The debate on immigration reform in the United States took an important turn this week when representatives from 11 Latin American countries meeting in Cartagena, Columbia, announced plans launch a coordinated campaign to defeat the Republican sponsored immigration reform bill now pending in Congress. The bill would turn undocumented immigrants into felons and would create a 700 mile long wall along the Mexican border. It passed the House in December, and is now headed for the Senate. The Bush administration supports the measure, but it’s also calling for the creation of a guest worker program to accompany it.
The 11 Latin American governments, including close allies of the Bush administration, plan to lobby Congress and to mobilize religious groups, chambers of commerce, immigrant rights groups and others to defeat or significantly alter the bill.
For Latin America, the stakes are high. There are up to 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US today, most from Latin America. Undocumented workers coming into the US from Latin America now outnumber those with visas. The remittances that immigrant workers send back home pump $32 billion into Latin America’s economies, providing an important source of foreign capital for many countries.
While the massive migration of workers has created an integrated hemispheric-wide labor market, the laws and institutions which regulate it have remained national. The move by the Latin Americans signals a recognition that this should change: immigration is a global issue that must be addressed by all of the countries involved including those countries that send migrants and those that receive them. Immigration laws are no longer a national matter.
The Latin Americans argue that the US is being hypocritical by placing ever more barriers in the way of migrants. After all, the US economy produces hundreds of thousands of low-wage jobs each year—most of which are filled by immigrants—and yet it issues only a few thousand visas for unskilled workers. The rest are undocumented.
By creating new criminal laws and building physical barriers along the border, the US only makes the immigrant workforce more desperate and more vulnerable. For instance, each year hundreds of people die trying to cross the deserts along the US-Mexican border. Building a wall will only make the crossing more dangerous by forcing people to even more remote locations, and it will have little over-all effect on the number of immigrants coming. In fact, as border enforcement has stiffened over the past few years, the number of those crossing has actually increased. And turning immigrants into felons will make them even more unwilling to organize into unions or to report labor law violations or workplace abuse.
The intervention by Latin American governments is one more step in the development of transnational public policy. Immigration now joins issues like trade in the global public policy arena. And not just in the America--the on-going controversy in EU over the rights of Eastern Europeans to work in the older EU states is another aspect of this emerging discussion.
Labor needs to be involved in the global public policy arena and particularly in this discussions on issues like immigration. Labor has staked much of its future on organizing low wage workers, many are immigrants, many are undocumented. And as the number of undocumented workers in the workforce and in unions increases there could be an anti-immigrant backlash. The drumbeat of nativist demagogues, coupled with genuine worry but US workers about the effect immigrants are having on wages, could result in one part of the labor movement demanding the deportation of another part the labor movement. But by placing the immigration issue where it belongs--in the broader context of globalization--labor can shift the debate to more rational and more worker friendly solutions.
Building a global labor movement must be about more than collective bargaining or promoting national public policies. It also requires cooperation among unions and allies around the world to affect public policy at the national and international levels. US labor should convene meetings with unions and social movements from throughout the Americas to come up with a common agenda on immigration reform. It is not enough to let global elites dominate this conversation. Work such as The Alternatives for the Americas agenda of the Hemispheric Social Alliance could serve as the basis for thinking about an integrated public policy agenda in the Americas.
US unions have the resources to act now and they can draw on the hundreds of thousands of workers from throughout the Americas that are already within its ranks to help in the process of developing worker friendly immigration laws.
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