Immigration: Obama goes where the imbecile Bush feared to tread

by Richard Mellor

When Clinton signed the North American Free Trade agreement (NAFTA) it had a number of consequences.  It sped up the export of US jobs as US manufacturers shifted production south of the border to take advantage of cheaper labor power.  By 2010, more than 500,000 US jobs were displaced according to the Economic Policy Institute. This also had the effect of lowering wages in the US as NAFTA never contained provisions that protected Mexican workers from super exploitation and US firms demanded concessions to compete.  The threat of moving was used more and more as a form of economic terrorism to force US workers to accept concessions.

NAFTA threw Millions of Mexican subsistence farmers off their land; destroyed their way of life as there was no way these small farmers producing corn could compete with US agribusiness which is highly mechanized by comparison and which by 2002 was subsidized to the tune of 40% of net farm income.

Having no means of subsistence, many of these landless Mexican peasants headed north.  As I have said many times before, the relationship between the global power and its southern neighbor reminds me very much of that between England and Ireland which supplied the colonial power with a steady supply of cheap labor and cheap food.

By 2007 more than 850,000 people were caught trying to cross in to the US illegally through our southern border. You cannot stop people trying to feed themselves and their families. The politics and economic behind it all is hidden.  The role of US imperialism in that part of the world, an area the US capitalist class considers their “back yard” is unknown to most Americans; the invasions, government coups, assassinations of opponents to the US multinational corporations that have plundered the region's resources, poisoned its environment and exploited its workers, we don’t hear too much about that.

As was the case with the Irish in Britain, these southern immigrants come under assault in all sorts of ways.  They are firstly raped, robbed and beaten by those they pay to transport them here. They have been murdered by their guides or US border agents as has been the case on more than one occasion.  If they find work here, their undocumented status makes them most vulnerable to all sorts of exploitation by landlords and employers. They are blamed in the media for the taking of jobs “real” Americans could fill and as a burden on the taxpayer.

In bad economic times they are the perfect scapegoat, they are poor, foreigners, a different nationality and more often than not, although not exclusively, a different color; a perfect part of a divide and rule strategy.

Responding to this xenophobic warfare, Republicans pushed the imbecile Bush to do more.  By 2007 they demanded that he “deploy four drones” along the border, build 105 radar and camera towers and increase the number of border agents to 20,000 while building more fencing.

Where Bush failed though, Obama has not feared to tread.  In his first term the Obama administration spent $73 billion on immigration enforcement. Presently the US has 120 drones scouting the border, has installed 670 miles of fencing, erected 300 towers and beefed up the border agents to 21,394, 18,500 of them on the US Mexican border according to Bloomberg Business Week.  The results have been favorable as immigration agents deported close to 1.5 million undocumented workers in the past four years. The reduction in border crossing most experts agree is also due to the crash as fewer jobs were available and many immigrants returned home.

As I pointed out in a previous blog, for workers it is in our economic and class interests to oppose these measures and the racist and xenophobic attacks on undocumented workers. There was a headline in my local paper a few weeks ago about Latino’s being the most populous ethnic group in the state before too long. “The Latinos are coming, my god, the Latinos are coming.”  But which Latinos? I would argue as a worker it is “our” Latinos, people from the same class background as the vast majority of us, wage earners-----workers.  The 11million or so undocumented workers already in the US pay their dues and have paid them a thousand times over.  They work in the worst jobs for the lowest pay and face savage discrimination at times.  They are the butt of racist jokes and are denied basic human services by politicians who are millionaires ( and billionaires) and who whip up this climate of fear in order to divide us and drive all workers to conditions that prevailed before the rise of the CIO in the 1930’s and the civil rights movement that followed.

I don’t intend to beat a dead horse but to side with the anti-immigrant crowd on this issue is disastrous. We cannot escape the effects of having a 2000 mile border with a low waged economy and super exploited workers. For workers not to have an independent position on this issue means the bosses win all round.  Leaving aside the $73 billion of our money being spent on militarizing US society which will be used against US workers as we resist the destruction of our living standards in the future (drones will be used against us and so will the border guards to break strikes and protests against austerity), having cheaper labor just across the border also weakens us in other ways.  As I wrote some time ago in a piece I distributed at work:

“But even if these workers and peasants don't come here to the US, staying in their home countries will have basically the same effect. It will increase the supply of Labor, further driving down wages (Labor’s price) and increasing the rate at which capital invests since there would be even greater profits to be made there. Obviously this would mean further job losses here in the U.S. Thus, we cannot escape the affects of the conditions of those workers and peasants, no matter if they come here or stay in their home countries. The only real difference is that if they come here, the effects of this forced competition are more visible to us.”

A Mexican farmer doesn’t leave his family, his children and his country without being forced to either by the gun or through economic terrorism. Neither does an African migrant in Europe. While it isn’t realistic to simply call for the opening of all borders when on one side wages and conditions are higher than the other, as it would simply depress the higher in favor of the lower which would be opposed by higher paid workers and divide the class an alternative is to recognize class solidarity, overcome nationalist sentiment and do what we can to build links with workers south of the border or any workers no matter where they may be, and join with them in raising their wages and standard of living. We must join with them in the struggle against global capital launching a global offensive of our own.  We must build an independent political party of our own that will break the monopoly the two Wall Street parties have over the political process and prevent them from moving production by taking over the industry; the Democrats will never do this.

We only have to think of all the money we spend on defense and militarization of our borders and immigration control and what effect that has.  We can’t as Americans travel in half the countries of the world.  Our standard of living is declining; our jails are the most populated in the world, our health care is dismal; the inequality gap is wider than ever before, and our young people will, if they are lucky enough to have a job, will be able to retire at 80.

We need more allies not enemies; we’ve got plenty of them on Wall Street and in Washington.  We call them, "fellow Americans".

Some reading:

The Myth of Free Trade

Tariffs and Tortillas

Lessons of NAFTA

Hey Look, Somehow the Border Got Secured Businessweek Feb 25, 2013

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Amnesty for the undocumented, they've earned it.

by Richard Mellor

Immigrants are hard workers; they have to be.  They are usually economic refugees, victims of wars, both physical wars and trade wars.  The Irish came to England and to the US in droves to escape poverty in their homeland, a poverty that was a product of occupation and the theft of their land.  As a person of English origin living in California, I have often compared the Irish immigrants to Britain to our Mexican and other Latino immigrants who are also economic migrants, forced to leave their homes and families to stave off starvation.  NAFTA drove more than a million Mexican farmers from their subsistence farms; many came up here.  It’s hard to compete with Con Agra or Monsanto when it comes to agricultural production, the US small farmer can testify to that.

Many of the day laborers we see on the street corners of our cities are indigenous people that fled Guatemala to escape the murderous regime that the US installed there.  These peasants fought to defend their land but US weaponry and money ensures the land barons their primary place in the pecking order.

The question of “illegal” immigration is a major issue between the two Wall Street parties here in the US.  The Democrats claim to be the party of the poor, the workers, the downtrodden masses. But the voluntary exit from the political arena of some 140 million eligible voters in the election cycle shows how much faith Americans have in either of the parties of capitalism. The trade Union hierarchy continues to push a political party that millions of US workers have already abandoned.

In hard times----meaning during times of market failure----immigrants are an easy target, a handy scapegoat to divert attention from the inability of the market to provide a secure and fruitful existence for millions of people even in the most powerful economy in human history. They are to blame along with native workers but more so.  They take our jobs, they drag down wages, use our public services, etc. Racism is added to the mix; they wouldn’t be desperate if they could govern themselves; if they were smart like us.

There are some 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, the majority of them from Mexico and the rest of Latin America.  How to deal with these people is a bit of an issue in Democratic and Republican circles.  As they always do in order to obscure the class divide, Obama talked of unity in his recent Inaugural address. “He used the word, ‘together’ seven times in the 15 minute speech” according to Bloomberg Business Week.

He went on to the subject of immigration touting the US as the land of opportunity and that the US “journey”(to where I’m not sure) is not complete “Until bright young students and engineers are listed in our workforce, rather than expelled from our country.”

It is not so difficult to get in to the US if you are a Russian tennis star or a former assassin for the CIA (there’s a few of them here) or a former dictator that helped US corporations plunder a third world country’s resources, Marcos of the Phillipines, the Shah of Iran, etc.

If you have money there are special considerations.

Neither party really seriously objects to these types of immigrants, the “bright stars”. The ones with money or potential to make money. The problem is the 11 million who “aren’t the ‘bright young’ future job creators Obama lauded in his speech.”, says Business Week.   So who are they then?

Making Calif a global agricultural powerhouse

Well if you live in California and you eat anything that pretty much grows out of the ground you can thank many of these brothers and sisters for it, undocumented or not.  If you go out for a nice meal no matter which type of ethnic food it is, Indian, Persian, Italian, Pakistani, Afghan or plain old American food, there’s a good chance a Latino, one of the 11 million will be cooking it.  If you need work on your home, your lawn, your rental unit, they might be doing that too.  They’ll be doing all of this for piss poor wages.  Then there’s the hog factories meat processing plants and chicken processing plants, you name it. You’ll find them there as well. After crushing militancy in the meat backing Unions with the help of the Union hierarchy, the bosses actually recruited labor from Mexico and Central America, providing transportation up north.

The ruling class whips up anti-immigrant feeling when it’s useful for them.  They take our jobs, they’re jacking up the cost of medical care and when there is a serious criminal offense committed by one of them it proves how we have to deal with this problem.

These workers are economic migrants, victims of the market.  They are the allies of US workers not the enemies.  The bosses favor the “bright stars” those that will more likely support capitalism and have ambitions to exploit workers when they arrive.  The US capitalist class doesn’t support these people coming in because they “create”jobs.  They support them because they are not hostile to the state of affairs, to capitalism.  Because they have desires to exploit Labor, to become rich off of the Labor of others or to at least facilitate the process of capital accumulation through their special skills for which they’ll be handsomely rewarded; they will tend to be more middle class in their outlook.

The Republicans are supposed to be the obstacle but what do the Democrats offer?  Outgoing Labor Secretary Hilda Solis wants things to be “fair”. She wants to bring the undocumented “out of the shadows”. Amnesty is “..a word we do not use.” she tells Charlie Rose, the journalist, commentator and big business insider. Solis has a radical solution, “earned legalization and fairness.”  Once this is done these immigrants “pay their back taxes, they get in line, they have no criminal record.”

Back taxes?  How about reimbursing them for all the profits they’ve made for US businesses receiving slave wages in return?  How about that? What about the rents they have paid to the “bright stars” in the slumlord business? Solis is herself a Latina from an immigrant working class background whose father was a Teamster and a shop steward.  But she represents the US capitalist class, rising to a considerable rank in one of its two political parties.  The undocumented workers in the US have contributed a lot more to our society than Donald Trump.  They have done so through the most backbreaking work in the worst conditions and living in constant fear and insecurity.  They do what all immigrants do, they work their asses off. They have to listen to racist ideologues demanding that they be denied basic rights like the right to drive a car legally (a must in California where “communist”public transport is so poor) or the right to medical care.  They have paid for the right to medical treatment ten times over. They actually contribute to our welfare.

Those immigrants that Obama refers to, the “bright young students and engineers”are generally less likely to join Unions or appeal to Unions or live in or close to the communities of native-born workers no matter what their racial background.  They will not frequent the bars and clubs and social activities we frequent in the main as we are forced to do through work and living in communities that border each other.  The class composition of the 11 million is overwhelmingly working class, and despite their attempts to divide us, demonize them and weaken class unity, when the struggle breaks out in to the open, there is a powerful tendency to overcome these divisions and for us to seek class allies and unite along class lines. Racism and xenophobia will also play its part, but this tendency to class unity is always there.  This is why these 11 million immigrants are feared and why they have to be portrayed negatively.

The AFL-CIO leadership needs the 11 million as does the Catholic Church, one for dollars in the Sunday plate the other to add to the declining Union membership and as votes for their Democratic allies at election time.  Not long ago a friend of mine who was a waiter in a fancy hotel helped the restaurant workers’ Union get a foot in the door.  The place was eventually Unionized.  Their pay increased a little and they now had Union dues.  My friend wanted to have a steward’s election and was an aggressive advocate of workers’ rights himself.  He called me frustrated with the Union staffer’s lack of response, never returning his calls.  He eventually went down the Union office and managed to talk to one of the staffers who told him that their resources were stretched as they were busy “growing”the Union.  In their competition with other Unions for “market share” and revenue growth, both bosses’ terms, they were done with the hotel.  They had a five-year contract a no-strike clause and some increased revenue.  The workers meanwhile were already beginning to hate the Union

It was Clinton who not long ago betrayed the Labor officialdom with his support for NAFTA after agreeing to oppose it, but they’ll let that go; their jobs are secure; won’t be exported. The Wall Street Journal reports today that Latino membership in Unions has risen 21% over the last 10 years while “white” membership fell 13%.  Leaving aside the discriminatory reasons for it, we could put this another way; we could say that higher paying jobs with better benefits and Union strength on the job have declined and low waged unionized service jobs have grown. The Union hierarchy is less interested in immigrant rights than the need for increased revenue as they see the Unions as employment agencies with them as the CEO’s.  They call for support for a wage raise to $10 an hour from $8 for a family of four as they assist the bosses drive wages and benefits at the higher end down further.

AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, like any good businessman needs increased revenue. He brushes the past aside and ignores the fact that his Democratic Party allies, like California governor Jerry Brown are savaging workers’ living standards on behalf of the corporations announcing that the AFL-CIO leadership looks, “…..forward to working with members of Congress and the president to ensure that all men and women here, regardless of their skin color or where they were born, can participate meaningfully in the United States of America with full rights and equal protections.”

Good luck with that Mr. Trumka. Some team you’re on there.

Those in the immigration debate that simply call for the opening of borders are on the wrong track as a huge influx of Labor power would undoubtedly place significant downward pressure on wages.  The Labor movement must develop its own response to these issues rather than allowing big business, through the two political parties that it controls to set the ground rules. We must support immigrant rights domestically and not fall in to the skape-goating trap while at the same time assisting the growth and development of Labor organizations in other counties where poverty is rife. Most people emigrate because they can’t feed their families. We must reject competition between workers in different countries and work to build a united global working -class movement to fight global capital.

Even if these workers and peasants don't come here to the US, staying in their home countries will have basically the same effect. It will increase the supply of Labor, further driving down wages (Labor’s price) and increasing the rate at which capital invests since there would be even greater profits to be made there; capital doesn’t like closed borders. Obviously this would mean further job losses here in the U.S. Thus, we cannot escape the affects of the conditions of those workers and peasants, no matter if they come here or stay in their home countries. The only real difference is that if they come here, the effects of this forced competition are more visible to us. We can bury our heads in the sand and ignore the conditions in such countries as El Salvador, Mexico, etc., but that in no way means that those conditions don't affect us just as much. Therefore, our only choice is to join with them, wherever they are, in a united struggle to improve wages and conditions, as well as democratic rights, whether they be here or there.

Of course, this means opposing U.S. foreign policy, which has actively suppressed democracy and trade union rights in these countries in the interests of the giant multi-nationals.  It also means a struggle within the AFL-CIO whose leadership has blindly supported this foreign policy that has installed and/or supported one ruthless dictator after another in these countries.

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