Michael Billeaux and Chris Lockamy contributed to this article. 

Between March 10 and May 1, more than five million people took to the streets to demand fair treatment for immigrant laborers.  United in their desire to achieve basic legal rights for so-called ‘illegals’, their efforts make up the largest civil rights movement in the United States since the 1960s.

Whereas these efforts have united Latinos, public opinion polls reveal that the country as a whole remains divided as to how it should cope with the 12 million unauthorized migrants currently living in the United States. In Congress, proposals to handle the “immigration problem” have ranged from legalized exploitation to mass deportation of migrant laborers, with the former usually offered as a “compromise” position – a compromise between corporations and right-wing extremists, that is. Mass legalizations, on the other hand, are simply out of the question. With a little help from media giants, the whole affair is used to expand federal power to more frightening levels than it currently enjoys, as well as help Republicans recover their fan base.

Where did the uproar come from? What are the proposals in Congress, and what do they represent? What does the public think, and why? These are heady questions, already complicated by anti-immigrant hysteria. To treat them seriously requires freeing people from propaganda and widely held myths.

HR 4437: The Pogrom Begins 

Latino communities organized the May 1 demonstrations primarily in response to the passage of the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Reform Act of 2005 (HR 4437), proposed by James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and passed by the Republican-controlled house on Dec. 16, 2005.  Sensenbrenner also introduced the PATRIOT Act, as well as authored the Real ID Act – both landmark examples of legislation that assault privacy and basic civil liberties. Like both of these bills, HR 4437 has more to do with controlling people than it does with homeland security. 

Fueled by the racist belief that Latino immigration results in a “browning of America” that threatens civilization itself, this proposed new law calls for increased border security and constructing 700 miles of wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. More importantly, it would also make it a felony for any undocumented immigrant to live in the United States or for any person to help such immigrants, carrying draconian penalties for offenders.

Logistically, attempting to deport 12 million people is impractical, to say the least, and 700 miles of wall would span only about one-third of the U.S.-Mexico border. But putting practicality aside, there are several other problems with HR 4437 and what it represents.

Making it a felony—rather than a misdemeanor—to enter the country illegally is a shameful debasement of hard working people and others trying to unite with their families. Immigration has historically been a civil issue, not a criminal one, and equating immigrants with criminals and terrorists is xenophobic lunacy. The bill also attempts to greatly expand the definition of “alien smuggling” so that church groups, activists, social and health care workers, and even family members who assist undocumented immigrants would be treated as smugglers. This is reminiscent of the 1851 Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a felony to aid or abet a fugitive slave in an attempt to crush the abolitionist movement. Moreover, even documented immigrants can potentially become felons under the dictates of HR 4437, since minor documentation errors (a change of address, for instance) can quickly result in an illegal status.

If enacted, these changes to currently existing immigration laws would tear many families apart, since undocumented members of mixed-status families would be incapable of attaining legal immigration status. A coalition of Republican lawmakers has even called for a mean-spirited provision that would deny citizenship to children of undocumented workers that were born in the United States. Furthermore, because HR 4437 increases mandatory detention, expedited removal, and criminal penalties for civil immigration violations for all aliens, undocumented immigrant children would be automatically subject to imprisonment without the right to see an immigration judge.

HR 4437 does not make exceptions for asylum seekers, either. This is in stark violation of international law, in particular Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, which prohibits penalizing asylum seekers for the irregular ways they enter countries of refuge. (Not that this is very surprising, of course. The United States has routinely detained undocumented children and asylum seekers since 1996, often in high security prisons alongside convicted or suspected criminals, and for prolonged periods of time.) Anti-terrorism measures in the United States and several countries have dramatically eroded “core refugee protection standards,” as Human Rights Watch predicted would occur shortly after 9/11.  In 2004, for instance, the United States illegally forced 867 Haitian asylum seekers to return to their country, despite that “Conditions in Haiti [were] too dangerous to permit the safe return of Haitians to their country.”  Because of these anti-terrorism measures, HR 4437 also “has the potential to deny individuals who face death, torture or abuse in their home countries from obtaining relief under withholding of removal,” in the words of the House members who wrote the dissenting views to accompany HR 4437.

These and some of the bill’s other fierce provisions are motivated by a commitment to transfer powers from municipal and state agencies to the federal government, in this case the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. The Bush administration began this transfer in 2003, when it dissolved the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and absorbed it into the Homeland Security Department, along with FEMA and dozens of other federal agencies created to help citizens and residents. HR 4437 simply continues the process. By turning over all captured immigrants to federal custody, by authorizing the secretary of Homeland Security to refuse visas and deport immigrants at whim, and by bolstering Border Patrol and surveillance capabilities to establish operational control of U.S. borders, HR 4437 invests unwarranted power in the federal government. By deputizing police and sheriffs in border towns to enforce immigration laws, it provides employers with a tool for removing immigrant workers who try to enforce their rights. And by providing this militaristic framework in which to handle immigration, HR 4437 seriously erodes the prospects for a fair immigration policy.

For these reasons and others (see sidebar), unions, churches, and immigrant rights groups rightly denounced HR 4437 and its irresponsible, inhuman implications. As of this writing, the bill has yet to be reconciled with any bill from the Senate, which is not likely to pass anything as terrible as an unmodified version of HR 4437. Nevertheless, HR 4437 represents the basic position on immigration of the House Republicans, as well as inspires many racists and xenophobes to new highs. Because of this, the lessons of HR 4437 are still valuable ones, worth bearing in mind as the struggle continues.

Anti-Immigrant Legislation Continued

In addition to providing a militaristic framework in which to handle immigration, Joaquín Bustelo has noted that HR 4437 also provides the “legal framework for a pogrom” against Latinos.  Recent crackdowns on undocumented workers suggest that his claim is on-target, although it is worth noting that other, important anti-immigrant bills appeared before the passage of HR 4437.

On May 12, 2005, Senators John McCain (R-UT) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA) introduced S 1033 and HR 2330, the “Secure America and Order Immigration Act,” or Kennedy-McCain for short. This bicameral, bipartisan bill includes a lengthy process whereby immigrants could eventually petition the government for permanent residency. It would also require undocumented immigrants to pay back taxes and $2,000 in fines, learn English and civics, and pass security and background checks.

Many misguidedly view Kennedy-McCain as a pro-immigrant bill. Although it is less abrasive than HR 4437, its provisions are grossly inadequate for handling current immigration rates and, despite several claims to the contrary, it does not guarantee a path to citizenship. Furthermore, Kennedy-McCain legalizes the presence of undocumented immigrants for a period of up to six years by granting them ‘H5-B non-immigrant’ status. As Suvrat Raju notes, it is evident that “this is a recipe for creating second-class citizens who would live in constant fear of losing their status.”  For these reasons, immigrant rights supporters should reject the provisions of Kennedy-McCain as representing a fair solution.

At the far right, Tom Tancredo (R-CO), organizer of an extreme anti-immigrant caucus in the House, introduced the REAL GUEST Act of 2005 (HR 3333) on July 19, 2005. HR 3333 includes internal and border crackdowns in addition to provisions requiring expulsion of all undocumented immigrants, a large no-rights guest worker program, increased employer sanctions, and denial of citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. This proposal is simply atrocious. On July 20, the day following introduction of HR 3333, Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and John Kyl (R-AZ) introduced S 1438, which includes big crackdowns and a guest worker program reminiscent of the Bracero program. For obvious reasons, it should be rejected as well.

Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) introduced the more respectable HR 2092 in the House on May 4, 2005. It included a more generous legalization path, no guest worker program, and vocational training programs for black and other poor and minority workers possibly displaced by immigration. Many members of the Congressional Black Caucus supported HR 2092, but no Senator was willing to sponsor it.

Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (S 2611)

Much recent debate has surrounded S 2611, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (CIRA), introduced by Arlen Specter (R-PA) on Apr. 7, 2006 and passed by the Senate on May 25, 2006. Generally regarded as the Senate’s “compromise bill,” CIRA is the Senate’s parallel to HR 4437. But unlike HR 4437, it includes a citizenship path and a guest worker program.

This bill represents a three-tiered approach to handling immigration. Under CIRA, undocumented immigrants who have been in the country for five years or more can apply for citizenship by paying fines and back taxes; immigrants who have been in the country for two to five years would be forced to leave and then reapply at the border; and those in the country for under two years would be required to return to their original countries. The bill also allows employers to bring foreign workers into the country with a “blue card”, permitting a stay of six years after which the employee would return to their country of origin for one year, calls for constructing 370 miles of border fencing (rather than 700), and increases the number of H-1B visas issued for skilled foreign workers.

Predictably, anti-immigrant Republicans and organizations denounced CIRA for being too soft. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, for instance, a nativist organization known for giving grants to anti-Mexican conspiracy theorists, unreasonably estimates that CIRA “would send the U.S. population skyrocketing towards a billion people by the close of the century,” with the U.S. unprepared to handle the effects (emphasis added).

The problem with CIRA, however, is not that it’s too soft; rather, it does not go far enough towards securing basic rights for immigrants and their families. When demonstrators took to the streets between March 10 and May 1, it wasn’t to militarize the border, promote crackdowns, and institutionalize a status system to divide the immigrant population. Instead, it was to demand basic rights and affirm human dignity. Any bill that calls for financially bleeding people, militarizing the border, and casting millions into a second-class status rather than fair treatment for every person—illegal or not—is simply another obstacle to overcome later.

As the AFL-CIO’s Ana Avendaño points out, the policy of allowing employers to recruit workers outside the country on temporary visas “turns jobs which are now held by permanent employees with rights and benefits into jobs filled by temporary, contract employees. It basically takes the jobs of millions of people out of the protections of the New Deal, won by workers decades ago.” Furthermore, as David Bacon writes, “if currently undocumented workers and new immigrants were given permanent residence status instead of temporary visas, they would be able to exercise their rights as workers and community residents.”

Unsurprisingly, President Bush supports CIRA and its guest worker provisions. One reason he supports CIRA is because months before 9/11 made sweeping immigration reform unthinkable, Mexican President Vicente Fox persuaded Bush to explore the possibilities for such reform in the United States. In particular, Fox challenged Bush to pursue amnesty for undocumented Mexican nationals and a guest worker program, both steps that would “deepen” NAFTA along the lines of the European Union.

Another reason Bush supports CIRA is because the U.S. government has long pursued a policy of keeping legal immigration from Latin American countries low while turning its head when U.S. employers not only hire undocumented immigrants, but actively promote illegal immigration. If this weren’t true, the Justice Department would pursue more criminal charges against employers who hire illegal immigrants. Between 1999 and 2003 – after Bush came into office, that is – work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal data. Although Bush has never favored “amnesty” – itself a loaded term, since it implies wrongdoing – he and other right-wingers realize that millions of cheap, exploitable laborers are a boon to U.S. corporations, since they drive down wages for other workers and guarantee job insecurity.

The committed capitalists of the right wing aren’t alone in their support for CIRA, either. Many of CIRA’s main provisions were lifted from the Kennedy-McCain bill, and the Democrats, the leaders of some of the more mainstream immigrant rights groups, and the officials of unions such as SEIU and UNITE-HERE have all supported CIRA as well, calling it a major step forward. However, if the immigrant rights movement compromises on basic demands with a weak bill, it will have missed a window of opportunity to implement a viable, fair resolution. Once a bill has been passed and the “problem” has been “solved,” then the political climate for supporting serious changes will simply evaporate.

On June 20, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives announced that they would hold new hearings on CIRA before Congress, in a move to prevent the legislation from being passed before the 2006 elections. This is because House Leaders, seeking reelection in November 2006 on a “tough on immigration” platform, have vowed to oppose any bill that grants “amnesty” to undocumented immigrants. Unfortunately, House Republicans will undoubtedly use the intervening months to chip away at CIRA in order to bring it more in line with the even more terrible HR 4437. Passing no bill is better than passing CIRA, but if the House Republicans get their way, then whatever Congress eventually passes will be even worse.

Free Trade and Immigration

Michael Billeaux contributed to this section.

According to a Mar. 31 poll conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, roughly one-half of Americans believe that immigrants are a burden because they take jobs and housing. No doubt there is a grain of truth to this, although ‘take’ is the wrong word to use.

At 7.2 million people, undocumented workers presently make up five percent of the U.S. labor force. Not surprisingly, the majority of these workers are concentrated in states along the U.S.-Mexico border, with 1.4 million working in Texas alone. These workers are generally paid tax-free cash, at hourly rates usually below the minimum wage. With so many workers being paid at such low wages, it seems to be a matter of simple economics that in a competitive labor market they would be employed over native-born workers, who typically demand higher wages, benefits, and better working conditions.

However, there is very little competition for menial jobs in the construction, dish washing, or agriculture industries. “For that argument to hold, it would be based on the assumption that people authorized to work would actually be interested in those types of jobs,” says Adolfo Benavides, professor of economics at Texas A&M – Corpus Christi. “The fact that [illegal immigrants] find work here tells me that there aren’t too many legal workers with carpentry, roofing, [or] bricklaying skills to apply for those types of jobs.” If immigrants are simply filling jobs that native-born workers are not willing to take, then these are not jobs that are being “taken away,” and the impact on wages for documented workers is, if anything at all, only minimal.

Additionally, according to the analysis of high-immigration cities by David Card, professor of economics at the University of California-Berkeley, recent immigration has a very low impact in local labor markets, and opportunities for low-skill workers across all industries are sustained – not diminished – by immigration, due to a relative increase in the amount of available low-skill labor.

Nevertheless, immigrant labor is used to the great benefit of employers, since they can threaten native-born workers with replacement in order to drive wages down and help deteriorate working conditions. However, this is simply another reason why undocumented immigrants should be paid the same wages and receive the same rights as native-born workers, not an argument in favor of increased crackdowns and deportations. So long as immigrants in this country work for lower wages than native-born workers do – which, presumably, will be for a very long time – it is in the interests of the working class and the immigrant rights supporters to unite and oppose exploitation of all workers by their employers.

It would be incredible to say that illegal immigration into the country has zero effect on workers’ wages, or that it only helps the economy and everyone living here. Those who insist this are simply pushing laissez-faire propaganda. But it is equally dishonest to use immigrants as a scapegoat for deterioration of workers’ statuses. This deterioration is simply the logical outgrowth of advanced global capitalism. The real culprits here are the transnational corporations and politicians such as Bill Clinton who rammed through NAFTA and other so-called “free trade” agreements without public support, knowing full well that these agreements were predicted to drive wages down and reinforce job insecurity for the poor and working classes.

In 1982, Mexico ran out of money to make payments on its foreign debt, setting off a near panic in New York, Washington, and other world business centers where it was feared that other Latin American debtors would follow Mexico’s example by declaring de facto defaults. The U.S. government, together with the IMF, rushed a “rescue” package to Mexico that enabled the country to continue paying its debts. This came at a steep price to the Mexican people, as real wages fell, public spending was cut, state-owned companies were privatized, and the population was shoved into economic misery.

Since then, successive Mexican governments have been increasingly pressured to accept neoliberal economic policies (in other words, “free trade”, austerity, and privatization), with disastrous effects. When NAFTA was passed in 1994, for instance, six million Mexican farmers were forced out of work because they couldn’t compete with government-subsidized corn and wheat from the United States and Canada. And in 2008, as many as two million more farmers will be ruined by the full opening of Mexico’s borders to U.S. exports of corn, beans, and powdered milk, the last products to be liberalized under NAFTA.

The position that people are forced into by these circumstances is what drives so many to immigrate to the United States, where they are attacked by the very same neoliberal forces who propelled them into misery in the first place. It should come as no surprise that the United States praises the merits of “free trade” while it grants enormous subsidies to its agricultural industries – probably the largest such subsidies granted on the planet, in fact. For the United States, “free trade” means free trade for us, but not anyone else.

Families will be torn apart, whole countries will be subjected to economic tyranny, and thousands will die trying to cross militarized borders until the people of this nation realize that immigrants are victims rather than criminals and that the struggle for immigrant rights has international dimensions. Until we can address neoliberalism and its legacies, we can’t begin to solve the immigration problem.

Xenophobia and its Political Uses 

Chris Lockamy contributed to this section.

Demonizing immigrants has many political uses, none of which are in the interests of the American working class, let alone immigrants or their supporters. Among blacks, for instance, there is strong resistance to what many consider co-optation of the civil rights movement, historically a black cause. According to the Pew Hispanic Center study cited above, 33 percent of blacks also believe that immigrants take jobs. As Chicana activist Elizabeth Martinez observes, “Various studies conclude that this is mainly true only on the level of low-income work, but the feeling persists along with the belief that immigrants depress wages by accepting low incomes.”

Republicans exploit these rifts as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy. The first big indicator of this occurred in 1994, when nearly 50 percent of Californian blacks, frustrated by illegal immigration, voted for Proposition 187, which denied public services to undocumented immigrants. That year, Republican governor Pete Wilson shamelessly exploited anti-immigrant hysteria to win the election, garnering 20 percent of the black vote – more than double what Californian Republicans typically receive.

However, blacks, immigrants, and workers in general would all be better off if they were in solidarity with one another. As black political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson points out, “A shrinking economy, savage state and federal government cuts in and the elimination of job and skills training programs, failing public schools, a soaring black prison population, and employment discrimination are still the major reasons for the grim employment prospects and poverty in inner city black neighborhoods.”

The immigration debate is also used to distract the public from other, more pressing issues. In recent months, Republicans have drummed up anti-immigrant sentiment as well as pressed for amendments banning flag burning and gay marriage in order to recover their fan base, whereas both parties have focused on immigration to distract Americans from Iraq, the economy, domestic spying, and other failings that stem from imperial overreach.

Similarly, immigrants play the part politicians assign to “communists” and “terrorists”: that is, they are used as a pretext to crack down on the civilian population and advance U.S. militarization. In January, for instance, Halliburton subsidiary KBR was awarded a 385 million dollar contract from the Department of Homeland Security to build “temporary detention and processing capabilities.” This has been done in order to augment existing detention facilities “in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.”

The quotes are Halliburton’s own, but they don’t really say what these “new programs” entail. There’s some speculation, however, that they might be used in the future to implement martial law in much the same way that internment camps were used to hold Japanese-American citizens during WWII. Other companies that stand to benefit from militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border include Wackenhut, G.E.O., and Corrections Corporation of America. The implications of Washington inciting border wars to help defense contractors reap in enormous profits could not be more frightening.

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Against these many arguments are repeated complaints that we must “respect law and order,” that we must prevent terrorist infiltration, and that refusing to grant immigrants the same legal rights as U.S. citizens should not be construed as “anti-immigrant.” But respect for “law and order” is and has always been a clever ruse to protect power and privilege. If the United States is so concerned about terrorists entering the country, then it should quit harboring war criminals and international terrorists such as Emmanuel Constant, Luis Posada Carriles, and Orlando Bosch. And if group A treats group B as if it were the plague, it would be impossible not to draw the conclusion that group A has something against group B.

There is much more to be said about these themes, of course. Hopefully we will have an opportunity to revisit these issues before Labor Day (Sept. 4) this year, when many immigrants rights group intend to hold another round of demonstrations.

DC Tedrow is a writer living in Corpus Christi,  Texas. He is a founding member of both  Turning the Tide and the Church of High  Resolution. Michael Billeaux is a student at Texas A&M -  Corpus Christi who is pursuing his interests  in alternative, independent media. Chris Lockamy is a poet, writer, and activist  living in Corpus Christi.

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