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Fourteen
Dead on the Border - For What?
By David Bacon, June 27, 2001, Pacific News Service
Pushed by economic reforms from rural areas, migrant workers
keep coming north into the United States despite an increasingly
dangerous border. It is clear the migration will continue
but, despite some shifts in the political ground, there is
only hope that their situation might improve.
Last month, 14 men and women left their coffee farms in Veracruz,
Mexico, and began traveling north. Days later, their bodies
were found on the hardpan of the Sonora desert.
They died of agonizing dehydration, like hundreds of others
trying to cross the same border over the last few years.
But the cause of their deaths was not just lack of water.
These farmers were driven off their mountain land by free-market
reforms proscribing rural credit and crop subsidies. And once
they decided to come north, for jobs and a better life, U.S.
immigration policy made their deaths practically inevitable.
They could not come to work legally -- the waiting line for
green cards at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City goes back to
1976. And a vicious border policy has pushed migrants further
and further into the desert and mountain, making them less
visible as well as far more likely to die.
And if they had arrived safely, these farmers would have become
part of a migrant workforce with bottom-level wages and working
conditions -- no rights, no unemployment insurance, no medical
care, no social benefits of any kind. Under present law, the
very act of working would have been a crime.
Perhaps the worst thing about their deaths is that they will
be used not to advocate a more humane immigration policy,
but to justify a new "guest worker" or bracero program.
In such a program, border-crossers become a permanent, second-class
workforce for the profit of U.S. business. President George
Bush and his fellow free-market advocate, Mexican President
Vicente Fox, both under pressure to reduce border deaths,
argue that expanding guestworker programs would open the doors
of legal immigration to those now crossing in secret.
While guaranteed labor rights on paper, however, guestworkers
can only stay in the country if their job continues. So employers
not only have the power to fire workers, but in effect to
deport them as well.
In other words, beneath its humanitarian cover, the guestworker
program gives business what it wants -- workers at lower wages
with fewer rights. Surely, those who make the journey deserve
something better.
For 20 years, most unions wrote off immigrant workers -- in
1986, the AFL-CIO supported employer sanctions. But unions
have done some rethinking and this has changed the political
alliances that limited immigration reform.
"Most unions today are at least trying to organize," explains
Hotel Employees Union President John Wilhelm. "And no matter
the industry, they run into immigrant workers. That's what
brought home the failure of the AFL-CIO's old immigration
policy."
Last year, the percentage of U.S. workers belonging to unions
dropped from 13.5 percent to 13.3 percent, and fell to nine
percent in the private sector. If they are to keep this level,
unions must organize 400,000 workers a year; to increase by
one percent, they have to organize twice that number -- levels
not seen since the 1940s.
Over the last decade, immigrant workers have proven key to
labor's resurgence. "Every period of significant growth in
the labor movement was fueled by organizing activity among
immigrant workers," Wilhelm says. "We're a labor movement
of immigrants and we always have been."
Unions are proposing, instead of a new bracero program, "a
comprehensive agenda, including legalization, repeal of employer
sanctions, and workplace protections," says Eliseo Medina,
Service Employees Union vice-president.
Illinois Congressman Luis Gutierrez has introduced a bill
expanding legalization opportunities for immigrants who arrived
before this year, while Senator Phil Gramm is introducing
a bill to permit recruiting guestworkers for a year's labor,
so long as they have no right to stay -- and strengthening
employer sanctions, which would make the undocumented even
more vulnerable.
The question is not how to stop people from crossing the border,
but about their status here -- in bondage or freedom.
Behind the debate lies a fundamental question: Is the purpose
of immigration law to supply labor to industry on its own
terms or to protect immigrants themselves?
There is another framework for dealing with migration. The
UN's International Convention on the Protection of the Rights
of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families supports
the right of family reunification and equal treatment with
citizens of the host country. It prohibits collective deportation.
Both sending and receiving countries are responsible for protecting
migrants, and retaining the right to determine who is admitted
to their territories, and who has the right to work.
The UN International Convention, recognizing the global scale
and permanence of migration, starts by protecting the rights
of migrants themselves. That is where an immigration policy
based on human rights begins.
PNS
Associate Editor David Bacon writes widely on immigrant and
labor issues.
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