November 27 2007
The controlled movement of labor has been essential to the working of the plantation economy since 1492. Criminalizing, and de-humanizing people has made it easier to justify the denial of their basic human rights in this process.
Immigration of people from the Caribbean region to the United States is rooted in the economic history of the region. With the passage of the NAFTA, CAFTADR, GATT, CARICOM, and other free trade agreements in recent years ( since the mid 1970s) the practice of multinational corporations crossing borders without impunity to find the cheapest labor costs, and protect themselves for environmental and safety legislation and local taxes has been codified. At the same time controls on labor who want to cross borders have increased.
The immigration debate in the United States today has roots in U.S. immigration and labor history. The criminalization and dehumanization of immigrants and Latinos and low-wage workers, the denial of citizenship rights to particular ethnic and racial groups that we are seeing today in the United States is not new. It has it roots in the history slavery, plantation agriculture, railroad construction and 19th century urban sweatshops.
West Africans, forced to migrate to work as slaves on plantations of the Carolinas Georgia and Virginia and Maryland from the 17th- 19th century were described by those who owned them, as heathens and barbarians. Still these English Plantation owners were happy to profit from their labor. Any slave who sought their freedom by escaping north was considered a fugitive and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 specified that anyone harboring an escaped slave, even in a free state, were themselves criminals. After abolition when former slaves sought to divorce themselves from the plantation, landowners sought to keep hold of their farm-workers. Southern states passed vagrancy laws that criminalized anyone who refused to return to the plantation. The dream of forty acres and a mule was replaced by the sharecropping system– a form of debt peonage exacerbated by company towns that robbed former slaves of the opportunities afforded European immigrants to seek their fortune when the government gifted Native American land to those who could farm it through the Homestead Act of 1862.
However, first-generation European immigrants also experienced exploitation. In the 1750s English colonists tried to figure out what to do with the influx of Scot’s Irish and German immigrants who had their own way of doing things. They saw German’s inability to speak English as a sign of ignorance. Benjamin Franklin called them the “most stupid of their nation.” Thus stigmatized as second class citizens, they were ghettoized in the outer reaches of the colonies where Franklin’s English-speaking colonists sought to create a buffer between themselves and the Native Americans.
When the potato famine in Ireland led to a huge influx of Irish immigrants to the United States they were shunned, due to their Catholic religion and impoverished condition. They were given the most menial jobs and the lowest wages. Thousands walked off the ship only to board a train for the southwest to fight and die in the U.S. Mexican War (1846-48). Not good enough to be considered proper U.S. citizens, they were good enough for cannon fodder.
In the 1870s railroad and mining companies recruited thousands of Chinese immigrants to blast rock and lay track. They came to the United States to work for reduced wages: the policy on the railroad was ½ of the wages paid white workers. Many lost their lives on the job. Instead of organizing the Chinese workers, the nascent American Federation of Labor led a campaign to ban Chinese workers from the United States. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act did exactly that. Overnight these super-exploited builders of U.S. capital were designated the first “illegal” immigrants.
Anti-Asian sentiment grew during the last decades of the 19th century leading to the so- called Gentleman’s Agreement in which Japan agreed not to issue visas to Japanese people wanting to come to the United States. The first border guards on the Rio Grande were unconcerned about Mexican immigration. One hundred years ago their only concern was making sure that no-one from China or Japan used the Southern border to enter the United States.
It was not until 1917 that border taxes were issued on the Mexican border to control Mexican immigration. The border tax was selectively enforced: anyone recruited by an employer did not have to worry about the costs. Recruiters for factory-farms would stand at train depots in Mexico and promise high wages across the border. Thus began a century of legal relativism on the border – that is the employer’s needs of the moment and not the “rule of law” decided the legal status and the application of laws on the books concerning immigrant workers form the Caribbean region.
The anti-immigrant movement of the early 1920s targeted primarily Europeans -- Southern and Eastern Europeans, Catholics and Jews, Italians and Poles. Business leaders and labor unions came together to push for immigration quotas. The same organizations that today lead anti-immigrant campaigns, the – They succeeded in pushing through the Emergency Quota Act that specified who was desired (Northern Europeans) – and who was not. The Quota act continued to prohibit Asian migration and citizenship. Native Americans did not become U.S. citizens until 1926.
Although there was much discussion about including quotas for Mexicans in 1924, employers were successful in protecting a population that was becoming their primary source of cheap temporary labor. Geography made Mexicans a favored group for temporary labor – people you could recruit for a season and get rid of when the harvest was done. A pattern of circular migration began. Those who did settle found themselves subject to deportation in the early 1930s. After the Stock market crash of 1929, jobs were scarce. The United States government, the Mexican government, social service organizations, employers and unions cooperated to deport Mexicans, citizen or not, documented or not. About 1/3 of the Mexican-American population left during the early thirties.
One decade later the United States government was in desperate need of workers to fill war-time positions. The Bracero program, begun in 1942 recruited Mexican workers to come and work in the United States for 11 month stints. The Bracero program lingered on for two decades after the war was over and reached its acme in 1954. Three times as many Braceros (Arms) were hired in the mid-fifties -not a period of labor shortages- as during WWII. The Bracero program codified the policy of using Mexican workers for low wage temporary work especially in the agricultural industry. The year the Bracero program ended in 1964, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers began their long term farm workers’ strike and boycott of Northern California vineyards. Meanwhile U.S. and Mexican businesses partnered to create border factories or maquilas to continue the exploitation of cheap labor on the other side of the border.
In 1952 U.S. Congress passed another restrictive immigration law. The Immigration and Nationality Act barred “subversives” from entering the United States. Those suspected of being homosexuals or communists were explicitly barred. Anyone involved in labor or civil rights work was also considered suspect. Dominant civil rights organizations and labor unions, fearful of landing on a McCarthy-era blacklist, did not oppose the bill.
Historically employers, consumers, politicians, and hate groups have used new immigrants to fill the role of substandard laborer, while vilifying them as outside agitators and/or inferior beings due to their race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual preference, and organized labor has been unwilling to stand up for the rights of new arrivals.
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In 2007 we have our share of vilifiers. There are the Lou Dobbs’ and Pat Buchanan’s, whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment in small towns and urban neighborhoods. Since December of 2006 the U.S. immigration organization I.CE. has been defying the rule of law, conducting illegal raids of immigrants in their homes, workplaces and communities, with no regard for due process, search warrants and other legal protections. An anti- immigrant, anti-Latino wave is reflected in the way this issue has been discussed on the campaign trail by both political parties. The recent resignation of Cuban American Mel Martinez as chair of the Florida Republican Party, stating his dismay at the racist rhetoric used by presidential candidates on the immigration issue, is one indication that today there is a racial/ ethnic divide in consciousness on this issue.
Today, as in the past, there are also those fighting back. A significant part of the organized labor movement is supporting immigrant rights. In the 21st Century U.S. labor unions find that they must think globally and act locally if their movement is going to grow. They know that the corporations they work for cross borders at will, to seek the cheapest labor, forcing unions to organize solidarity on an international scale. When workers cross U.S. borders in search of employment, some union locals are welcoming them, with or without documents. These include UFCW, AFSME, SEIU and UAW locals. They are joined by religious organizations; Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim organizations who view the issue as a moral one, pointing to religious scriptures that direct followers to welcome the stranger and seek justice for all. And in our public schools the next generations are developing relationships across ethnic lines and without regard to citizenship status.
Many citizens of color, including Native Americans—the only group who has the right to complain about immigrants in the United States-- are defining immigrant rights as a 21st century civil rights issue. Organizations like the NAACP and AIM have taken up the issue of immigration as a civil rights issue. Most importantly, immigrants themselves are speaking up, in numbers, that are at least as large as those of any of the largest civil rights and labor and civil liberties movements we have seen in the history of the United States.
Vilifying and criminalizing immigrants and low wage workers while enjoying the fruits of their labor may be a long standing tradition in this country ----but some have decided it is not one we need to preserve.
Anne Winkler-Morey
November 27 2007.
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