David Bacon, Oakland, California
If you listen to President George Bush, the only way Mexicans can avoid the deadly and illegal trip across the US border is to come as "guest" workers — temporary contract labourers for US industry and agriculture. The 8-14 million immigrants already living in the US without visas, he says, must also become guest workers if they want to get legal documents.
While the president's proposal is the most extreme of those before Congress (and hasn't yet been formally introduced), all the other bills that would reform US immigration law also have some temporary contract worker proposal attached to them. All except one.
In March, Houston Congress member Sheila Jackson Lee introduced the most comprehensive immigration reform proposal so far, HR 4885. Jackson Lee proposes to legalise undocumented people who have: lived five years in the US; have some understanding of English and US culture; and have no criminal record. "These are hardworking, taxpaying individuals", she said. "My system would give them permanent legal residency".
Bush proposes that immigrants come for three or six years, and then leave. "But people are human", Jackson Lee explained. "They might have married, invested or tried to buy a house. It's very difficult to imagine that a person with a three-year pass would voluntarily leave, particularly if they faced an oppressive situation where they came from."
The Jackson Lee bill is unique for another reason. Its 21 co-sponsors are members of the Congressional Black Caucus. This is the first time the caucus has taken a pro-active approach to immigration.
Jackson Lee's bill is not the only effort to find common ground between African Americans and immigrants. In the current hotel negotiations, the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) has proposed connecting protection for the rights of immigrant workers with an effort to overcome past hiring discrimination.
Cleaners fight back
In the early 1980s, Los Angeles cleaning contractors dumped their mostly African-American and white workers, and hired immigrants, tearing up union contracts and lowering wages. Hotels cut labour costs the same way. Low-wage factory jobs multiplied, while union jobs in auto, steel, rubber and aerospace plants vanished. To the owners of the new sweatshops, displaced workers were anathema — too used to high wages, too likely to form unions, just plain too old, and often, too Black.
Sometimes employers miscalculated. LA's new immigrant cleaners also proved to be pro-union, even willing to get beaten and fired in the long drive to push wages back up. New hotel and factory workers often did the same. But in South Central, Black unemployment stayed high.
Today, this economic history shapes the political terrain of cities like Los Angeles. Black workers make up only 6.4% of the present LA hotel workforce. The union has asked companies to commit to a hiring ombudsman and a Diversity in the Workplace Taskforce, to reach out to African-American communities that need jobs, and eliminate any hiring barriers. At the same time, the union has proposed new protections for the job rights of the immigrants who make up a majority of the hotel industry workforce.
The union proposal strengthens an important ruling won four years ago by HERE in San Francisco, when an arbitrator held that immigrant workers couldn't be fired just because their Social Security numbers were in question. Last year the union organized the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, a national demonstration for immigration reform joining immigrants with Black veterans of the original 1960s freedom rides.
Both the Hotel Employees and Jackson Lee envision a new civil rights movement, geared to a changed world of globalisation. The key is prohibiting discrimination — against immigrants because of their status and vulnerability, and against displaced workers, by enforcing job creation and affirmative action as national policy. Both proposals also share the same assumption that unions and high wages are the best protection against job competition.
Jackson Lee is careful to note that she doesn't want her bill viewed as just an African-American proposal, but her voice nevertheless carries a note of pride in referring to her cosponsors as "the conscience of America, the conscience of the Congress".
Today a growing number of labour, immigrant rights and Black political activists recognize the similarity between the denial of civil rights to African Americans and the second-class status of immigrants in the US.
After pointing out that she would never be in Congress without laws to remedy discrimination, Jackson Lee cautions, "the rights of minorities in this country are still a work in progress. Nevertheless, someone recognised that the laws of America were broken as they related to African Americans — that we had to fix them. Now we have to fix other laws to end discrimination against immigrants."
The Jackson Lee bill therefore prohibits discrimination based on immigration status, and makes it an unfair labour practice for an employer to threaten workers with deportation if they invoke their labour rights or worker protection laws. The bill would also require the Secretary of Labor to conduct a national workplace survey, to determine the extent of the exploitation of undocumented workers.
Jackson Lee opposes temporary worker programs because she believes they inevitably result in second-class status, in which workers can't enforce labour rights or use social benefits. She says it also has a high social cost. "Who pays for their housing and healthcare?" she asks. "Do they pay into Social Security, or are they denied benefits? What rights do they really have?"
Competing for jobs?
The social cost of guest worker programs can also include the impact on the jobs and wages of other workers. Here Jackson Lee is stepping off into a political mine field, because of a widely held perception that Blacks and immigrants, especially Latinos, compete for jobs. "Certainly you're made to believe that", she says, "that one group hinders the other. That's absolutely wrong, and I believe in fighting against it."
The heart of her bill makes a direct connection between immigration and jobs. The money paid in application fees would fund a job creation and training program for unemployed workers.
Creating jobs for the country's 9.4 million unemployed would require more resources than this. But the bill recognises that the issues of jobs and immigration don't have to pit immigrants and native-born against each other. Instead they can unite in a common pursuit of jobs, legal status and workplace rights. And it recognises that until immigrant workers have legal status and the security to fight for better conditions and wages, all low-wage workers will be harmed.
Black unemployment nationally has grown at a catastrophic rate — from 10.8% to 11.8% in May alone. Nearly half (172,000) of the 360,000 people who lost their jobs in June were African Americans, although they're just 11% of the workforce. In New York City, only 51.8% of Black men aged between 16 and 65 had jobs in 2003, according to the Bureau of Labor. For Latinos, it was 65.7%, and for whites 75.7%. June's overall unemployment rate in 2003 was 6.4%.
Very little of the rise in African American unemployment is a result of direct displacement by immigrants. It's caused overwhelmingly by the decline in manufacturing and cuts in public employment, and the refusal of new industries to use workers used to union membership and reasonable conditions (as in the cleaners' case).
Today, corporations in those same industries argue they need workers to fill future labour shortages, and promote temporary workers as the answer. But giving employers the ability to bring in thousands of contract labourers allows them to sharpen job competition, defeating unionising workers attempts to raise wages or challenging past patterns of discrimination.
Bush takes his cue from large employer associations, who have been pushing guest worker programs for years. Guest worker programs have a long record of illegally low wages, hiring blacklists, and dangerous working conditions. Employers particularly want to eliminate the requirement that they hire unemployed workers before bringing in contract labour.
Immigration unstoppable
Immigration is not a conspiracy by employers to drive wages down. The movement of people from developing countries to rich industrial ones is not only happening everywhere, it is unstoppable. Poverty and war force people to leave their homes. The deaths every year of hundreds of people trying to cross the US/Mexico border is bitter testimony to the price paid by families migrating north, desperate to survive.
Immigration law can't and doesn't stop people from coming, but it can and does make people unequal here. Undocumented immigrants can't drive a car, or collect unemployment or Social Security. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 made the act of working illegal. When working becomes a crime, workers must risk a lot to protest low wages and bad treatment, join unions, and assert their rights.
Jackson Lee also recognises that US foreign and trade policy often exert great pressures on people to migrate, by spreading poverty and war. The country should welcome the immigrants who continue to arrive, while attacking the poverty and oppression that uproot people, she concludes: "We would do better to build the economies of countries like Mexico, so people can live their own dream in their own nation. If we don't help build the economy of the nations who surround us, we will continue to have people fleeing for both economic reasons and because they're being persecuted."
Bill Fletcher, the president of TransAfrica Forum says that US unions haven't taken this problem seriously enough, although he adds that they have done a great deal, now being part of a large national pro-legalisation coalition. Unions even adopted the language of the 1960s civil rights movement to promote last year's Immigrant Workers' Freedom Ride to Washington DC, and today have lined up behind an immigration reform proposal that contains both a legalisation and a temporary worker program, which its proponents argue makes passage more likely in a Republican-controlled Congress.
Nevertheless, there's a disconnect, Fletcher asserts, between advocacy for immigrants and looking at the role US policy plays in creating the poverty which makes migration necessary. "There's very little understanding in the labor movement about why people migrate. We don't look at the role of US foreign policy in particular as an essential cause — the way the war in Central America forced the migration of Salvadorans, or the Vietnam War the migration of people from Southeast Asia. When we don't speak out on foreign policy, we don't anticipate the human cost."
While the Jackson Lee bill doesn't address foreign or trade policy directly, it does seek to correct some of the inequities created by an immigration policy that often is used as an instrument of political reward or punishment. The Congresswoman points to the huge backlog of applicants waiting for visas in Third World countries, while many European countries can't even fill their quotas. For Europeans, whose standard of living is often higher than that in the US, there's very little pressure to use up their visa allotment. But from Latin America to Africa, the poverty created by war and neoliberal economic policies produces far more applicants than there are visas available. Jackson Lee's approach is a diversity proposal that would take those differences into account.
She further seeks to help refugees from two countries, Liberia and Haiti, whose refugee status is imperiled or denied, and whose cause the Black Caucus has championed in the past. Liberians were allowed to come as refugees a decade ago as their country was engulfed in civil war, and her bill seeks to give them permanent rather than temporary refuge. Haitians are victim of a "system driven by politics," according to Fletcher. A double standard allows Cubans to become legal residents as soon as they step onto US soil, while the Coast Guard picks up desperate refugees from Haiti, fleeing repression in tiny boats, before they get to the Florida beach. If they somehow reach it, they're held behind barbed wire as illegal refugees. "There is an inequity between those fleeing from one island and those fleeing another," the Congresswoman comments dryly.
Jackson Lee is the granddaughter of Jamaican immigrants, and sees in their effort to build a home in the US the same daily struggle carried on by the many immigrants in her own Houston district. But unlike her grandparents, today's immigrants face a system she condemns as broken, and often pay a painful price. She cites especially post-9/11 discrimination against immigrants from the Middle East.
"Families are torn apart," Jackson Lee laments bitterly, "and we're not adding to our security, but only to the misery of human beings who want to give their best to this country. We have a system that's not helping anyone. It's not helping to build the economy - it's helping to tear it down. For immigrants here we need an orderly system that allows them to do their jobs and build the American economy, and US workers to have jobs and do likewise."
From Green Left Weekly, September 29, 2004.
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