FULL IMMIGRANT RIGHTS IN FIFTY YEARS?
By David Bacon
Dollars and Sense, 11-12/24
https://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/1124fiftyyears.html
For the 50th-anniversary issue of Dollars and Sense, editors asked David Bacon, a contributor for 30 of those years, to imagine what U.S. immigration policy could look like 50 years from now. Here is his answer.
Given the descent of U.S. immigration policy from its high point in 1965 to its current disastrous low, it might seem unrealistic to describe other than a dystopian vision of the future fifty years from now. Today even a Democratic Presidential campaign proposes draconian restrictions and has virtually abandoned any progressive proposals, in order to compete for votes with an even more racist Republican framework.
Yet in 1965 a progressive immigration bill was part of a broad set of transformative legislation, the product of a popular consensus created by the civil rights movement. It drew on decades of organizing and struggle to prioritize the needs of families and communities over employers' contract labor programs. It weakened racial quotas and the racist foundations of immigration restrictions. For a time, the use of immigration policy to punish political radicalism through deportations, and banning the entry of Communists and other dissidents, was ended by a Supreme Court that obeyed the popular will.
Keeping that history in mind, it is important to project a vision of immigrant justice, of the world as it might and should be. It must be based on what actually meets the needs and desires of working people, and to move beyond the discourse over what a conservative Congress and its compliant media hold possible. That vision has been articulated by the left before. In 1986 leftwing immigrant rights activists opposed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which traded an amnesty program for making it illegal for undocumented people to work, and beginning the militarization of the border.
Later they opposed the same tradeoff in the so-called comprehensive immigration reform proposals under Presidents Bush and Obama. As an alternative based on labor and human rights, the American Friends Service Committee wrote "A New Path," and a coalition of labor and community organizations formulated the Dignity Campaign platform. Others made similar proposals.
They were all based on the idea that radical reform is still possible under capitalism, while some viewed it as a step towards even more fundamental and structural change. Achieving even reforms, however, requires a broad peoples' movement, able to restrict corporate activity and government policies that defend it. Those reforms would place peoples' needs to move, work and unite their families at the center, and develop economic and racial policies that find and create common ground between newcomers and longtime residents.
A movement for immigrant justice will be able to achieve basic change if it is part of the larger effort that unites people fighting injustice in all parts of U.S. society. This is true not just because immigrants will only have the power they need in this broad alliance, but because the issues of immigrant justice are so intimately tied to so many others. Demanding climate justice, for instance, includes addressing the forced migration produced by the disasters caused by global warming. It means meeting the demands made by former colonies on wealthy nations, in compensation for the disasters caused by the industrialization built on the profits from colonial exploitation.
The movement of millions of people in the current world is a forced movement, caused by the legacy of colonialism, and by the continuing reasons why people have to leave home - poverty, hunger and war. A world in half a century could be a world of justice in which the destructive consequences of capitalist development are acknowledged, and in which U.S. policy changes the way it produces displacement and inequality today. This change in public attitudes will require a massive educational campaign about the real reasons for displacement.
In this just world of the future, the people's movement world-wide will have overcome the power of corporations and monopolies that profit from a war-ridden, unequal world. The basis for corporate investment itself will have to change. While private investment is part of capitalism, it can be restricted. If U.S. corporations invest in factories in other countries, for instance, they must produce for the consumption of the people of those countries. They cannot create export platforms to compete with factories in the U.S., using different standards of living to make profits. Trade agreements and neoliberal economic policies, to create lower living standards and thereby profitable investment conditions, will be a thing of the past in a more just world. Those conditions have been a primary source of the migration of displaced communities.
In that just world, U.S. activity in other countries in general will be subject to the decisions of local communities and worker organizations. The people's movement in the U.S. will support democratic movements seeking to raise living standards, guarantee political and social rights, and the ability to stay on the land for rural people. The activity of the U.S. government to undermine those movements will end. We have a long history of international solidarity in this country, and it can become a majority movement more powerful than even those that opposed apartheid in South Africa, intervention in Central America and the Vietnam War.
The worst of the profit-making activity by U.S. corporations abroad is the sale of arms and the fomenting of war. Millions of people are forced into migration as a result. Here the interests of people in war-torn countries and people in the U.S. itself are the same. The production of arms by U.S. corporations must be cut to a tiny fraction of its current level, and the export of arms ended completely. While not all conflicts are the direct product of U.S. intervention, we can reduce their number by not contributing to them. At the same time, coming to terms with history will mean the payment of reparations for the damages done, whether in Gaza, Vietnam or Haiti. Rebuilding, under the control of the people of those countries rather than local elites or foreign agencies, will create the possibility of a full life, giving communities a future where they live, rather than forcing their members into exile as refugees.
At the same time, we will finally acknowledge that the movement of people is part of the human experience. In our schools, in the media and in our politics we will speak of voluntary movement and migration as, not only a human right, but as a positive value. Success in this will produce the political base for the complete reorientation of the way we see the border. The walls will be torn down in a celebration of our common roots as Mexicans, Canadians and U.S. people. In its place, two friendship parks will extend from ocean to ocean, in the south and in the north. The Peace Arch at the Blaine Canadian border crossing will be multiplied, and decorated with the same profusion of art and graffiti that artists have displayed on today's border wall.
The arrival of new people into our communities and worksites will be welcomed, and the purpose of immigration policy will be to facilitate their movement, making it easier for people to keep families together, and find homes and jobs. There is enough work for all people in this country, although the current vicious economic system continuously places us into competition. Over the next 50 years a people's movement can force the acceptance of what was the basic premise of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act - where the private sector cannot produce enough jobs for everyone, the public sector will do so. By ending the military budget and taxing the wealthy, we will have plenty of money to employ people to meet our basic needs in providing free medical care, free education in modern schools with highly paid and respected teachers, low-cost well-maintained public housing, and a rebuilt infrastructure from mass transit to internet.
More workers will be needed, and are in fact needed now. The contract labor programs that have been the source of enormous abuse, however, will be ended. If employers need workers, they will have to raise wages and provide decent secure jobs in order to attract them. At the same time, unions will grow as workers gain more political and economic power, and job rights will be expanded for all workers, including especially the enforceable right to organize. To get hired, all workers will simply show their Social Security number. The Social Security and benefit system (which will include a national health system) will enroll everyone, and everyone will be equally entitled to benefits. Discrimination because of national origin will be illegal in all aspects of life.
Addiction to drugs will be treated as a medical and social problem, and will no longer be criminalized. Treatment centers will help people deal with addiction. With better housing and jobs, and a future in livable communities, the market for drugs will shrink. Since the cartels that supply drugs are a product of that market, it will become much easier to deal with them.
Legalization instead of punishment is part of a broader movement to end the carceral system. Immigrants will benefit from that, as well as people of color and working people in general. With no need for immigration enforcement, the detention centers, private and public, can be torn down like the wall. No need for sweeps, or an immigration enforcement system of thousands of agents, cops, judges and special courts.
It is easy to imagine a better world, and hard to win.
Before the cold war, the defense of the rights of immigrants in the U.S. was mounted mostly by immigrant working class communities, and the alliances they built with the left wing of the U.S. labor movement. In the 1950s, at the height of the cold war, U.S. immigration policy became more overtly a labor supply scheme than at any other time in its history. Radical immigrant rights leaders were targeted for deportation, and the combination of enforcement and contract labor reached a peak. In 1954 1,075,168 Mexicans were deported from the U.S. And from 1956 to 1959, between 432,491 and 445,197 Mexicans were brought into the U.S. each year as braceros.
In less than a decade the civil rights movement ended the bracero program, and created an alternative to the deportation regime. Chicano activists of the 1960s - Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chávez, Bert Corona, Larry Itliong, Dolores Huerta and others - convinced Congress in 1964 to repeal the law authorizing the bracero program and in 1965 to pass immigration legislation that established new pathways for legal immigration. Essentially, a family- and community-oriented system replaced the old labor supply/deportation program.
A new era of rights and equality for migrants won't begin in Washington DC, any more than the civil rights movement did. Human rights will be a product of the social movements of this country. That's what made possible advances in 1965 that were called unrealistic and politically impossible ten years earlier. Just as it took a civil rights movement to pass the Voting Rights Act, any basic change to establish the rights of immigrants will also require a social upheaval and a fundamental realignment of power.
Dollars and Sense editor Chris Sturr followed up with an interview about these ideas on Economics for the People, a program on KKFI, 90.1FM, in Kansas City. The interview begins at 38 minutes into the show.
https://kkfi.org/program-episodes/ep15-50th-anniversary-celebration-for-dollars-and-sense-magazine/
