The huge immigrant demonstrations of the past few days and weeks have put a face on the country’s immigrant population, and could serve as one anchor for a new progressive politics and a revival of the labor movement. The demonstrations have prompted a much needed public discussion about work, wages, and how job markets function.
Many unions have worked hard to mobilize members for the demonstrations and to educate their members on immigration issues. Best of all, it’s now very clear that across the board labor supports an amnesty for workers currently in the country.
But labor has made less of a contribution to solving the problem posed by massive immigration. That’s a pity, because this debate is fundamentally about work and labor is the social institution with the standing to speak on employment matters.
Some unions have supported the Senate reform efforts, even as draconian measures were tacked on to bills and the amnesty provisions were trimmed. These unions formed alliances with business groups interested in access to low wage workers through a guest worker program, without demanding the kinds of protections that such a program would require. The support and the alliances were well intentioned--the desire for amnesty and reform in a difficult political environment--but the proposed reforms would benefit neither immigrant nor established workers. Other unions simply rejected the reforms outright because they contained guest worker programs. But while rejecting the current bills is good in itself it’s time for a proactive worker friendly immigration reform program to emerge from the ranks of labor.
With the various immigration bills apparently stalled in Congress until after the November congressional elections, there is time for labor to work towards its own comprehensive reform program. Such a program needs to address the interests of both immigrants and currently established workers and include in-put from sending and receiving communities and countries. To that end, labor should promote a hemispheric dialogue on all aspects of migration/immigration issue.
There is some movement in that direction among hemispheric elites and governments. In February representatives of 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries met in Columbia and agreed upon a plan to lobby the US Congress about immigration reform. The specific target was the draconian House bill that would build a physical barrier along the border and criminalize undocumented immigrants. The group agreed to mobilize religious, business, and immigrant groups in the lobbying campaign. Such intervention in the US legislative process is an example of the importance neighboring countries place on immigration reform. The intervention may have helped give the immigrant workers the confidence that made massive demonstrations possible.
Largely ignored in the US debate are the factors pushing people in Latin America to become migrants. Policies supported by the US, and institutionalized in treaties like NAFTA, have driven up to two million peasants off the land in Mexico and forced many domestic industries out of business because they were unable to compete with cheaper imports. While NAFTA was touted as a way to slow northward migration, it has done exactly the opposite. The giant sucking sound that many thought NAFTA would produce has turned out to be less from jobs going south than from people going north. In 1994 there were 2.5 million undocumented Mexican workers in the US, ten years after NAFTA there were around 10.5 million.
It’s not surprising that many think that increased border security will block this migration, but as Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey, who has studied the border over past few decades writes, this is not the case.
The number of Border Patrol officers increased from around 2,500 in the early 1980's to around 12,000 today, and the agency's annual budget rose to $1.6 billion from $200 million. The boundary between Mexico and the United States has become perhaps the most militarized frontier between two nations at peace anywhere in the world.
… border militarization had little effect on the probability of Mexicans migrating illegally..
But as Massey points out, if it has not kept people out it has kept people in.
My study has shown that in the early 1980's, about half of all undocumented Mexicans returned home within 12 months of entry, but by 2000 the rate of return migration stood at just 25 percent.”
Immigrants come looking for work, and they find it in the relatively open US economy. As a result, many US labor markets are actually hemispheric is scope. In 2004 one third of all new jobs in the economy were filled by undocumented immigrants. In some industries like agriculture and construction immigrants are a major fraction of the entire workforce. In some trades and occupations—insulation workers, drywall workers, cleaners, and butchers--immigrants represent more than one quarter of all workers.
The concentration of immigrants in low wage industries and occupations poses a potential threat to wages and working conditions in some sectors. There is very credible data that current immigration flows depress wages and close employment opportunities in some industries for already established workers especially in low income communities. There is also some evidence that the massive immigration of the past few years is lowering wages for the newest immigrants, as well. (We leave the question of how visa and immigration policies affect high skilled high tech workers for another day.) Immigrant rights advocates ignore these uncomfortable facts at their peril.
The pervasive economic insecurity experienced by workers in the US could be manipulated by right-wing demagogues to destructive ends. As labor stakes much of its future on organizing in sectors with large immigrant populations, it’s not too difficult to imagine a backlash in which one group of union members demands the deportation of another group.
To prevent such a backlash, US labor needs to develop a program that ends exploitation of vulnerable immigrants, promotes job creation in the hemisphere, and elevates wages and working conditions for immigrants and established workers alike.
An example of the kinds of proposals a cross border dialogue could produce was recently aired by former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda. In aninterview on NPR, Castaneda talked about the deal that Mexico wants on immigration: amnesty for those already here and a guest worker program that matches the number of workers already coming illegally and which assures decent wages and working conditions. In exchange Mexico would agree to “step up to the plate” and deal with remaining illegal immigration. He proposes that instead of walls and armies a series of non-repressive “incentives and disincentives” including better welfare support for families and better educational opportunities for those that stay in Mexico.
Another piece of a comprehensive program could be the creative use of remittances to support the kind of economic development that would allow to people to stay in their own countries. In the past 10 years remittances have come to play an important role in the economies of the sending communities and countries. About 18% of Mexican adults—and 29% of Salvadoran adults—receives remittances from someone in the US. Those remittances support families and help build communities. In Mexico as Douglas Massey writes, migrant families use money earned abroad “as a tool to overcome failed or missing markets for insurance, capital, and credit at home….. because Mexico has virtually no mortgage banking industry, a large share of the money earned by Mexican immigrants in the United States is channeled into the construction or purchase of homes in Mexico.” The remittance flow could serve as the basis of a community banking system that would help meet the housing and other investment needs of Latin American communities.
The point here is not whether these proposals are good or bad but that new concrete proposals are possible when concerns of both the sending and receiving communities are addressed together.
Now its time for labor to “step up to the plate” and convene a hemispheric dialogue involving union and social movements to develop a comprehensive worker friendly plan that tackles all of the issues—amnesty, regulating the flow of migrants, new development policies, repealing or redesigning NAFTA, and protecting the wages of established workers in the US.
These are questions that are too big for national answers and too important to be left to elites.
(Click on "migration" on the menu to the left for more blogs on the immigration debate.)
M.O.
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