After Congress passed NAFTA, six milliondisplaced people (He means Mexicans. — Ed) came to the US as a result.
In a little over a month,hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people will fill thestreets in city after city, town after town, across the US. This yearthese May Day marches of immigrant workers will make an importantdemand on the Obama administration: End the draconian enforcementpolicies of the Bush administration. Establish a new immigration policybased on human rights and recognition of the crucial economic andsocial contributions of immigrants to US society.
This year’s marches willcontinue the recovery in the US of the celebration of May Day,recognized in the rest of the world as the day recognizing thecontributions and achievements of working people. That recovery startedon Monday, May 1, 2006, when over a million people filled the streetsof Los Angeles, with hundreds of thousands more in Chicago, New Yorkand cities and towns throughout the United States. Again on May Day in2007 and 2008, immigrants and their supporters demonstrated andmarched, from coast to coast.
One sign found in almost everymarch said it all: “We are Workers, not Criminals!” Often it was heldin the calloused hands of men and women who looked as though they’djust come from work in a factory, cleaning an office building orpicking grapes. The sign stated an obvious truth. Millions of peoplehave come to the United States to work, not to break its laws. Somehave come with visas, and others without them. But they are allcontributors to the society they’ve found here.
The protests have seemedspontaneous, but they come as a result of years of organizing,educating and agitating – activities that have given immigrantsconfidence, and at least some organizations the credibility needed tomobilize direct mass action. This movement is the legacy of BertCorona, immigrant rights pioneer and founder of many national Latinoorganizations. He trained thousands of immigrant activists, taught thevalue of political independence, and believed that immigrantsthemselves must conduct the fight for immigrant rights. Most of theleaders of the radical wing of today’s immigrant rights movement werestudents or disciples of Corona.
Immigrants, however, feel theirbacks are against the wall, and they came out of their homes andworkplaces to show it. In part, their protests respond to a wave ofdraconian proposals to criminalize immigration status, and work itselffor undocumented people. But the protests do more than react to aparticular congressional or legislative agenda. They are the cumulativeresponse to years of bashing and denigrating immigrants generally, andMexicans and Latinos in particular.
In 1986, the Immigration Reformand Control Act made it a crime, for the first time in US history, tohire people without papers. Defenders argued that if people could notlegally work they would leave. Life was not so simple.
Undocumented people are part ofthe communities they live in. They cannot simply go, nor should they.They seek the same goals of equality and opportunity that workingpeople in the US have historically fought to achieve. In addition, formost immigrants, there are no jobs to return to in the countries fromwhich they’ve come. Rufino Dominguez, a Oaxacan community leader inFresno, California, says, “The North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA) made the price of corn so low that it’s not economicallypossible to plant a crop anymore. We come to the US to work becausethere’s no alternative.”
Instead of recognizing thisreality, the US government has attempted to make holding a job acriminal act. Some states and local communities, seeing a green lightfrom the Department of Homeland Security, have passed measures that goeven further. Last summer, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoffproposed a rule requiring employers to fire any worker who couldn’tcorrect a mismatch between the Social Security number the worker hadprovided an employer and the SSA database. The regulation assumes thoseworkers have no valid immigration visa, and therefore no valid SocialSecurity number.
With 12 million people living inthe US without legal immigration status, the regulation would lead tomassive firings, bringing many industries and businesses to a halt.Citizens and legal visa holders would be swept up as well, since theSocial Security database is often inaccurate. Under Chertoff, theBureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted sweepingworkplace raids, arresting and deporting thousands of workers. Manyhave been charged with an additional crime – identity theft – becausethey used a Social Security number belonging to someone else to get ajob. Yet, workers using another number actually deposit money intoSocial Security funds, and will never collect benefits theircontributions paid for.
The Arizona legislature haspassed a law requiring employers to verify the immigration status ofevery worker through a federal database called E-Verify, which is evenmore incomplete and full of errors than Social Security. They must fireworkers whose names get flagged. And Mississippi passed a bill makingit a felony for an undocumented worker to hold a job, with jail time of1-10 years, fines of up to $10,000, and no bail for anyone arrested.Employers get immunity.
Many of these punitive measureswere incorporated into proposals for “comprehensive immigration reform”that were debated in Congress in 2006 and 2007. The comprehensive billscombined increased enforcement, especially criminalization of work forthe undocumented, with huge guest worker programs under which largeemployers would recruit temporary labor under contract outside the US,bringing workers into the country in a status that would deny thembasic rights and social equality. While those proposals failed inCongress, the Bush administration implemented some of their mostdraconian provisions by executive order and administrative action.
Together, these factors haveproduced a huge popular response, which has become most visible in theannual marches and demonstrations on May Day. Nativo Lopez, presidentof both the Mexican American Political Association and the HermandadMexicana Latinoamericana, says “the huge number of immigrants and theirsupporters in the streets found these compromises completelyunacceptable. We will only get what we’re ready to fight for, butpeople are ready and willing to fight for the whole enchilada.Washington legislators and lobbyists fear the growth of a new civilrights movement in the streets, because it rejects their compromisesand makes demands that go beyond what they have defined as ‘politicallypossible.'”
The marches have put forward analternative set of demands, which include a real legal status for the12 million undocumented people in the US, the right to organize toraise wages and gain workplace rights, increased availability of visasthat give immigrants some degree of social equality, especially visasbased on family reunification, no expansion of guest worker programs,and a guarantee of human rights to immigrants, especially incommunities along the US/Mexican border.
At the same time, the price oftrying to push people out of the US who’ve come here for survival isthat the vulnerability of undocumented workers will increase.Unscrupulous employers use that vulnerability to deny overtime pay orminimum wage, or fire workers when they protest or organize. Increasedvulnerability ultimately results in cheaper labor and fewer rights foreveryone. After deporting over 1,000 workers at Swift meatpackingplants, Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff called for linking”effective interior enforcement and a temporary-worker program.” Thegovernment’s goal is cheap labor for large employers. Deportations,firings and guest worker programs all make labor cheaper and contributeto a climate of fear and insecurity for all workers.
The May 1 actions highlight theeconomic importance of immigrant labor. Undocumented workers deservelegal status because of that labor – their inherent contribution tosociety. The value they create is never called illegal, and no onedreams of taking it away from the employers who profit from it. Yet thepeople who produce that value are called exactly that – illegal. Allworkers create value through their labor, but immigrant workers areespecially profitable, because they are so often denied many of theunion-won benefits accorded to native-born workers. The averageundocumented worker has been in the US for five years. By that time,these workers have paid a high price for their lack of legal status,through low wages and lost benefits.
“Undocumented workers deserve immediate legal status, and have already paid for it,” Lopez says.
On May 1, the absence ofimmigrant workers from workplaces, schools and stores demonstratestheir power in the national immigration debate and sends a powerfulmessage that they will not be shut out of the debate over their status.They have rescued from anonymity the struggle for the eight-hour day,begun in Chicago over a century ago by the immigrants of yesteryear.They overcame the legacy of the cold war, in which celebrations of MayDay were attacked and banned. They are recovering the traditions of allworking people for the people of the United States.
David Bacon is a writer and photographer. His new book, “Illegal People- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants,” wasjust published by Beacon Press.