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MIGRATION: Human Beings Can’t Be ‘Illegal’, Book Argues

Ben Case

NEW YORK, May 12 2009 (IPS) - Julio Guerrero came from Mexico to the U.S. state of North Carolina on a legal, H2-A temporary visa to work on a tobacco farm in 2002. After only a few weeks on the job, his fingers began to hurt and before long his fingernails had fallen off.

Smith farm tried to prevent him from seeing a doctor, but when he did, he discovered the damage was caused from working in fields doused in dangerous pesticides with no gloves.

Guerrero called Legal Aid, a programme providing free legal services to low-income people. As a result, he was sent back to Mexico and blacklisted, his name put on an official “record of ineligibility” for work visas in 2003. Legal Aid responded anyway, issuing a pink “know your rights” booklet to guest workers in North Carolina farms.

The following year, Juan Villareal, also on a guest visa from Mexico, was one of 200 workers taken to a barn outside the North Carolina Growers Association office, where the workers were told to throw their “know your rights” booklets in a trash can. They were then made to sign contracts, written in a language they could not understand, under threats of arrest and uncompensated tickets back to Mexico if they did not comply.

Theirs and other stories are part of David Bacon’s new investigative book ‘Illegal People: How Globalisation Creates Migration and Criminalises Immigrants’, which details the history of immigrant labour and the latest round of attacks by anti-immigration forces.

There are currently 300,000 documented guest workers and more than 11 million undocumented workers in the United States. Making up about 5 percent of the country’s workforce, more than half of undocumented migrants are from indigenous regions of Mexico like Chiapas and Oaxaca.

Almost half of “illegal” workers enter the U.S. legally, then either overstay or violate the terms of their visas.

Those who enter illegally pay exorbitant amounts of money for the chance to make it to the Unites States and often brave brutal conditions along the way. Once in the U.S., undocumented people contend with discrimination and abuse by employers and authorities.

These same undocumented workers contribute 7 billion dollars to social security and 1.5 billion dollars to Medicare annually, despite ineligibility to ever collect benefits, through mismatched or fake Social Security numbers they need in order to be hired.

Bacon, an associate editor of Pacific News Service and former journalist, has spent more than two decades as a union organiser and rights activist. He has published several books on the subjects of immigration and labour.

Bacon takes aim at the very term “illegal” as it refers to human beings – as opposed to an act – preferring the term “undocumented” person or worker.

The term “illegal,” Bacon argues, is part of the United States’ history of white male property owners’ efforts to dehumanise and demonise the people they rely upon for the hardest labour, dating back to slavery.

“People in guest workers programmes are treated neither as guests nor as workers but as slaves for rent,” says North Carolina Legal Aid attorney Andrew McGuffin in the book.

“The right of people in this country to continue to work is a fundamental right,” Bacon told IPS. “The questions are who have these rights and how do we fight for them. The idea that the way to protect jobs of people living in this country is to deport some other people living in this country is a racist argument.”

Bacon does a good job of intertwining history and politics with personal accounts and testimony, like that of Ana Martinez, who worked under harsh conditions in a Texas Instruments calculator factory in El Salvador.

Martinez was forced to emigrate after participating in a days-long strike in response to right-wing death squads that had been terrorising union workers. The army reacted by executing organisers and arresting the whole union, prompting Martinez to flee to the U.S., where she risked abuse and rape as an undocumented housekeeper until becoming a union organiser in a spa factory, producing luxury hot tubs for the wealthy in Los Angeles.

There is also Robetro Sabanal, who was shot and beaten by privately-contracted paramilitaries along with his comrades for striking at a Dole banana plantation in the Philippines in 1998.

The book takes a holistic view of immigration, discussing the complex intermingling of seemingly disparate forces, from corporate lobbying to Mexican electoral politics to insurrections in Oaxaca to individuals supporting their families.

Much of the material ties into events that have transpired since its publication, making it especially timely and relevant. Bacon delves into the Smithfield Foods pork factories in North Carolina and its subsidiaries in Veracruz, Mexico, where the recent outbreak of H1N1 flu is believed to have started.

Smithfield ran small pig farms in the area out of business, and imported those workers from their homes in Veracruz to work in its plant in North Carolina. Smithfield located its pig farm subsidiary in Veracruz in 1994, the year after NAFTA was signed, and its poor sanitation practices such as disposing of pig corpses and waste in the open, near the public water supply, is very plausibly related to the H1N1 outbreak, critics say.

“You certainly can’t compete as an old-fashioned pig farmer any longer that town. Then you have this company making people live around pounds and pounds of pig excrement with no sewage.” Bacon explained. “All of these things are connected, and it’s easy to see the connections once you start looking for them.”

Another key aspect of the book is Bacon’s connection of migrant workers’ plight to the labour movement as a whole. He describes the often difficult relationship between established labour unions in the U.S. and new arrivals, as well as the tenacious attempts by both documented and undocumented immigrants to organise.

Bacon elaborated to IPS, “Our experience shows that when a company came down on immigrants they were saying to the white and black workers that their situations would improve if they let it happen. Experience also shows it was only when those workers were able to cross the lines of race and nationality to fight for the right of everyone to work that there were results.”

“Unemployment and racism in the U.S. economic system pit communities of colour against each other, and against working-class white communities. Competition produces lower labour costs and higher profits,” he said.

This unfortunate reality, Bacon argues, underlines both the past achievements of inter-ethnic organising and the necessity of a continued struggle in that direction.

“Today, working people of all countries are asked to accept continuing globalisation, in which capital is free to go wherever it wants. By that token, migrants must have the same freedom, with rights and status equal to those of anyone else.”