Socialist Action newspaper

Following is a section of a report on the U.S. immigrants’ rights movement by James Frickey, which was presented to the Socialist Action National Committee. The National Committee approved the report at its plenum, held in San Francisco, March 23-25.

The U.S. capitalist class is committed, in principle, to a dramatic restructuring of its labor force to guarantee itself an increased rate of profit across basic industries. By means of "comprehensive immigration reform," it seeks to regiment millions of undocumented immigrant workers into a reserve army of super-exploited labor and import them into labor-intensive industries like construction, meatpacking, agriculture, hotels, textiles, and manufacturing.

Under the current system, undocumented immigrants lead a fugitive existence. They risk their lives crossing the remote desert of the U.S.-Mexico border, obtain false identification or purchase someone else’s identity, and work longer hours for lesser pay than their "legal" peers.

Undocumented workers typically receive no health care, retirement, or paid vacation. Their precarious legal status and life under constant threat of deportation conditions them to accept the most dangerous work assignments without complaint.

The applicability of U.S. labor law to undocumented workers, however, despite its assorted gray areas, has been fairly consistent insofar as they are able to arbitrate unpaid wages, join unions, even sue for mistreatment. Most important, in light of the debate brewing in the Senate, is the current ability of undocumented workers to quit a job and look for something better. Job mobility is what enables the living conditions of the undocumented to rise over time—even to achieve parity with their "legal" peers. While not a substitute for permanent legal status, job mobility has served to mitigate the drag of undocumented immigration on living standards across industries.

For decades, undocumented workers led a clandestine existence on the margins of the U.S. working class. Sharp political exchanges on immigration were as a rule confined to regions with dense immigrant concentrations, like the Southwest and California.

However, 12 years of bilateral trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA have removed barriers to the flow of U.S. capital into dependent economies, particularly in Latin America, and shattered the century-old regional migration pattern. The result in the dependent economies has been a social erosion of the bourgeoisie that smothers the urban proletariat in the abysmal conditions inherent to foreign monopolization of production. The result in the U.S. has been a vast geographic expansion of migration patterns to cities and towns whose population had not received an influx of new arrivals since as far back as the turn of the 20th century.

The current state of the Mexican textile industry will suffice to demonstrate the process in the dependent countries. Textile, it will be recalled, was to be the model industry on which to display the reciprocal benefits of NAFTA to the U.S. manufacturer and the Mexican worker alike. Instead it has produced a bleak landscape of monopolized production, shuttered factories, and a raft of hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers adrift in the informal economy, many of whom will soon emigrate to the U.S.

Wal-Mart is the dominant player in factory production in Mexico, and its voracious business practices have done much to precipitate the crisis. It leverages its predominant market share to lower prices from suppliers, forcing into bankruptcy those which cannot comply. For example, Wal-Mart recently forced its suppliers to agree to a 90-day wait for payment of goods (up from 60 days)—in effect extorting the Mexican textile owners to finance the multinational giant, or perish.

The monopolization of the textile industry, epitomized by Wal-Mart, has resulted in the closing of 3286 textile factories since 2000, the termination of more than 150,000 textile workers, and extremely degraded working conditions that rank among the worst in the world for those who remain.

An article in La Jornada in December 2006 gave more information on this issue, reprinting portions of a report by Huberto Juárez Nuñez, a professor at the University of Puebla. In the report, “The Dressmaking Maquiladora Industry in Mexico,” Prof. Juárez stated: “As a result, not only do the workers offer the cheapest labor in the world, since 60-70% of them receive no benefits nor are they even registered for social security—but pregnancy tests for women in the maquiladoras have become the norm, freshwater springs are left contaminated by the fading process for jeans, and the surrounding inhabitants are infected by the use of chemicals and dust in production. Thus the social and economic dislocation that has turned Puebla into one of the main exporters of cheap Mexican labor to the U.S.”

The "New Latino South" is a clear example of how dramatically the era of unrestrained capital flow to Latin America has reshaped migration patterns to the U.S. The number of Latinos settling in North Carolina from 1990 to 2000 increased by 394%. In Arkansas, the number increased 337%; in Georgia, 300%; Tennessee; 278%, South Carolina, 211%; and Alabama, 208%. The growth in the Latino population was even more dramatic at the county level, exceeding 1000% in some places and 500% in many others. This is but a regional snapshot of a national phenomenon.

The image of the undocumented immigrant as primarily a seasonal farm laborer bears no resemblance to the present situation. Undocumented labor has become the lifeblood of essential industries in the U.S., including 1.4 million in construction; 500,000 in leisure and hospitality (food preparation and serving); 350,000 in maintenance, cleaning and landscaping; 340,000 in manufacturing; 270,000 in wholesale and retail; 125,000 in education and health services; and 110,000 in agriculture.

Mexicans account for 57% of undocumented arrivals to the United States. Latin Americans as a whole comprise 78% of the total. Mexico and Latin America are the most advanced cases of social dislocation of workers to the U.S., but they are not unique. Undocumented workers from South and East Asia, for example, have increased by 365,000 since 2000.

Plans for a new kind of indentured servitude

The unilateral turn of U.S. foreign policy away from the "democratic pluralism" of post-war institutions like the United Nations, its open advocacy of torture, its unapologetic use of extraordinary rendition, its secret military tribunals, and its abrogation of due-process rights to prisoners in Guantanamo Bay all find their domestic complement in the pending legislation for "comprehensive immigration reform." A more reactionary domestic policy has never come up for serious consideration in Congress.

All proposals for "comprehensive immigration reform" legislate a program of indentured servitude and iron-heeled methods of social control to enforce it. Undocumented workers are to become "guest-workers," or contract laborers whose legal status is bound to a specific employer. They would depend on their employer not only for income but also for their legal right to reside in the country. Even their eligibility for a green card is likely to be contingent on employer sponsorship.

In economic terms, a guest-worker program is a means to depress wages and conditions for all workers by attacking the immigrant base. It eliminates the bit of bargaining leverage that immigrants gain by selling their labor on the open market. In the long-term, it regiments the unruly flow of undocumented labor into a reserve army of servants indentured to their employer-sponsor who serve to drive down living standards across whole productive industries.

Debate over the degree of mobility to grant guest-workers is utter nonsense. Even under the best-case scenario, they would never break out of the circle of hell that confines the lowest-paid and most grueling jobs in the economy.

No industry in the U.S. will be spared the ill effects of the guest-worker program. Employers need only show that the jobs in question are too grueling and poorly compensated for a legal resident to accept them. By definition, jobs for guest-workers are the worst in the country.

The guest-worker program is sure to inflame native-born resentment of immigrant workers on a scale never before seen. Fascist groupings can expect to reap the benefits, especially from the ruination of smaller employers sure to result from the monumental advantage the program grants to big business.

Guest-workers are also inherently more vulnerable than the undocumented to employer abuse. Like raw materials, they are imported by U.S. corporations and shipped to the factory or farm. They are dependent on employers for legal status, so that to remain in the U.S., a worker must remain in the good favor of the employer. Complaints of unsafe conditions, unpaid wages, or harassment become deportable offenses whose violators are blacklisted.

Thai guest-workers profiled in The New York Times revealed the abuses inherent in the system. Signing up to earn $48,000 for three years of farm labor in North Carolina, they instead collected from just $4200 to $7200 to clean up debris in New Orleans. In a lawsuit filed against several contractors, the Thai workers allege months of work without pay; squalid housing in a hurricane-battered hotel without lights, gas, or potable water; and seizure of their passports upon arrival.

Adding insult to injury, the banks are moving in to repossess family plots in Thailand that the men put up as collateral for their airline tickets. ''None of them gave us what they promised,'' said Pradit Wiangkham, 42, a Thai electrician turned guest worker.

A dozen Guatemalan guest-workers in Granby, Conn., suffered a similar hardship. A landscaper recruited them to plant trees in North Carolina for $7.50 an hour. Instead, their boss seized their passports on arrival and shipped them to Connecticut to landscape for $3.75 an hour, minus deductions for rent and expenses. They were warned that if they complained, they would be deported and left to pay the debt for travel expenses.

The final straw came when the boss threatened to fire one of the guest-workers, Marvin Coto, for seeking medical attention for an illness. "There was no escape," Coto told the Hartford Courant. "We never let our guard down. We never relaxed. But no matter how hard we worked, we could never please them."

The enforcement provisions seem geared to reassure the ruling class that the guest-worker program is viable. The increased border enforcement is also likely to increase the debt burden that new arrivals owe to human smugglers. The expanded reach of ICE, including its collaboration with local authorities, harsher "employer sanctions," and new detention facilities would risk further weakening the resolve of undocumented workers to continue their struggle, regardless of whether or not a guest-worker program accompanies them.

The enforcement provisions of the new era include a 700-mile border wall, 500 miles in vehicle barriers, a large increase in the number of border patrol and ICE agents, stiffening of employer sanctions, and a biometric national ID card.

The "pathway to citizenship," the holy grail of immigration reformers, is a far cry from a general amnesty. It is likely to require at least six years of residency, English-language proficiency, leaving the country and returning, and payment of "back taxes" plus a $2000 fine.

Labor movement is divided

Eleven months ago, the spring mobilizations for immigrant rights overturned the legislative shell game of Democrats and Republicans. The sea of immigrants in the streets was an image of the revolutionary future that the U.S. rulers are desperately trying to delay. The predominance of American flags or white t-shirts in the crowd did not conceal the working-class power on display when immigrants stopped production in basic industry.

The Sensenbrenner bill, passed by the House in December 2005, ignited the historic protest. It would have declared as felons all undocumented workers and anyone who provided them assistance. But it did not provide for the cheap labor needs of U.S. employers, which was a tip-off that it was a decoy bill.

The main priority of the U.S. ruling class from the start of the "great debate" has been the institution of a guest-worker program to drive down wages and conditions across whole industries. The implications of this program are so grave, and the administration of it so repressive, that a bogeyman was necessary to make the alternative seem progressive by comparison.

Sensenbrenner served that purpose all too well. In retrospect, the size of the outpouring of protest seems to have far surpassed the ruling class’s careful calculations, forcing the Senate to hastily withdraw its plan to overhaul the federal immigration system. The bipartisan Senate bill was vulnerable in part because it contains the identical language of state repression that drew the ire of millions to defeat the Sensenbrenner bill.

Both bills called for stiffer employer sanctions, hundreds of miles of border wall and vehicle barriers, a biometric national ID card, and an exponential increase in the number of ICE agents, among other repressive measures.

Kennedy-McCain was too risky to debate amid the intense radicalization. However, the bill and its powerful sponsors succeeded in drawing a number of prominent groups into the legislative morass—most notably the National Council of La Raza, the Catholic Church, and labor unions like SEIU, UNITE-HERE, and the UFW. As early as May Day 2006, a split opened in the national leadership on the question of how to relate to the Senate compromise.

The camp of groups that lend critical support to the Senate compromise explain their position with reference to what they consider its more progressive aspects. For instance, they hold out hope that the "pathway to citizenship" contains a means for millions of undocumented workers already in the U.S. to attain legal status. Or they conceive of the guest-worker program primarily as a mode of safe entry into the U.S. that spares the lives of thousands of workers who might otherwise die attempting to cross the desert—though the number of deaths on the factory floor is bound to increase, according to the AFL-CIO.

What matters, they contend, is that the guest-worker program guarantee its participants the full rights accorded to all workers. But how could it be otherwise? Labor law applies to all workers—on paper.

The SEIU, UNITE-HERE, and UFW leaderships accept the guest-worker program as a progressive alternative to undocumented status in that it would guarantee immigrant workers a legal permit to work and the option to join a union. But even at the peak of its power, labor failed to organize the guest-workers imported in the bracero program of the 1940s and ’50s. Furthermore, it was unable to even limit the scale the abuses and labor law violations in the program.

Why should a labor movement that represents an anemic 6 percent of workers in the private industry expect to improve on its performance from a time when 37 percent of all workers were union members—unless, of course, that movement has a conscious leadership and a fighting program to unite all workers in the fight for full legalization. But that is in the future we are fighting for!

The AFL-CIO does not support the guest-worker program, referring to it as "a construct that guarantees the deterioration of working conditions in the U.S." In the place of transient servitude, the Federation demands that Congress "revise its permanent employment-based visas system."

Why does the AFL-CIO take on the Democrats when its breakaway faction, Change To Win, is so intent on making a deal with them? One reason is that SEIU, UNITE-HERE, and UFW hope that their Democratic Party friends in Congress will allow them to collect union dues from tens of thousands of guest-workers. Similar arrangements exist between these unions and state legislatures in New York and California. In that case, the AFL-CIO has less to gain than its rival. It is also working with the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, which stands to be obliterated by a guest-worker program.

More broadly speaking, the AFL-CIO may simply read the handwriting on the wall and recognize the guest-worker program as a threat to its very existence. Under this scenario, Stern & Co. represent a vile new breed of corporatist unionism who might have needed to split from the parent federation in order to better enact their social compact with the bosses.

The AFL-CIO is alone in demanding that Congress uphold the Davis-Bacon Act, a law requiring federal contractors to pay a prevailing local wage. For its part, the SEIU has not commented on Davis-Bacon, but one of its key allies, the National Immigration Forum, has urged "compromise" with the National Chamber of Commerce as "the only solution."

The split in the immigrant rights movement leadership has widened in the 11 months succeeding the Great American Boycott of May Day 2006. Groups that lend support to the Senate compromise have pulled back from mobilizations or even turned hostile to them.

The most detrimental effect of the split has been to paralyze the mass movement in the face of reaction. Homeland Security is in the 10th month of a federal crackdown on immigrant workers known as "Operation Return to Sender," which it claims has resulted in more than 18,000 arrests at homes and workplaces. The arrests have targeted union worksites, day-laborer centers and pick-up sites, union organizing drives, and cities and towns that participated in the national strike.

No call for a national mobilization has yet been issued to stop the raids. The united-front strategy that gave rise to mass protests a year ago has given way to a popular-front-type strategy based on "humane" legislation geared to appeal to the more "progressive" Democrats. The National Alliance for Immigrant Rights (NAIR), the first attempt to consolidate a national coordinating body out of the spring upsurge, fell victim to the drop-off in actions and has virtually disappeared as a political entity.

True to form, the most visible personalities presiding over NAIR’s founding convention, such as Nativo López of the Mexican American Political Association, have relocated the political debate to closed-door "leadership summits," such as the one held on Feb. 3 in Phoenix. The leaders of this summit deigned to invite interested activists to a post-conference reception at a United Food and Commercial Workers union hall to hear what was discussed and decided. Initial reports indicate that the meeting focused on developing legislation for the coming session of the Congress and issued no call for action. There is an urgent need for unity but no immediate prospects.

At a Los Angeles conference in February, the call was made for a nationwide general strike for immigrants rights on May Day 2007. However, the leadership void, and the open hostility of the groups who opened the door last time, will undoubtedly take a toll on any effort to duplicate the turnout of 4-5 million on May Day 2006. The emergence of a real Latino leadership, dedicated to the construction of a new civil rights movement based on equality for immigrants, will take more time.

Cracks in the armor of opportunism

The immigrant rights movement is capable of outgrowing the split over the Senate bill and mobilizing another sterling display of working-class power to defeat it. Cracks are already showing in the base of institutional support for the ruling-class plan—even before details of it are known.

Moreover, the Kennedy-McCain bill can no longer claim to be the lesser of two evils, since its fraternal twin in the House was killed. Sen. Ted Kennedy has no one left to blame but ICE itself, trying to portray the agency as a renegade outfit and creature of the Republican Party, even as his bipartisan legislation moves to reinforce it.

The Democratic Party has pulled into line its auxiliaries in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the CEOs of the National Council of La Raza and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and the executive officers of SEIU, UNITE-HERE, and the UFW, among others. But none of them is immune to the growing pressure from their membership.

WE ARE AMERICA, a network led by the aforementioned groups, split in its national conference in August over a floor vote to support Kennedy-McCain. Local affiliates opposed the bill while those based in Washington, D.C., voted to support it, resulting in a 60-40 split.

Priests in Catholic dioceses that serve largely immigrant parishes have likewise shown a willingness to go beyond the political limits prescribed by the hierarchy. The political cost of abstaining from the mass movement is too high for them to pay.

The SEIU is in a similar bind in trying to preserve its place at the forefront of immigrant struggles in the labor movement while supporting the bosses’ guest-worker bill. Its vulnerability was laid bare when a half-dozen of its locals in California initiated the "No Worker is Illegal" campaign to pressure the international officers to rescind their support for the guest-worker bill.

Brian Cruz, a member of SEIU Local 790, told ZNet that he thinks the primary reason the SEIU international is supporting the guest-worker bill is that "SEIU sees building partnerships with employers as the way to build the union. It's the way Andy Stern spells it out in his book. He calls it ’Team U.S.A., workers and corporations working hand in hand against competitors around the world.’ There's a lot of skepticism about the immigrant movement. The feeling is, they don't believe we can build a strong movement, so we'd better take the best the politicians have to offer."

The No Worker is Illegal campaign deserves a lot of the credit for the content of SEIU’s "Open Letter to Senator Kennedy," whose debut coincided with the rise of internal dissent. In the letter, Stern and his secretary treasurer, Anna Burger, elaborate their position and qualify the union’s support for the guest-worker bill as contingent on its worker protections, labor-law enforcement, and guarantee of the right to change jobs, join unions, and petition for legal residency without needing employer sponsorship. SEIU further calls for an increased number of permanent work authorizations.

Stern & Co. remain on record in support of the guest-worker bill and continue to participate in the bosses’ Essential Worker Coalition. However, external and internal pressures have raised the political price for their abstaining from springtime mobilizations. An early sign of their responding to pressure was the endorsement and participation of SEIU Locals 32BJ and 1199 in a broad planning meeting for a broad "leadership summit" set for April 14 in New York City. They are in the room, so to speak. Whether they can be pressured to mobilize depends on the strength of the forces calling for mass action.

LULAC’s national leadership is moving away from its support for the guest-worker bill under the threat of a national revolt from local affiliates, according to Nativo Lopez. Whether or not LULAC reverses its position, the point is that even those groups most subservient to the Democrats, in this case its Latino auxiliaries, are subject to membership pressure.

Divisions in the pro-legislation camp, along with other pre-conditions for a return to mass action, are bound to increase as details of the reform become known and reveal its destructive potential to millions of immigrant workers and their supporters.

Importance of ICE raids to bosses’ strategy

The short-term purpose of the ICE raids is to manufacture consent for Congress to pass its guest-worker bill and to break the resolve of immigrant workers to resist it. In the long run, the raids enable ICE to test its capacity for mass deportation.

The presence of 12 million undocumented workers in the U.S. is a sensitive issue for supporters of the guest-worker program. All of the schemes in Congress to allow for a limited number of immigrants to legalize their status rest on the assumption that a general amnesty is beyond the pale. That simple fact, in combination with bipartisan agreement on draconian enforcement and the enhanced means of capture and detention, points to an imminent police action or series of actions to round up and deport hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers.

Historical precedent confirms the threat of mass deportation: "Operation Wetback" was a paramilitary assault of the U.S. Border Patrol against Mexican communities across the nation in 1954 that resulted in the deportation or flight of well over a million migrant workers and their families. Its purpose was to remove Latino immigrants who worked in the U.S. but did not participate in the bracero program.

ICE draws on the experience of "Operation Wetback" for its up-to-date blueprint, known as "Endgame." Unlike its predecessor, which lasted for one year, "Endgame" has a 10-year time-line. ICE states its goal as to "set in motion a cohesive enforcement program to build capacity to remove all removable aliens, eliminate the backlog of unexecuted final order removal cases, and realize its vision."

The radical shift that a guest-worker program anticipates in the relationship between employer and immigrant laborer necessitates the largest police action in U.S. history to implement. To stop the raids is to render the guest-worker program impossible. The basis for outflanking the union bureaucracy and establishing a united front that affords a chance to win the ranks of the reformist organizations is our unyielding opposition to the raids.

The split in the national movement over the guest-worker bill is an undeniable fact that we cannot sidestep. Nor can we try to paper it over with progressive legislative proposals meant to woo the unions away from the Democrats by moral appeal instead of mobilizing working-class power.

Rather, the key to unifying the movement for immigrant rights around a broad class-struggle perspective begins with mobilizing immigrants and their supporters to oppose the ICE raids. The example can only inspire the broader labor movement.

The ruling class has had temporary success in misleading the public into thinking that its immigration reform is progressive. However, the concomitant paramilitary methods that ICE employs to round up immigrants are offensive to the democratic sensibilities of Americans and serve as the basis of a united front for immigrant rights.

A demand for a general amnesty (e.g., "Immediate legalization for all!") remains a crucial means, along with opposition to the raids, for explaining the dangers of "comprehensive immigration reform." Other demands that serve to educate the movement about working-class politics include: No employer sanctions! Full labor rights, civil rights, and civil liberties for all! No militarization of the border! No border wall! No criminalization of workers! Increased family reunification visas!