforcement of US immigration law has become a key weapon in the proliferation of those conditions, undermining the ability of immigrant workers to fight for better pay and treatment, and the effectiveness of unions which try to help them.
The slide backwards got a big push with the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which made employer sanctions part of federal law. Under the employer sanctions, employers are required to request documents from workers to verify their legal right to reside in the US, and record those documents on I-9 forms.
Employer sanctions have had a strong economic impact — decreasing the wages of undocumented labour and increasing profit rates in industries dependent on it.
Undocumented workers have been a permanent part of the US population for decades. According to the Urban Institute, there were 2.5 to 3.5 million undocumented workers in 1980, 3 to 5 million in 1986 and 2.7 to 3.7 million in 1992 — a relatively stable 1% of the total population.
The National Immigration Forum calculates that undocumented immigrants pay about $7 billion in taxes each year, subsidising funds like Social Security and unemployment insurance from which they cannot collect benefits.
A University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) study found that the 1.4 million undocumented workers (34% of the total in the US) contribute approximately 7% of California's $900 billion gross economic product, or $63 billion. The contribution by each undocumented immigrant (including children, the unemployed, the sick and the elderly) is therefore about $45,000.
The labour of undocumented workers pumps tens of billions of dollars into the state's economy, but the workers themselves receive only a small percentage of it. Almost all receive wages near, and sometimes below, the legal minimum of $5.75 per hour ($11,960 a year).
That difference is a source of extra profit for those industries which employ largely undocumented workers — agriculture and food processing, land development (including the residential construction and building services industries), tourism (including the hotel and restaurant industries), garment production and light manufacturing, transportation, retail trade, health-care and domestic services.
When that workforce is made more vulnerable by immigration legislation, it also becomes cheaper for employers.
Union busting
Over the last decade, undocumented workers have been the backbone of many strikes and organising drives. Employers have used their vulnerability, however, in an effort to stop growing support for unions.
Portrait of Injustice, a report issued last week by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights on the impact of immigration raids by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Raids Task Force, documents how immigration enforcement has been used to deny immigrants their workplace rights.
During the current joint organising drive by the Teamsters Union and the United Farm Workers in Washington state's apple industry, for example, the Stemilt Fruit Company told workers that "there hasn't been a union here yet, and the INS hasn't done any raids. But with a union, the INS is going to be around." Using those threats, the company was able to defeat the union in a ballot on representation.
Since the 1986 act, many employers have used the I-9 process as a mechanism for firing pro-union workers.
In 1990, Shine Building Maintenance in Silicon Valley faced an organising drive by its immigrant janitors. The company told its workers they had to provide new documentation verifying their legal status. When workers couldn't produce it, they were terminated. The I-9 check provided a way to eliminate a pro-union workforce, without violating prohibitions against terminations for union activity.
In San Leandro in 1997, Mediacopy, a video reproduction company, used threats to verify workers' immigration status as a means to terrorize them before a union election, and to reduce the number of eligible voters. In December 1996, immigration agents went through the company's I-9 forms to find the names of undocumented workers. A major raid followed in January, in which 99 people were deported.
Workers nevertheless signed union cards at the plant, and filed for an election. A month before the voting, the company announced it had received an INS request for the re-verification of the documents of another 166 people. Many workers then simply disappeared. Those who remained were convinced that another raid was imminent. The union lost the election.
The ability of an employer to inform on its workforce and use the INS to remove pro-union workers was legally reinforced last year in the Montero case in New York State.
In 1992, workers at STC Knitting in Long Island City, New York, began an organising drive with the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (now UNITE). Just before the representation ballot, the company's attorney wrote to the INS telling the agency that undocumented workers were employed in the sweatshop.
The INS conducted an I-9 check and arrested 10 workers, including Gloria Montero, an active union committee member. When she appealed the way in which immigration enforcement was used as a tool by the employer to terrorize workers and remove union supporters, a federal court ruled that it was a legal application of employer sanctions.
Reducing wages
Even in the absence of direct union organising, the pressure of immigration raids keeps wages low among some of the most vulnerable sections of the workforce.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, such raids have focused on fast-food workers, car wash workers, and day labourers seeking jobs on the street corner. Enforcing low wages among these workers undermines wages generally in the service, fast food and construction industries.
The enforcement of employer sanctions has also undermined the ability of workers to protest the violation of fair labour standards. In 1992, the INS signed a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Labor. It requires department inspectors to verify I-9 forms when they are called in by workers over unpaid overtime and other wage and hour violations.
In Los Angeles (LA), the INS initiated a series of raids in garment sweatshops, called Operation Buttonhole, in response to information from department inspectors. In one raid, on P.K. Fashions, garment worker Miguel Angel Garcia Serrano was so frightened he jumped out of an eight-story window.
"Workers in the garment industry won't complain about workplace violations if it gets out that the department and the INS are working together", says UNITE organiser Cristina Vasquez. "Manufacturers and contractors will use it to scare and threaten workers." A department survey released this summer shows that less than 40% of the licensed garment factories in southern California comply with labour and employment laws.
Similar raids also followed a 1998 campaign by the Korean Immigrant Workers Association to enforce wage and hour laws in restaurants in LA's Korean community. Just weeks after Department of Labor inspectors were called in over wage and hour violations, the INS began a wave of I-9 checks and deportations.
Employer sanctions also increase the risk for union activity in other ways. An undocumented worker considering whether to organise a union has to take into account the possibility of being fired, as do other workers. But sanctions make finding another job harder and riskier. The period of unemployment is likely to be longer.
Because sanctions also disqualify a fired worker from unemployment benefits, food stamps or other sources of income, a fired worker is forced to take whatever job is available, at whatever wage. And under National Labor Relations Board rulings, if an employer shows that a worker fired for union activity is undocumented, it is not obliged to rehire her or him.
When it becomes harder and riskier for workers to make demands for social services, or to assert their rights at work or in the community, the price of their labour drops.
Immigrant wages are getting worse. According to UCLA professor Goetz Wolff, in women's apparel in LA, the average hourly wage fell from $6.37 to $5.62 between 1988 and 1993. Some 120,000 people work in LA's garment sweatshops, almost all immigrants, mostly undocumented.
Despite these obstacles, immigrant workers, including the undocumented, have been the backbone of labour's resurgence in California, in a multitude of strikes and organising drives. Often, those union efforts have involved unique tactics to deal with the problem of immigration status.
Defiance
In the year-long strike by southern Californian drywallers in 1992, mostly Mexican immigrants were able to stop all home construction from the Mexican border to Santa Barbara. They defied the police and the border patrol, blockading freeways when their car-caravans were rousted as they travelled to construction sites.
Mass mobilisations and militant tactics also marked the campaigns by Justice for Janitors in Century City, Silicon Valley and Sacramento. In smaller local struggles, unions like Warehouse Local 6 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have established a presence in the immigrant community through the use of strikes and direct action, and a willingness to take on the problem of immigration.
The history of the union struggles of immigrant workers in California is largely one of success. According to veteran union organiser Joel Ochoa, "the immigrant community is looking for ties with labour. People are coming here from Mexico and all over Latin America, with a tradition and culture that gives them a rich repertoire of tactics for fighting the companies."
Many Californian unions have realised that they will grow, and become more effective, as immigrant workers organise and contribute their traditions to the broader labour movement. Increasingly, they are calling for an end to the use of immigration law as a weapon of employers.
Repealing employer sanctions is a position now shared by the Service Employees International Union, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Technical Employees, the United Electrical Workers and the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO.