THE RIGHT TO REMAIN

THE RIGHT TO REMAIN
Interview with David Bacon
franknews, 6/29/20
http://www.franknews.us/interviews/415/the-right-to-remain
This interview with David Bacon, journalist, photographer and author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, was conducted and condensed by franknews. 

 

 

franknews:  Can you start by talking about your background a bit?

I grew up in Oakland. The racial politics of my youth was centered around Black people and white people. Learning about how the imperial and racist history of this country affects African American people, Asian American people, and Latino people and their migration has been a lifelong learning experience for me. I say that because, I want to make sure that it's understood that I'm a learner, a lifelong learner.

In the 1960s, I was involved in supporting the Delano grape strike by the workers in Central Valley. I would stand in front of Safeway and try to convince people not to buy grapes. After a while, I wanted to know more about what was going on with the workers themselves. In the 1970s I convinced a friend of mine, a lawyer for the United Farm Workers Union, to let me volunteer in one of their offices. I began working at the union, on a ridiculous salary of $5 a week, taking statements from workers who were being fired or beaten up because of their union sympathies. Using the skills I learned with the UFW I worked as a union organizer with other unions for about 20 years. As time went by, I became more and more drawn into documenting what I was seeing. So I made the transition to the work that I do now, and have done for the last 30 years, as a writer and a photographer.

I look at the process of migration from the perspective of those who are migrating. I ask: What uproots people and sets the process of migration into motion? What is the experience of traveling as a migrant? What happens to migrants once they reach the place they are going?

franknews:  How does your work with the unions inform your perspective of immigration.

The union was a school for me  - it taught me Spanish, it taught me organizing, it taught me about immigration. I'll never forget how one evening, I was meeting with a group of date orchard workers at the union office. The next day, when I went out to talk to them again, they were being handcuffed and loaded into a green border patrol van. I was just floored by it. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't stop it. I chased the van all the way down to the Imperial Valley, trying to figure out how to help them. It was a very brutal learning experience, certainly more brutal for them than for me, but it also taught me something very important. I realized that this country's immigration policy has a great deal to do with work, and a great deal to do with labor.

I've written a lot about the US immigration process over the years, and I have tried to put an analytical framework around the process. The framework I use is this: people get displaced in their countries of origin due to the penetration of capital from large wealthy industrial countries into developing countries. Those who are uprooted become an important part of the workforce of the countries that displaced them in the first place. It's a singular system. And it is a system that is motivated by producing economic results.

franknews:  What is an example?

Well, there was economic incentive in the process that made Walmart the largest employer in Mexico.

Mexico used to buy corn from small producers in states like Oaxaca to help those communities survive. They would then turn that corn into tortillas, and sell them at state run markets in the cities to help poor people.

That system became illegal under the new rules of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Walmart comes in as the big retailer of tortillas in Mexico, and the tortillas are no longer made from Oaxacan corn, but corn imported from Iowa. What happens to the farmers who were previously supported by Mexico's system? They become migrants. About a third of the agricultural workforce in California is made up of people coming from Oaxaca. The irony is that Oaxaca is the birthplace of domesticated corn -those farmers are coming from towns that gave corn to the world, but they can no longer grow it themselves, so they became migrants.

franknews:  You have worked with migrants for many years. What is the starkest example of change in the migration system that you have seen?

The border has become much more militarized. Largely that is due to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.  

Before '86, if a hot band was playing in Mexicali, undocumented workers working in the Imperial Valley would cross the border, see the show, and go back across the border to sleep in the labor camps that they were living in. In many places, even now, the border consists of nothing. For all of Trump's talk about the border, the reality is that it is still hardly marked at all in some places, but the process of crossing has become much more difficult and deadly, and much more expensive.

franknews:  At the time that you were organizing with unions how did migrants look at immigration?

People generally looked at the United States as a place that they had to come to in order to work. The Bracero Program from 1942 to 1964 was crucial in shaping this dynamic. Hundreds of thousands of people were recruited in Mexico, contracted a short period of time to work in the US, and then sent back to Mexico.

We still have programs that are very much like the Bracero program today, such as the H-2A. People have very conflicting feelings about those programs. On the one hand, people want to come here to work. They know the wages they can get here, and they see the programs as a possible way to get US jobs. On the other hand, people know that those programs do not offer you the ability to stay in the US permanently or the ability to bring your family to the US. It's just work.

At the same time, there are thousands of undocumented migrants in California who live in garages or shacks or even under trees.  People put up with conditions that are sometimes worse than the poverty in the communities they come from, because they need to work and send money home.  Sometimes folks say, "Well, it's just for awhile. I can put up with it for now while I send money home. In a way, it's better for me - if I don't have to pay rent, I can send more money home."

franknews:  How does that affect worker organizing?

That sentiment is very important to acknowledge in worker organizing. Often migrants, especially when they first arrive, don't have much to lose, but they don't have much to gain either. If somebody comes to them and says, let's go on strike here because the wages are too low, they may not be willing to risk their job if they know they are only in the US temporarily. The more someone lives here, as they start to pay rent, as they start a family, the more they come to think of themselves as part of the community. They have a greater stake in trying to change things.

What is interesting is that very often people come to the US with a lot of organizing skills. I remember one man spoke to me about how his father had participated in land reform struggles in Baja, California. He and other landless people burned down the mansion of the local Hacienda owner and redistributed the land in this land reform upsurge. Migrants come with organizing skills and experience. When those skills are combined with a stake in labor conditions, change can be explosive. We are seeing the results of that in California and in Washington state right now.

franknews:  And how does the opposite work. How do anti-union and anti-immigration policies work in tandem?

US immigration policy makes workers vulnerable, which makes it harder for people to organize. There are many mechanisms by which this happens.

The most obvious is that many people come here without papers. Out of a workforce of about 2.5 million farm workers, 1.25 million of those folks have no papers. They don't have permission to work, and the employers or labor contractors who hire them, generally speaking, know this. They exploit this vulnerability and to keep wages low. They tell workers, explicitly or implicitly, if you stir up trouble, you can be deported.

Under the employer sanctions section of our immigration law, it is illegal for an employer to hire undocumented workers. Employers who are facing an organizing effort by their workers therefore can say, "We've discovered that you don't have any papers. We're not legally able to keep you. You're fired." Sometimes immigration authorities will initiate that vetting. The law says the employers should be punished and fined because of who they are hiring, but that almost never happens. It is the workers themselves who pay the price and lose their jobs.

The guest worker programs also have adverse effects on migrant workers rights. Through these programs, employers hire foreign workers on temporary visas. The migrant's visa, and their right to be in the US, is dependent on the job. If the employer fires someone, which can be for any reason, the worker has to leave the country.  Through the H-2A program, which is specifically for temporary agricultural work, about 250,000 people, mostly from Mexico, are recruited every year. A report recently came out about this program. Every single worker interviewed spoke about abuse of their labor rights, and sometimes these violations were egregious. The precarious nature of these programs results in workers who have to risk their immigration status just to complain.  

The function of US immigration policy, despite the speeches that you hear, is not to keep people out. Rather, it is to determine and control the status of people when they're here. The purpose is to make the labor of migrants available to employers at a price that they want to pay. The mechanisms differ, but the results are the same.

franknews:  A lot of people think about immigration through a lens of opportunity. How would you encourage a reframing of our current view on immigration?

Well, we need a reality check. There are 40 million people in the United States who were born somewhere else. Why do people come here to begin with? The decision to migrate, often, is not a voluntary one, it is a survival tactic. It is not just that opportunities exist in the US, it is that the opportunity to survive shrinks in peoples country of origin.

We have to look at our own responsibility for that. What kind of policy does the US government pursue in other countries that lead to the displacement of people? We have to look at trade policy. We have to look at NAFTA.

I think that a lot of people do get that in a way, because they get that NAFTA hurt people. They often think of it in terms of how NAFTA hurt us, because jobs went south. But people here also, in many cases, are able to think about its impact in other countries as well, too, in terms of the way which has displaced people.

This movement of people and this process of displacement between the US and Mexico is not going to stop. You can build as many walls as you like, but it's not going to stop people from coming here. The things that are pushing people to migrate are much stronger. The need to survive is stronger than a wall. The desire to reunite the family is stronger than a wall.

Given that this movement of people is not going to stop, what do we want our immigration policies to do? Do we want them to make people more or less vulnerable? For working people, it is better to fight to make migrants less vulnerable. If migrants do not have rights, it affects the entire workforce. If you want to organize a union in your workplace, and there are people there that are terrified, and unwilling to be part of that process, that's going to hurt you because it makes it harder to fight to change conditions.

franknews:  What sort of policy prescription or framework would you suggest?

We have to find where we have common ground. Where does an unemployed Black person in the US find common ground with a Mexican immigrant?   Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee tried to find it in  a really effective policy proposal. About a decade ago, she proposed an immigration bill that simultaneously considered both of those groups.

She proposed a legalization program for people who were currently undocumented here, and, at the same time, a job creation program for people living in communities of high unemployment. The employers who benefit from the immigration system would have paid for it.  Her framework made it in the interest of both groups to advocate for the same immigration bill, because both stood to benefit from it. Instead of pitting people against each other in a competition for scarce jobs and resources, you unite to build political power.

That is the big question about iimmigration policy in this country: How do we promote unity in our mutual interest?  How do we look across the obvious dividing lines here and recognize people as people on each side? And not just from a moral point of view, but actually figuring out a way in which we can mutually advance our material interests.

We also have to address voter disenfranchisement. A huge percentage of the working population cannot vote or elect people because they are not citizens.  If they were not disenfranchised due to their immigration status, we would have more worker friendly elected officials pursing more worker friendly policies. We should look past what's often presented as a moral question "Why should those people be able to vote?", and ask, "How will we benefit as working people?" If everybody who worked had the right to vote, then we would be able to change politics much, much more easily.

franknews:  I think the conversation has found some new urgency amid the coronavirus pandemic, because we have had to look really clearly at who are our essential workers and how have they been mistreated.

Yes. We're in the process of unpacking that. Essential means yes, your labor is necessary, but essential also means that you can't say no.  Essential means that you must work.

So on one hand, we are acknowledging that picking fruits and vegetables, or working in meat packing plants, or working in hospitals, is socially necessary work. We are recognizing that we need to value the work and the people who are doing it.

On the other hand, essential is also being used by the administration and by employers as a way of saying that because your work is essential, you may not withhold it. You must go to work regardless of what the risks are. We are getting a good education about what actually happens to these essential workers as a result of their immigration status, their poverty, and their lack of rights as workers. We can look at the meat packing plants. People are being forced into working, with the knowledge that a percentage of them are going to get sick and die. That got underlined when they passed the relief bills. Not only did people who were undocumented not get relief money, but anyone who was even married to somebody who was undocumented did not get the $1,200 in relief payments.  

People who are undocumented can't get unemployment benefits, much less the extra $600 a week.  That removed any kind of support that could enable someone to make a decision about whether or not she or he wanted to work. If you can't get unemployment, you can't get relief, you can't get anything.  What other choice is there but to work?  

That this is not lost on people. I've interviewed a lot of farmworkers who say, "This is really a slap in the face. First you call us essential. You tell us how important this work is. You come outside and eight o'clock in the evening and you clap your hands for us. And yet what does it actually mean to us? We're working the same job as before, with the same low wage as before, and now we have no choice but to go to work."

franknews:  Are you hopeful for meaningful change past this sort of rhetoric?

In the end, I am an optimistic person. There have been a series of strikes where immigrants are demanding better protective equipment, demanding social distancing, and demanding hazard pay.

I think as a result of the pandemic, people at the bottom are being forced to look at their own situation and ask how much they are willing to put up with, and what they are willing to risk to change things.   Before the virus it was a question of whether you were willing to risk your job for a wage raise. Now it is a matter of survival. When the threat is death, the question becomes - How can we afford to not take action?

franknews:  A heavy realization.

A heavy realization, but it produces activity. Crisis teaches people something. I think change is coming. How? I'm not sure. I can't predict the future, but I can see it coming. You feel the rumbling under your feet, right?