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The Basic Contradiction of U.S. Immigration Policy
by James Frickey / June 2006 issue Socialist Action
For the past 20 years, the U.S. has sought in
earnest to remove its southern border as a barrier to foreign trade and
investment, while continuously reinforcing it as a barrier to the free
movement of workers.
Over the years, the Mexican peasantry has
been uprooted, the rate of emigration has greatly increased, and the
clandestine underclass of undocumented workers has swelled and finally
burst into the open. Every step in U.S. policy has been pre-determined to
draw larger numbers of low-skilled undocumented labor into the workforce.
Advanced capitalist economies demand
workers who will toil under unpleasant conditions, at low wages, in jobs
with great instability and little chance for advancement. And who is better
suited than Mexican immigrants? Wages in Mexico are one-fifth those of the
U.S., jobs are sparse, and Mexico, as its dictator Porfirio Diaz was fond
of saying, “was so far from God, yet so close to the United States.”
The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that as
many as 12 million undocumented workers currently live in the U.S.—and 56
percent of them are Mexican. They arrive at a rate of 500,000 per year and
fewer are returning home, aided in their decision by the heightened risk
and cost of re-entry associated with increased border security.
Immigrant workers have become integral to
the competitiveness and profitability of multiple U.S. industries. And the
narcotic-like dependency of U.S. capitalism on low-wage undocumented labor
has had the unintended consequence of consolidating the position of
immigrant workers in the U.S. working class. They are integral to the U.S.
construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and service industries. A day
without immigrants in any of these industries is a day without profit.
The U.S. ruling-class appears to hold all
the cards; its politicians, journalists, labor statesmen, and nonprofit
nurslings are lined up neatly in a row. A renewed Bracero Program is within
its reach. But it may be dismayed to find that its 21st-century guest
workers are nothing like the braceros, who at their peak were never more than
several hundred thousand farm laborers and track-layers on the railroad.
Braceros were landless peasant farmers
recruited from the Mexican hinterlands. The 21st-century guest workers are
a class-conscious urban proletariat of 12 million. They did not wait for a
Senate bill to “bring them out of the shadows” but stepped out themselves
en masse on a scale of protest never before seen in U.S. history. Within
their ranks is an unknown reserve of leadership capable of actuating the
next heroic chapter in the U.S. workers’ movement. It is there that the
immigration debate ultimately turns.
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