WHY IMMIGRANT WORKERS WILL FILL THE STREETS THIS MAY DAY
By David Bacon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
http://www.truthout.org/
OAKLAND, CA (4/4/09) -- In a little less than a month, hundreds
of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people will fill the streets
in city after city, town after town, across the US. This year May Day
marches of immigrant workers will make an important demand on the
Obama administration: End the draconian enforcement policies of the
Bush administration. Establish a new immigration policy based on human
rights and recognition of the crucial economic and social
contributions of immigrants to US society.
This year's marches will continue the recovery in the US of the
celebration of May Day, the day that celebrates worldwide the
contributions of working people. That recovery started on May 1, 2006,
when over a million people filled the streets of Los Angeles, with
hundreds of thousands more in Chicago, New York and cities and towns
throughout the United States. Again on May Day in 2007 and 2008,
immigrants and their supporters demonstrated and marched, from coast
to coast.
One sign found in almost every march said it all: "We are Workers,
not Criminals!" The sign stated an obvious truth. Millions of people
have come to the United States to work, not to break its laws. Some
have come with visas, and others without them. But they are all
contributors to the society they've found here.
The protests are a result of years of organizing, the legacy of
Bert Corona, immigrant rights pioneer and founder of many national
Latino organizations. He trained thousands of immigrant activists,
taught the value of political independence, and believed that
immigrants themselves must conduct a struggle for their rights. Most
of the leaders of the radical wing of today's immigrant rights
movement were his students.
In part, the May Day protests respond to a wave of draconian
measures that have criminalized immigration status and work itself for
undocumented people. In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act
made it a crime, for the first time in US history, to hire people
without papers. Defenders argued that if people could not legally work
they would leave. Life was not so simple.
Undocumented people are part of the communities they live in. They
cannot simply go, nor should they. They seek the same goals of
equality and opportunity that working people in the US have
historically fought for. In addition, for most immigrants there are
no jobs to return to in the countries from which they've come. After
Congress passed The North American Free Trade Agreement, six million
displaced Mexicans came to the US as a result of the massive
displacement the treaty caused. Free trade and free market policies
have similarly displaced millions more in poor countries around the
world.
Instead of recognizing this reality, the US government has
attempted to make holding a job a criminal act. Some states and local
communities, seeing a green light from the Department of Homeland
Security, have passed measures that go even further. Mississippi
passed a bill making it a felony for an undocumented worker to hold a
job, with jail time of 1-10 years, fines of up to $10,000, and no bail
for anyone arrested. Employers get immunity.
Last summer, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff proposed a
rule requiring employers to fire any worker who couldn't correct a
mismatch between the Social Security number given to their employer
and the SSA database. The regulation assumes those workers have no
valid immigration visa, and therefore no valid Social Security number.
With 12 million people living in the US without legal immigration
status, the regulation would have led to massive firings, bringing
many industries and businesses to a halt. Citizens and legal visa
holders would have been swept up as well, since the Social Security
database is often inaccurate. While the courts enjoined this
particular regulation, the idea of using Social Security numbers to
identify and fire millions of workers is still very much alive in
Washington, DC.
Under Chertoff, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement conducted sweeping workplace raids, arresting and
deporting thousands of workers. Many were charged with an additional
crime - identity theft - because they used a Social Security number
belonging to someone else to get a job. Yet workers using those
numbers actually deposit money into Social Security funds, and will
never collect benefits their contributions paid for. The new Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says the big raids need to be
reexamined, but she continues to support measures to drive
undocumented workers from their jobs, and to keep employers from
hiring them.
During her term as governor, the Arizona legislature passed a
law requiring employers to verify the immigration status of every
worker through a federal database called E-Verify, even more full of
errors than Social Security. They must fire workers whose names get
flagged. This is now becoming the model for Federal enforcement.
Many of these punitive measures surfaced in proposals for
"comprehensive immigration reform" that were debated in Congress in
2006 and 2007. The comprehensive bills combined criminalization of
work for the undocumented with huge guest worker programs. While those
proposals failed in Congress, the Bush administration implemented some
of their most draconian provisions by administrative action. Many
fear that new proposals for immigration reform being formulated by
Congress and the administration will continue these efforts to
criminalize work.
In reality, the labor of 12 million undocumented workers is
indispensable to the economy, just as is the labor of 26 million
people with visas, and the many millions of workers who were born in
the U.S. The wealth created by undocumented workers is never called
illegal. No one dreams of taking that wealth from the employers who
profited from it. Yet the people who produce this wealth are called
exactly that - illegal.
All workers need jobs and a way to support their families, not
just some. And in a country with schools behind the rest of the
industrialized world, with bridges that fall into rivers and people
living in tent cities for lack of housing, there is clearly no
shortage of work to be done. If the trillion dollars showered on
banks were used instead to put people to work, there would be plenty
of jobs and a better quality of life for everyone.
Nativo Lopez, president of the Mexican American Political
Association and the Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, says,
"Washington legislators and lobbyists fear a new civil rights movement
in the streets, because it rejects their compromises and makes demands
that go beyond what they have defined as 'politically possible.'"
The price of trying to push people out of the US who've come here for
survival is increased vulnerability for undocumented workers, which
ultimately results in cheaper labor and fewer rights for everyone.
Under Bush, that was the government's goal -- cheap labor for large
employers, enforced by deportations, firings and guest worker
programs. This is what millions of people want to change. And the
Obama administration was elected because it promised "change we can
believe in."
In past May Day marches many participants have put forward an
alternative set of demands, which includes tying legalization for 12
million undocumented people in the US with jobs programs for
communities with high unemployment. All workers need the right to
organize to raise wages and gain workplace rights, including the 12
million people for whom work is a crime. More green cards, especially
visas based on family reunification, would enable people to cross the
border legally, instead of dying in the desert. Ending guest worker
programs would help stop the use of our immigration system as a supply
of cheap labor for employers. And on the border, communities want
human rights, not more guns, walls, soldiers and prisons for
immigrants.
This May Day, immigrants will again send this powerful message.
Their marches have already rescued from obscurity our own holiday,
which began in the struggle for the eight-hour day in Chicago over a
century ago. Today they are giving May Day a new meaning, putting
forward ideas that will not only benefit immigrant communities, but
all working families.
For more articles and images on immigration, see
http://dbacon.igc.org/
Just out from Beacon Press:
Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes
Immigrants
http://www.beacon.org/
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border
(University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/
--
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
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Student/Farmworker Alliance
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http://sfalliance.org
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http://allianceforfairfood.org
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