The INS and Outs of "Immigrant" Labor

A review of videos by Heather McRae-Woolf and Daniel Reyes

by Paul Axelrod, Free Press Contributor

here's a lot of talk these days about the New World Order, a world in which capital and labor are free to move at will, to follow the market, as it were, so that if there's business to be had in Mexico, Americans can set up shop there; if there's money to be made in Washington State, Mexicans can find work here. There's only one thing wrong with this picture of economic and social freedom. It happens to be a lie--the New World Order of capital and labor mobility is a one-way street, and good luck to you if you're facing the wrong way.

Washington State is the second largest producer of agricultural products in the country, and there's a big market for those goods right here. On Capitol Hill in central Seattle, there are no less than five major supermarkets and two co-ops supplying the resident population with a huge variety of delicious Washington-produced foods--from piles of apples and zucchini to bottles of Pinot Noir and loaves of freshly baked Como bread. We live in the lap of luxury, enjoying the not just the fruit of the earth but its vegetables, wines, and grains too. At less than a dollar per pound for most vegetables and not much more for fruits, you might be excused for thinking that such low prices reflect our proximity to the source of production. But you'd be wrong. Cheap prices for food are due to a single phenomenon: non-unionized labor doing hard, sweaty, back-bending work for low wages.

On Friday, March 19th, two videographers presented documentary works showing the dismal reality of the agricultural labor that makes our sumptuous picnics possible: Raids and Rights: INS Activity in Washington, a 14-minute piece directed and produced by Heather McRae-Woolf; and Los Amigos de la Tierra Norte, by Daniel Reyes. I hesitate to refer to the subject matter of these videos as "immigrant" labor, since some of the featured workers have been in Washington for decades. They are simply farm workers. But they also happen to be Hispanic. And, according to McRae-Woolf and Reyes, in the convergence of "agricultural labor" and "Hispanic," there arises a vast complex of problems for the simple reason that these folks are not Joneses or Smiths but Hernandezes and Aguilars.

Under the xenophobic pretext of protecting American jobs, immigration laws in this country empower the Immigration and Naturalization Service to conduct sweeping raids on Hispanic communities in order to uproot undocumented farm workers, disrupting families by deporting fathers and mothers without their children. Sometimes parents are deported on the spot, in their work clothes, covered with chicken blood or mud from the fields--to Mexico, anywhere in Mexico, not necessarily even their place of origin. The INS is ordered to raid packing plants, and its agents tell the owners to dismiss any workers who happen to be found without proper papers. Aside from showing the internal contradiction of a system that defines certain workers as "illegal" but which also benefits from the cheap food that such workers provide, these two documentaries also revealed the enormous amount of manpower and money wasted by the INS in conducting raids and deportations that culminate in nothing other than the reentry of deported workers back into the U.S., sometimes reaching their families again in less than a month after being sent out. And the cycle continues, seemingly without end, because of a widespread anti-immigrant sentiment pervading much of the electorate. Such nationalism makes it politically impossible for most state or federal legislators to write laws that would force the American agricultural labor market to put its money where the New World Order's mouth is.

After the show, McRae-Woolf and Reyes held a small discussion forum with the audience. Though the two videos tended to merge in their deliverance of a single message--give people the right to work where they want--the two videographers couldn't have been more different in person. McRae-Woolf showed what was almost humility before her audience, claiming to have sought nothing more than to reveal the situation that Hispanic farm workers are now facing, without claiming to have any solution. Reyes, on the other hand, played a much savvier hand, giving us a message, a goal to fight for: unionize agricultural workers, ensure that they have decent housing and health benefits. Though his message was stronger than McRae-Woolf's that night, his video work was much weaker. His documentary, about fifteen minutes of footage compiled from hours of interviews, gave a personal look at the people who own or work
the fields. Unfortunately, at times the piece seemed whimsical and lacking any particular sense. For instance, in one segment, an elderly couple--notably, the only non-Hispanic people shown in the video--talked about their tulip farm, but how was this supposed to relate to other footage, of lettuce pickers singing in the fields, or a female Hispanic, former tractor driver, who had lived in the States since the 1940s? Reyes said that his aim was partly to give a history of the people who work in the fields, but what was lost was how all of these people--some of whom are different in terms of language, religion and ethnicity--are all connected in a single picture.

McRae-Woolf's work, on the other hand, is much stronger in capturing the impact of immigration politics on particular communities. Her video that night focused on the INS raids breaking up the community of Brewster in Okanogan County, and she is currently working on a similar project covering the recent deportation of 70 people by the INS from Amanda Park, a small town on the Olympic Peninsula. Both videographers were careful not to blame particular agents for the predicament of Hispanic farm workers and their families, and instead pointed out the general anti-immigrant atmosphere that makes INS raids possible. It was clear that for both of these artists, the real issue was one of class and race. For instance, playing off interviews of young, articulate Hispanic women against Boss Hogg-like INS officers, McRae-Woolf set the stage for a moral battle dressed up in socio-cultural terms: the rich system versus poor labor, white INS agents against colored workers, male officers against mothers threatened with deportation, and a distant government way off in Washington DC against the here-and-now of local workers' communities and their families.