MIGRANT WORKERS AS AN IMPEDIMENT TO MASS DEPORTATION: A Q&Q WITH DAVID BACON

MIGRANT WORKERS AS AN IMPEDIMENT TO MASS DEPORTATION: A Q&Q WITH DAVID BACON

The Border Chronicle, 12/12/24

https://www.theborderchronicle.com/p/migrant-workers-as-an-impediment?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=373432&post_id=153031157&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=8mf9r&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

 

 

 

Immigrant workers from the Woodfin Suites hotel and their supporters rally outside the hotel in Emeryville, California, while white students from college Republican clubs counterdemonstrate in support of the company. Hotel managers fired 20 workers, accusing them of lacking legal permission to work. (Photo by David Bacon)

 

 

President-elect Donald Trump says he will enact a mass-deportation operation starting his first week in office. But according to photojournalist, author, and organizer David Bacon, there are serious limitations on what he can do, because big business in the United States depends so heavily on migrant labor.

 

What follows in this interview is an analysis, from a worker's perspective, of Trump's promise to ramp up immigration enforcement. Bacon's analysis is informed by his history as a union organizer, decades of research and writing through multiple administrations, including Trump's first term, as well as knowledge of the global economic system. Bacon offers several examples of how undocumented workers organized, mobilized, and prepared for potential raids in the past, and notes that corporate bosses are not necessarily keen on mass deportations.

 

Bacon has authored several books, including Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration, and More than a Wall/Más que un muro.

 

 

What do Trump's mass-deportation plans mean for the U.S. economy and its many industries that depend on migrant labor?

 

Immigration enforcement doesn't exist for its own sake. It plays a role in a larger system that serves capitalist interests by supplying employers the labor force they require. Immigrant labor is more vital to many industries than it's ever been before. Over 50 percent of the country's agricultural workforce is undocumented, and the list of other industries that depend on immigrant labor is long-meatpacking, some construction trades, building services, health care, restaurant and retail service, and more.

 

Trump is not free to eliminate this workforce-which is an advantage and even a source of potential power for workers. Employers know this, and within months of his 2017 inauguration, agribusiness executives were already meeting with him to ensure that he would not follow through on his threats of raids and a tightened border when they needed labor. Last month construction companies in Texas were warning Trump that mass deportations would threaten their profits. Even in 2006, growers in California bused workers to the big marches in hopes that the Sensenbrenner bill wouldn't deprive them of workers.

 

But workers, communities, and unions can't depend on employers to battle Trump for them. What companies need is labor at a cost they want to pay. The existing system has worked well for them. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 8 million of the 11 to 12 million undocumented people in the U.S. are wageworkers, and most earn the minimum wage or close to it. The abysmal federal minimum of $7.25 an hour produces an annual income of $14,500. Even the higher minimums in states like California render an income of barely twice that. The average farmworker family income is below $25,000. Yet Social Security estimates that the average U.S. wage is $66,000.

 

That difference is a source of enormous profit. If the industries that depend on immigrant labor paid the average wage, they would have to pay undocumented workers an additional $250 billion, so the rewards they reap from low-wage labor are huge. Trump has to guarantee not just workers to contribute the labor, but labor at a cost that is acceptable to corporate employers. If we look at his cabinet picks, it is clear that their needs come first.

 

In his 2017 meetings with growers, Trump promised to expand the contract labor system, in which as many as 900,000 people recruited by employers work in the U.S. each year. These workers can come only to work, not to stay. Visa categories include the notorious H-2A program for farm labor, like the old bracero program of the 1950s. Last year growers were given 370,000 H-2A visa certifications-a sixth of the entire U.S. farm labor workforce. The program is known for abusing workers, and the recent reforms by Secretary of Labor Julie Su are already being targeted by growers and their MAGA allies for repeal. The H-2A program is huge, but similar ones are growing in hospitality, meatpacking, and other industries, even for teachers in schools.

 

 

What do you expect to see in terms of workplace raids? Will corporate executives also be arrested and jailed?

 

Workplace enforcement is based on a provision, called employer sanctions, of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. It makes it illegal for employers to hire undocumented workers. In reality, the law makes it illegal for people without papers to work. Over almost 50 years, the federal government has built up a database, called E-Verify, that seeks to identify every undocumented worker. ICE then requires employers to fire anyone it says is not in the U.S. legally.

 

Employers are almost never punished in this enforcement strategy. The only ones punished are workers, who lose their jobs and therefore can't pay rent, buy food, or survive. By making it impossible to live, the strategy seeks to force workers to "self-deport." Heavy workplace enforcement has also included raids, in which ICE enters workplaces and detains anyone they accuse of being undocumented. Both tactics have been used extensively by both Republican and Democratic administrations for half a century. Trump will undoubtedly make them a primary enforcement strategy too. There is also, however, a long history of resistance by workers and unions to workplace enforcement, and it is important to learn from that history the tactics we've used.

 

 

 

Migrant farmworkers, domestic workers, and their supporters march through San Francisco's Mission District to call for passage of the Registry Bill, which would allow undocumented people to gain legal immigration status. (Photo by David Bacon)

 

 

Under President George W. Bush, federal prosecutors charged workers with felonies for giving their employers a false Social Security number. He further proposed the complete enforcement of employer sanctions, but he was defeated in a suit filed by unions and civil rights organizations. Under President Obama, workplace enforcement was further systematized. In just one year, 2012, ICE audited 1,600 employers. Tens of thousands of workers were fired during Obama's eight years in office. Trump's announced appointments for the coming administration include some of the strongest advocates of this kind of enforcement.

 

In the period before Trump took office in 2017, many unions expected that workplace raids and firings would be a large part of his immigration enforcement program. The hotel union in Oakland, California, developed a proactive strategy to keep ICE away from workplaces, and it asked the Oakland City Council to protect immigrants on the job. The council passed a resolution, noting that Oakland has been a "city of refuge" since the anti-apartheid movement of the mid-1980s: "The City Council ... calls upon all employers to establish safe/sanctuary workplaces where workers are respected and not threatened or discriminated against based on their immigration status."

 

Like many unions, HERE Local 2850 (now part of UNITE HERE Local 2) sought alternatives by negotiating protections as part of their contracts with employers, requiring managers to notify the union if immigration agents tried to enter, interrogate workers, or demand papers. The contract says the hotel has to keep agents out unless they have a warrant. California's janitors union, SEIU United Service Workers West, drafted the Immigrant Worker Protection Act, a state law requiring employers to ask for a judicial warrant before granting ICE agents access to a workplace. It prohibits employers from sharing confidential information, like Social Security numbers, without a court order. The act came after years of fighting workplace raids and immigration-related firings.

 

As Trump took office in 2017, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Filipino Advocates for Justice, and several other groups organized trainings to prepare workers for raids. Union members acted out scenarios that used job action to protect each other. Some were veterans of an earlier organizing campaign among recycling workers, in which they stopped work to keep the company from firing employees for not having papers.

 

 

What else do you foresee the new Trump administration doing on immigration? And what do workers need to do to fight back?

 

In the outpouring of fear and outrage over Trump's threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, many have drawn parallels to the mass deportations of 1932-33. At the height of the Great Depression, with hunger haunting the homes of millions of working-class people, the relief authorities of that era denied food to Mexican and Mexican American families. Racist bureaucrats appealed to the government to deport them, claiming that forcing them to leave would save money and open up jobs for citizens. These age-old lies have been recycled again and again for a century, repeated most recently by the MAGA campaign.

 

Hunger was really the most powerful weapon used to force people to leave. But thousands were also swept up in street raids, and many more fled because of the terror the raids produced. Voluntary or not, people were loaded into boxcars and dumped at the border gates. The euphemism of the 1930s was "repatriation." Today's immigration enforcers call it "self-deportation." The idea is the same, and Trump and Pence are only the latest in a long line of proponents of this inhuman idea.

 

So Trump's enforcement program intends to make the conditions of life for people without papers so bad that they will leave. He may need some mass raids to instill the terror, but he can't, and doesn't have to, pick up every undocumented person in order to do this. This is important because just as the raids will target certain people, our resistance can also be targeted. This is part of our history of resistance.

 

 

 

 

People of faith hold a vigil outside the immigration building in San Francisco, California, where immigrants have their hearings before being deported. (Photo by David Bacon)

 

 

The working-class neighborhoods of Chicago, for instance, have a long history of launching huge marches to protest immigration raids. As Obama entered his second term in 2013, activists, including Occupy Chicago, blocked buses going to the immigration courts. Emma Lozano, from Centro sin Fronteras, and other labor activists were arrested. Similar direct-action tactics were used in Tucson, Arizona, by young people who chained themselves to buses carrying detainees to the notorious special immigration court.

 

Trump's 2016 campaign promised to make Chicago a focus for both enforcement and resistance. As anti-immigrant hysteria promoted by his campaign spread, ICE began detaining people during traffic stops, knocking on apartment doors and pulling people off the street for interrogation and detention. The enforcement wave included sweeps of the corners and sidewalks near Home Depot and other gathering sites for day labors looking for work. The public presence of day laborers has historically made them a particular target for immigration street sweeps.

 

Activists met the Trump threat with actions. In July 2019 thousands of people marched through the Loop chanting "Immigrants are welcome here!" A day earlier they'd shown up at the Federal Plaza after hearing that ICE agents were about to be deployed. Unions helped organize the resistance.

 

 

What about cross-border solidarity? Do you have any examples of international organizing that might be inspiring?

 

The relationship between cross-border solidarity and immigrant rights is based on an important reality. If we think of Mexico as being its people, and not simply a geographic place, then part of Mexico exists in the U.S. In Mexico this idea is called el gran México, or Greater Mexico. Mexican communities that are the home of migrants also increasingly discuss the existence of two rights-the right to social equality and labor rights in the U.S., and the right to stay home for people who don't want to be forced to leave in order to survive.

 

Increasingly, these rights animate the discussions of migrant organizations in the U.S. as well. The outpouring of support for Andrés Manuel López Obrador's campaigns among people north of the border, for instance, has been based not just on a love of democracy but on his promise to end the neoliberal reforms in Mexico imposed under pressure from the U.S and World Bank. Those reforms, intended to make Mexico profitable for foreign investors, have caused the poverty that forced people to leave in order to survive.

 

Organizations in U.S. communities of Mexican migrants often have, therefore, a more sophisticated analysis of what immigration justice requires. It means fighting for political change in both countries-against immigration-based repression in the U.S. and for change in Mexico, which creates the basis for a full life. In cities from Los Angeles to Fresno, from Chicago to New York, Mexican migrant organizations are among the most active organizers of demonstrations and resistance. The high point was undoubtedly May Day 2006, when millions of people marched to defeat the Sensenbrenner bill, a proposed law that would have made it a federal felony to be undocumented.

 

 

 

SHERIDAN PRIZE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDED TO THIS PHOTOGRAPH

 

The Sheridan Prize for Photography, encompassing art created by artists in the 9 San Francisco Bay Area counties and Sacramento and Santa Cruz counties has been awarded by jurist Eduardo Soler to “Watermelon Crew Tossing Melons”, a photograph by David Bacon.