May Day: "WE ARE WORKERS, NOT CRIMINALS"

By David Bacon

May 1, 2008, posted to Portside by the author

In the big immigrant marches that swept the country on May
Day in 2006 and 2007, one sign said it all: "We are Workers,
not Criminals!"  Often it was held in the calloused hands of
men and women who looked as though they'd just come from work
in a factory, cleaning an office building, or picking grapes.

The sign stated an obvious truth.  Millions of people have
come to this country to work, not to break its laws.  Some
have come with visas, and others without them.  But they are
all contributors to the society they've found here, not
people who mean it harm.  Again this May Day, immigrant
workers are filling the streets, making the same point.

Yet today the Federal government is taking actions that make
holding a job a criminal act.  Some states and local
communities, seeing a green light from the Department of
Homeland Security, are passing measures that go even further.
These actions need a reality check.

Last summer, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff
proposed a rule requiring employers to fire any worker who
couldn't correct a mismatch between the Social Security
number they'd provided their employer, and the SSA database.
The regulation assumes those workers have no valid
immigration visa, and therefore no valid Social Security
number.

With 12 million people living in the U.S. without legal
immigration status, the regulation would lead to massive
firings, bringing many industries and businesses to a halt.
Citizens and legal visa holders would be swept up as well,
since the Social Security database is often inaccurate.

Under Chertoff the Bureau of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement has conducted sweeping workplace raids, arresting
and deporting thousands of workers.  Many have been charged
with an additional crime - identity theft - because they used
a Social Security number belonging to someone else to get a
job. Yet workers using another number actually deposit money
into that holder's account, and these immigrants will never
collect benefits their contributions paid for.

The Arizona legislature has passed a law requiring employers
to verify the immigration status of every worker through a
federal database called E-Verify, which is even more
incomplete and full of errors than Social Security.  They
must fire workers whose names get flagged.  And Mississippi
passed a bill making it a felony for an undocumented worker
to hold a job, with jail time of 1-10 years, fines of up to
$10,000, and no bail for anyone arrested.  Employers get
immunity.

Congress is now debating two bills, the SAVE Act and the New
Employee Verification Act that would require similar use of
the E-Verify database.

In 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act made it a
crime, for the first time in our history, to hire people
without papers.  Defenders argued that if people could not
legally work they would leave.  Life was not so simple.

Undocumented people are part of the communities they live in.
They will not simply go, nor should they. They seek the same
goals of equality and opportunity that everyone else in our
country believes in.

For most, there are no jobs to return to in the countries
from which they've come.  Rufino Dominguez, a Oaxacan
community leader in Fresno, says, "The North American Free
Trade Agreement made the price of corn so low that it's not
economically possible to plant a crop anymore.  We come to
the U.S. to work because there's no alternative."

When Congress passed NAFTA, six million displaced people came
to the U.S. as a result.  If Congress stops passing new free
trade agreements, and instead faces the damage NAFTA and
other pro-corporate measures did in Mexico, the poverty and
desperation that fuel migration can eventually be reversed.

Trying to push people out of the U.S. who've come here for
survival simply won't work.  The price of trying is that the
vulnerability of undocumented workers will increase.
Unscrupulous employers use that vulnerability to deny
overtime, minimum wage, or fire workers when they protest or
organize.  Increased vulnerability ultimately results in
cheaper labor and fewer rights for everyone.  Children live
in fear that their parents will be picked up in raids.

After deporting over 1000 workers at Swift meatpacking
plants, Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff called for
linking "effective interior enforcement and a temporary-
worker program."  The government is really after giving cheap
labor to large employers. Deportations, firings and guest
worker programs all make labor cheaper and union organizing
harder.  They contribute to a climate of fear and insecurity
for everyone.

Instead of making work a crime and treating immigrants as
criminals, we need equality, economic security, jobs and
rights for everyone. Coming in September, 2008, from Beacon
Press: Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration
and Criminalizes Immigrants

For more articles and images on immigration, see
http://dbacon.igc.org/Imgrants/imgrants.htm

See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the
US, Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR
Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575

See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico
Border (University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html

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