HOW U.S. CORPORATIONS WON THE DEBATE OVER IMMIGRATION

by David Bacon

In 1947, after reading a newspaper article about the crash of a plane carrying a group of Mexican contract workers back to the border, Woody Guthrie wrote a poem, later set to music by Martin Hoffman. In haunting lyrics he describes how it caught fire as it flew low over Los Gatos Canyon, near Coalinga at the edge of California's San Joaquin Valley. Observers below saw people and belongings flung out of the aircraft before it hit the ground, "falling like leaves," Guthrie says. "Deportee" became the name of the song.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

Today, the word illegal is used to mean a person without immigration papers. But Guthrie uses it in the sense of an earlier era--of being excluded. To him, it means someone who is not a real resident of the place where he works, not part of a community, or accepted by the society around him.

Young men in a camp near Graton, California in June, 2004. The camp was set up by migrant indigenous workers from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, who live under tarps next to a field of wine grapes. The workers are Chatinos, and use their cultural practices and family ties to support each other while looking for farm work in Sonoma County, one of the wealthiest wine-producing areas of the US. Photos by David Bacon.

For 22 years, an army of transient workers like these harvested America's crops, and for two years, laid its railroad tracks as well.

At the time, being illegal and being a bracero, or contract worker, was practically interchangeable. The growers who sent these dozens to their death in a fireball were taking advantage of this fact. Workers caught without papers were often given the opportunity to be deported and flown back to Mexicali, on the border. There they would be hired again, this time under contract. Some growers even dropped a dime on their own undocumented workers, bringing them back again as braceros, a process called "drying out wetbacks."

Last February George Bush finally introduced his long-awaited plan for immigration reform. For three years, the administration raised expectations with compassionate-sounding, pro-immigrant rhetoric. But when the package finally arrived, it sounded depressingly familiar. It was, in fact, remarkably like the program recalled in Guthrie's song. It must have given a bizarre sense of deja vu to those few who remember the old practice of recycling deportees, to see even this return as a provision of Bush's new reforms.

The official bracero program, negotiated in 1942 between the US and Mexican governments, was ended in 1964. Cesar Chavez was an early voice calling for its abolition. Chavez later said he could never have organized the United Farm Workers until growers could no longer hire braceros during strikes. In fact, the great 5-year grape strike in which the UFW was born began the year after the bracero program ended.

Guest worker programs in the United States never really ended, though. New laws created new visa categories, and among them are four that permit employers to bring workers in for temporary labor. Some cover agricultural laborers and some cover skilled workers in healthcare and high tech. Employers complain about restrictions on all of them--on numbers, and requirements that they show that US resident workers aren't available for the jobs they want to fill.

Until George Bush was elected, their complaints were largely dismissed as self-interested efforts to lower wages. But at the end of the 1990s, the country's largest employer associations formed a low-profile group to change that. And when the votes were counted (or not) in Florida in 2000, their fortunes began to change.

The Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (EWIC) was organized in 1999, while Bill Clinton was still president. Its genesis is tied to one of the Clinton administration's most celebrated immigration enforcement plans, Operation Vanguard. For an entire year in 1998, the Immigration and Naturalization Service went through the employment records of every meatpacking plant in the state of Nebraska.

Poring through the documents of 24,310 people employed in 40 factories, they pulled out 4,762 names. These individuals were sent letters, asking them to come in for a chat with an INS agent down at the plant. About a thousand actually did that. Of them, 34 people were found to be in the country illegally and deported. The rest, over 3500 people, left their jobs, whether for immigration reasons or just as part of normal turnover.

The INS declared victory, crowing that they'd found a new, effective means of enforcing employer sanctions - that part of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which makes it illegal for an employer to hire someone without papers, and a crime for an undocumented worker to hold a job. Nebraska's Governor Mike Johanns and the American Meatpacking Institute (AMI) hit the roof. They accused the INS of creating production bottlenecks, and implied they'd been denied a necessary source of labor if America wanted to continue eating beef for dinner.

And oddly enough, the INS agreed. In fact, one of Operation Vanguard's architects, Dallas District Director Mark Reed, boasted that year that the operation would force employer groups to support guest worker legislation.

There's no question that many US industries have become dependent on immigrant labor. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that, in 2001, undocumented workers comprised 58 percent of the work force in agriculture, 23.8 percent in private household services, 16.6 percent in business services, 9.1 percent in restaurants, and 6.4 percent in construction. The Migrant Policy Institute reports that in 1990 11.6 million immigrants made up 9 percent of the US workforce, and that by 2002, their numbers had grown to 20.3 million workers, or 14 percent of the workforce.

1999 was the year the AMI and a group of corporate trade associations formed EWIC and began lobbying for a new, greatly expanded guest worker program. Its rhetoric referred to immigrants as essential workers, and its proposals treated guest workers as the most essential of all. Industry faced a huge labor shortage, EWIC announced, and "part of the solution involves allowing companies to hire foreign workers to fill the essential worker shortages."

The group quickly grew to include 36 of the country's most powerful employer associations, headed by the US Chamber of Commerce. The National Association of Chain Drug Stores also belongs (think Wal Mart, which has 2 members on the NACDS board, and was sanctioned for employing undocumented workers last year). Hotel, restaurant, healthcare, and construction associations are also members.

The Clinton administration tried to work with the EWIC program. Henry Cisneros, after leaving his job as HUD secretary, promoted a package immigration deal including guest workers. In an April 2000 meeting in Washington, he proposed that unions and immigrant rights groups, which were seeking an amnesty for the undocumented, relax their opposition to guest worker programs in return for amnesty.

But with George Bush's first election, growers walked out of those negotiations, convinced they could get a better deal. The Florida vote count gave EWIC hope as well. Bush fed those expectations, conducting a highly publicized series of meetings with Mexican President Vicente Fox over a set of immigration law changes described by then-Mexican Foreign Secretary Jorge Castaneda as "the whole enchilada." This deal proposed the same tradeoff--amnesty for a new guest worker program. EWIC was a key player in these talks.

Whether Bush could have ever forced the rightwing of the Republican Party to agree to an amnesty, or even wanted to, is a question for historians.

In any event, economic recession and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon changed everything. Immigrants across the board were scapegoated for terrorism. Over 40,000 airport screeners were fired from their jobs, and refused rehire because they weren't citizens. In highly publicized raids, dubbed Operation Tarmac, the INS deported hundreds of fast food and service workers in airports. In 2003 alone, Social Security sent over 70,000 letters to employers listing over three-quarters of a million workers whose names and numbers didn't jibe, and massive numbers of people were fired.

In this new political climate, EWIC recast its proposals. Guest worker programs, it said, were actually a means to track the names and identities of those who otherwise would sneak across the border. Terrorists thus could be identified and pursued. "September 11 means we have to look at all these issues through the lens of national security," said John Gay, EWIC co-chair and vice-president of the International Franchise Association.

No undocumented worker from Mexico or Central America has ever been connected with terrorism, and those who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon all came to the US with visas. Nevertheless, an EWIC letter to senators asked, "How can the immigration status quo be tolerated?"

EWIC has always emphasized the economic benefits of guest worker programs. In 2002, however, it began to mount an ideological defense as well. EWIC joined forces with the Cato Institute, the conservative/Libertarian think tank whose ideology frames much of the Bush administration's legislative agenda. Asserting that "America's border policy has failed to achieve its principal objective: to stem the flow of undocumented workers into the US labor market," a Cato Institute report authored by Daniel T. Griswold called instead for an "open, integrated labor market." The key to meeting the demand for low-skilled workers, Griswold asserted, was legal immigration of a special type.

Guest workers with temporary visas would be able to get into line for eventual permanent visas after a few years of work. It's a long line--an applicant today at the Mexico City embassy, with the lowest preference, has to wait 12-15 years to get a permanent residence visa.

Undocumented people already in the United States would also be allowed to apply to become temporary workers, and eventually get into the back of the line. This substitute for amnesty would "dry out the wetbacks," much as the growers were doing with those who perished in Los Gatos Canyon.

The Cato Institute report was issued in October 2002. When President Bush finally issued his reform proposal in February 2004, it was identical to the Cato report. It contained no broad-based amnesty for the millions of undocumented currently in the US, unlike the compromise signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986, or the amnesty/guestworker deal proposed under Clinton. As the Cato report recommended, it focused entirely on establishing a new temporary worker program.

EWIC and Cato were successful in getting support from the conservative wing of the Republican Party as well. Tom Delay announced that "it is vitally important this country have some sort of guest worker program. It is only fair to those here in the United States who need the workers and it is doubly fair to the families, Mexicans that need the work."

Bush's proposal, however, was not warmly embraced by immigrants themselves, even those who supposedly would benefit the most. In a poll conducted by Bendixen and Associates for New California Media and the James Irvine Foundation, 50 percent of the undocumented workers surveyed opposed it once its provisions were explained, while only 42 percent supported it. Renee Saucedo, director of San Francisco's Day Labor Program, said that the city's street corner laborers discussed the proposal extensively, and rejected it almost unanimously. "They feel that a temporary visa status would make them as vulnerable to exploitation as the undocumented status most of them now share," she explained.

The organization of veterans of the bracero program, with chapters in both the US and Mexico, was even more critical. "We're totally opposed to the institution of new guest worker programs," explained Ventura Gutierrez, head of the Union Sin Fronteras. "People who lived through the old program know the abuse they will cause." One former bracero, Manuel Herrera, told the AP's Juliana Barbassa that "they rented us, got our work, then sent us back when they had nor more use for us." Thousands of former braceros are still trying to collect money deducted from their pay during the 40s and 50s, money that was supposedly held in trust to ensure they completed their work contracts, but which was never turned over to them. Bush's proposal contains a similar provision. "If we accept, then our grandsons and great-grandsons will go through what we went through," ex-bracero Florentino Lararios told Barbassa.

US labor opposition focused on the lack of a real amnesty. Eliseo Medina, executive vice-president of the Service Employees International Union, and one of the AFL-CIO's key policy makers on immigration, said that "Bush tells immigrants you have no right to earn citizenship but tells corporations you have the right to exploit workers, both American and immigrant ... This proposal allows hard-working, tax-paying immigrants to become a legitimate part of our economy, but it keeps them from fully participating in our democracy--making immigrants a permanent sub-class of our society."

While expanded guest worker programs have been a key element in Republican immigration reform proposals that predate Bush's, one mark of the success of EWIC in influencing the national debate has been its incorporation into Democratic proposals as well. The Gutierrez-Kennedy Bill, nicknamed the SOLVE Act, would not force currently undocumented workers to become guest workers. Instead it would allow people who have lived in the US for the past five years, and worked for two years, to apply for legal status.

It would, however, allow employers to bring in up to 350,000 additional temporary workers, presumably through a recruitment system similar to the current one. Temporary worker visas would be renewable, and last for either 9 months or two years. Workers could bring spouses and children, and change employers after three months.

EWIC must have savored its moment of legislative triumph. No matter which side of the aisle proposals come from, the centerpiece of its agenda--a temporary guest worker program--was included. In fact, the only comprehensive immigration reform package now in Congress which doesn't include guestworkers is that authored by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, and cosponsored by members of the Congressional Black Caucus. It would allow people to normalize their status based on residency in the US, and would expand the numbers of permanent residency visas.

EWIC doubtless deserves credit for its lobbying and legislative skill. It may seem self-evident that migration should be harnessed to provide labor to corporate employers--if it does, it is a mark of the success of employer groups like it. But EWIC is also riding a new political wave, and its proposals reflect a growing effort by governments in all the wealthy countries of the global north to retailor their immigration policies to meet industry needs.

On a worldwide scale, according to the Geneva-based Migrant Rights International, more than 130 million people today live outside the countries in which they were born.

Overwhelmingly, this unprecedented level of human migration is caused by the factors of expulsion--millions of people can no longer survive in their communities of origin because of war, poverty or economic dislocation. This migratory flow is generally from the developing countries of the global south to the wealthy nations of the north.

It is also generally a self-initiated migration. In other words, while they may be driven by forces beyond their control, people also move at their own will and discretion, trying on the one hand to find economic opportunity and survival, and on the other to reunite their families and create new communities in the countries they now call home.

And increasingly, the remittances of migrant workers have become the main source of income for the communities from which they come. In fact, remittances from abroad are now the first or second largest source of national income for counties like Mexico, Guatemala, the Philippines and others. Systems of managed migration--like temporary guest worker visas--simply institutionalizes this arrangement. Large corporations and industries of wealthy countries get the benefit of this labor force, and workers themselves pay the fees of maintaining it.

Developing countries do, however, have a framework for protecting the rights and status of this migrant population. The UN's International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families proposes an alternative framework for dealing with migration. It supports the right of family reunification, establishes equality of treatment with citizens of the host country, and prohibits collective deportation. Predictably, the countries that have ratified it are the sending countries. Those countries most interested in guest worker schemes, like the US and Britain, have not.

At the heart of immigrant-based proposals in the US is the relaxation of restrictions on granting normal, green card visas, which allow migrants to live and participate in community life in the US, but which also allow them to move back and forth freely, to and from their countries of origin.

The Salvadoran American National Network (SANN) called for "reduction of the long waiting lists that currently exist in the processing of permanent residency petitions" and suggested that future applications for permanent residence be processed within six months, instead of the current 12-15 years. SANN also pointed out that any long-term solution would have to include "development and implementation of new economic and social policies in our home countries... thereby reducing migration flows to the United States."

Immigrant rights groups make arguments of inclusion. Immigrants are more than workers. If simply supplying labor is the primary goal of immigration policy, then labor protections and the right of people to community can no longer be guaranteed.