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Congress Debates ‘Reform’ Bill on Immigrant Rights
by James Frickey / June 2006 issue Socialist Action
Andrew Stern, president of the
1.7-million-member Service Employees International Union, once likened the
leadership of a mass movement to the crew on a sailboat. What matters is
the wind in the sails, he said, not the fight over who steers.
The wind behind the movement for immigrant
rights had reached gale-force by May Day 2006. Millions of immigrant
workers and students took to the streets and dealt the first direct blow to
U.S. capital in recent memory. But the hand on the tiller—belonging to a
coalition of unions, churches and nonprofit advocacy groups—has steered the
boat into the shoals of bipartisan immigration “reform” and collaboration
with capitalists in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Stern’s union of mostly immigrant workers
finds itself in the perverse position of supporting a bill to turn back the
clock on immigrant rights more than 40 years.
He is joined in this questionable endeavor by the
Laborers' International Union of North America and UNITE-HERE, both unions in
industries that employ large numbers of undocumented workers.
The Senate bill, known as Hagel-Martinez,
arose in the terrifying shadow of a House of Representatives bill that
would have sealed the Mexican border and deported 12 million people. The
House measure, the Sensenbrenner Bill, was an election-year appeal by
provincial politicians to brewing nativist resentment of immigrants, fear
of job loss and wage depression, and the argument that the local tax base
in some places cannot support the current rate of undocumented immigration.
Hagel-Martinez has a lot in common with
Sensenbrenner, but differs in two very important ways: first, it does not
criminalize legal residents who interact with immigrants, such as churches,
social workers, union organizers, etc; second, it preserves the supply of
undocumented labor to U.S. employers.
A compromise between the Senate and House
versions is in the works. The relationship of class forces overwhelmingly
favors the Senate bill, which is a wish list of the construction,
manufacturing, agricultural, and service industries. It has key political
support from major unions and immigrant advocacy groups and is unlikely to
undergo major alterations from nativist interest.
Witness the editorial in The New York Times
one day after passage of the Senate bill, admonishing Republican House
Speaker Dennis Hastert for “czarist excess” of the past and foretelling
certain doom if Republican hardliners upset the delicate bipartisan
compromise. In similar fashion the Chicago Tribune, organ of the
$6-billion-a-year Tribune Company declared: “The Senate bill represents our
best chance yet to finally set things right.”
To U.S. workers, the Senate bill represents
employers using immigrant labor to bludgeon their living standards, union
rights, and civil liberties. The all-important flow of low-wage workers to
U.S. employers would assume the form of a guest-worker program cruelly
conceived to tie the legal status of immigrants to exclusive employment
with a single company.
Job loss would thus become inextricably
bound up with immediate deportation, and whole industries would be
positioned to artificially depress the wage rates of immigrant workers—and
non-immigrants as well, by implication.
“It would be little more than an
opportunity for employers to turn hundreds of thousands of permanent jobs
in the United States into temporary jobs filled by exploitable immigrants
who are paid low wages and receive few if any benefits,” wrote AFL-CIO
President John Sweeney in The Huffington Post.
And what of basic rights on the job? As it
is, employers routinely flout wage-and-hour laws for undocumented workers.
At least now the workers can pursue the matter in court without fear of
deportation. What recourse will they have under the guest-worker program?
And how will their complaints about safety
be received by an employer who functions as their legal caretaker? The
Senate bill proposes that the process for filing complaints be modeled on
the National Labor Relations Board—which is another way of saying the
employers will be completely unencumbered. Workers who desert their
assigned employer would have to endure a lawless underground labor market
as fugitives ineligible for social services and stripped of the personal
mobility that enables them to bargain for better wages.
Enforcement language in the Senate
bill—adopting the tone and feel of a counter-insurgency program—grants full
authority to the Department of Homeland Security. Border surveillance is
particularly Orwellian with its “virtual” border fence, aerial drones, and
tethered aerostat radar courtesy of the Defense Department. Border agents
would increase by 11,000. Triple-layered border fences along 370 miles of
border and an additional 500 miles of vehicle barriers will relegate most
border-crossers to the most barren and deadly stretches of desert.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the
enforcement arm of Homeland Secruity—known by its apt moniker ICE—is
training and equipping teams of agents to carry out deportation in the
interior. The roundups of Arab and Muslim-Americans in the wake of 9/11
accelerated the integration of ICE with state and local police, whose
advanced stage has been on display in a rash of swift and sudden
deportations since the May Day protests.
Halliburton Corporation has already
received a contract to double the detention capacity in the border region.
For good measure, a biometric identification card is to be developed for
guest workers, and harsh penalties for document falsification are part of
the Senate bill.
Such an ambitiously repressive plan would necessitate
inflaming divisions in the working-class—which is likely to mean endless
incitement of the native-born worker’s sense of self-entitlement—and
stratify undocumented workers based on length of stay in the U.S.
The Senate bill creates three categories of undocumented
workers: those in the U.S. for less than two years, who face immediate
deportation; those here less than five years, who must leave the country
but may apply to reenter through a currently unknown process; and those
here more than five years, who may apply for guest-worker status.
Why would labor unions and advocates
support such a barbaric policy toward immigrant workers? Considering that union
attempts to organize guest workers in the 1940s and ’50s were unqualified
failures, union support is particularly difficult to understand.
Hagel-Martinez does protect the wage rate in union shops by requiring
employers to pay guest workers according to the scale outlined in the
collective bargaining agreement.
In the long-term, however, the guest-worker
program is likely to undermine the wage and benefit standards of whole
industries. The answer may lie in the standard practice of SEIU and
UNITE-HERE to enlist politicians as brokers of “conduct agreements” with
employers in which they pledge to remain neutral during union organizing
drives in their workforce.
Given the widespread use of this practice,
it is not unreasonable to assume that unions expect to be vouchsafed the
“right” to sign up guest workers. Of course, whether this could actually
happen—and if so, for how long—would depend on the goodwill of politicians
and employers.
Nonprofit advocates are more
straightforward in their reasons for supporting Hagel-Martinez. The Senate,
under the pressure of a mass upsurge, has granted them the top of their
legislative wish list, which includes the “pathway to citizenship” and the
DREAM Act to extend in-state college tuition to the children of the undocumented.
The National Council of La Raza—the largest
Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S.—expressed
misgivings about certain aspects of the bill but nevertheless pronounced it
“a major step forward in a debate that is vital to our community and to the
nation.”
The pathway to citizenship, it must be
noted, is more of a gauntlet that requires undocumented workers to have
lived in the U.S. for five years, to pay thousands in application fees, to
prove they’re studying English and “U.S. history,” and to prove they have
never used false papers to find work. Of course, immigrants can choose to
step off the “pathway” and proceed directly to citizenship if they serve at
least two years in active-duty military service, according to Hagel-Martinez.
Many of the grassroots activist groups that
called the historic protests of April and May are regrouping to oppose both
Sensenbrenner and Hagel-Martinez. The May 1st Coalition in Los Angeles, the
March 25 Coalition in Chicago, the Asian American Legal Defense and
Education Fund in New York, the San Francisco Bay Area Immigrant Rights
Coalition and many others have been very critical of the Senate bill.
Many of these forces are promoting the
National Grassroots Immigrant Strategy Conference on July 28-30 in
Washington, DC, which was called by members of the Los Angeles movement.
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