3-07-06, 9:06 am
Equality has become an unmentionable word in Congress. It doesn't come even once in the 300-page omnibus immigration bill introduced last week by Senator Arlen Specter, nor in any of the others Congress is considering. They all deny equality to millions of people. In the testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Specter chairs, no one even dares to advocate it. Is this what we stand for? The assumption that reinforcing social inequality is a good idea defines the basic difference in direction between those in Washington, like Specter, urging new immigration restrictions, and those who want to stop them. Sheila Jackson Lee, Houston's African American Congresswoman, calls immigration 'the civil rights struggle of our time.' Immigrants crossing borders, she says, want the same thing sought by Black people trying to recover from slavery and Jim Crow -- equal rights, to really belong to the communities where they live, and economic opportunity for their families. Yet Congress is divided between the supposed 'conservatives' who want to stop immigration and turn the undocumented into criminals, and the 'liberals' who want to give employers new guest worker programs. But proposals will cause immense suffering, and benefit only a tiny elite. There is an alternative, in best traditions of our country - the expansion of rights for all people. To Linda Chavez Thompson, executive vice-president of the AFL-CIO, guest worker programs are like the old south's Jim Crow strictures. 'There is absolutely no good reason,' she says, 'why any immigrant who comes to this country prepared to work, to pay taxes, and to abide by our laws and rules should be relegated to a repressive, second-class guest worker status.'
Specter's bill (which President Bush supports) treats migrants as people completely separate from the community surrounding them. In 1954 the Supreme Court found that such forcible separation bred inequality. Some 10-12 million people, according to the Pew Hispanic Trust, now live in the United States without proper immigration documents. Poverty and global inequality, produced largely by current free trade policies, have already displaced 170 million people from their countries of origin, according to Geneva-based Migrant Rights International. With no change in those policies, people will continue to cross borders. For the undocumented already here, the bill holds no promise of rights and equal status. Instead, it requires them to report to immigration authorities, and apply for work permits. If approved, they get no visa or even formal permission to stay in the country, much less any prospect of obtaining citizenship in the future. If they become unemployed, they will be deported, regardless of the roots they and their families have planted.
But history shows that making work a crime doesn't create employment for anyone, although it does weaken unions and lowers wages. Nebraska's huge Operation Vanguard workplace enforcement operation in 1998, for instance, didn't produce a single job for citizens or legal residents. Specter's bill will provide companies a seamless transition from an undocumented workforce to workers on temporary visas, facing certain termination and deportation. But it won't give workers a way to become full members of the communities they live in. These ideas bear the fingerprints of the Bush administration, which proposed the same basic scheme in January. Their main promoter since 1998 has been the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, which includes 43 of the largest corporate industry associations in the US, including Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and other large employers of immigrant labor. As the President so often puts it, the idea is to connect willing employers with willing employees. For two years, a few unions and Washington DC lobby groups have hoped that a milder guest worker and enforcement regime might be attached to a promise of legal status for the undocumented. Their proposal, sponsored by Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy, has stalled, however, as Congressional Republicans line up behind Specter and Bush. In the new Change to Win union federation, two unions still support the basic guest worker/legalization tradeoff - the Service Employees and UNITE HERE, the union for hotel and clothing workers. Two other unions in the federation, however, have spoken out against it - the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers. In a recent letter to the New York Times, UFCW President Joe Hansen cautioned that 'historically, guest worker programs have led to worker mistreatment. There's every reason to believe that an expanded guest worker program would lead to increased worker abuse at a time when the current climate is to relax, if not outright ignore, labor protections in many workplaces.' For the UFCW, 'a constructive immigration policy would respect and provide a legalization process for the millions of immigrant workers already contributing to our economy and society, while protecting wages and workplace protections for all workers.'
Meanwhile, other unions in the AFL-CIO have become the most vocal critics of Congress' proposed reforms. Comparing the Specter bill to the reviled bracero program of the 1940s and 50s, Chavez-Thompson calls for 'a more just and democratic immigration system that protects the interests of all workers-immigrants and U.S.-born alike.' Reform proposals, she says, must provide a clear path to permanent residency, and enforcement of workplace standards.
'We certainly don't need more programs that see immigrants just as cheap labor,' says Cathi Tactaquin, director of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, 'that segregate them and treat them as less than equal. Congress isn't offering real protection for native or foreign born workers -- just a lot of tough talk and guest worker programs.' Chavez Thompson warns that Congress' current direction will produce 'an undemocratic, two-tiered society. We should embrace [immigrant] workers not as 'guests' but as full members of society --as permanent residents with full rights and full mobility.' The choice between second-class status and equality has always been the faultline in US racial, labor and immigration policies. It still is.
From TruthOut
