One sign carried in almost every May Day march of the last few years in the United States says it all: “We are Workers, not Criminals!” Often it was held in the calloused hands of men and women who looked as though they’d just come from work in a factory, cleaning an office building, or picking grapes.

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.

In the largest U.S. May Day event this year, marchers were joined by the public workers who protested in the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, who have become symbols of the fight for labor rights in the U.S. Their message was the same: we all work, we all contribute to our communities and we all have the right to a job, a union and a decent life.

May Day marches and demonstrations over the last five years have provided a vehicle in which immigrants protest their lack of human rights, and unions call for greater solidarity among workers facing the same corporate system. The marches are usually organized by grass roots immigrant rights groups, increasingly cooperating with the formal structure of the labor movement. This year the attacks on public workers provided an additional push to unions to use May Day as a vehicle for protest.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka spoke at the largest of those marches, in Milwaukee, where national attention has focused on the attacks on public workers and their mass resistance. Trumka’s presence marked two important political changes in labor. May Day is no longer a holiday red-baited in the U.S. labor movement, but one used to promote a defense of workers’ rights, as it is in the rest of the world. And unions are slowly adopting a tradition of May Day demonstrations calling for immigrant rights, a tradition begun by immigrant communities themselves in 2006.

For the last five years, May Day protests have responded to a wave of draconian proposals to criminalize immigration status, and work itself, for undocumented people. The defenders of these proposals have used a brutal logic: if people cannot legally work, they will leave. But undocumented people are part of the communities they live in. They seek the same goals of equality and opportunity that working people in the United States historically have fought to achieve. In addition, for most immigrants, there are no jobs to return to in the countries from which they’ve come.

Instead of recognizing this reality, the U.S. government has attempted to make holding a job a criminal act. Thousands of workers have already been fired. Some have been sent to prison for inventing a Social Security number just to get a job. Yet they stole nothing and the money they’ve paid into Social Security funds now subsidizes every pension or disability payment.

Undocumented workers deserve legal status because of that labor-their inherent contribution to society. Past years’ marches have supported legalization for the 12 million undocumented people in the United States. In addition, immigrants, unions and community groups have called for repealing the law making work a crime, ending guest worker programs, and guaranteeing human rights in communities along the U.S./Mexico border.

Undocumented workers and public workers in Wisconsin have a lot in common. With unemployment at almost 9% nationally, and higher in many states, all working families need the Federal government to set up jobs programs, like those Roosevelt pushed through Congress in the 1930s. If General Electric alone paid its fair share of taxes, and if the troops came home from Iraq and Afghanistan, every person wanting a job could find work building roads, schools, and hospitals. All communities would benefit.

Immigrants and public workers need strong unions that can push wages up, and guarantee pensions for seniors and healthcare for the sick and disabled. A street cleaner whose job is outsourced, and an undocumented worker fired from a fast food restaurant both need protection for their right to work and support their families.

Instead, some states like Arizona, and now Georgia, have passed measures allowing police to stop any “foreign looking” person on the street, and question their immigration status. Arizona passed a law requiring employers to fire workers whose names are flagged by Social Security. In Mississippi an undocumented worker accused of holding a job can get jail time of 1-5 years, and fines of up to $10,000.

The states and politicians that go after immigrants are the same ones calling for firing public workers and eliminating their union rights. Now a teacher educating children has no more secure future in her job than an immigrant cleaning an office building at night.

In Milwaukee President Trumka told marchers, “It’s the same fight. It’s the same people that are attacking immigrants’ rights, workers’ rights, student rights, voting rights.” He paid tribute to the role immigrants have played in resurrecting May Day as a day for worker demonstrations in the U.S.

“Your voices have been heard across this nation,” Trumka said, “inspiring an uprising of America’s working people, standing together and saying ‘No’ to divide-and-conquer politics. ‘No!’ to tearing working families down, rather than building us up. ‘No!’ to corporate-backed politicians trying to turn us into a low-wage, no-rights workforce as payback to their CEO friends. And what is this America we want? It’s a land of equal opportunity, a land of fairness in the workplace and society.”

While May Day marches this year were smaller than the millions-strong turnout of five years ago, they had a more organized participation from unions themselves. That marks a fundamental shift in the attitude of U.S. labor towards May Day.

Although Mayday was born in the fight for the 8-hour day in Chicago more than a century ago, during the Cold War U.S. unions stopped celebrating it. In 1949 nine leftwing unions were expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and a witch hunt then purged activists, including Communists, socialists and anarchists, from leadership in most unions. The U.S. labor movement grew more conservative, enshrining a “business unionism” model, which negotiated increases in wages and benefits while defending the corporate system.

Eventually, some of the highest elements of U.S. labor leadership collaborated with U.S. intelligence services in supporting right-wing coups in other countries, in which labor and political militants were murdered. At the same time, unionists in the U.S. who advocated celebrating May Day as a symbol of international labor solidarity were attacked and red-baited.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, however, large corporations, assisted by the government, intensified their attacks on unions and workers. The percentage of workers belonging to unions fell drastically, causing an internal crisis in the labor movement. Many Cold War-era leaders were challenged, and at the AFL-CIO convention in New York in 1995 a contest over leadership brought John Sweeney to power as president. Richard Trumka, who’d led a critical battle of coal miners against the Pittston Corporation, was elected secretary-treasurer.

At that time, Trumka proposed a new model for internationalism in U.S. labor. “The cold war has gone,” he declared. “It’s over. We want to be able to confront multinationals as multinationals ourselves now. If a corporation does business in 15 countries, we’d like to be able to confront them as labor in 15 countries. It’s not that we need less international involvement, but it should be focused towards building solidarity, helping workers achieve their needs and their goals here at home.”

Jack Henning, past executive secretary of the California Labor Federation, one of the most vocal critics of the old AFL-CIO Department of International Affairs, admitted, “we were associated with some of the very worst elements…all in the name of anti-communism. But I think there’s an opportunity now to review our foreign activities, to stop the global competition for jobs among the trade unions of the world.”

Their ideas embodied a pragmatic view of solidarity, a first step away from that Cold War past. But it was not radical enough to confront the new challenges of globalization – the huge displacement and migration of millions of people, the enormous gulf in the standard of living dividing developed from developing countries, and the wars fought to impose this system of global economic inequality.

Slowly, Cold War barriers began to come down. In Colombia, the United Steel Workers became a bastion of support for the embattled unionists of its leftwing labor federation. In Mexico the USW supported striking copper miners in Cananea, and gave refuge to their exiled union president in Canada. Under pressure from US Labor Against the War, the AFL-CIO publicly rejected U.S. military intervention in Iraq. But progress was uneven. The Democratic Party’s support for war in Afghanistan and for Israel’s attack on Gaza was greeted with silence. In Venezuela, U.S. labor even supported coup plotters against the radical regime of Hugo Chavez.

Among U.S. union members at home, the key issues were jobs and trade policy, and their corollaries, displacement and immigration. The implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 (supported by both U.S. political parties), and the battle in Seattle at the World Trade Organization meeting of 1999, profoundly affected workers’ thinking about their own future. Many were educated by the fight against corporate trade policy, and began to understand the way neoliberal reforms displaced workers and farmers in Mexico, leading to migration across the U.S./Mexico border. That understanding created a base for solidarity with Mexican workers in the U.S. that did not exist during the Cold War era.

During the years after 1994, when NAFTA took effect, over six million people from Mexico migrated to the U.S. in search of jobs. The number of people living in the U.S. without legal immigration status climbed to over 12 million. Those workers, as they faced threats to imprison them as criminals because of their immigration status, began using May Day marches to call for human, political and labor rights. People migrating to the U.S. came with a tradition of using May Day celebrations to call for labor rights. May Day in the U.S. became their vehicle to challenge anti-immigrant hysteria.

This wave of increasingly assertive workers was hardly the first to challenge U.S. unions, many of which were organized by earlier immigrants and their children. But U.S. unions were organized in a working class deeply divided by race and nationality. Some unions saw (and still see) immigrants as unwelcome job competitors, and sought to exclude, and even deport them. But other unions fought racism and anti-immigrant hysteria, and argued for organizing all workers together.

Today, undocumented immigrants wonder, “Will my union defend me when the government tells my boss to fire me because I don’t have papers?” It’s not an abstract question. Thousands of workers have already been fired in the Obama administration’s program to enforce immigration law in the workplace. Last year alone, almost 400,000 people were deported, almost all ordinary workers.

The debate over immigration policy puts critical questions before U.S. unions. Are unions going to defend all workers, including the undocumented? Should unions support immigration enforcement designed to force millions of workers from their jobs? How can labor achieve the unity and solidarity it needs to successfully confront transnational corporations, both internally within the U.S., and externally with workers in countries like Mexico?

The White House website says “President Obama will remove incentives to enter the country illegally by preventing employers from hiring undocumented workers and enforcing the law.” A few months after taking office he told Congress members that the government was “cracking down on employers who are using illegal workers in order to drive down wages — and oftentimes mistreat those workers.”

The law Obama is enforcing is the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which requires employers to keep records of workers’ immigration status, and prohibits them from hiring those who have no legal documents, or “work authorization.” In effect, the law made it a crime for undocumented immigrants to work. This provision, employer sanctions, is the legal basis for all the workplace immigration raids and enforcement of the last 23 years. “Sanctions pretend to punish employers,” says Bill Ong Hing, law professor at the University of California at Davis. “In reality, they punish workers.”

The history of workplace immigration enforcement is filled with examples of employers who use audits and discrepancies as pretexts to discharge union militants or discourage worker organization. The 16-year union drive at the Smithfield pork plant in North Carolina, for instance, saw two raids, and the firing of 300 workers for bad Social Security numbers.

Whether motivated by economic gain or anti-union animus, the firings highlight larger questions of immigration enforcement policy. “These workers have not only done nothing wrong, they’ve spent years making the company rich. No one ever called company profits illegal, or says they should give them back to the workers. So why are the workers called illegal?” asks Nativo Lopez, director of the Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana. “Any immigration policy that says these workers have no right to work and feed their families is wrong and needs to be changed.”

President Obama says sanctions enforcement targets employers “who are using illegal workers in order to drive down wages — and oftentimes mistreat those workers.” This restates a common Bush administration rationale for workplace raids. Former ICE Director Julie Meyers asserted that she was targeting “unscrupulous criminals who use illegal workers to cut costs and gain a competitive advantage.” An ICE Worksite Enforcement Advisory claims “unscrupulous employers are likely to pay illegal workers substandard wages or force them to endure intolerable working conditions.”

Curing intolerable conditions by firing or deporting the workers who endure them doesn’t help the workers or change the conditions, however. And that’s not who ICE targets anyway. Workers at Smithfield were trying to organize a union to improve conditions. In Minneapolis, 1200 fired janitors at ABM belonged to SEIU Local 26, got a higher wage than non-union workers, and had to strike to win it. And despite President Obama’s notion that sanctions enforcement will punish those employers who exploit immigrants, employers are rewarded for cooperation by being immunized from prosecution. This policy only hurts workers.

The justification is implicit in the policy’s description on the White House website: “remove incentives to enter the country illegally.” This was the original justification for employer sanctions in 1986 – if migrants can’t work, they won’t come. Of course, people did come, because at the same time that Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, it also began debate on the North American Free Trade Agreement. That virtually guaranteed future migration. “The real questions we need to ask are what uproots people in Mexico, and why U.S. employers rely so heavily on low-wage workers,” says law professor Bill Ong Hing.

No one in the Obama administration wants to stop migration to the U.S. or imagines that this could be done without catastrophic consequences. The very industries it targets for enforcement are so dependent on migrant labor they would collapse without it. Immigration policy consigns those migrants to an “illegal” status, and undermines the price of their labor. Enforcement then becomes a means for managing the flow of these migrants, and making their labor available to employers at a price they want to pay.

Managing the flow is the object, not just of current policy, but also of the proposals for immigration reform that have been supported by the Obama, Bush, and Clinton administrations. Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff explained the purpose of these proposals clearly. “There’s an obvious solution to the problem of illegal work,” he said, “which is you open the front door and you shut the back door.” “Opening the front door” allows employers to recruit “guest” workers to come to the U.S., giving them visas that tie their ability to stay to their employment. And to force workers to come through this system, “closing the back door” criminalizes migrants who work without “work authorization.” When she was Arizona governor, current DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano supported this arrangement, signing the state’s own draconian employer sanctions bill, while supporting guest worker programs.

The comprehensive reform bills died in Congress over the last several years. But Bush and Obama both began implementing their key provisions through administrative action. The use of guest worker programs, especially for farm workers, has grown rapidly. And enforcement through deportations, detention and firings has mushroomed.

This growing wave of firings is provoking sharp debate in unions, especially those with large immigrant memberships. ABM’s janitors, for instance, were dues-paying members for years. They expect the union to defend them when the company fires them for lack of status. At American Apparel, where 2000 sewing machine operators were fired in 2009, there was no union, but some workers had actively tried to organize one. “I worked with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers and the Garment Workers Center,” recalls Jose Covarrubias. “When I got to American Apparel I joined right away. I debated with the non-union workers, trying to convince them the union would defend us.” Covarrubias was fired with the rest, and unions in Los Angeles did very little to help them.

The twelve million undocumented people in the U.S., spread in factories, fields and construction sites throughout the country, includes lots of workers like Covarrubias. Many are aware of their rights and anxious to improve their lives. National union organizing campaigns, like Justice for Janitors and Hotel Workers Rising, depend on their determination and activism. That reality convinced the AFL-CIO in 1999 to reject the federation’s former support for employer sanctions, and call for repeal. Unions recognized that sanctions enforcement has made it much more difficult for workers to defend their rights, organize unions, and raise wages.

Opposing sanctions, however, put labor in opposition to the Obama administration, which it helped elect. Some Washington DC lobbying groups now support sanctions enforcement instead. One group, Reform Immigration for America, says, “any employment verification system should determine employment authorization accurately and efficiently.” The AFL-CIO and the Change to Win labor federation in 2009 also agreed on a new immigration position that supports a “secure and effective worker authorization mechanism …one that determines employment authorization accurately while providing maximum protection for workers.” Verification of authorization is exactly what happened at American Apparel and ABM. When workers couldn’t provide authorization, they were fired.

With a few exceptions, U.S. unions have been mostly silent in the face of the firings. That undermines their growing criticism of the way corporate trade policies produce undocumented migration.

Before he retired and was succeeded by Richard Trumka, John Sweeney, former president of the AFL-CIO, wrote to President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Harper. He reminded them that “the failure of neoliberal policies to create decent jobs in the Mexican economy under NAFTA has meant that many displaced workers and new entrants have been forced into a desperate search to find employment elsewhere.” The joint immigration position of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win federations recognized that “an essential component of the long-term solution [to immigration reform] is a fair trade and globalization model that uplifts all workers.”

Continued support for work authorization and employer sanctions contradicts this understanding. Even with a legalization program, millions of people will remain without papers, as more come every year. For them, work without “authorization” will still be a crime. And while employer sanctions will not stop migration, they will make those workers vulnerable to employer pressure.

In a speech in Cleveland in 2010 AFL-CIO President Trumka challenged “working people who should know better, some in my own family – [who say] that those immigrants are taking our jobs, ruining our country … When I hear that kind of talk, I want to say, did an immigrant move your plant overseas? Did an immigrant take away your pension? Or cut your health care? Did an immigrant destroy American workers’ right to organize? Or crash the financial system? Did immigrant workers write the trade laws that have done so much harm?”

Trumka accurately described the class exploitation that underlies U.S. immigration policy. “Too many U.S. employers actually like the current state of the immigration system-a system where immigrants are both plentiful and undocumented-afraid and available,” he explained. “Too many employers like a system where our borders are closed and open at the same time – closed enough to turn immigrants into second-class citizens, open enough to ensure an endless supply of socially and legally powerless cheap labor.”

Trumka concluded by declaring that “we are for ending our two-tiered workforce and our two-tiered society … We need to restore workers’ fundamental human right to organize and bargain with their employers. And we need to make sure every worker in America – documented or undocumented – is protected by our labor laws.”

When he called for “a land of fairness in the workplace and society” in Milwaukee a year later on May Day, immigrant workers in the audience at that march, and those who read his words later, hoped this would mean a sharper challenge to the Obama enforcement policy.

Across the country, tens of thousands marched and rallied to call for national immigration reform and to support all workers’ rights. Marchers often bore placards declaring: “Somos Unos-Respeten Nuestros Derechos” or “We Are One-Respect Our Rights.” In addition to the 100,000 in Milwaukee, ten thousand marched in Los Angeles, five thousand in San Jose (in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley), and thousands more in New York, Atlanta, Houston, Buffalo, Chicago and other major cities. Smaller towns with a large immigrant population, like Fresno, in the heart of California’s agricultural complex, also turned out large demonstrations. In Boston, marchers demanded “From Cairo to Wisconsin to Massachusetts – Defend All Workers’ Rights.”

In Milwaukee, Jose Salazar, a volunteer with Equality Wisconsin, joined Trumka on the stage. “Issues relating to immigration and labor law affect us all,” he told the crowd. “That is why the lesbian and gay community is joining today’s May Day March for Immigrant and Worker Rights. We march to protest Governor Scott Walker’s budget cuts that hurt our families and children. And we march to support the union between immigrant and worker communities.”

SACRAMENTO, CA – Early Tuesday morning busses of domestic workers and their children began arriving at the huge grassy mall in front of California’s state capitol building. Dozens of Mexican, Filipina and African American moms, kids in tow, poured out onto the steps leading into the legislature’s chamber. When the crowd grew to several hundred, they took up their placards, pushed their strollers out in front, and began marching around the building.

Some of the kids had clearly done things like this before. One five-year-old raised her fist in the air as the crowd chanted, calling on members of the state Assembly and Senate to pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Another girl, who looked about three, knew the chant by heart: “We are the children, mighty mighty children, fighting for justice and our future.” She didn’t miss a beat, and as one of the organizers held the bullhorn up to her mouth she did a little militant dance to accompany it.

With balloons and even a couple of clowns, it all seemed very festive. But the happy atmosphere didn’t hide a more unpleasant truth. Many of the moms there probably see less of their own children than the youngsters they care for. And in the case of those caring for the aged, sick or disabled, the conditions of that work can seem like something a century ago.

Domestic workers often don’t get a break to eat, even working many more than the eight-hour workday considered normal for most workers. Others cook for the families they work for, but can’t use the same implements to cook for themselves. If they have to sleep in the homes of clients, they often have to get up during the night several times to perform basic services for them, like taking them to the bathroom, or giving them medicine. And the night is considered a rest period, for which they sometimes don’t get paid.

One Filipina caregiver from the East Bay explained that she sleeps in the same bed as her client. “What I’d like would be a bed where I could sleep by myself,” she said.

Even at five or six, the kids marching with their moms are old enough to understand a little of those bitter truths. When one young girl, who looked about kindergarten age, held up a sign saying “trabajo digno,” or “decent work,” she knew enough to explain, “she doesn’t get enough money, and she works too hard.”

Last year the state Assembly passed AB 889, authored by Assembly members Tom Ammiano and V. Manuel Perez, that would give domestic workers some state-recognized rights in their efforts to curb abusive conditions. It would provide meal and rest breaks, overtime and reporting pay as enjoyed by other workers, and expand domestic workers’ access to workers compensation. In addition, it would guarantee eight hours of sleep for those who work around the clock, and allow them to use kitchen facilities.

The bill would affect the 200,000 people who work in California domestic service, who are almost entirely women, and immigrants or people of color. While domestic workers face the same excuses for substandard conditions faced by other women, namely that they’re only working to supplement the income of men, most of them are either the sole source of income for their families, or are bringing home pay that their families can’t live without. One woman explained that she was still working many more than 40 hours a week, and was in her 70s.

The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights is modeled on one that was enacted in New York State in 2010. It is supported by dozens of statewide worker and community advocates, including the California Labor Federation and many other unions, Filipino Advocates for Justice, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, the Women’s Collective of the San Francisco Day Labor Program, a number of churches and synagogues, and Hand in Hand, the Domestic Workers Employers Association. Its main opponent is the business association for agencies that provide domestic workers to clients.

At the end of the last session of the legislature, the bill was in the appropriations committee of the state Senate. The marchers hoped to pry the bill loose, get it passed through the Senate, and convince Governor Jerry Brown to sign it. One of several legislators who spoke to the crowd, Watsonville Assembly member Bill Monning explained in Spanish, “This bill is just, and we’re going to make sure it becomes law and that domestic workers finally get the same basic rights as other workers.”

Name of Practitioner:

Nansen Dialogue Network

Website:

http://www.nansen-dialogue.net/

www.facebook.com/nansendialoguenetwork

Contact Information:

Nansen Dialogue Network Coordination Unit
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsonsgt. 2
N – 2609 Lillehammer – Norway
Norway & Western Balkans,
Phone: +47 61 26 54 00
Email: contact@nansen-dialogue.net

Practitioner’s aims, programs of activities and fields of expertise:

Founded in 1995
NDN is member of EPLO (European Peacebuilding Liaison Office) Steering Committee
Our vision is of a world in which:
- Societies are peaceful, inclusive and functional
- Diversity is an asset
- Every person respects and enjoys human rights
- Integration, and not segregation, is a core value
- Conflicts are transformed into opportunities through dialogue
Our mission: To support actively and effectively intercultural and interethnic dialogue processes at local, national and international levels with the aim of contributing to conflict prevention, reconciliation and peace building
Awards
2011 – Awarded by OSCE with the Max van der Stoel Award (NDC Skopje)
2011 – Award of the Presidency of the Republic of Croatia (NDC Osijek)
2011 – Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
2010 – Livia Foundation Award
2009 – Nomiated for Nobel Peace Prize
2004 – Bridge-builder Prize
1999 – Amalie Laksov Prize for the Protection of Human Rights (1999)
Products
- Local community reconciliation projects.
- Establishment of and support to Dialogue Centers.
- Projects & policy advice on school/educational issues.
- Design of multicultural school curricula.
- Projects supporting inter-ethnic municipality cooperation for the improvement of citizens’ lives.
- Training and knowledge/experience sharing initiatives (courses, seminars, workshops, etc.).
- Development of training materials.
- Information and sensitization actions targeting public opinion, civil society, local and national authorities and international community.
- Research.
- Publications

Resources and Publications available:

Go to NDN Publications Section @ http://www.nansen-dialogue.net

OAXACA, MEXICO — Just before Christmas, the women and children who’d spent 17 months living on the sidewalk outside the governor’s palace in Oaxaca announced they were going home. In the spring of 2010, these refugees abandoned their homes in San Juan Copala, the ceremonial center of the Triqui people. Many houses were burned after they left.

Stringing tarps and ropes across the palacio’s outdoor colonnade, they set up their planton, an impromptu community of sleeping and cooking areas across the sidewalk from the zocalo, the plaza at Oaxaca’s heart. It looked hauntingly similar to the settlements of the Occupy protesters that spread across the United States last fall, but rather than fighting to remain in their tents, the Triqui families in the planton were fighting for the right not to live there, for the right to go home.

Finally, this December, they announced an agreement with representatives of Gabino Cue, elected governor last July, who promised to protect the families if they returned to San Juan Copala. Still, many question whether they can really go back safely. Even more importantly, they ask what can bring an end to the violence that has claimed the lives of at least 500 people over the last two decades.

This question is not just debated on the sidewalk by the zocalo, or only in Oaxaca. It is asked, albeit in whispers, by migrant farm workers in Baja California and Sinaloa, in northern Mexico, and in Hollister and Greenfield, in California’s Salinas Valley.

Indigenous Triqui children march through the streets of Oaxaca on December 19, 2011, to protest a wave of killihngs in their home community of San Juan Copala.

Mixtecos have been leaving Oaxaca for decades, driven mostly by the endemic poverty of the Mexican countryside, says Gaspar Rivera Salgado, a Mixteco professor at UCLA and past coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations. Yet for many years the Triquis, who were equally poor and live in the same region, stayed put. Their migration only began when the violence in their communities made life unbearable.

Once displaced, they began to migrate within the Mixteca region, then within Oaxaca, and then within Mexico. They traveled north, following other Oaxacans to San Quintin in the 1980s, and then in the 1990s, to California.

Triqui migrants might have escaped the violence, but not the political presence of the groups they were fleeing. Wherever they went, the Movement for the Unification of the Triqui Struggle (MULT) and the Social Welfare Group of the Triqui Region (UBISORT) sent agents, requiring people to pay monetary quotas and participate in mobilizations.

In the 1980s, Triqui activists organized MULT. “It was a grassroots organization to fight the caciques (rural political bosses) over control of land, forests and other natural resources,” says Rivera Salgado. “The caciques were so violent that MULT members had to arm themselves. Eventually, those armed men became a paramilitary group. The caciques were overcome, but what began as a grassroots organization became something different. There was no transition to a civil society form of organization.”

A Triqui boy carries a sign that says, “We want justice for the widows, the orphans and our injured.

Eventually MULT itself fractured into factions. One faction became UBISORT, which began fighting MULT for political control of Triqui communities. Oaxaca’s repressive state government used the conflict to enhance its own control.

UBISORT was organized with the support of then-governor Jose Murat, and became a political support base for Oaxaca’s old governing party, the PRI (Party of the Institutionalized Revolution). MULT organized its own political party, the Popular Unity Party. But behind the parties were the guns.

“A civil war went on between them,” Rivera Salgado says. In 2006, Raul Marcial Perez, a leader of UBISORT, was assassinated. Then in October, 2010, Heriberto Pazos, the founder of MULT, was gunned down in the streets of Oaxaca city.

In the only municipio that remained in Triqui hand, San Martin Itunyoso, Antonio Jacinto López Martínez, a MULT leader, was elected president in 2004, but then couldn’t take office because of threats, and fled to the nearby city of Tlaxiaco. Last October, as he was crossing the street there with two members of his family, a gunman shot him in the head. Many others were killed in years of violence and retribution.

The Triquis attempted to create an autonomous town in San Juan Copala, and were expelled by paramilitary gangs. They carried crosses with the names of people who were killed.

The High Cost of Migration

For Triquies, migration has had a high cost – they’ve had to fight for survival wherever they went. “They faced tremendous racism and prejudice,” Rivera Salgado charges. “They’re always the outsiders, treated like savages.”

Over the course of some 25 years, so many have fled the political murders plaguing their homeland that they’ve formed towns like Nueva Colonia Triqui, or New Triqui Town, in Baja’s San Quintin Valley. In that colonia, or in California’s Triqui neighborhoods, people ask whether peace is possible, and if it were, would they go home too?

“People left looking for a better future, but they worry about the safety of their families at home,” says activist Elvira Santos (whose name has been changed), pointing to the fear that many Triquis share of reprisals for speaking publicly not only against themselves, but also against their families in Oaxaca. “They’ll think twice before going back because the conflicts and the same armed groups are still there.”

In north Mexico, migrants found farm labor camps with dirt floors and no electricity. When they wanted homes for children and families, Triquis and other indigenous migrants had to mount land invasions, building houses on Federal land, and then awaiting the police sent to evict them.

The march called on the governor, Gabino Cue, to guarantee their safety when they try to return to the town and to arrest those responsible for the killings.

In one of the most celebrated cases, Julio Sandoval, a Triqui leader from Yosoyuxi, was imprisoned for two years in the penitentiary in Ensenada for helping families settle in Cañon Buenavista.

When Triqui migrant farm workers arrived in Greenfield, the local police and legal system condemned them for cultural practices like home births or early marriages, or for drinking in public, a normal activity at home. Eventually they reached agreement with the local police chief, who even set up a desk in the police station for a Triqui leader to provide translation.

Then town residents, who saw the migrants as unwelcome invaders, tried to fire the chief. The Triqui community by then numbered at least 3,000 people. Helped by the United Farm Workers, migrants marched through town to assert their right to live there.

Roots of the Violence

Adelfo Regino Montes, a Mixe indigenous leader and writer for Mexico’s leftwing daily, La Jornada, traces the violence in the Triqui region to “political submission, territorial disintegration, economic exploitation, racial discrimination and exclusion in every aspect of daily life.”

Triqui men joined the women and children in the march.

After Mexico won its independence, Triquis controlled three municipios, or counties, where they were the majority. That gave them some degree of political power. After the Mexican Revolution, however, two of the municipios were dissolved, and much of the community’s autonomy was lost.

“San Juan Copala itself was no longer a municipio,” Santos explains. “Many mestizos [people of mixed indigenous and Spanish ancestry] didn’t want Triquis to have power. They introduced alcohol and arms in order to gain control of the land and resources.” Those caciques ruled Triqui towns using repression and violence.

“[Triqui municipios] were dispersed into districts where non-indigenous people are the majority,” Regino Montes said in a 2010 Jornada column. “The big majority of Triqui communities have been excluded from any decisions that affect their lives and destinies, undermining their autonomy and freedom to make their own choices. Those decision remained in the hands of the caciques, the state and federal governments, and the party leaders of the PRI.”

In the only municipio that remained in Triqui hands, San Martin Itunyoso, Antonio Jacinto López Martínez, a MULT leader, was elected president in 2004, but then couldn’t take office because of threats, and fled to the nearby city of Tlaxiaco. Last October, as he was crossing the street there with two members of his family, a gunman shot him in the head.

The women carry a banner that says, “Neither forgive nor forget, punishment to the assassins. Autonomous town of San Juan Copala.”

“The violence is created by a lack of the assertion of the rule of law. But the government has excused its failure to stop it with such racist ideas as ‘Triquis are savages and uncivilized,’” Rivera Salgado charges.

Indigenous self-government

Looking for a way out themselves, in 2007 Triqui activists created the autonomous municipio of San Juan Copala, inspired by the experiences of the Zapatistas in nearby Chiapas. “They recreated the system of indigenous self-government,” Regino Montes wrote, “the only real possibility for peace in the region.”

“They were looking for a political alternative,” adds Rivera Salgado, “and they used the political process. They weren’t armed. And they won in a clean election.”

Those activists had roots in another splinter from MULT, called MULT Independiente, or MULT-I. UBISORT and MULT united against them, and eventually laid siege to the town, which went on for months. A number of residents were killed.

A Triqui girl carries a sign that says, “Long live the autonomy of the native people of the planet earth.”

On April 27, 2010, a caravan of Mexican and European human rights activists set out for San Juan Copala. They were stopped at a roadblock, and gunmen began shooting. Beatriz Alberta Cariño Trujillo, a Mexican human rights activist, and a Finnish supporter Tyri Antero Jaakkola, were murdered. The others fled into the hills.

Human rights lawyer Gabriela Jimenez Rodriguez said she was captured by hooded men who told her they were from UBISORT and MULT. “They told us than no one could pass here, that it was their territory.” Finally she and others were released. Police recovered the two bodies, but never tried to enter the town.

On August 22, three more people were killed and two wounded, as they drove to nearby Santa Cruz Tilapia, where residents were also trying to establish an autonomous municipio. One was the town leader, Antonio Ramirez Lopez, 78 years old.

Then in September, 500 paramilitaries surrounded San Juan Copala and told supporters of the autonomous municipio they had 24 hours to leave. “That wasn’t just a threat,” Reyna Martinez, one of the town’s leaders, told La Jornada. “They did the same thing in San Miguel Copala, where they killed twelve of our colleagues in the city hall. Neither state nor Federal authorities dare even to come into San Juan Copala.”

Women and children walked past the street vendors selling toys in the city’s main plaza, with the star and masked figure on their banner showing their connection to the Zapatista movement.

No need for protective measures?

Oaxaca’s governor at the time, Ulisses Ruiz, notorious for his violent suppression of the teachers’ strike of 2006, said there were no gunmen, deaths or disappearances in the Triqui region, and no need for protective measures for residents. By that time, families who’d fled were already living in the planton outside his office, and some had gone to Mexico City to set up a similar planton there. “They got us to leave,” said another leader, Marcos Albino Ortiz, “but that doesn’t mean we’ve given up.”

Last July, however, Gabino Cue, who Ruiz defeated in the election of 2004, beat the PRI candidate for governor. UBISORT campaigned for the PRI. MULT’s PUP ran its own candidate, viewed largely as an attempt to draw votes from Cue. After the election, Cue put Region Montes in charge of the state Secretariat of Indigenous Affairs. Rufino Dominguez, former coordinator for the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, was appointed director of the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants.

The women in the planton didn’t stop demonstrating against the government, however, and the violence continued. In August three MULTI members were killed in Agua Fria. Their bodies were brought to the planton for a public funeral. In October, Reyna Martinez was arrested with two dozen others for occupying a piece of land near the airport, in an act of civil disobedience. They demanded that the new state government provide protection to allow their return to San Juan Copala, pay for the destruction of peoples’ homes there, and arrest those responsible for the killings. And in December women and children in bright red huipils marched through Oaxaca city, demanding the government accept the conditions.

In response to the pressure, Rufino Juarez, a UBISORT leader, was arrested in May for killing MULTI activist Celestino Hernandez Cruz a year earlier. Cue’s administration then issued arrest orders for a number of others, but so far none have been detained, with one exception. Authorities did arrest a MULTI founder and retired teacher, Miguel Angel Velasco, accusing him of arranging the disappearance of two young women from MULT in 2007.

The planton in front of the governor’s palace on the main square in Oaxaca.

Nevertheless, Marcos Albino Ortiz, says that the state government “has fulfilled about half of what it agreed to. We’re going back to San Juan Copala, and we’re talking with the communities there to ensure they support our decision. Our objective is to pacify the region.” He predicts that the state and federal police will provide an escort, along with representatives of the Interamerican Commission for Human Rights, which has issued orders of protection for many of the activists. Some 135 families have received some restitution for their burned homes, he says.

Can Triqsuis go home?

To ensure peace in San Juan Copala, however, some police presence there is unavoidable, at least in the short run, Rivera Salgado believes. “The litmus test is whether the government will create the conditions in which people can go home,” he says. “You can’t change overnight a situation that’s existed for 30 years. In the short term they have to disarm the armed people. This can create political space. But military occupation is not a long-term solution. People need to become a force for change themselves.”

Following the ambush of the caravan, Regino Montes asserted, “The solution must be the recognition and respect, in law and in action, for the process of Triqui autonomy.” Now he is a responsible official in a government that has the power to implement that recommendation.

Peace in Oaxaca may encourage Triqui migrants to return, but going home won’t be easy. No one can afford to go back to Oaxaca, just to take a look.

A child sleeps in a planton set up by the Triquis in Mexico City’s zocalo, or main square.

Triqui migration hit the U.S. after the amnesty of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, so most people have no legal immigration status. They can cross the border into Mexico, but coming back to the U.S. is a much bigger problem. It’s expensive — $2500 for a coyote for the crossing is two months wages for a farm worker. Plus, it’s more dangerous every year, as people get pushed by increased enforcement into the most remote sections of the border to cross.

Going back home is a permanent decision, not a temporary visit. Nor has the fear of violence there diminished. In the last few years, five Triqui families even won political asylum, helped by San Francisco’s Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. Nevertheless, “most migrants get much harsher treatment now,” according to Rivera Salgado. “The current enforcement policy is based on excluding them, through violence and jail at the border, and isolation and fear in their community. The idea is to make life so hard for them in the U.S. they’ll have to leave. But where are they supposed to go?”

“I think a lot of people would go home if they could,” Santos believes. “Our land is very productive, and as farm workers here we’ve seen new crops that we could grow in Oaxaca. But we need jobs and schools there, and especially security. Right now, we don’t know if we can even hope for that. Some of us have lost hope. Our governments have made these promises before. It would be good if it were true this time, but we have to see if their actions match their words.”"

“And where is home?” asks Rivera Salgado. “Lots of Triquis have grown up in San Quintin or Greenfield by now. Yet the first generation still yearns for connection to San Juan Copala. It is part of their identity and sense of belonging. Everybody needs that.”

Over the last few years, Europe has become more culturally and religiously diverse. While migration to and from Europe is not a new phenomenon, it has taken on a different form and shape in recent years. It has led to multicultural societies in Europe with numerous diaspora communities. However, while diaspora communities are an integral part of our societies, they are rarely a well integrated part.

Moreover, there seems to be an increasing disintegration of European societies. This is often a consequence of the fragmentation of social norms, rather than culture- or religion-based. Nevertheless, there is a trend to explain social uproar or discontent, clashes within society, riots and protests, expressions of outrage or short-comings within the social system by the increasing number of migrants or rather blamed on. Their lacking integration into European societies is portrayed as a danger to cohesive societies, a threat to cultural and social traditions of host societies and reason for the decline of social standards. This culminated in the concept of multiculturalism being declared to have failed by many experts and politicians.

Learning to Live in a Multicultural World [PDF]

Over the last 25 years, guest worker programs have increasingly become a vehicle for channeling the migration that has stemmed from free market reforms. Increasing numbers of guest workers are recruited each year for labor in the U.S. from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean under the H1-B, H2-A and H2-B programs. Recruiters promise high wages and charge thousands of dollars for visas, fees and transportation. By the time they leave home, the debts of guest workers are crushing.In 2007 the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report, Close to Slavery, documenting the treatment of guest workers. No one gets overtime, regardless of the law. Companies charge for tools, food and housing. Guest workers are routinely cheated. Recent protests have exposed the exploitation of guest workers recruited from India to work in the Mississippi shipyard of Signal International. They paid $15-20,000 for each visa, lived in barracks in the yard, and had to get up at 3.30 to use the bathroom because there weren’t enough for everyone. The company cut the wages, held six workers prisoner for deportation, and fired their leader, Joseph Jacobs. In 2006 Santiago Rafael Cruz, an organizer for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, was murdered when the union tried to set up an office in Mexico to end the corruption and abuse by guest worker contractors.

Graton, California — Rafael Cisneros, an H2-A worker, looks at a photo of his son, who he left behind in Mexico to work in the U.S.

If workers protest this treatment, they’re put on a blacklist and won’t be hired the following year. Protesting wouldn’t do much good anyway. Prior to the current administration, the U.S. Department of Labor almost never decertified a guest worker contractor, no matter how many complaints were filed against it. The paper industry depends on this system. Twenty years ago, it stopped hiring unemployed workers domestically, and began recruiting guest workers. As a result, labor costs in the forests have remained flat, while paper profits have gone up.

U.S. guest worker programs in general are just one part of a much larger, global system, which produces labor and then puts it to use. In Latin America, economic reforms promoted by the U.S. government through trade agreements and international financial institutions displace workers, from miners to coffee pickers. They then join a huge flood of labor moving north. When they arrive in the U.S., they become an indispensable part of the workforce, whether they are undocumented or laboring under work visas. Displacement creates a mobile workforce, an army of available workers that has become an indispensable part of the U.S. economy, and that of wealthy countries like it. The same system that produces migration needs and uses that labor.

The creation of a vulnerable workforce through the displacement of communities is not new. Africa became “a warren for the hunting of black skins” during the bloody displacement of communities by the slave traders. Uprooted African farmers were transported to the Americas in chains, where they became an enslaved plantation workforce from Colombia and Brazil to the U.S. South. Their labor created the wealth that made economic growth possible in the U.S. and much of Latin America and the Caribbean. But displacement and enslavement produced more than wealth. As slave-owners sought to differentiate slaves from free people, they created the first racial categories. Society was divided into those with greater and fewer rights, using skin color and origin. When anti-immigrant ideologues call modern migrants “illegals,” they use a category inherited and developed from slavery.

Today displacement and inequality are as deeply ingrained in the free market economy as they were during the slave trade. Mexican President Felipe Calderon said during a 2008 visit to California, “You have two economies. One economy is intensive in capital, which is the American economy. One economy is intensive in labor, which is the Mexican economy. We are two complementary economies, and that phenomenon is impossible to stop.” When Calderon says intensive in labor, he means that millions of Mexican citizens are being displaced, and that the country’s economy can’t produce employment for them. To Calderon and employers on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border, migration is therefore a labor supply system.

U.S. immigration policy determines the rules under which that labor is put to use. Employers see migrants as a source of labor, and seek to organize the flow of migration, to direct it where it’s needed. “The economic interests of the overwhelming majority of [U.S.] employers favor borders as porous for labor as possible,” according to Faux. But employers want labor in a vulnerable, second-class status, at a price they want to pay.

President George Bush said the purpose of U.S. immigration policy should be to “connect willing employers and willing employees.” He was simply restating what has been true throughout U.S. history. Providing labor is the reason Chinese migrants were brought from the Pearl River delta to build the transcontinental railroad in the 1850s. Providing labor was the motivation for the slave trade. In the 1920s and 30s Filipinos were kept moving from labor camp to labor camp, while anti-miscegenation laws kept them from settling down and forming families. They, too, provided labor, as did those Mexican farmers brought to the U.S. during the bracero contract labor program, from 1942 to 1964.

U.S., industrial agriculture has always depended on a migrant workforce, formed from waves of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Mexicans, and more recently, Central Americans. Today a growing percentage of farm workers are indigenous people speaking languages other than Spanish, an indication that economic dislocation has reached far into the most remote parts of Mexico’s countryside.

Within this system of displacement and migration, U.S. immigration policy determines the status of migrant labor. It doesn’t stop people from coming into the country, nor is it intended to. Its main function is to determine the status of people once they’re here. And an immigration policy based on providing a labor supply produces two effects. Displacement becomes an unspoken tool for producing workers, while inequality becomes official policy. The unquestioned assumption is that migrants will not have the same rights as people living in the community around them. All the immigration bills debated by Congress over the last few years are based on this assumption.

Today, calling someone an “illegal” doesn’t refer to an illegal act. Illegality is a social category. Illegality creates an inexpensive system. So-called illegal workers produce wealth, but receive a smaller share in return – a source of profit for those who employ them. Inequality is profitable. In 1994 the labor of undocumented workers pumped $45,000 per person into the California economy according to the North American Integration and Development Center at UCLA. Assuming almost all were working at close to the minimum wage, each received only a small part of the value he or she produced, about $8840 each. The average manufacturing wage at the time produced an annual income more than twice that. That additional value was expropriated by employers.

Companies depend, not just on the workers in the factories and fields, but also on the communities from which they come. If those communities stop sending workers, the labor supply dries up. Work stops. Yet no company pays for a single school or clinic, or even any taxes, in those communities. Workers pay for it all, through the money they send home.

About 11 percent of Mexico’s population lives in the U.S., according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Their remittances, which were less than $4 billion in 1994 when NAFTA took effect, rose to $10 billion in 2002, and then $20 billion three years later, according to the Bank of Mexico. In 2006 that figure reached $25 billion. At the same time, the public funds which used to pay for schools and public works leaves Mexico in debt payments to foreign banks. Remittances, as large as they are, cannot make up for this outflow. According to a report to the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, remittances accounted for an average of 1.19% of the gross domestic product between1996 and 2000, and 2.14% between 2001 and 2006. Debt payments accounted for 3% annually. By partially meeting unmet, and unfunded, social needs, remittances are indirectly subsidizing banks.

At the same time, companies dependent on this immigrant stream gain greater flexibility in adjusting for the highs and lows of market demand. The global production system has grown very flexible in accommodating economic booms and busts. Its employment system is based on the use of contractors, which is replacing the system in which workers were directly employed by the businesses using their labor. This has been the employment model in the garment and janitorial industries and in agriculture for decades. Displaced migrant workers are the backbone of this system. Its guiding principle is that immigration policy and enforcement should direct immigrants to industries when their labor is needed, and remove them when it’s not.

Guest worker and employment-based visa programs were created to accommodate labor needs. When demand is high, employers recruit workers. When demand falls, those workers not only have to leave their jobs, but the country entirely.

Today employers call for relaxing the requirements on guest worker visas, especially since those protections have recently been strengthened by the current Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis. Simply putting more labor protections on the programs does not change their basic structure that makes those workers vulnerable. “They don’t have labor rights or benefits,” charges Rufino Domínguez, the former coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, who now heads the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants. “It’s like slavery. If workers don’t get paid or they’re cheated, they can’t do anything.”

Labor Programs and Greater Enforcement – The Corporate Agenda on Immigration

The meatpacking industry started lobbying for guest workers in the late 1990s, when companies organized the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition – corporations like Wal-Mart, Marriott, Tyson Foods and the Associated Builders and Contractors. While Republicans are strong guest worker supporters, the proposals in Congress are bipartisan, supported by liberals like Senator Edward Kennedy and Congressman Luis Gutierrez.

New guest worker programs are the heart of the corporate program for immigration reform, and are combined with proposals for increased enforcement and a pro-employer program for legalization of the undocumented. Guest worker proposals, advanced now even at the negotiations of the World Trade Organization, have two characteristics. They allow employers to recruit labor in one country and put it to use in another, and they tie the ability of workers to stay in their new country to their employment status. If they aren’t working, they have no right to stay. These inevitably lead to a different social, political and economic status, in which workers don’t have the same rights as those around them, and can’t receive the same social benefits.

Oakland, California — Protesting raids at a local hotel.

Some bills in the U.S. Congress in recent years would have allowed some of the largest corporations to recruit and bring into the country, through labor contractors, as many as 800,000 people a year. And in the middle of the final debate in 2006 in which his proposal failed, President George Bush tried to eliminate all family-based immigration, and allow people to come to the U.S. only when recruited by employers. Under his proposal almost all immigrants would have become guest workers. Significantly, however, the general three-part approach of the Obama administration’s immigration reform program is not significantly different from that of his predecessor.

A second element in the corporate program is legalization, but in a program tailored more to protect employers from legal charges for hiring undocumented workers than helping families adjust their status. Congress’ comprehensive bills all would have imposed waiting periods from 11 to 18 years on immigrants applying for legalization, during which time they would be as vulnerable as ever. But their employers would be protected from charges they’d violated employer sanctions, while they organized the recruitment of new workers through guest worker programs.

Because of the record of abuse of guest worker programs, and because working outside those programs offers an attractive alternative, the third necessary element of this kind of corporate reform in an increase in enforcement against undocumented labor in the workplace, and unauthorized border crossing. These proposals seek to end spontaneous migration, in which people decide for themselves when to come and where to go, by making it impossible to work without a work visa and contract. In its place they substitute a regimented system in which people can only migrate as contracted labor.

After the big immigrant rights marches of 2006 the Federal government launched a dramatic increase in raids in workplaces and communities. Spokespeople for the bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS), explained they were intended to show the need for the administration’s immigration program. ICE also began to implement many of the enforcement measures contained in the reform bills Congress didn’t pass.

In 2007 then-Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff proposed a rule requiring employers to fire any worker who couldn’t correct a mismatch between the Social Security number they’ provided their employer, and the SSA database. The regulation assumes those workers have no valid immigration visa. That regulation was challenged in federal court by unions and immigrant advocates. But the Obama administration has simply implemented the same scheme using different tactics.

Recently the Council on Foreign Relations proposed two goals for U.S. immigration policy. In a report from the CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force on U.S. Immigration Policy, CFR Senior Fellow Edward Alden stated, “We should reform the legal immigration system,” it advocated, “so that it operates more efficiently, responds more accurately to labor market needs, and enhances U.S. competitiveness.” This essentially calls for continuing use of migration to supply labor at competitive, or low, wages. “We should restore the integrity of immigration laws,” Aiden went on to say, “through an enforcement regime that strongly discourages employers and employees from operating outside that legal system.” This couples an enforcement regime like the one at present, with its raids and firings, to that labor supply scheme.

For two years dozens of other employers have fired workers in response to demands from ICE, the enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security. ICE chief John Morton made serial announcements of the number of companies being audited to find undocumented employees – citing figures from 1000 to 1654. Many thousands of workers have lost their jobs. In Minneapolis, Seattle and San Francisco over 1800 janitors, members of SEIU union locals, lost their jobs. In 2009 some 2000 young women laboring at the sewing machines of American Apparel were fired in Los Angeles. At one point Morton claimed ICE had audited over 2900 companies.

President Obama says this workplace enforcement targets employers “who are using illegal workers in order to drive down wages-and oftentimes mistreat those workers.” An ICE Worksite Enforcement Advisory claims “unscrupulous employers are likely to pay illegal workers substandard wages or force them to endure intolerable working conditions.” Curing intolerable conditions by firing workers who endure them doesn’t help the workers or change the conditions, however. Instead, the administration’s rhetoric has fed efforts to blame immigrants for “stealing jobs” and for undermining wages.

The DHS workplace enforcement wave is focusing, not on low-wage employers, but on high-wage, and often unionized ones. There is a long history of anti-union animus among immigration authorities. Agents have set up roadblocks before union elections in California fields, conducted raids during meatpacking organizing drives in North Carolina and Iowa, audited janitorial employers and airline food plants prior to union contract negotiations, and helped companies terminate close to a thousand apple packers when they tried to join the Teamsters Union in Washington state.

Unscrupulous employers use their vulnerability to deny undocumented workers the minimum wage or overtime, and to fire workers when they protest or organize. This affects workers in general. After deporting over 1000 employees of Swift meatpacking plants, former Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff called for linking “effective interior enforcement and a temporary-worker program.” The government is again giving a cheap labor subsidy to large employers. Deportations, firings and guest worker programs all make labor cheaper and union organizing harder.

Meanwhile, some states and local communities, seeing a green light from the Department of Homeland Security, have passed measures that go even further. The Arizona legislature has passed a law requiring employers to verify the immigration status of every worker through a federal database called E-Verify, and fire workers whose names get flagged. It then passed a law, SB 1070, requiring police to check the immigration status of all people they stop on the street. 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. States like Georgia and Alabama have passed bills even more repressive than Arizona’s. Congress itself has passed bills requiring similar use of the E-Verify database, which were supported by both political parties.

Watsonville, California – A Mixtec father drops his daughter off at a migrant education preschool, before going to work in the fields.

Workplace raids and firings are part of an overall program for increasing immigration enforcement. One of its most bitterly-fought elements is the growing connection between police departments and immigration authorities. Under President Bush, the federal government began implementing “287g” agreements, under which local police departments shared information and turned over to immigration agents people arrested for even minor traffic violations. Those agreements then were codified in a federal program called “Secure Communities.” At first, ICE tried to sign agreements with state and local law enforcement bodies, requiring them to turn over the fingerprints of anyone with whom they came into contact. The Obama administration claimed that it was only seeking criminals for deportation.

In practice, however, this increased cooperation led to the detention of hundreds of thousands of immigrants with no criminal record, who were held simply because they were undocumented. Deportations skyrocketed. Over a million people have been deported from the U.S. as a result of all this combined enforcement since Obama took office. When even some states tried to pull out of the program, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it didn’t need their agreement, and would continue expanding the program with or without them. A rising wave of protest has met this declaration, as the wave of deportations has grown. In response to criticism, the administration has called for the passage of “comprehensive immigration reform” as its alternative to criminalization and mass removals – essentially using blackmail and repression to advance the corporate immigration reform program.

David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org

http://www.cipamericas.org/

Roberto Ortega tried to make a living slaughtering pigs in Veracruz, Mexico. “In my town, Las Choapas, after I killed a pig, I would cut it up to sell the meat,” he recalls. But in the late 1990s, after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) opened up Mexican markets to massive pork imports from US companies like Smithfield Foods, Ortega and other small-scale butchers in Mexico were devastated by the drop in prices. “Whatever I could do to make money, I did,” Ortega explains. “But I could never make enough for us to survive.” In 1999 he came to the United States, where he again slaughtered pigs for a living. This time, though, he did it as a worker in the world’s largest pork slaughterhouse, in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

His new employer? Smithfield-the same company whose imports helped to drive small butchers like him out of business in Mexico.

David Ceja, another immigrant from Veracruz who wound up in Tar Heel, recalls, “Sometimes the price of a pig was enough to buy what we needed, but then it wasn’t. Farm prices were always going down. We couldn’t pay for electricity, so we’d just use candles. Everyone was hurting almost all the time.”

Ceja remembers that his family had ten cows, as well as pigs and chickens, when he was growing up. Even then, he still had to work, and they sometimes went hungry. “But we could give milk to people who came asking for it. There were people even worse off than us,” he recalls.

In 1999, when Ceja was 18, he left his family’s farm in Martinez de la Torre, in northern Veracruz. His parents sold four cows and two hectares of land, and came up with enough money to get him to the border. There he found a coyote who took him across for $1,200. “I didn’t really want to leave, but I felt I had to,” he remembers. “I was afraid, but our need was so great.”

He arrived in Texas, still owing for the passage. “I couldn’t find work for three months. I was desperate,” he says. He feared the consequences if he couldn’t pay, and took whatever work he could find until he finally reached North Carolina. There friends helped him get a real job at Smithfield’s Tar Heel packinghouse. “The boys I played with as a kid are all in the US,” he says. “I’d see many of them working in the plant.”

North Carolina became the number-one US destination for Veracruz’s displaced farmers. Many got jobs at Smithfield, and some, like Ortega and Ceja, helped lead the sixteen-year fight that finally brought in a union there. But they paid a high price. Asserting their rights also made them the targets of harsh immigration enforcement and a growing wave of hostility toward Mexicans in the American South.

The experience of Veracruz migrants reveals a close connection between US investment and trade deals in Mexico and the displacement and migration of its people. For nearly two decades, Smithfield has used NAFTA and the forces it unleashed to become the world’s largest packer and processor of hogs and pork. But the conditions in Veracruz that helped Smithfield make high profits plunged thousands of rural residents into poverty. Tens of thousands left Mexico, many eventually helping Smithfield’s bottom line once again by working for low wages on its US meatpacking lines. “The free trade agreement was the cause of our problems,” Ceja says.

Smithfield Goes to Mexico-and Migrants Come Here

In 1993 Carroll Foods, a giant hog-raising corporation, partnered with a Mexican agribusiness enterprise to set up a huge pig farm known as Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) in Veracruz’s Perote Valley. Smithfield, which had a longtime partnership with Carroll Foods, bought the company out in 1999.

So many migrants from Veracruz have settled in North Carolina and the South that they name markets for their home state. Because of ferocious anti-immigrant laws, however, many businesses have lost customers as immigrants flee the state.

By 2008 the Perote operation was sending close to a million pigs to slaughter every year-85 percent to Mexico City and the rest to surrounding Mexican states. Because of its location in the mountains above the city of Veracruz, Mexico’s largest port, the operation could easily receive imported corn for feed, which makes up two-thirds of the cost of raising hogs. NAFTA lifted the barriers on Smithfield’s ability to import feed. This gave it an enormous advantage over Mexican producers, as US corn, heavily subsidized by US farm bills, was much cheaper. “After NAFTA,” says Timothy Wise, of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, US corn “was priced 19 percent below the cost of production.”

But Smithfield didn’t just import feed into Mexico. NAFTA allowed it to import pork as well.

According to Alejandro Ramírez, general director of the Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork in 1995, the year after NAFTA took effect. By 2010 pork imports, almost all from the United States, had grown more than twenty-five times, to 811,000 tons. As a result, pork prices received by Mexican producers dropped 56 percent. US pork exports are dominated by the largest companies. Wise estimates that Smithfield’s share of this export market is significantly greater than its 27 percent share of US production.

Imported pork had a dramatic effect on Mexican jobs. “We lost 4,000 pig farms,” Ramírez estimates, based on reports received by the confederation from its members. “On Mexican farms, each 100 animals produce five jobs, so we lost 20,000 farm jobs directly from imports. Counting the five indirect jobs dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000 jobs in total.”

“That produces migration to the US or to Mexican cities,” Ramírez charges.

Corn imports also rose, from 2 million to 10.3 million tons from 1992 to 2008. “Small Mexican farmers got hit with a double whammy,” Wise explains. “On the one hand, competitors were importing pork. On the other, they were producing cheaper hogs.” Smithfield was both producer and importer. Wise estimates that this one company supplies 25 percent of all the pork sold in Mexico.

The increases in pork and corn imports were among many economic changes brought about by NAFTA and concurrent neoliberal reforms to the Mexican economy, such as ending land reform. Companies like Smithfield benefited from these changes, but poverty increased also, especially in the countryside.

In a 2005 study for the Mexican government, the World Bank found that the extreme rural poverty rate of 35 percent in 1992-94, before NAFTA, jumped to 55 percent in 1996-98, after NAFTA took effect-the years when Ortega and Ceja left Mexico. This could be explained, the report said, “mainly by the 1995 economic crisis, the sluggish performance of agriculture, stagnant rural wages, and falling real agricultural prices.”

By 2010, according to the Monterrey Institute of Technology, 53 million Mexicans were living in poverty-half the country’s population. About 20 percent live in extreme poverty, almost all in rural areas.

The growth of poverty, in turn, fueled migration. In 1990, 4.5 million Mexican-born people lived in the United States. A decade later, that population had more than doubled to 9.75 million, and in 2008 it peaked at 12.67 million. About 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa; another 7 million couldn’t but came nevertheless.

As an agricultural state, Veracruz suffered from Mexico’s abandonment of two important policies, which also helped fuel migration. First, neoliberal reforms did away with Tabamex, a national marketing program for small tobacco farmers. A similar program for coffee growers ended just as world coffee prices plunged to record lows. Second, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the country’s corrupt president, pushed through changes to Article 27 of the Constitution in 1992, dismantling land reform and allowing the sale of ejidos, or common lands, as private property.

Waves of tobacco and coffee farmers sold their land because they could no longer make a living on it. Many became migrants. But allowing the sale of ejidos to foreigners made it possible for Carroll Foods to buy land for its swine sheds. Displaced farmers then went to work in those sheds at low wages.

Simultaneous changes in the United States also accelerated migration. The Immigration Reform and Control Act, passed by Congress in 1986, expanded the existing H2-A visa program, creating the current H2-A program, which allows US agricultural employers to bring in workers from Mexico and other countries, giving them temporary visas tied to employment contracts. Growers in North Carolina became large users of the program, especially through the North Carolina Growers Association. Landless tobacco farmers from Veracruz became migrant tobacco workers in the Carolinas.

“Many Veracruzanos came because we were offered work in the tobacco fields, where we had experience,” remembers Miguel Huerta. “Then people who’d been contracted just stayed, because they didn’t have anything in Mexico to go back to. After the tobacco harvest, workers spread out to other industries.”

From Huerta’s perspective, “these companies are very powerful. They can go to Mexico and bring as many employees as they want and replace them when they want.” Poverty, though, was the real recruiter. It created, as Ceja says, the need. “We all had to leave Veracruz because of it,” he emphasizes. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t do something so hard.”

Exporting the Hazards of Corporate Hog Raising

Hog raising is a dirty business-and the environmental damage it creates has provoked rising opposition to Smithfield’s operations within US borders. In Virginia in 1997, federal judge Rebecca Smith imposed the largest federal pollution fine to that date-

$12.6 million-on the company for dumping pig excrement into the Pagan River, which runs into Chesapeake Bay. That year the state of North Carolina went further, passing a moratorium on the creation of any new open-air hog waste lagoons and a cap on production at its Tar Heel plant. In 2000 then-State Attorney General Mike Easley forced Smithfield to fund research by North Carolina State University to develop treatment methods for hog waste that are more effective than open lagoons. Despite North Carolina’s well-known hostility to regulating business, in 2007 Easley (by then governor) made the moratorium permanent. In the face of public outcry over stench and flies, even the anti-regulation industry association, the North Carolina Pork Council, supported it.

Fausto Limon looks at his bean plants, knowing they need more fertilizer, but lacking the money to buy it.

In Mexico’s Perote Valley, however-a high, arid, volcano-rimmed basin straddling the states of Veracruz and Puebla-Smithfield could operate unburdened by the environmental restrictions that increasingly hampered its expansion in the United States. Mexico has environmental standards, and NAFTA supposedly has a procedure for requiring their enforcement, but no complaint was ever filed against GCM or Smithfield under NAFTA’s environmental side agreement. Carolina Ramirez, who heads the women’s department of the Veracruz Human Rights Commission, concluded bitterly that “the company can do here what it can’t do at home.”

For local farmers like Fausto Limon, the hog operation was devastating. On some warm nights his children would wake up and vomit from the smell. He’d put his wife, two sons and daughter into his beat-up pickup, and they’d drive away from his farm until they could breathe without getting sick. Then he’d park, and they’d sleep in the truck for the rest of the night.

Limon and his family all had painful kidney ailments for three years. He says they kept taking medicine until finally a doctor told them to stop drinking water from the farm’s well. Last May they began hauling in bottled water. Once they stopped drinking from the well, the infections stopped.

Less than half a mile from his house is one of the many pig farms built by Smithfield’s Mexican hog-raising subsidiary, GCM. “Before the pig farms came, they said they would bring jobs,” Limon remembers. “But then we found out the reality. Yes, there were jobs, but they also brought a lot of contamination.”

David Torres, a Perote native who spent eight years in the operation’s maternity section, estimates that GCM has eighty complexes, each with as many as 20,000 hogs. The sheds look clean and modern. “When I went to work there, I could see the company was completely mechanized,” he says. The Mexican News online business journal explains that “production cost is very low because of the high ratio of pigs to workersŠ. The preparation of food and feeding of the pigs is completely automated, along with temperature control and the elimination of excrement.”

Workers aren’t employed directly by Granjas Carroll, however, according to Torres. “Since we work for a contractor, we’re not entitled to profit-sharing or company benefits,” he says. “Granjas Carroll made millions of dollars in profits, but never distributed a part of them to the workers,” as required under Mexico’s federal labor law. Torres was paid 1,250 pesos ($90) every fifteen days; he says the company picked him up at 6 every morning and returned him home at 5:30 each evening, often six days a week.

In back of each complex is a large oxidation pond for the hogs’ urine and excrement. A recent drive through the valley revealed that only one of several dozen was covered. “Granjas Carroll doesn’t use concrete or membranes under their ponds,” Torres charges, “so the water table is getting contaminated. People here get their water from wells, which are surrounded by pig farms and oxidation ponds.” Ruben Lopez, a land commissioner in Chichicuautla, a valley town surrounded by hog farms, also says there is no membrane beneath the pools.

In response to an article published in August in Imagen de Veracruz, a Veracruz newspaper, GCM public relations director Tito Tablada Cortés declared, “Granjas Carroll does not pollute.” And Smithfield spokeswoman Amy Richards says, “Our environmental treatment systems in Mexico strictly comply with local and federal regulationsŠ. Mexico encourages, and requires, anaerobic digesters and evaporation ponds.”

Yet despite the 1,200 jobs the pig farms created in a valley where employment is scarce, Limon estimates that a third of the young people have left. “They don’t see a future, and every year it’s harder to live here,” he says.

In 2004 a coalition of local farmers called Pueblos Unidos (United Towns) started collecting signatures for a petition to protest the expansion of the swine sheds. According to teacher Veronica Hernandez, students told her that going to school on the bus was like riding in a toilet. “Some of them fainted or got headaches,” she charges.

When expansion plans moved forward nonetheless, on April 26, 2005, hundreds of people blocked the main highway. That November a construction crew about to build another shed and oxidation pond was met by 1,000 angry farmers. Police had to rescue the crew. Finally, in 2007 GCM’s Tablada Cortés signed an agreement with local towns blocking any new expansion. That year, however, the company filed criminal complaints against Hernandez and thirteen other leaders, charging them with “defaming” the company. Although the charges were eventually dropped, the farmers were intimidated and the protest movement diminished.

A local farmer declares that the people of the Perote Valley want the hog farms removed to protect the environment and health of the communities there.

Then, in early 2009, the first confirmed case of swine flu, the AH1N1 virus, was found in a 5-year-old boy, Édgar Hernández from La Gloria. Pickup trucks from the local health department began spraying pesticide in the streets to kill the omnipresent flies. Nevertheless, the virus spread to Mexico City. By May, forty-five people in Mexico had died. Schools closed, and public events were canceled.

Smithfield denied that the virus came from its Veracruz hogs, and Mexican officials were quick to agree. Tablada’s note to Imagen de Veracruz asserted, “Our company has been totally cleared of any links with the AH1N1 virus,” and “the official position of the Secretary of Health and the World Health Organization leaves no room for doubt.” By one estimate, fear of the virus had led to losses of $8.4 million per day for the US pork industry for the first two weeks of the global scare. So meatpacking companies breathed a sigh of relief at Smithfield’s exoneration. In the valley, though, “no one believed it,” Limon recalls.

This past August, GCM representatives received a permit from the municipal president of Guadalupe Victoria, the county next to Perote, for building new hog farms. Representatives of eighteen town councils have denounced the expansion plans and accuse state authorities of “threatening to use public force (the granaderos) so that the company can continue to expand, against our will.”

“It doesn’t do any good to threaten to kill us,” responds one farmer. “We’re not going to let them build any more sheds. We want GCM to leave the valley.”

Veracruzanos Fight for the Union in Tar Heel

As unrest grew in Veracruz, it was also growing among the company’s workers in North Carolina. When the Tar Heel slaughterhouse opened in 1992, its labor force was made up mostly of African-Americans and local Lumbee Native Americans. Many objected to the high line speed and the injuries that proliferated as a result. The plant kills and dismembers 32,000 hogs every day. People stand very close together as animal carcasses speed by. They wield extremely sharp knives, slicing through sinews and bone in the same motion, hundreds of times each hour. Repetitive stress and other injuries are endemic to meatpacking, and the faster the line runs, the more injuries there are.

The workers’ frustration with the low wages and brutal working conditions produced one of the longest and bitterest fights to organize a union in modern US labor history. In 1994 and 1997 the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) lost two union representation elections. The 1997 election was thrown out by the labor board, but an administrative law judge ruled that in both, Smithfield “engaged in egregious and pervasive unfair labor practices and objectionable conduct.” In 1997 police in riot gear lined the walkway into the plant, and workers had to file past them to cast their ballots. At the end of the vote count, union organizer Ray Shawn was beaten up. Security chief Danny Priest and the other guards were later deputized, and Smithfield maintained a holding cell in a trailer on the property, which workers called the company jail.

Even by standards in North Carolina, where union membership and wages are low, Smithfield’s pay scale and reputation for injuries made it hard for the company to attract local workers. In the mid-’90s, Mexicans pushed by the effects of NAFTA to leave the Veracruz countryside began arriving in North Carolina and going to work at the Tar Heel slaughterhouse. All over Veracruz, meatpacking companies were recruiting them, according to Carolina Ramirez. “There were recruiters in many Veracruz towns,” she remembers. “There were even vans stationed in different places, and a whole system in which people were promised jobs in the packing plants. It was an open secret.” Richards, the Smithfield spokeswoman, denied that the company recruited workers in Mexico. “With one exception [a management trainee program], Smithfield Foods does not travel to, nor advertise in, other countries or outside of our local communities to actively recruit employees for our various facilities around the country,” she said.

Roberto Ortega remembers that there were hundreds of people from Veracruz in the Tar Heel plant when he worked there in the late ’90s and early 2000s. They’d have community get-togethers, eat seafood and play their state’s famous jarocho music on wooden harps and guitars. “Almost the whole town [of Las Choapas] is here,” he says. “Some are supervisors and mayordomos, and they bring people from the town.”

Keith Ludlum is president of UFCW Local 1208.

As new migrants, the Veracruzanos were desperate and hungry. Most were undocumented. According to Keith Ludlum, one of the plant’s few white workers, “After Smithfield ran through the workforce around here, you started seeing a lot more immigrants working in the plant. The company thought the undocumented would work cheap, work hard, and they wouldn’t complain.”

Ramirez describes the Veracruz immigrants as “docile at first, because they didn’t have the experience.” For employers, she explains, “these people were a safe workforce. They didn’t understand their rights, but they got the message-don’t organize. They would work fast for fear of losing their jobs, because there was no alternative.”

“They pressured you so you’d work faster and produce more,” Ortega recalls. “You felt like knifing the foreman. Many wanted to throw their knives at his feet and just leave. But if you are the support of your family, you put up with it. I am not going to leave my work, you’d say to yourself-who will pay me then?”

Eventually, however, like the locals, the immigrants didn’t put up with it either.

In the early 2000s the UFCW sent in a new group of organizers, who began helping workers find tactics to slow down the lines. They set up a workers’ center in Red Springs, offering English classes after work. In 2003 the night cleaning crew refused to work, keeping the lines from starting the following morning. David Ceja helped organize another work stoppage a year later.

Ortega was fired in 2005. “Perhaps they saw us talking about this [the union] on our meal breaks, and they started to notice there is something going on with these people,” he says. “They never told me and I never knew why I was fired. They just said, As of today there is no more work for you.” He then began making visits to other workers.

By 2006 Mexicans made up about 60 percent of the plant’s 5,000 employees. In April of that year, protests and demonstrations for immigrants’ rights were spreading across the country, culminating in massive May Day rallies in dozens of cities. Hundreds left the Tar Heel plant and marched through the streets of Wilmington. On May Day only a skeleton crew showed up for work.

Abel Cervantes, a worker at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, was cut by a knife at work. At 20 years old, he can no longer use his hand or work.

That spring, Smithfield enrolled in the Department of Homeland Security’s IMAGE program, in which the government identifies undocumented workers and employers agree to fire them. The program enforces a provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act called employer sanctions, which prohibits employers from hiring undocumented workers. Smithfield spokeswoman Richards says, “We do all that the law requires, and more, in assuring that our workforce is authorized to work in the US.”

In October 2006 the company announced that it intended to fire hundreds of workers suspected of being undocumented because they had bad Social Security numbers. When terminations started, 300 workers walked out and stopped production, temporarily forcing the company to rescind the firings.

Ludlum, who had just been rehired after a twelve-year legal battle, says, “It was really empowering to see all those workers stand up together-probably one of the best experiences of my life.” It had an effect on African-American workers too. They collected 4,000 signatures, asking the company for the day off on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. When managers refused, 400 black workers on the kill line didn’t come in. With no hogs on the hooks at the beginning of the lines, no one else could work either. The plant shut down again.

Nine days later, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained twenty-one Smithfield workers for deportation, questioning hundreds more in the lunchroom. Fear was so intense that most immigrants didn’t show up for work the following day. A few months later, another raid took place. Some of the detained workers were later charged with federal felonies for using bad Social Security numbers.

Meanwhile, ICE agents swept through Mexican communities, detaining people at home and in the street. Ludlum and union organizer Eduardo Peña followed the ICE agents with video cameras but couldn’t stop the raids. Ludlum, Peña and other union activists believed the company had cooperated in the immigration enforcement because the Veracruzanos were no longer useful. “The workforce that was in the shadows was expecting rights, expecting to be part of the community,” Ludlum says. “That’s not what the company wanted.”

Eventually, the crackdown took its toll, and the immigrant workforce shrank by half, as people left. Union organizing stalled. But then, in 2006, led by activist Terry Slaughter, African-American workers stopped the plant again by sitting all day in the middle of the kill floor. They put union stickers on their hard hats and began collecting signatures demanding union recognition. Spurred by widespread community support and the threat of lawsuits, the company agreed to an election without its old bare-knuckle tactics. When the ballots were finally counted on December 11 that year, the union had won. Today Ludlum is president of UFCW Local 1208, and Slaughter is secretary-treasurer.

Terry Slaughter is secretary-treasurer of UFCW Local 1208.

A Veracruzana, Carmen Izquierdo, sits on the union executive board. “In the union it doesn’t matter if you’re undocumented, if you have papers or not,” she says. “All the workers here, whether or not we have papers, have rights.” Ludlum and Slaughter say line speed is slower now, and workers can rotate from one job to another, reducing injuries. Ceja feels that the union gave workers a tool to change conditions. “I’m glad it came in. We worked hard to get it,” he says. But he was not there to enjoy the union’s victory; he left after he was made a supervisor at the time of the raids. “They wanted me to send workers to the office, where I was afraid the immigration agents would be waiting for them,” he explains. “I thought it was better for me to leave, so I wouldn’t have to turn in my compañeros.”

Others left because of fear, especially in the intensifying anti-immigrant climate in North Carolina. Roberto Ortega and his wife, Maria, left the state when the hostility got worse and they couldn’t find work. Juvencio Rocha, head of the Network of Veracruzanos in North Carolina, says bitterly that “after we contributed to the economy, they didn’t want us here anymore. They even took our driver’s licenses away.”

Resisting the System on Both Sides of the Border

Smithfield didn’t invent the system of displacement and migration. It took advantage of US trade and immigration policies, and of economic reforms in Mexico. In both countries, however, the company was forced to bend at least slightly in the face of popular resistance. Farmers in Perote Valley have been able to stop swine shed expansion, at least for a while. Migrant Veracruzanos helped organize a union in Tar Heel. Yet these were defensive battles against a system that needs the land and labor of workers but does its best to keep them powerless.

“From the beginning NAFTA was an instrument of displacement,” says Juan Manuel Sandoval, co-founder of the Mexican Action Network Against Free Trade. “The penetration of capital led to the destruction of the traditional economy, especially in agriculture. People had no alternative but to migrate.” Sandoval notes that many US industries are dependent on this army of available labor. “Meatpacking especially depends on a constant flow of workers,” he says. “Mexico has become its labor reserve.”

Raul Delgado Wise, a professor at the University of Zacatecas, charges that “rather than a free-trade agreement, NAFTA can be described asŠa mechanism for the provision of cheap labor. Since NAFTA came into force, the migrant factory has exported [millions of] Mexicans to the United States.”

About 11 percent of Mexico’s population lives in the United States, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Their remittances, which were less than $4 billion in 1994 when NAFTA took effect, rose to $10 billion in 2002, and then

$20 billion three years later, according to the Bank of Mexico. Even in the recession, Mexicans sent home $21.13 billion in 2010. Remittances total 3 percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product, according to Frank Holmes, investment analyst and CEO of US Global Investors. They are now Mexico’s second-largest source of national income, behind oil.

However, Mexico’s debt payments, mostly to US banks, consume the same percentage of the GDP as remittances. Those remittances, therefore, support families and provide services that were formerly the obligation of the Mexican government. This alone gives the government a vested interest in the continuing labor flow.

For Fausto Limon, the situation is stark: his family’s right to stay in Mexico, on his ranch in the Perote Valley, depends on ending the problems caused by the operation of Granjas Carroll. But he has no money for planting, and he shares the poverty created by meat and corn dumping with farmers throughout Mexico. The trade system that allows this situation to continue will inevitably produce more migrants-if not Limon, then probably his children. The fabric of sustainable rural life at his Rancho del Riego is being pulled apart.

The border wall in the mountains west of Mexicali.

In both the United States and Mexico, many migrant rights networks believe that rational immigration reform must address issues far beyond immigration law enforcement in the United States: real reform must change the US trade policies that contribute to displacing people. Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, a professor at UCLA and former head of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, a group of indigenous Oaxacans living in Mexico and the United States, believes that in the United States “migrants need the right to work, but with labor rights and benefits.” In Mexico, “we need development that makes migration a choice rather than a necessity-the right to not migrate. Both rights are part of the same solution.”

There are some constructive proposals on the table. The TRADE Act, proposed in the 110th Congress by Maine Democratic Representative Mike Michaud, received support from many migrant rights groups because it would hold hearings to re-examine the impact of NAFTA, including provisions like the environmental side agreement that did nothing to restrict the impact of Granjas Carroll on Perote Valley. Another immigration reform proposal, called the Dignity Campaign, goes one step further. It would ban agreements that lead to displacement, like that caused by pork imports or the cross-border investments that created the Perote pig farms. It would also repeal employer sanctions, the immigration law that led to the firing of so many Veracruz migrants at the Tar Heel plant.

“Employer sanctions have little effect on migration,” says Bill Ong Hing, a law professor at the University of San Francisco, “but they have made workers more vulnerable to employer pressure. The rationale has always been that this kind of enforcement will dry up jobs for the undocumented and discourage them from coming. However, they actually become more desperate and take jobs at lower wages-in effect, a subsidy to employers.”

“When you make someone’s status even more illegal,” Carolina Ramirez adds, “you just make their living and working conditions worse. Jobs become like slavery. And if there are no remittances, kids in Veracruz can’t go to school or to the doctor. All the social problems we already have get worse. And all this just provokes more migration.”

The Dignity Campaign and similar proposals are not viable in a Congress dominated by Tea Party nativists and corporations seeking guest-worker programs. But as it took a civil rights movement to pass the Voting Rights Act, any basic change to establish the rights of immigrants will also require a social upheaval and a fundamental realignment of power.

The walkouts in Smithfield and the marches in the streets in 2006 show a deep desire among migrants for basic changes in their conditions and rights. In Perote Valley, farmers are equally determined to prevent the expansion of pig farms and the destruction of their environment. These organizing efforts are linked not just because they’re carried on by people from the same state, facing the same transnational corporation. They’re trying to change the same system.

“We are fighting because we are being destroyed,” says Roberto Ortega. “That is the reason for the daily fight, to try to change this.”

David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org

http://www.cipamericas.org/

A political alliance is developing between countries with a labor export policy and the corporations who use that labor in the global north. Many countries sending migrants to the developed world depend on remittances to finance social services and keep the lid on social discontent over poverty and joblessness, while continuing to make huge debt payments. Corporations using that displaced labor share a growing interest with those countries’ governments in regulating the system that supplies it.

Increasingly, the mechanisms for regulating that flow of people are contract labor programs-called “guest worker” or “temporary worker” programs in the U.S., or “managed migration” in the UK and much of the EU. With or without these programs, migration to the U.S. and other industrial countries is a fact of life. Despite often using rhetoric that demonizes immigrants, the U.S. Congress is not debating the means for ending migration. Nothing can, short of a radical reordering of the world’s economy.

Santiago Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, Mexico — Zacarias Salazar plows a cornfield with an ox.

Nor are the current waves of immigration raids and deportations in the U.S. intended to halt it. In an economy in which immigrant labor plays a critical part, the price of stopping migration would be economic crisis. The intent of immigration policy is managing the flow of people, determining their status here in the U.S., in the interest of those who put that labor to work.

Migrants are human beings first however, and their desire for community is as strong as the need to labor. The use of neoliberal reforms and economic treaties to displace communities, to produce a global army of available and vulnerable workers, has a brutal impact. Existing and proposed free trade agreements between the U.S. and Mexico, Canada, Central America, Peru, Colombia, Panama, South Korea, and Jordan not only do not stop the economic transformations that uproot families and throw them into the migrant stream-they push that whole process forward.

On a world scale, the migratory flow caused by displacement is still generally self-initiated. In other words, while people may be driven by forces beyond their control, they move at their own will and discretion, trying to find survival and economic opportunity, and to reunite their families and create new communities in the countries they now call home. But the idea of managing the flow of migration is growing.

It is the contention of this paper that these global economic forces are driving the development of U.S. immigration policy. Increasingly, the political fault lines that divide the U.S. immigrant rights movement are determined by decisions to either support this general trend in policy, and its political representatives in Washington DC, or to oppose it and create a social movement for equality and rights based in the communities of migrants themselves.

The development of a labor supply and labor management system to govern the flow of migrants, that is, of people, requires increasingly ferocious enforcement. With the criminalization of work for undocumented migrants a quarter century ago, along with the resurrection of a contract labor program for migrants, in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the parameters were set for the debates over immigration policy that continue to the present. Today immigration raids and enforcement actions, harsh and racist legislation, and the hysteria that comes with all this, are sweeping our country. Today’s migrants have become needed low-wage labor and criminals at the same time.

This paper will outline first the global economic forces driving displacement and migration, and their impact on communities. It will then outline the basic structure and purpose of U.S. immigration policy, and the basic proposals for changing it. It will examine the division between mainstream, Washington DC-based supporters of corporate immigration reform and community- and labor-based groups who call for an alternative, and finally it will outline their proposals for an alternative based on human and labor rights.

We begin with the examination of one particular stream of migrants, of indigenous people from Oaxaca, both because their experience is similar to others, but also because organizations in the communities involved have articulated a sophisticated analysis of the system in which they move.

Where the Flow of People Begins

Rufino Domínguez, the former coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, who now heads the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants, estimates there are about 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca living in the U.S., 300,000 in California alone.

According to Rick Mines, author of the 2010 Indigenous Farm Worker Study, “the total population of California’s indigenous Mexican farm workers is about 120,000 Š a total of 165,000 indigenous farm workers and family members in California.” Counting the many indigenous people living and working in urban areas, the total is considerably higher, he says, easily meeting Domínguez’ estimate.

Monterrey, Mexico — La Alianza barrio, a community of displaced people, who work in maquiladoras.

The study counted 54,000 people who had emigrated from 350 Oaxacan towns, or about 150 per town. Given the size of many small communities, this supports the widespread assertion of many indigenous Oaxacans that some towns have become depopulated, or are communities of the very old and very young, where most working-age people have left to work in the north.

“In the early 1990s there were about 35,000 indigenous farm workers in California,” Mines says, “while in the 2004 to 2008 period there were about four times as many, or 120,000 indigenous Mexican farm workers.” In addition, indigenous people made up 7% of Mexican migrants in 1991-3, the years just before the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In 2006-8 they made up 29% – four times more.

California has a farm labor force of about 700,000 workers, so the day is not far off when indigenous Oaxacan migrants may make up a majority. They are truly the workforce that has been produced by NAFTA and the neoliberal changes in the global economy. Further, “the U.S. food system has long been dependent on the influx of an ever-changing, newly-arrived group of workers that sets the wages and working conditions at the entry level in the farm labor market,” Mines says. The rock-bottom wages paid to this most recent wave of migrants – Oaxaca’s indigenous people – sets the wage floor for all the other workers in California farm labor, keeping the labor cost of California growers low, and their profits high.

Economic crises provoked by the North American Free Trade Agreement and other economic reforms are now uprooting and displacing these Mexicans in the country’s most remote areas, where people still speak languages that were old when Columbus arrived from Spain. While farm workers 20 and 30 years ago came from parts of central Mexico with a larger Spanish presence, migrants today come increasingly from indigenous communities. “There are no jobs, and NAFTA forced the price of corn so low that it’s not economically possible to plant a crop anymore,” Dominguez says. “We come to the U.S. to work because we can’t get a price for our product at home. There’s no alternative.”

As he points out, U.S. trade and immigration policy are linked together. They are part of a single system, not separate and independent policies. The negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement was in fact an important step in the development of this relationship.

Since NAFTA’s passage in 1993, the U.S. Congress has debated and passed several new trade agreements – with Peru, Jordan, Chile, and the Central American Free Trade Agreement. At the same time it has debated immigration policy as though those trade agreements bore no relationship to the waves of displaced people migrating to the U.S., looking for work. Meanwhile, a rising tide of anti-immigrant hysteria has increasingly demonized those migrants, leading to measures to deny them jobs, rights, or any pretense of equality with people living in the communities around them. To resolve any of these dilemmas, from adopting rational and humane immigration policies to reducing the fear and hostility towards migrants, the starting point must be an examination of the way U.S. policies have both produced migration, and criminalized migrants.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act and NAFTA

Trade negotiations and immigration policy were formally joined together when Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in 1986. Immigrant rights activists campaigned against the law because it contained employer sanctions, prohibiting employers for the first time on a federal level from hiring undocumented workers. Those advocates said the proposal amounted to criminalizing work for the undocumented. IRCA’s liberal defenders pointed to its amnesty provision as a gain that justified sanctions, and the bill eventually did enable over 4 million people living in the U.S. without immigration documents to gain permanent residence. Showing the broad bipartisan consensus for the bill’s approach to immigration in Washington DC, the bill was signed into law by Ronald Reagan, a Republican and the country’s most conservative president up to that time.

Few noted one other provision of the law. IRCA set up a Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development to study the causes of immigration to the U.S. The commission was inactive until 1988, but began holding hearings when the U.S. and Canada signed a bilateral free trade agreement. After Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari made it plain he favored a similar agreement with Mexico, the commission made a report to President George Bush Sr. and to Congress in 1990. It found, unsurprisingly, that the main motivation for coming to the U.S. was economic. To slow or halt this flow, it recommended “promoting greater economic integration between the migrant sending countries and the United States through free trade” and that “U. S. economic policy should promote a system of open trade.” It concluded that “the United States should expedite the development of a U.S.-Mexico free trade area and encourage its incorporation with Canada into a North American free trade area,” while warning that “it takes many years – even generations – for sustained growth to achieve the desired effect.”

Postville, Iowa – Maria Rosala Mejia Marroquin, a Guatemalan immigrant, was arrested in an immigration raid at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville. She was released to care for her child, but had to wear an ankle bracelet to monitor her movements. She could not work or travel, and was eventually deported.

The negotiations that led to NAFTA started within months of the report. As Congress debated the treaty, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari toured the United States, telling audiences unhappy at high levels of immigration that passing NAFTA would reduce it by providing employment for Mexicans in Mexico. Back home Salinas and other treaty proponents made the same argument. NAFTA, they claimed, would set Mexico on a course to become a first-world nation. “We did become part of the first world,” says Juan Manuel Sandoval, coordinator of the Permanent Seminario on Chicano and Border Studies at Mexico City’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. “The back yard.”

NAFTA, however, did not lead to rising incomes and employment, and therefore, it did not decrease the flow of migrants to the U.S. Instead, it became an important source of pressure on Mexicans, particularly Oaxacans, to migrate. The treaty forced yellow corn grown by Mexican farmers without subsidies to compete in Mexico’s own market with corn from huge U.S. producers, subsidized by the U.S. farm bill. Agricultural exports to Mexico more than doubled during the NAFTA years, from $4.6 to $9.8 billion annually – $2.5 billion in 2006 in corn alone. In January and February of 2008, huge demonstrations in Mexico sought to block the implementation of the agreement’s final chapter, which lowered the tariff barriers on white corn and beans.

As a result of a growing crisis in agricultural production, by the 1980s Mexico had already become a corn importer. Corn imports rose from 2,014,000 to 10,330,000 tons from 1992 to 2008. According to Alejandro Ramírez, general director of the Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork in 1995, the year NAFTA took effect. By 2010 pork imports, almost all from the U.S., had grown over 25 times, to 811, 000 tons. As a result, pork prices received by Mexican producers dropped 56%.

Imports had a dramatic effect on Mexican jobs. “We lost 4000 pig farms,” Alejandro Ramírez estimates. “On Mexican farms, each 100 animals produce 5 jobs, so we lost 20,000 farm jobs directly from imports. Counting the 5 indirect jobs dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000 jobs in total. This produces migration to the U.S. or to Mexican cities – a big problem for our country.” Once Mexican meat and corn producers were driven from the market by imports, the Mexican economy was left vulnerable to price changes dictated by U.S. agribusiness or U.S. policy. “When the U.S. modified its corn policy to encourage ethanol production,” he charges, “corn prices jumped 100% in one year.”

NAFTA then prohibited price supports, without which hundreds of thousands of small farmers found it impossible to sell corn or other farm products for what it cost to produce them. The CONASUPO system, in which the Mexican government bought corn at subsidized prices, turned it into tortillas and sold them in state-franchised grocery stores at subsidized low prices, was abolished.

Mexico couldn’t protect its own agriculture from the fluctuations of the world market. A global coffee glut in the 1990s plunged prices below the cost of production. A less entrapped government might have bought the crops of Veracruz farmers to keep them afloat, or provided subsidies for other crops. But once free market structures were in place prohibiting government intervention to help them, those farmers paid the price. Veracruz campesinos joined the stream of workers headed north. There they became an important part of the workforce in the Smithfield pork processing plant in North Carolina, as well as in other industries.

U.S. companies were allowed to own land and factories, eventually anywhere in Mexico, without Mexican partners. U.S.-based Union Pacific, in partnership with the Larrea family, became the owner of the country’s main north-south rail line, and immediately discontinued virtually all passenger service, as railroad corporations had done in the US. Mexican rail employment dropped from over 90,000 to 36,000. Facing privatization, railroad workers mounted a wildcat strike to try to save their jobs, but they lost and their union became a shadow of its former presence in Mexican politics.

Slashing wages in privatized enterprises and gutting union agreements only increased the wage differential between the U.S. and Mexico. According to Garrett Brown of the Maquiladora Health and Safety Network, the average Mexican wage was 23% of the U.S. manufacturing wage in 1975. By 2002 it was less than an eighth, according to Mexican economist, and former Senator Rosa Albina Garabito. Brown says that since NAFTA went into effect, real Mexican wages dropped by 22%, while worker productivity increased 45%.

Low wages are the magnet used to attract US and other foreign investors. In mid-June, 2006, Ford Corporation, already one of Mexico’s largest employers, announced it would invest $9 billion more in building new factories. Meanwhile, Ford said it was closing at least 14 US plants, eliminating the jobs of tens of thousands of U.S. workers. Both moves were part of the company’s strategic plan to stem losses by cutting labor costs drastically and moving production. When General Motors was bailed out by the U.S. government in the current recession, it closed a dozen U.S. plants and laid off tens of thousands of workers. Its plans for building new plants in Mexico went forward without any hindrance.

In NAFTA’s first year, 1994, one million Mexicans lost their jobs, by the government’s count, when the peso was devalued. To avert the sell off of short-term bonds and a flood of capital to the north. U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin engineered a $20 billion loan to Mexico, which was paid to bondholders, mostly US banks. In return, U.S. and British banks gained control of the country’s financial system. Mexico had to pledge its oil revenue to pay off foreign debt, making the country’s primary source of income unavailable for social needs.

As the Mexican economy, especially the border maquiladora industry, became increasingly tied to the U.S. market, Mexican workers lost jobs when the market for what those factories produced shrank during U.S. recessions. In 2000-2001 400,000 jobs were lost on the U.S./Mexico border, and in the current recession, thousands more have been eliminated.

Displacement – A Product of Free Market Reforms

All of these policies produced displaced people, who could no longer make a living or survive as they’d done before. The rosy predictions of NAFTA’s boosters that it would raise income and slow migration proved false. The World Bank, in a 2005 study made for the Mexican government, found that the extreme rural poverty rate of 35% in 1992-4, prior to NAFTA, jumped to 55% in 1996-8, after NAFTA took effect. This could be explained, the report said, “mainly by the 1995 economic crisis, the sluggish performance of agriculture, stagnant rural wages, and falling real agricultural prices.”

By 2010 53 million Mexicans were living in poverty, according to the Monterrey Institute of Technology – half the country’s population. About 20% live in extreme poverty, almost all in rural areas. The growth of poverty, in turn, fueled migration. In 1990 4.5 million Mexican-born people lived in the U.S. A decade later, that population more than doubled to 9.75 million, and in 2008 it peaked at 12.67 million. About 11% of all Mexicans now live in the U.S. About 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa, but another 7 million couldn’t, and came nevertheless.

Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico — A boy jumps over a polluted canal on his way to cross the border.

People were migrating from Mexico to the U.S. long before NAFTA was negotiated. Juan Manuel Sandoval emphasizes that “Mexican labor has always been linked to the different stages of U.S. capitalist development since the 19th century – in times of prosperity, by the incorporation of big numbers of workers in agricultural, manufacturing, service and other sectors, and in periods of economic crisis, by the deportation of Mexican laborers back to Mexico in huge numbers.” The current wave of deportations – one million people in the last two years – bears him out.

From 1982 through the NAFTA era, successive economic reforms produced more migrants. The displacement of people had already grown so large by 1986 that the commission established by IRCA was charged with recommending measures to halt or slow it.

Its report urged that “migrant-sending countries should encourage technological modernization by strengthening and assuring intellectual property protection and by removing existing impediments to investment” and recommended that “the United States should condition bilateral aid to sending countries on their taking the necessary steps toward structural adjustment. Similarly, U.S. support for non-project lending by the international financial institutions should be based on the implementation of satisfactory adjustment programs.” The IRCA commission report even acknowledged the potential for harm by noting “efforts should be made to ease transitional costs in human suffering.”

The North American Free Trade Agreement, however, was not intended to relieve human suffering. In 1994, the year the treaty took effect, U.S. speculators began selling off Mexican government bonds. According to Jeff Faux, founding director of the Economic Policy Institute, “the peso crash of December, 1994, was directly connected to NAFTA, which had created a speculative bubble for Mexican assets that then collapsed when the speculators cashed in.”

“It is the financial crashes and the economic disasters that drive people to work for dollars in the U.S., to replace life savings, or just to earn enough to keep their family at home together,” says Harvard historian John Womack. “The debt-induced crash in the 1980s, before NAFTA, drove people northŠThe financial crash and the Rubin-induced reform of NAFTA, New York’s financial expropriation of Mexican finances between 1995 and 2000, drove the economically wrecked, dispossessed and impoverished north again.”

The U.S. immigration debate has no vocabulary that describes what happens to migrants before they cross borders – the factors that force them into motion. In the U.S. political debate, Veracruz’s uprooted coffee pickers or unemployed workers from Mexico City are called immigrants, because that debate doesn’t recognize their existence before they leave Mexico. It would be more accurate to call them migrants, and the process migration, since that takes into account both people’s communities of origin and those where they travel to find work.

Displacement itself becomes an unmentionable word in the Washington discourse. Not one immigration proposal in Congress in the quarter century since IRCA was passed tried to come to grips with the policies that uprooted miners, teachers, tree planters and farmers, in spite of the fact that Congress members voted for these policies. In fact, while debating bills to criminalize undocumented migrants and set up huge guest worker programs, four new trade agreements were introduced, each of which would cause more displacement and more migration.

David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org

http://www.cipamericas.org/

Development of the Immigrant Rights Movement to 1986

Before the cold war, the defense of the rights of immigrants in the U.S., especially those from Mexico, Central America and Asia was mounted mostly by immigrant working class communities, and the alliances they built with the left wing of the U.S. labor movement. At the time when the left came under attack and was partly destroyed in the cold war, immigrant rights leaders were also targeted for deportation. Meanwhile, U.S. immigration policy became more overtly a labor supply scheme than at any other time in its history.

In the 1950s, at the height of the cold war, the combination of enforcement and contract labor reached a peak. In 1954 1,075,168 Mexicans were deported from the U.S. And from 1956 to 1959, between 432,491 and 445,197 Mexicans were brought into the U.S. each year on temporary work visas, in what was known as the “bracero” program. The program, begun during World War Two, in 1942, was finally abolished in 1964.

Los Angeles, California — Bert Corona, hero of the U.S. immigrant rights movement.

The civil rights movement ended the bracero program, and created an alternative to the deportation regime. Chicano activists of the 1960s – Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chávez, Bert Corona, Dolores Huerta and others – convinced Congress in 1964 to repeal Public Law 78, the law authorizing the bracero program. Farm workers went on strike the year after in Delano, California, and the United Farm Workers was born. They also helped to convince Congress in 1965 to pass immigration legislation that established new pathways for legal immigration – the family preference system. People could reunite their families in the U.S. Migrants received permanent residency visas, allowing them to live normal lives, and enjoy basic human and labor rights. Essentially, a family- and community-oriented system replaced the old labor supply/deportation program.

Then, under pressure from employers in the late 1970s, Congress began to debate the bills that eventually resulted in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. That debate set in place the basic dividing line in the modern immigrant rights movement. IRCA contained three elements. It reinstituted a bracero-like guest worker program, by setting up the H2-A visa category. It penalized employers who hired undocumented workers (“employer sanctions”), and required them to check the immigration status of every worker. And it set up an amnesty process for undocumented workers in the country before 1982.

The main trade union federation to which most U.S. unions belong, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), supported sanctions, saying they’d stop undocumented immigration (and therefore, presumably, job competition with citizen or legal resident workers). The Catholic Church and other Washington DC liberal advocates supported amnesty and were willing to agree to guest workers and enforcement as a tradeoff. Employers wanted guest worker programs. The bill was opposed by immigrant communities and leftwing immigrant rights advocates, from the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), founded in Los Angeles by labor and immigrant rights leader Bert Corona, to the Bay Area Committee Against Simpson Mazzoli in Northern California, and similar groups around the country. Local labor activists and leaders also opposed the bill, but were not strong enough to change labor’s position nationally. The Washington DC-based coalition produced the votes in Congress, and Ronald Reagan, one of the country’s most conservative presidents, signed the bill into law.

Once the bill had passed, many of the local organizations that had opposed it set up community-based coalitions to deal with the bill’s impact. In Los Angeles, with the country’s largest concentration of undocumented Mexican and Central American workers, pro-immigrant labor activists set up centers to help people apply for amnesty. That effort, together with earlier, mostly left-led campaigns to organize undocumented workers, built the base for the later upsurge of immigrants that changed the politics and labor movement of the city. Elsewhere, local immigrant advocates set up coalitions to look for ways to defend undocumented workers against the impact of employer sanctions. Grass roots coalitions then began helping workers set up centers for day laborers, garment workers, domestic workers, and other groups of immigrants generally ignored by established unions.

The Movement since IRCA

Over the 27 years since IRCA, a general division has marked the U.S. immigrant rights movement. On one side are well-financed advocacy organizations in Washington DC, with links to the Democratic Party and large corporations. They formulate and negotiate over immigration reform proposals that combine labor supply programs and increased enforcement against the undocumented. On the other side are organizations based in immigrant communities, and among labor and political activists, who defend undocumented migrants, and who resist proposals for greater enforcement and labor programs with diminished rights.

In the late 1990s, when the Clinton administration acquiesced in efforts to pass repressive immigration legislation (what eventually became the Immigration Reform And Immigrant Responsibility Act), Washington lobbying groups advocated a strategy to allow measures directed at increasing deportations of the undocumented to pass (calling them “unstoppable”) while mounting a defense only of legal resident immigrants. Many community-based coalitions withdrew from the Washington lobbying efforts, refusing to cast the undocumented to the wolves. The strategy failed, in any case, and the eventual law includes severe provisions directed at legal, as well as undocumented immigrants.

Emeryville, California — Hotel workers were fired from their jobs after demanding a living wage, when the hotel said they had no papers.

In the labor movement, the growing strength of immigrant workers, combined with a commitment to organize those industries where they were concentrated, created the base for changing labor’s position. At the 1999 AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles, the federation called for the repeal of employer sanctions, for a new amnesty, and for defending the labor rights of all workers. The federation was already opposed to guest worker programs. That position was maintained by the AFL-CIO, even after several unions left to form the rival Change to Win federation, until 2009. At that time, a compromise was reached between the two federations, in which they dropped their previous opposition to employer sanctions, so long as they were implemented “fairly.”

In the years between 2003 and 2009, a succession of “comprehensive” immigration reform bills were introduced into Congress. At their heart are the guest worker programs proposed by employers. But while the employer lobbies wrote the first bills, they’ve been supported by a political coalition that includes some unions, beltway immigrant advocacy groups, and some churches. Except for the vacillating and divided position of unions, this is the same political coalition that passed IRCA in 1986.

Some local immigrant rights coalitions have also supported the bills, although most have been unwilling to agree to guest worker programs and more enforcement. Supporters of the comprehensive bills have organized a succession of high-profile lobbying efforts, which received extensive foundation support. The structure of the bills has been basically the same from the beginning – the same three-part structure of IRCA – guest workers, enforcement and some degree of legalization.

Over the last decade, however, a loose, unorganized network of groups has grown that has generally opposed most CIR bills and their provisions, and that have also organized the movements on the ground that have opposed increased enforcement and repression directed against immigrant communities. Outside the Washington beltway, community coalitions, labor and immigrant rights groups are advocating alternatives. Some of them are large-scale counters to the entire CIR framework. Others seek to win legal status for a part of the undocumented population, as a step towards larger change.

The DREAM Act

One of those proposals is the Dream Act. First introduced in 2003, the bill would allow undocumented students graduating from a U.S. high school to apply for permanent residence if they complete two years of college or serve two years in the U.S. military. Estimates are that it would enable over 800,000 young people to gain legal status, and eventual citizenship. For seven years thousands of young “sin papeles,” or people without papers, have marched, sat-in, written letters and mastered every civil rights tactic to get their bill onto the Washington DC agenda.

Many of them have “come out” – declaring openly their lack of legal immigration status in media interviews, defying authorities to detain them. Three were arrested when they sat-in at the office of Arizona Senator John McCain, demanding that he support the bill, while defying immigration authorities to come get them. The DREAM Act campaigners did more than get a vote in Washington. They learned to stop deportations in an era when more people have been deported than ever since the days of the Cold War.

When it was originally written, the bill would have allowed young people to qualify for legalization with 900 hours of community service, as an alternative to attending college, which many can’t afford. However, when the bill was introduced, the Pentagon pressured to substitute military for community service. Many young activists were torn by this provision, and ultimately, the bill did not pass Congress, even with that change. Nevertheless, many immigrant rights activists view the DREAM Act as an important step towards a more basic reform of the country’s immigration laws.

Supporting the Dream Act and other partial protections for the undocumented are the worker centers around the country. This movement is based on organizing centers for contingent workers, who are mostly undocumented. Some of the centers have anchored the protests against repression in Arizona, or fought to pass laws in California, New York and elsewhere prohibiting police from turning over people to immigration agents. They’ve especially developed grassroots models for organizing migrants who get jobs on street corners, and these projects have come together in the National Day Labor Organizing Network. The National Domestic Worker Alliance was organized last year, in part using the experience of day labor organizing, to win rights for domestic workers, almost all of whom are women. It won passage of a bill of rights in New York, and is working on passing it in California.

On a broader scale, what would be a law that would liberate people- not turn them into modern day slaves- today? Many progressive immigrant rights organizations have sought to formulate an answer to this question, especially in response to the CIR proposals in Washington that they oppose.

Advocating New Policies- Progressive Proposals

The Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales (Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations – FIOB) conducted a series of organized discussions among its California chapters to formulate a very progressive position on immigration reform, with the unique perspective of an organization of migrants and migrant-sending communities. Because of its indigenous membership, FIOB campaigns for the rights of migrants in the U.S. – for immigration amnesty and legalization for undocumented migrants – while also condemning proposals for guest worker programs. At the same time, “we need development that makes migration a choice rather than a necessity – the right to not migrate,” explains Gaspar Rivera Salgado, FIOB’s binational coordinator. “Both rights are part of the same solution. We have to change the debate from one in which immigration is presented as a problem to a debate over rights. The real problem is exploitation.” This perspective is especially important in the U.S., where those debating immigration policy need to hear the voices of Mexicans, especially on the left, as they discuss the movement of people back and forth across the border.

The FIOB proposal on immigration reform is similar to that advanced by the Dignity Campaign, a loose coalition of organizations around the country that have proposed an alternative to the comprehensive (labor supply plus enforcement) bills. The constituent organizations have participated in other earlier coalitions opposing employer sanctions and guest worker programs. The Dignity Campaign brings together immigrant rights and fair trade organizations, to encourage each to see the global connections between trade policy, displacement and migration. It also brings together unions and immigrant rights organizations to spur the growth of a fight back against immigration enforcement against workers, highlighting the need to oppose the criminalization of work.

Santiago Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, Mexico — Indigenous farmers in a FIOB assembly protest the impact of NAFTA.

The Dignity Campaign proposal draws on previous proposals, particularly one put forward by the American Friends Service Committee called “A New Path,” – a set of moral principles for changing U.S. immigration policy. Several other efforts were also made earlier by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to define an alternative program and bring together groups around the country to support it. Important contributions to the Dignity Campaign were made by many other organizations, listed on its website, http://dignitycampaign.org/.

The critique shared by all these organizations contends that the CIR framework ignores trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, which produce profits for U.S. corporations, but increase poverty in Mexico and Central America. Without changing U.S. trade policy and ending structural adjustment programs and neoliberal economic reforms, millions of displaced people will continue to come, no matter how many walls are built on the border.

Under the “comprehensive immigration reform” (CIR) proposals, some of which were introduced as bills into Congress, people working without papers would continue to be fired and even imprisoned and raids would increase. Vulnerability makes it harder for people to defend their rights, organize unions and raise wages. That keeps the price of immigrant labor low. This will not stop people from coming to the U.S., but it will produce a much larger detention system. Last year over 350,000 people went through privately-run prisons for undocumented immigrants. At the same time, the Washington DC-based CIR proposals all expand guest worker programs, in which workers would have few rights, and no leverage to organize for better conditions. Finally, the CIR legalization measures would impose barriers making ineligible many of the 12 million people who need legal status. They condition legalization on “securing the border,” which has become a Washington DC euphemism for a heavy military presence augmenting 20,000 Border Patrol agents, creating a climate of wholesale denial of civil and human rights in border communities.

“The governments of both Mexico and the U.S. are dependent on the cheap labor of Mexicans. They don’t say so openly, but they are,” Rufino Domínguez concludes. “What would improve our situation is legal status for the people already here, and greater availability of visas based on family reunification. Legalization and more visas would resolve a lot of problems – not all, but it would be a big step,” he says. “Walls won’t stop migration, but decent wages and investing money in creating jobs in our countries of origin would decrease the pressure forcing us to leave home. Penalizing us by making it illegal for us to work won’t stop migration, since it doesn’t deal with why people come.”

Changing corporate trade policy and stopping neoliberal reforms is as central to immigration reform as gaining legal status for undocumented immigrants. It makes no sense to promote more free trade agreements, and then condemn the migration of the people they displace. Instead, Congress must end the use of the free trade system as a mechanism for producing displaced workers. That also means delinking immigration status and employment. If employers are allowed to recruit contract labor abroad, and those workers can only stay if they are continuously employed, then they will never have enforceable rights.

The root problem with migration in the global economy is that it’s forced migration. A coalition for reform should fight for the right of people to choose when and how to migrate. Freedom of movement is a human right. Even in a more just world, migration will continue, because families and communities are now connected over thousands of miles and many borders. Immigration policy should therefore make movement easier.

At the same time, workers need basic rights, regardless of immigration status. It would be better to devote more resources to enforcing labor standards for all workers, instead of penalizing undocumented workers for working, and employers for hiring them. “Otherwise,” Domínguez says, “wages will be depressed in a race to the bottom, since if one employer has an advantage, others will seek the same thing.”

To raise the low price of immigrant labor, immigrant workers have to be able to organize. Permanent legal status makes it easier to organize. Guest worker programs, employer sanctions, enforcement and raids make organizing much more difficult. Today the section of workers with no benefits and the lowest wages is expanding the fastest. Proposals to deny people rights or benefits because of immigration status make this process move even faster. A popular coalition should push back in the other direction, toward more equal status, which will help unite diverse communities.

Building a political coalition for a more pro-worker and pro-immigrant reform has to start by seeking mutual interest among workers. That common ground is a struggle for jobs and rights for everyone. Black unemployment, for instance, is at catastrophic levels. Very little unemployment is a result of displacement by immigrants, and is caused mostly by the decline in manufacturing and cuts in public employment. In the 2001 recession 300,000 out of 2,000,000 Black factory workers lost their jobs. But in the growing service and high tech industries, displaced African American and Chicano workers are anathema. Employers think they’re too pro-union. They demand high wages the companies don’t want to pay.

It’s not possible to win major changes in immigration policy without making them part of a struggle for the goals of African Americans, unions and working-class communities. To end job competition, for instance, workers need Congress to adopt a full-employment policy. To gain organizing rights for immigrants, all workers need the Employee Free Choice Act and labor law reform. Winning those demands requires an alliance between workers – immigrants and native-born, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans and whites. An alliance with employers, giving them new guest worker programs, will increase job competition, push wages down, and make affirmative action impossible.

Kennett Square, Pennsylvania – On May Day, 2007, immigrants and their supporters marched through the streets of a small town where many labor in sheds growing mushrooms. Marchers protested anti-immigrant bills in Congress and local anti-immigrant initiatives. Many called for amnesty — permanent residence visas which would give the undocumented immediate legal status and rights.

The Dignity Campaign proposal, therefore, is not just an alternative program for changing laws and policies, but an implicit strategy of alliances among those communities and constituencies based on their mutual interest. The basic elements of such an alternative include:

* Giving permanent residence visas, or green cards, to undocumented people already here, and expanding the number of green cards available for new migrants.

* Eliminating the years-long backlog in processing family reunification visas, strengthening families and communities.

* Allowing people to apply for green cards, in the future, after they’ve been living in the U.S. for a few years.

* Ending the enforcement that has led to thousands of deportations and firings

* Repealing employer sanctions, and enforcing labor rights and worker protection laws, for all workers.

* Ending all guest worker programs

* Dismantling the border wall and demilitarizing the border, so more people don’t die crossing it, and restoring civil and human rights in border communities.

* Responding to recession and foreclosures with jobs programs to guarantee income, and remove the fear of job competition

* Redirecting the money spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to rebuilding communities, refinancing mortgages, and restoring the social services needed by working families.

* Renegotiating existing trade agreements to eliminate causes of displacement and prohibiting new trade agreements that displace people or lower living standards, including military intervention intended to enforce neoliberal reforms.

* Prohibiting local law enforcement agencies from enforcing immigration law, ending roadblocks, immigration raids and sweeps, and closing detention centers.

There is no shortage of needed work in the U.S., but budget priorities must be changed to redirect resources to the areas that will produce jobs and increased well-being. To resolve the dilemmas of migration and globalization, the U.S. needs a system that produces security, not insecurity. Corporations and those who benefit from current priorities might not support this alternative, but millions of people will.

A new era of rights and equality for migrants won’t begin from Washington DC, any more than the civil rights movement did. A human rights reform will be a product of the social movements of this country, especially of people on the bottom outside the beltway. A social movement made possible advances in 1965 that were called unrealistic and politically impossible a decade earlier. The Dignity Campaign proposal may not be a viable one in a Congress dominated by Tea Party nativists and corporations seeking guest worker programs. But just as it took a civil rights movement to pass the Voting Rights Act, any basic change to establish the rights of immigrants will also require a social upheaval and a fundamental realignment of power.

David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org

http://www.cipamericas.org/

Name of Practitioner:

Scanlon Foundation

Website:

http://www.scanlonfoundation.org.au/aboutus.html

Practitioner’s aims, programs of activities and fields of expertise:

The Scanlon Foundation was established in 2001 with the purpose of enhancing social cohesion within Australia.

Since its inception in 2001 we have supported over 300 recipient organisations around Australia. Our principle focus is:

Social Cohesion

Social Cohesion relates to social connectedness in a community and its sense of unity, trust, belonging, acceptance and tolerance. It is a key factor in social stability and harmony.

Australia’s uniquely diverse culture is arguably one of its most defining characteristics. Our continued ability to achieve Social Cohesion with such diversity is paramount to the quality of life for all Australians.

The Scanlon Foundation therefore fosters Social Cohesion through a range of activities that currently include;

• Social Cohesion Research
• Community Grants
• Multi-Year Projects
• Major Community Development Projects
• Celebrating Diversity at work with ‘A Taste of Harmony’ Campaign

Scanlon Foundation Charter

In its mission to enhance Social Cohesion the Scanlon Foundation recognizes the significance of cultural diversity within Australia and seeks to;

Support Capacity -building and program delivery including through ‘Grassroots’ Community based organizations that;

• Identify and provide solutions for ‘emerging’ issues facing culturally diverse communities.
• Support people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse backgrounds recently arrived to ‘Connect’ to their communities.

The Foundation often in collaboration also invests in projects that;

• Develop skills and Provide opportunities for people from CALD backgrounds in high migrant Local Communities to allow them to meaningfully contribute towards their families, education, work, cultural and community life.
• Promote and celebrate cultural diversity and its benefits