The
Migrant Trap, And The Migrants' Way Out: May 1, 2007
By Leslie Radford
01 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The
pre-dawn pounding at the door startles the family out of its sleep.
“Police!” a voice bellows from the other side. Maybe a family
member or neighbor is in trouble, maybe there’s an emergency in
the neighborhood. The door’s unlatched and opened, and federal
agents burst through. They grab the mother, handcuff her, and disappear
her into the night.
Agents in riot gear seal
off the factory, locking doors and windows, and, pointing military rifles
at the employees, sort them into two groups. One group is dragged out
and dispersed to prisons a thousand miles away. Older sisters lead their
younger siblings through local jails looking for a parent. A nun roams
detention facilities clutching a nursing baby, trying to find the child’s
mother. It takes weeks and a lawsuit before lawyers and family members
learn where all the workers have been taken.
The imprisoned have only
two choices: struggle through a legal process they barely understand
with official assurances they won’t succeed and might endanger
the rest of their family, or go into self-imposed exile abroad, away
from their wife, husband, sons, and daughters, from their home and their
community.
This is not the extraordinary
rendition of fingered terrorist suspects in some faraway land. This
is the increasingly ordinary rendition of migrants from within the United
States. Meanwhile, the Democratically-controlled Congress touts a new
plan for "comprehensive immigration reform," itself hardly
better than last year's heinous Sensenbrenner bill or the forced-labor
Bracero program of five decades ago. And this time, the migrants will
pay for their own exploitation. These are the options offered migrants
in the U.S. today.
And so it's happening again.
On May 1st, 2007, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, will stand
up to the anti-migrant tide, against the raids and deportations, against
punitive and terroristic "immigration reform." Migrants and
those with recent migrant roots, will emerge from invisible communities
and underground economies to demand dignity and justice from a government
that is offering only a choice between which oppression it will unleash
on them. And they have an answer: stop the raids and deportations, and
legalization for all immigrants now.
The U.S. House of Representatives,
where the Sensenbrenner bill originated, has offered the migrants an
untenable conundrum, a choice between poisons: continue living with
the fear of imminent deportation and separation, or accept the Gutierrez-Flake
proposal, officially called the STRIVE Act (Security Through Regularized
Immigration and a Vibrant Economy) of 2007 and dismissed on the streets
as the Son of Sensenbrenner. In short, the Gutierrez-Flake bill gives
Republicans nearly every punitive measure they flouted in the original
Sensenbrenner proposal, and it gives migrants a rocky, uphill, nearly
impossible climb to citizenship.
On Tuesday, there will be
marches, rallies, vigils, and boycotts in the largest cities and tiniest
hamlets. Small businesses will shut down, traffic will be detoured,
employees will mysteriously fall ill, students will cut classes or make
their way home a few hours later than usual. And on this side of the
racial and economic divide, almost nobody knows it's happening, except
for alert economic advisers, wary policy wonks, and savvy political
candidates. But powers-that-be are watching carefully, after last year's
protests shut down the onerous Sensenbrenner anti-migrant bill in the
House, stalling immigration reform indefinitely and forcing the Republican
juggernaut to a standstill.
Likely they have already
noticed that independent truckers have forced the Los Angeles Port Authority
to declared May Day 2007 a holiday, to avoid the fines and penalties
for an migrants' rights strike. Last year's May Day strike for migrants'
rights shut down more than 90% of the port's shipping. In claiming victory,
Ernesto Nevarez proclaimed, "We forced them to recognize May Day."
The Bush administration has
been fierce in its backlash to last year's demonstrations and legislative
shutdown. After massive numbers of people protested in 2006, Immigration
and Customs Enforcement raids took the place of failed Congressional
mandates. In Midwest cities, ICE agents wristbanded workers at the point
of assault weapons to signal who was "foreign" and who was
"domestic"; the "foreign" workers were shipped to
detention camps across the country. After the Swift & Co. raids,
whole cities rallied to take in abandoned children, and the news couldn't
ignore wives begging ICE for word of their husbands' fate for months
without response. So ICE learned to keep the raids small but frequent
and harsh, to strike at small towns and farmlands. Now, ICE agents burst
into homes in early morning hours to roust sleeping families and drag
parents away from cringing, terrified children. People who's "crime"
of entering the U.S. without a visa is subject to a $50 fine are dragged
off to private prisons for being in the vicinity of ICE sweeps for felons.
Farmers in North Dakota are handcuffed and helplessly overlook vacant
fields after thirty-six ICE agents cart away thirteen workers at gunpoint.
Rumors persist of bicyclers dragged away and ICE raids on public busses.
Two hundred children wear prison uniforms and languish in cells 23 hours
a day at the T. Don Hutto facility in Taylor, Texas. These and other
nightmares spread in whispers through migrant-descent communities, while
ICE gives the media nothing but local stories to report.
Not surprisingly, in the
two months leading up to this year's May Day protests, the detentions
have intensified. Armed, warrantless home invasions have left hundreds
of families shattered. People have been hauled out of pizza joints,
and "Latino-looking" shoppers at a Chicago mall were lined
up against a wall at gunpoint, while white shoppers walked away. The
Department of Homeland Security's notorious raid and deportation program,
Operation Return to Sender, brags that it has imprisoned 18,000 people
since its inception eleven months ago.
Last year in Asheville, NC,
thousands of people took to the streets. This year, organizers plan
a quieter vigil. Danielle Fernandez of "We Are One America,"
explains, "There's an unspoken anti-immigrant sentiment in Asheville.
We heard reports of people being ticketed and fired from their jobs
for participating in last year's march. But we have to be seen, as much
as it scares us. What's happening here is intolerable." But she
adds, "It [the abuse of migrants] has brought the Latino community
together. When I was walking in the marches, a counterprotestor tapped
me on the shoulder and said, 'Learn English, or go home.' This whole
hoopla is based on appearance." Fernandez is a third-generation
U.S. citizen, descended from Basque migrants.
For the government and its
corporate interests, the point of enticing undocumented workers to the
U.S. is to hold hostage a workforce that can't agitate, one that is
blackmailed into political and economic silence even as its labor is
exploited for bosses and businesses. But these migrants--from Mexico,
Korea, Guatemala, Russia, Ireland, Poland, Nigeria--have not been invisible
enough. They've brought new looks and sounds, different energies, and
a darker complexion to their new country, and they take to the streets
to demand humane treatment. Other people, born and raised in the long
shadow of "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It To Beaver,"
are uncomfortable, and so the newcomers must be intimidated back into
silence and invisibility. Hence, Operation Return to Sender, government
doublespeak that lays the blame for global migration on foreign economies
torn to shreds by U.S. trade policies.
Joy Marie Dunlap and Jennaya
Dunlap, a mother-daughter team, have dropped off six hundred flyers
at the high school, churches, and grocery stores in Romoland, CA, population
2000. They hope a hundred people will rally with them at 2nd St. and
Highway 74. Joy Marie Dunlap says the point is that "They’ll
be on notice that Romoland has a voice. There's little white support
for Latinos here, but our family's motto is 'Do unto to others as you
would have them do unto you.' If we don’t stand up for others,
who will stand up for us?" Her daughter adds, "We have friends
in the Latino community here who’ve worked hard all their lives
and have nothing to show for it. Here we are back at the civil rights
times, only this time it’s the Latinos.”
But government intimidation
and oppression doesn't work when the pain it inflicts outstrips the
fear it generates. For migrants, that pain is family separation. Since
the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Bill, the Israeli-style border
walls complete with drone aircraft and razor wire, and increasingly
violent Border Patrol tactics, seasonal immigration and emigration of
undocumented workers is too risky, too likely to end in exposure, dehydration,
and death in the desert. Crossing to the U.S. now means family migration
and growing, intergenerational communities. And deportation now means
heart-wrenching choices that divide families according to citizenship.
Some, like the Miranda-Munoz family chronicled by the L.A. Times, leave
their children in the U.S. Others, like Elvira Arellano, defy all the
might of the state's deportation order for each day with her son, on
May 1 breaking a 25-day hunger-strike in the sanctuary Adalberto United
Methodist Church in Chicago. Others take their children away from homes,
neighborhoods, friends, and schools to keep their family intact, to
a country where those children confront unfamiliar customs and languages
unpracticed since pre-school. The pain of homeland terrorism, the war
on migrants, has outstripped the fear.
In Washington, DC and Los
Angeles, hunger strikers maintain a vigil with Arellano, and on Sunday
in Los Angeles, according to organizer Javier Rodriquez, a Youth March
from La Placita Church to City Hall will highlight "children and
families affected by racist deportations." The children will demand,
"Legalize my parents." Rodriquez, along with Gloria Saucedo
of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional and others, are now in the seventh day
of a fourteen-day fast. They anticipate thousands will join them in
one-day fasts. The Los Angeles Police Department is planning for 400,000-person
convergence on Olympic and Broadway on Tuesday morning.
As Justin Akers Chacon has
summarized in "H.R. 1645 (The STRIVE ACT): Image and Reality of
'Comprehensive Immigration Reform'," this version of immigration
reform would massively expand the militarization of the border, including
actively recruiting ex-military with border enforcement experience in
war zones into the ranks of the Border Patrol. Like the original Sensenbrenner
bill, migrants who cross the border without papers, currently a $50
civil violation, will be criminalized, subject to 6 months in prison,
and employer enforcement and penalties will increase. Local law enforcement
will be paid to train and equip themselves to turn over migrants to
federal authorities.
At 4:00 pm EDT, ralliers
will gather at Malcolm X Park, 16 St NW and Euclid St, in DC to demand
that the District of Columbia declare itself a sanctuary city, that
the city prohibit police for detaining people on suspicion of illegal
entry, that all migrants be legalized, and that deportations end.
The much-touted "amnesty"
for migrants already within U.S. borders requires that these low-paid
workers leave the country and return, pay two thousand dollars in fines,
prove a consistent work history in the U.S., pay back taxes unless they
can establish a withholding record for years of past employment, and
take classes until they are fluent in English. Citizenship could take
up to fifteen years.
Only 400,000 "New Worker"
H-2C visas are scheduled for issuance in the first year of implementation,
with future adjustments based on business demand for fresh labor. The
visa would cost the visa holder an application fee, now priced at $1000,
and up an additional, punitive $500 fine. In comparison, for technological
and other highly skilled occupations, an H-1B visa costs the visa holder
$500, while $1000 is paid by the employer. In spite of claims of portability,
these "New Workers" effectively would be bound to an employer
for the three-year duration of the visa and tracked by an “Alien
Employment Management System." If the worker is fired by a vindictive
boss or leaves their job and does not have an approved job waiting,
they face deportation.
According to Dave Schmidt
of Se Se Puede Coalition, "This bill incorporates some of the most
odious elements of the Sensenbrenner Bill. It’s a step backwards.
It still has the criminalization element of the Sensenbrenner bill.
The people hear it’s from the Democrats, and they think it’s
the best they can get. But it’s a common thing in Latin America,
people really think pretty radically. The answer, if you don’t
want people dying in the desert, you allow a humane immigration policy
that allows people to work humanely." Si Se Puede Coalition is
coordinating a march from San Diego State College to Presidio Park on
Tuesday.
Migra Matters notes that
this Son of Sensenbrenner bill separates those who overstay their visas
from those who entered without papers, targeting Mexican and Central
American migrants. It allows broader use of indefinite detention--imprisonment
without a sentence--for lack of government paperwork than proposed in
the 2006 Sensenbrenner proposal, and a fifteen-year prison term for
misuse of identification. And the sweeps won't end if the bill is passed:
the Gutierrez-Flake bill provides for building twenty more detention
facilities, and a total of 20,000 beds.
Buffalo Forum in New York
sponsored a teach-in on the proposed legislation last week. Kathy Chandler
says they're planning a hundred-person march on May 1st from the high
school to a nearby park, and a caravan from there to the ICE facility
to continue their protest.
For people who've struggled
for years at seasonal, contract, and day labor, often for less than
minimum wage and sometimes for fly-by-night employers, the burden in
most cases will be too much to overcome. Fruit vendors on the turnpike
entrance, day laborers, cleaning women, farm workers shunted from site
to site by contractors, face insurmountable hurdles. The cost of the
"New Worker" visa alone amounts to roughly 16% of the annual
minimum wage of $9750 after federal taxes, making saving or helping
overseas families less than unlikely. But the ultimate insult is what
a New York migrant activist called the "modern-day slavery"
of being tied to the whim of an employer, nothing more than the old
Bracero program returned, only this time, workers will pay for their
own exploitation.
The incentives to work in
the U.S: making money for impoverished family members, the freedom to
move up the economic ladder, putting together a nest egg, all evaporate
under Gutierrez-Flake. The carrot of legal status is nearly impossible
to grasp. The penalties for failure to do so are immense. And the choice
between Gutierrez-Flake compliance and more deportations is a choice
only between instruments of punishment.
Panama Alba, a New York City
activist, isn't worried that this year's numbers may be fewer than last
year's. "We don't have the media backing. They've been told to
keep their mouths shut. [The migrants] only have a voice in the streets,
so they go to the streets. But it's not about numbers. They've tried
to shut us down. In light of the raids, any migrant who steps into the
streets is a hero or heroine." What's driving them? "People
are forced to emigrate for lack of work. Otherwise, they will die. Fourteen
men were rescued last December trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean from
Senegal to New York City in a 50-foot boat, in search of work. Every
other week we hear of the death or injury of a construction worker in
New York, because the bosses don't follow safety rules. Any guestworker
program is bullshit, it's not acceptable. We demand full legalization
for all who are here." The May 1st Coalition New York is marching
from Union Square to the Federal Building and immigration center at
Foley Square.
In Boston, New York, Los
Angeles, Chicago, Ashland, Romoland and dozens of other cities, town,
and villages on May 1st, businesses will be closed and the streets will
be jammed again, although perhaps not so densely as before, with the
outcry of the people forgotten in the equation of "compromise."
As chambers of commerce negotiate with nativist Congresspeople to find
common ground, on May 1 the people will give them their answer. It will
be one neither the corporations, the Administration, nor the Congress
want to hear. It is a simple demand for freedom and family, and for
the legal recognition and protections afforded to all other human beings
in the U.S. The question is, who will listen?
Leslie Radford is
a correspondent for Aztlan Electronic News, a contributor to several
other publications, and a migrants' rights activist.
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