Friday, November 20, 2015

THE MAQUILADORA WORKERS OF JUAREZ FIND THEIR VOICE

THE MAQUILADORA WORKERS OF JUAREZ FIND THEIR VOICE
By David Bacon
The Nation, web edition, 11/20/15


Fermina, the mother of a disappeared maquiladora worker, marched in one of the many protests over the murder of women in Juarez.


CIUDAD JUAREZ, CHIHUAHUA -- After more than a decade of silence, maquiladora workers in Ciudad Juarez have found their voice.  The city, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, is now the center of a growing rebellion of laborers in the border factories.  At the gates to four plants, including a huge 5000-worker Foxconn complex, they have set up encampments, or "plantons," demanding recognition of independent unions, and protesting firings and reprisals.

"We just got so tired of the insults, the bad treatment and low wages, that we woke up," explains Carlos Serrano, a leader of the revolt at Foxconn's Scientific Atlanta facility.  "We don't really know what's going to happen now, and we're facing companies that are very powerful and have a lot of money.  But what's clear is that we are going to continue.  We're not going to stop."

About 255,000 people work directly in Juarez' 330 maquiladoras, about 13% of the total nationally, making Juarez one of the largest concentrations of manufacturing on the U.S./Mexico border.  Almost all the plants are foreign-owned.  Eight of Juarez' 17 largest factories belong to U.S. corporations, three to Taiwanese owners, two to Europeans, and two to Mexicans.  Together, they employ over 69,000 - over a quarter of the city's total. 

Five (two U.S. and all the Taiwanese companies) are contract manufacturers of electronics equipment.  They assemble, and even design, laptops, cellphones and other electronic devices that are later sold under the famous brand names of huge corporations.  One contract manufacurer, Foxconn, is the world's largest.  The Taiwanese giant became notorious several years ago when workers in a huge plant in China committed suicide over stressful and abusive conditions. 

Three Juarez plants produce auto parts and electronics, including the city's largest factories - Delphi, with over 16,000 workers and Lear with 24,000.  Eleven of the top 17 maquiladoras are electronics manufacturers, whether for autos or consumers.

In most other maquiladora cities like Tijuana or Matamoros, workers are rigidly controled, and independent organizing suppressed, by a political partnership between the companies, government authorities and unions tied to Mexico's old ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party.  Often when workers file papers to gain legal status for an independent union, they discover that the company has a longstanding agreement with one of the "charro" unions.  The local labor board then places obstacles to prevent any independent organizing.  This arrangement is used as a selling point, to convince foreign corporations to invest in building factories. 


Juarez has been an exception, however.  Its selling point has simply been some of the lowest wages on the border.  Manufacturing consultant Chet Frame told the El Paso Inc. website that while company-friendly unions have agreements in other border cities, "they have not been able to get a toehold in Juarez."  As a result, a survey by the Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness found that the average pay of Juarez maquiladora workers was 18% less than the average for manufacturing workers in Mexico's border cities.

The Juarez protests come just as Congress gets ready to debate a new trade treaty, the Trans Pacific Partnership, which opponents charge will reproduce the same devastation Mexican workers experienced as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement.  Critics charge NAFTA cemented into place a regime of low wages, labor violations and violence on the border after it took effect in 1994.  Today, economic pressure has become so extreme that Juarez' workers feel they have no choice but to risk their jobs in hope of change.

Ali Lopez, a single mother at the planton outside the ADC CommScope factory, describes grinding poverty. "The only way a single mother can survive here is with help from family or friends," she says.  Lopez has two daughters, one 13 and one 6 years old.  "I can't spend any time with them because I'm always working.  When I leave in the morning, I leave food for the older one to warm up for lunch.  Childcare would cost 200 pesos a week or more, so I can't afford it."

A cold winter has already descended on Ciudad Juarez, close to freezing at night.  Parents worry that children at home alone with a heater for warmth risk fire in highly flammable homes of cardboard or castoff pallets from factories.  "We just have enough money to eat soup and beans," she explains.  "We don't eat meat."  Lopez' wage is 600 pesos a week (about $36).  "No one can live on this.  A fair wage would be 250 pesos a day.  In the U.S. people make in one hour what it takes us all day to earn."



Rosario Acosta and other mothers march behind the banner of the group they organized:  "Nuestras Hija de Regreso a Casa" - "May Our Daughters Come Home"


This new workers' movement began last August.  At Foxconn, people started talking in the bathrooms, at lunch and on the lines.  Anger over conditions quickly started to rise.  Operators on the line there make 650 pesos/week (about $39).  A family with kids, according to Serrano, needs 700-800 just for food.  A gallon of milk in Juarez costs the same as it does in El Paso, on the other side of the Rio Grande.

"Some foremen would tell young women that they had a good body, and demand to go out with them," Serrano adds.  "If they didn't, they'd call the women lazy or burros or good for nothing.  If the women went to Human Relations, the harassment still didn't stop."  In order to survive, some women were putting in two shifts, back to back, or even working three days straight through.  When they protested harassment, overtime was cut off, he says.

At CommScope, supervisors charged 50 pesos a week to put someone's name on the list for overtime, charges Cuauhtemoc Estrada, lawyer for the workers in the plantons.  "They felt so humiliated that some would break into tears." According to Raul Garcia, a CommScope worker, those who protested were sent to a special work area known as "the prison," or simply, "hell."  Older or slower workers were sent to another, called "the junkyard," where they were humiliated and ridiculed.

On September 16, Mexico's National Day, a group of 190 CommScope workers went to the local labor authorities, the Conciliation and Arbitration Board, and filed a request for a "registro," or legal status, for a union.   According to Garcia, the new union's general secretary, the company then started cutting overtime.  Some married couples had been working different shifts, so that each could be home to take care of children.  Managers reassigned them to the same shift, forcing one to quit.  Finally, 171 workers were fired on October 19.  The terminated workers then organized a permanent planton at the factory gates.



Soledad Aguilar, mother of a murdered daughter


At Foxconn workers also asked for a registro for their own union in September.  The labor board set up meetings with company managers to discuss their grievances.   "The managers agreed to do small things, like reinstate the 'employee of the month,'" Serrano recalls.  "But on the big issues like wages and mistreatment, they just promised to do something next year."

Workers organized a demonstration at the gates to pressure Foxconn.  When managers threatened them, the demonstration went on for a week.  The company filed a civil suit for damages against its own workers, and in mid-October the firings began there also.  Serrano was the first, and by the end of the month 110 people had been terminated.  On November 2 they set up a planton, and have been living at the gate ever since.  "They're treating us like criminals," he says, "but we're workers who have been there for many years.  They have to reinstate us, and the government has to give us our registro."

Neither Foxconn nor CommScope responded to interview requests, but Rick Aspan, vice-president of corporate communications for Commscope told Frontera Norte Sur, a news site published at the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, "We terminated fewer than ten people from the facility recently," for violating company rules.

Plantons have now spread to two other maquiladoras - a Lexmark factory making ink cartridges, and an Eaton Corporation auto parts plant.  Lexmark workers just filed their own request for a union registro. 

This insurgent wave threatens the established economic order in one of the main centers of maquiladora production on the border.  Even as Mexico continues to feel the impact of the U.S. recession, Juarez still has more than 330 plants employing more than 178,000 workers.  By U.S. standards, many are huge.  Foxconn's two factories employ over 11,000 people.  CommScope employs 3000, and Lexmark 2800.



Protesting the murders.


Companies are attracted to the border because of low wages and lax enforcement of labor and environmental laws.  In 2013, the minimum wage in Juarez was less than 65 pesos a day (today about $3.88). 

At the beginning of the NAFTA era, this low wage system was challenged by several attempts to organize independent unions.  In 1993 a partnership between the Mexican labor federation, the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) and the U.S. union, the United Electrical Workers, mounted a campaign at the General Electric factory, Compania Armadora.  Workers were fired, but pressure from UE members in U.S. plants forced GE to rehire several of them.  Nevertheless, the FAT lost the election that would have given it the right to negotiate a contract.

Other worker protests took place in the same period.  At Clarostat, a division of Allen Bradley Corp. (now Rockwell Automation) workers tried unsuccessfully to organize to raise wages.  When one of them, Alma Molina, was fired and then tried to get a job at a GE plant, a manager told her that her name was on a blacklist.

Worker activism of the period was fueled by a wave of birth defects.  Between 1988 and 1992, 163 Juarez children were born with anencephaly - without brains - an extremely rare disorder.  Health critics charged that the defects were due to exposure to toxic chemicals in the factories or because of their discharges. 



Protesting the murders.


In the mid-1990s Mexican and U.S. unions cooperated in opening a Center for Labor Studies to help educate workers about their rights.  It focused on the three factories owned by Lear Industries, which supplies car seats to General Motors.  Lear still employs over 7,700 people in Juarez.

"When I was being hired, after the interview, they asked me when I would have my next period," one worker explained.  "They said I couldn't actually start work until I had my period.  On the first day of my period, I came back.  The nurse was there, and she said, 'Let's see it, show me the sanitary napkin.'  They accepted me that same day."

CETLAC director Guillermina Solis charged at the time that companies didn't want to hire pregnant women, and even fired women when they become pregnant, in order to avoid government-mandated maternity benefits.  Her allegations were supported by the Women's Rights Project of Human Rights Watch.

Juarez' worker activism of the 1990s, however, declined as the city's women became victims of a notorious series of mass murders that terrorized them for a decade.  By February 2005 over 370 women had been murdered since 1993.  In 2010 alone 247 women were murdered, and between January and August of the following year, another 130.

The mothers of Juarez organized despite the terror to fight for the lives of their daughters.  They charged that larger social forces are responsible for creating a climate of extreme violence against women.  Juarez has become a huge metropolis built on the labor of tens of thousands of young women, overwhelmingly migrants, who have traveled north from cities, small villages, and rural areas in central and southern Mexico. 



Soledad Aguilar


 "While the city and its industry depend on them totally, they are important only as productive workers, not as human beings," Rosario Acosta, mother of one of the disappeared women, explained in a 2003 interview.  "We've opened the big door, our border to the U.S., in order to allow big multinationals to settle in our city.  We give them a permit to do absolutely anything.  They don't have to guarantee the most elementary aspects of life, from wages women can live on, to basic service in our communities, or even just security."

Residents of the border are treated as throwaway people, whether they're factory laborers in the plants, or barrio residents living along dirt roads, in cardboard houses with no sewers, running water or electricity.  According to Julia Monarrez Fragoso, a professor at Tijuana's College of the Northern Border (COLEF) "the practices of the maquiladora industry towards the workers reveal a consume and dispose cycle."

This new wave of worker protests, therefore, is breaking the fear and terror that has gripped working-class neighborhoods for over a decade.  Elizabeth Flores, director of the Pastoral Center for Workers for the past 15 years, says "each week a woman comes through our center looking for her daughter. At the same time, parents have lost hope that any better future awaits their children other than a job in the maquiladora.  And young people themselves don't want to go to work there.  Spend their lives - for what?" 

Nevertheless, she says, "People are tired of the abuse, which has been terrible.  They had to lose their fear to protest, but desperation and anger are potent antidotes to fear."


This year the business community of Juarez is celebrating 50 years of the Border Industrial Program, which opened the door to the maquiladora boom.  In that time, two and a half generations of workers have passed through the plants.  "They were always the fundamental part of production," concludes Cuauhtemoc Estrada.  "But the global economic model imposed on us by free trade meant the objective was always producing the most at the lowest cost.  Now we see the result.  And as difficult as it may be, workers are determined to change it."



Fermina

Thursday, November 5, 2015

WHOSE FAULT IS IT?

WHOSE FAULT IS IT?
By David Bacon
In These Times, 11/5/15



Young people in Silicon Valley, in the May Day immigrant rights march in 2013.


Undocumented Youth Are Here Through No Fault of Their Own.
But It's Not Their Parents' Fault, Either

Using the phrase "no fault of their own" in discussing undocumented young people does not encourage us to look at the roots of the poverty and violence their families experience.  Blaming undocumented youths' parents avoids assigning responsibility for their displacement and migration beyond the families themselves.



When President Obama introduced his executive order in 2012 to defer deportation for young people (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA), the White House website said it would "stop punishing innocent young people brought to the country through no fault of their own by their parents."

Last year, in the Republican assault on the President's next order that would have extended DACA to include other family members (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, DAPA), Jeff Denham, a right-wing Republican Congressman from California's San Joaquin Valley, used the same phrase. Taking pains to explain that opposing President Obama did not mean he supported deporting young people, he explained, "I have voted repeatedly in Congress to protect children who were brought into this country by their parents or guardians through no fault of their own."

The phrase "no fault of their own" sounds sympathetic. Using it to justify halting deportations implies good intentions towards at least some young people without papers. Yet the idea has other troubling implications as well.

If young people came here "through no fault of their own," then whose fault was it? Denham and Obama both say, "by their parents [and guardians]." Mothers and fathers made the decision to cross the border without papers. Therefore the parents are responsible for their children's lack of legal immigration status. The fault is the parents'.

This is also the argument presented by the administration to justify building two new detention centers in Texas to hold mothers and children from Central America. Two summers ago the President warned parents in Guatemala and El Salvador that they were endangering their children by bringing them north. Don't come, he said. If you do, you will be detained and deported.

Of course, people came despite the warning. The pressures to leave home are much more powerful than even the certain knowledge that imprisonment in a detention center awaits them once they cross the border.

Children are not coming to the United States because they have bad parents. They come because poverty and violence make survival difficult and dangerous in their communities of origin. Many are joining family members who are already here, having fled Central American civil wars or having come to find work and establish a base for reuniting divided families.

Many of the young people who tell their stories in Dreams Deported, a new book edited by Kent Wong and Nancy Guarneros, describe the memory of the experience, as it is retold in their families. Vicky's family in Mexico "was too poor to pay for her mother's medication and Vicky couldn't find a job to support her parents." Renata Teodoro says, "My father had been working in the United States for many years, and we survived on the money he sent us."

The book paraphrases other accounts. "The Gonzalez family left behind a life that Adrian does not remember. What he does remember is that his parents came to this country with hope for economic security." The parents of Steve Li "experienced the extreme poverty, violence and corruption of Peru. Conditions for Steve's family went from bad to worse when their restaurant was vandalized and their family was threatened."

The phrase "no fault of their own" does not encourage us to look at the roots of the poverty and violence these families experience. It especially avoids assigning responsibility for their displacement and migration beyond the families themselves. Yet individual families together make up huge movements of people responding to economic changes over which they have no control.

After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, for instance, the number of Mexican migrants in the U.S. went from 4.5 to 12.5 million in 20 years. The new immigrants were farmers driven off the land after being undercut by cheap U.S.-subsidized corn flooding the Mexican market, or workers suddenly jobless after waves of privatization. Like Renata Teodoro's father, once they arrived in the United States, they made up the backbone workforce sustaining agriculture, meatpacking, janitorial services and other industries, laboring at the lowest wages.

The companies that dumped the corn in Oaxaca, and those that paid illegally low wages to Oaxacan farmers to pick strawberries in Watsonville, certainly share some of the "fault." And they definitely reaped most of the benefits. But when Obama and Denham say children came through "no fault of their own," they are not pointing at the profiteers, much less at the treaties and policies that make displacement and exploitation possible and profitable.

In reading the testimony of the young people in Dreams Deported, it's clear that parents had little alternative to coming north, and bringing their children with them. Yet they are not victims. They are simply people struggling to survive and make a place in the world for their families. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz says, in the context of Native American genocide in North America, "survival is dynamic, not passive. Surviving genocide, by whatever means, IS resistance."




DREAMERS and young immigrant rights activists in the Oakland May Day march in 2012.


Sergio Sosa, a Guatemalan migrant who now directs Omaha's Heartland Workers' Center, says the same thing: "Mams and Qanjobales"-two indigenous groups in Guatemala-"face poverty and isolation, even the possible disappearance of their identity. But they didn't choose this fate. People from Europe and the U.S. crossed our borders to come to Guatemala, and took over our land and economy. Migration is a form of fighting back. Now it's our turn to cross borders."

Dreams Deported presents migrants as social actors, as resistors rather than victims. The phrase "no fault of their own" casts young people as innocent victims of their parents' actions. The reality is that the young people who have built the movement of the DREAMers, fighting for the right to go to school, for legal status and for change in immigration policy, are anything but victims. The book recounts the family experiences of migration, life in the U.S., and then the shock of confrontation with immigration authorities leading to deportation. Then it tells stories of resistance, documenting the ways young people pioneered a movement that successfully rescued family and friends from jails and detention centers.

This is the third book in a series produced by activists in the Dreamers movement, published by the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education. The first, Underground Undergrads, was published in 2008, when the possibility of immigration reform with some degree of legalization seemed possible to many people. It was a "coming out" moment, in which the first of the movement's organizers sought to make visible a generation of undocumented young people who were beginning to assert their rights. It was followed four years later by Undocumented and Unafraid, which profiled the growing movement in the wake of the huge effort to pass the DREAM Act. Now Dreams Deported chronicles the difficult struggle against deportations.

First introduced in 2003, the DREAM Act would have allowed undocumented students graduating from a U.S. high school to apply for permanent residence if they completed two years of college or served two years in the U.S. military. The act would have enabled an estimate 800,000-plus young people to gain legal status and eventual citizenship. In 2010 the Act failed in Congress, but for the seven years before that, undocumented young people marched, sat-in, wrote letters and mastered every civil rights tactic in the book to get their bill onto the Washington DC agenda.

Many of them gave new meaning to "coming out," declaring openly their lack of legal immigration status in media interviews-and defying authorities to detain them. Three were arrested in 2010 when they sat-in at the office of Arizona Senator John McCain, demanding that he support the bill while defying immigration authorities to come get them. They were arrested and held in detention overnight. The following morning a judge recognized the obvious: These were not "aliens" who might flee if they were released from detention, but political activists who were doing their best not only to stay in the country, but to do so as visibly as possible.

DREAM Act campaigners did more than try to get a vote in Washington. They used their activism to stop deportations, in an era that has seen 400,000 people deported each year from 2009 to 2014. By stopping deportations even in the absence of Congressional action, DREAM Activists made possible what political insiders held to be impossible: showing that people in the streets can change the conditions in their own communities. Congress and Washington's political class can be forced to respond to social movements outside the capitol.

Dreams Deported tells some of the stories of how they did it. In San Francisco, activists won freedom for Shing Ma "Steve" Li, a nursing student at City College of San Francisco. Immigration authorities detained him in 2010, igniting a lightening effort to stop his deportation. Li's parents had emigrated from China to Peru, where Li was born. They later came to the U.S., where their petition for political asylum was denied.

That made Li an undocumented immigrant, although as he went through San Francisco public schools, he had no knowledge of his status. As the net of immigration enforcement was cast more widely than ever, Li and his mother were arrested. She was bailed out of detention, but Steve Li was shipped to a detention center in Florence, Arizona. From there he would have been flown to Peru, where he has no relatives or family connections at all.

The case became a cause celebre for the Asian Law Caucus, the Chinese Progressive Association and other organizations in the city's Asian community. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the city college Board of Trustees both passed resolutions opposing the deportation. Finally, Senator Diane Feinstein introduced a private bill to grant Li permanent residence status. Li was then freed by ICE, and returned to San Francisco.

For Li and his supporters, however, the private bill was not the answer. Recalling the other young people he met in the Arizona detention center, he said, "Their stories and faces will be with me for the rest of my life." In his poem "Traffic Lights," he describes the being locked up in the privately-run Florence detention center:

            Today
            I am
            Lying still in this cold hard bed
            despised by society for trying to fit into the mold that they wanted me to be
            trapped behind an impenetrable door
            A door without a door knob
            with dents and scratches of previous prisoners who tried to escape
            A door that separates the desirables from the undesirables

Steve Li became one of the founders of ASPIRE, a San Francisco organization of undocumented Asian youth. Another member, Ju Hong, spoke out during a press conference held by President Obama, in which Asian young people were placed behind him to give a (silent) image of youthful support for administration immigration proposals.

Hong did not remain silent, calling out to the President to stop deportations. "There are thousands of people, undocumented immigrants, families that are being torn apart every single day," Hong shouted out. "Please use your executive order to halt the deportations for all 11.5 million undocumented immigrants right now!" To his credit, the President stopped his security detail from throwing the young people out, but nevertheless claimed he could not act on his own. His own actions later showed that claim to be false.




East Bay youth activists protest the incarceration of mothers and children from Central America.


Dreams Deported recounts other examples. Undocumented activists in the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance chained themselves to ladders, blocking the entrance to the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center. Other undocumented youth went to the U.S./Mexico border, crossed it to meet their families, and then demanded the right to return to their homes in the United States. Ericka Andiola, whose activism propelled her into a job in a congressional office in Washington, D.C., used her organizing skills to pry her mother loose from detention in Arizona.

Hareth Andrade similarly won her father's release. She wrote a poem, "america," and read it before the national convention of the AFL-CIO:

            Let's go and tell them,
            While they who have the power sit
            Separating us as they see fit
            While my father's hands blister from work all day
            and he doesn't feel like he has a say
            [In] this nation dedicated to the proposition
            that all men are created equal

There were other victories as well. In 2010 Fredd Reyes was picked up as he was studying for exams at Guilford Technical Community College, and taken first to the North Georgia Detention Center, and then to the Stewart Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. Reyes' parents had fled the massacres of Guatemala's counterinsurgency war. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan gave guns to that country's military, which were used against indigenous communities seeking social justice.

DREAM Act students understood why Reyes was in the U.S.-what "through no fault of their own" meant in a Qanjobal town in the Guatemalan highlands. They mobilized and eventually helped spring him loose.

Jennifer Abreu came to the U.S. with her parents when she was 13. She graduated from Lafayette High School in Lexington, Kentucky, where she became an activist. She performed Brazilian and Colombian dances at fiestas and dreamt of life as a journalist. After ICE picked her up, a campaign by DREAM Act students and supporters set her free too.

Ultimately, the big achievement of the DREAMers was the decision by President Obama to issue the DACA executive order in 2012, deferring the deportation of young people. Many activists in the movement credited this to a decision to sit in at his Chicago office at the height of that year's election campaign. Yet one single action, dramatic and well-timed as it was, would never have been powerful enough alone to win an executive order. The deportation defense movement not only saved activists who played important roles, but it produced the political pressure to find a way to slow down the detention/deportation juggernaut.

That pressure did not end with DACA. By 2014, it was powerful enough to force another executive order, DAPA, despite President Obama's claim to Ju Hong that he couldn't act. The DREAMers' deportation defense tactics, and their use of civil disobedience, had spread well beyond their own ranks. In a wave of activity around the country, community and labor activists, and deportees themselves, refused to quietly endure increased immigration enforcement.

Hundreds of people inside the Tacoma Detention Center launched a hunger strike against its private operator, Geo Corporation, demanding better conditions and a moratorium on deportations. Activists, who had held vigils outside the center for years, gathered every day to support those inside. The strike spread to another Geo prison in Texas. According to Maru Mora Villapando of Latino Advocacy in Tacoma, in both locations the company isolated the strikers and in Tacoma threatened to force-feed them.

In Tucson, San Francisco, Phoenix, Chicago and other cities, people sat down in front of ICE buses and vans, and chained themselves to vehicles, to block deportations. In Tucson, they stopped the Operation Streamline anti-immigrant court, which every day sentences dozens of young border crossers, brought before a judge in chains, to months in prison.

This wave of activity not only demanded a moratorium on deportations-it also exposed the cost of the failure of the Washington, D.C.-based comprehensive immigration reform strategy advocated by beltway groups. Even though Congress was paralyzed and unable to pass any legalization program for the undocumented, the enforcement and contract labor programs contained in the big comprehensive reform bills were implemented anyway.

The Border Patrol has grown to over 20,000 agents, and steel walls and helicopters have transformed the U.S./Mexico border into a heavily armed frontier. In addition to the hundreds of thousands deported every year, untold thousands more have been fired from their jobs simply because they lack legal immigration status. Many workers have even gone to prison because they invented Social Security numbers in order to get a job

The U.S. now spends more money on immigration enforcement, including the notorious Operation Streamline courts, than all other Federal law enforcement programs combined. And while enforcement against border crossers and the undocumented has grown exponentially, the number of guest workers brought to the U.S. by corporations and labor contractors, at low wages and with reduced labor rights, is also expanding. One report, Visas, Inc. puts the annual number at 900.000.

Meanwhile, the administration insists on a new trade treaty, the Trans Pacific Partnership (the text of which was released on November 5), guaranteed to cause more poverty in other countries, leading to yet more undocumented migration. Neither Congress nor the administration have discussed this impact. That's hardly a surprise, since a debate would reveal that NAFTA, adopted 23 years ago, led to the forced migration of 8 million people from Mexico.

Dreams Deported focuses on the human story of the impact of this rise in enforcement, and the way it subverts the values of working class families, whether immigrant or native born. "We have to remember that for every case like Steve Li's, there are hundreds of other young people who are deported," emphasizes Alisa Messer, past president of the union at City College of San Francisco, where Li was going to school. "These are our students. They're doing everything we want young people to do. So we have to fight for their right to get an education, to support their families, and to participate in society."

Most DREAMers view their movement as part of a larger struggle for a more basic reform of the country's immigration laws. Twelve million undocumented people live in the U.S., and most of them work for a living. Students not only need to stay in school, but then need the ability to work and use their education after graduation. Their parents need the same right, not just to pay for students' schooling, but for the survival of their families.

The DREAMers have shown that fighting detention and deportation is not only possible but the first step towards winning deeper changes. As they've marched and demonstrated, they've pointed out over and over that stopping the enforcement wave and changing immigration law are so connected that one can't be fought without fighting for the other. In the end, the basic requirement for both is the same: a social movement of millions of people, willing to take to the streets and the halls of Congress.


Dreams Deported
UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education, 2015, 96pp, $10