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City's Latinos reject Bush Immigration plan

     

"President Bush, it just won't work to tell us, 'Go home, but before you do, finish picking up my crops, finish making my food, and finish cleaning my house!"

-Pedro Sosa

 

"[Bush's Proposal] will set back our work for legalization and return us to the legalized slavery of the guest worker, or bracero program."

-Ramón Ramírez

Critics compare Bush plan to post-WWII Bracero program that was used to depress wages and stop unionization of agricultural workers.

By Dave Mazza

Leaders of Oregon’s Latino community denounced President Bush’s proposal for immigration reform at a press conference held at Portland State University’s Campus Christian Ministries on Jan. 16. Among those present were Ramón Ramírez of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (Oregon’s farm and forest workers’ union), Samuel Dávila and Guadalupe Quinn of the Latino coalition, CAUSA; and Pedro Sosa, an organizer with American Friends Service Committee and Project Voice. The leaders of several key Latino organizations characterized the president’s proposal as a significant step backwards to a time when imported agricultural workers were part of a system that differed little from legalized slavery.

The Bracero Program

The United States faced war in Europe and Asia in 1942. The Roosevelt administration, which started conversion to a war economy in the late 1930s, now needed to draft millions of workers into the armed forces while continuing to expand production in all sectors, including food. Women and minorities filled many of the vacancies created by mobilization. In the agricultural sector, however, government planners chose to utilize guest workers to replace drafted agricultural workers in a plan that came to be known as the Bracero Program.

Under the Bracero Program, farm workers in Mexico’s poor rural communities would be recruited under contracts - written in English — that authorized employers participating in the program to bring them back to the United States to work in the fields. When the bracero’s contract expired, the employer could either renew it, allowing the worker to remain in the U.S., or have the bracero deported back to Mexico. While such a decision was supposed to be made on the basis of the ready supply of workers, growers used the program to weed out union organizers or anyone else who might encourage the farm workers to demand better treatment.

While the program was developed to meet wartime needs, it came at a time when growers and other employers in the agriculture sector were under pressure from workers for better pay and working conditions. Drives by the Industrial Workers of the World to organize agricultural workers in the first decades of the 20th century were met with violent responses by growers. So too were similar efforts led by the Communist Party and other leftist groups in the 1930s as made famous by John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle and Grapes of Wrath.

The Bracero Program presented growers with a way to undo what limited gains farm workers had made over the previous three decades. Isolated, with no guaranteed rights, and the danger of deportation hanging over their heads, braceros had little choice but to endure bad housing, low wages and often brutal treatment by their employers. The program proved so successful — from the growers perspective - that it was continued after the war. The program was finally terminated in 1962. By that time, so many undocumented workers had entered the country that growers were able to replace braceros with this pool of workers who were even more vulnerable and less able to fight for their rights.

—Dave Mazza

“By proposing the creation of a vast, temporary workforce through the issuance of visas tied to specific employers, the president is promoting a system to the benefit of employers, in which legal status would be tied to employment and workers would be fearful of defending their rights on the job, and be vulnerable to exploitation,” stated Ramón Ramírez, president of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste.

Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride

Over the last year, immigrant worker groups have taken a page from the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s by organizing “freedom rides” that brought workers and communities across the nation together on the issue of immigrant rights. Groups like Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste and CAUSA sent workers on freedom rides to Washington D.C., where they joined immigrant workers from 11 other cities struggling to bring about fair immigration reform. Out of these freedom rides and discussions subsequently spurred by the rides came a set of principles by which all future immigration policy reform will be judged:

*Reward work by granting legal status to hardworking, taxpaying, law-abiding immigrant workers already established in the United States;

*Renew our democracy by clearing the path to citizenship and full political participation for our newest Americans;

*Restore labor protections so that all workers, including immigrant workers, have the right to fair treatment on the job;

*Reunite families in a timely fashion by streamlining our outdated immigration policies; and

*Respect the civil rights and civil liberties of all so that immigrants are treated equally under the law, the federal government remains subject to checks and balances, and civil rights laws are meaningfully enforced.

(Source: American Friends Service Committee)

—Dave Mazza

What Bush said

“Tonight I also ask you to reform our immigration laws, so they reflect our values and benefit our economy. I propose a new temporary worker program to match willing foreign workers with willing employers, when no Americans can be found to fill the job.

“This reform will be good for our economy — because employers will find needed workers in an honest and orderly system. A temporary worker program will protect our homeland — allowing border patrol and law enforcement to focus on true threats to our national security. I oppose amnesty, because it would encourage further illegal immigration and unfairly reward those who break our laws...”

The criticism was sparked by comments Bush made on Jan. 7 in which the president sketched out what he saw as essential components of immigration policy reform. Bush suggested creation of a temporary labor program which undocumented workers could join, qualifying them to apply for permanent U.S. residency. Undocumented workers in the program would receive guaranteed wage and employment rights, as well as three-year visas eligible for one-time renewals. Employers hiring workers from the program would have to prove that U.S. laborers were not available to fill the jobs they sought to fill with participants in this program. The president would encourage Congress to raise the current 140,000 annual limit on green cards so as to increase the available labor pool. The program would be administered by the Department of Homeland Security.

Ramírez and others speaking at the press conference emphasized that little was new in the Bush proposal to make it stand out from the punitive turn immigration policy has taken the past decade. In 1996, so-called immigration reform law empowered the Immigration and Naturalization Service to imprison asylum seekers fleeing persecution and to break up families through deportations of individual immigrants for “crimes” committed decades before adoption of the new immigration law.

In that same year, Oregon Senators Gordon Smith and Ron Wyden attempted to reform the “H-2A” program for immigrant workers — the successor to the original bracero program [see Bracero Program sidebar below] — adopting a similar punitive approach that left workers with fewer rights and employers with the tools needed to control their immigrant work force. Workers could qualify for permanent status, but only after working in the fields for five years. During that time, employers could get rid of difficult workers, having them deported back to Mexico. The system would make it easy for employers to weed out union organizers and sympathizers, setting a chilling example to the remainder of the workforce.

The Smith-Wyden bill drew support from a wide range of Republicans, including those like Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) who promoted the 1996 immigration law reform, as well as the governors of Arizona and New Mexico. Industry associations like the California Farm Bureau and the National Council of Agricultural Employers also backed what came to be known as the Agricultural Jobs Opportunity Benefits and Security Act or AgJOBS. The bill, and its subsequent revisions drew significant opposition from the Latino community who saw it as another chain in the enslavement of immigrant workers. Organized labor also fought the bill, not only for what it proposed for immigrant workers, but because the program offered a vehicle for building a controlled pool of labor that could be used to undermine unions existing in other segments of the agricultural sector, such as meat packing and food processing plants.

That opposition has resulted in a new version of the bill that is acceptable to both Latino groups and organized labor. The 2004 version of AgJOBS is the result of extensive national collaboration between Latino groups like the United Farm Workers and Pineros & Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, members of Congress and agribusiness associations. The bill would provide protection to over 500,000 farm workers and bring some rationality to national policies effecting immigrant workers. AgJOBS 2004 meets the five principles recently established by the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride to measure immigration reform [see sidebar below] and is currently supported by 23 Republicans and 23 Democrats in the U.S. Senate.

At present there is no legislation encompassing Bush’s Jan. 7 comments and no additional details were forthcoming in the President’s Jan. 20 State of the Union address to expand on his ideas. Latino organizations are understandably wary, however, that any fleshing out of what Bush intends will not be good news for immigrant workers.

Part of that wariness comes from the one area where the president has been very specific: there will be no granting of amnesty for undocumented workers. In his Jan. 7 statement, Bush asserted that “granting amnesty encourages the violation of our laws and perpetuates illegal immigration. America’s a welcoming country. But citizenship must not be the automatic reward for violating the laws of America.”

Clarity on this is no accident. Bush is running into bedrock opposition on the issue of amnesty. In an ABC News poll taken Jan. 7-11, 52 percent of those contacted opposed amnesty being granted to undocumented workers from Mexico. The figure climbed to 57 percent when asked about workers from other countries. Opposition was strongest within Bush’s own party — 58 percent. Democrats evenly split on the issue. Support for an amnesty program ran 41 percent and 37 percent respectively. The poll, conducted by TNS Intersearch, sampled 1,142 adults and has a three-point error margin.

Even with the clear exclusion of amnesty from the proposal — as well as the newly won support of Mexican president Vicente Fox and conservative Latino organizations like the League of United Latin American Citizens — Bush’s effort to satisfy the labor demands of his backers in western states is a hard sell. The government’s own General Accounting Office and the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform found no shortage of farm workers — the reason for introducing “guest workers” — and have gone on record as saying any new guest worker programs would be a mistake.

Organized labor is also working overtime to educate the public about the real reasons for introducing guest workers — to undermine and eventually replace organized workers. As the U.S. economy has globalized, the introduction of guest workers has not been limited to agriculture. Other elements of the H-2 program provides for importation of forestry workers, poultry processing workers, and various skilled workers, including in hi-tech industries. Rather than training displaced U.S. workers, corporations are finding it far more advantageous to use guest workers in the same way temporary workers have been used to undermine worker power on the job. This reserve pool of complacent workers can be brought in to meet specific needs and then moved out before workers can get to know each other, much less organize to protect themselves from exploitation. The pitting of immigrant workers against domestic workers is not an easy sell to a public hurting from an extended economic downturn.

The lack of more details in the president’s State of the Union address on Jan. 20 suggests he may recognize these obstacles as well, or has raised the issue for an entirely different reason — to secure much-needed Latino votes in the upcoming election.

Whatever Bush’s political motives, Latino organizations are treating the proposal as a serious risk to the struggle to win justice for undocumented immigrant workers. The leaders present at the Jan. 16 press conference hope the community will join them in a struggle that will effect them all.

“The approximately 12 million undocumented immigrants here are already an integral part of this nation’s economy and culture,” stated Pedro Sosa. “They work tirelessly and have a profound faith in this country and they deserve more! And the Latino community, other immigrant groups and the broader community deserve more than a program that only benefits business at the expense of workers.”

Dave Mazza is the editor of The Portland Alliance.

Find out more: American Friends Service Committee Project Voice 503-230-9427, psosa@afsc.org

 

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Last Updated: February 9, 2004