Monday, January 28, 2008

E-mail raises suspicion of immigration raids’ timing

E-mail raises suspicion of immigration raids’ timing

An e-mail acquired by the Associated Press on Saturday revealed that, one day before dozens of New Haven residents were arrested in federal immigrant raids last summer, local Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials notified the organization’s national director that the Board of Aldermen approved the Elm City Resident Card program.

The June 5 e-mail, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, also discloses that ICE — the largest arm of the Department of Homeland Security, which conducted the summer raids — expected the raids to garner substantial media attention. The raids took place in Fair Haven just two days after the Board of Aldermen passed the funds for the ID cards, which are available to residents regardless of immigration status.

New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. told the AP that the e-mail reinforces his belief that the timing of the June 6 arrests was not a coincidence and instead corresponded with the approval of the municipal ID program.

“It is really difficult to believe that the launch of our program has nothing to do with this,” City hall spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga said Sunday. “When you read these e-mails, you are reminded of that.”

But Jessica Mayorga also clarified Sunday that DeStefano does not think the raids were “retaliatory,” despite claims to the contrary immediately following the arrests.

National ICE officials said it is common practice to send e-mails on immigration developments across the nation, as they come up, and that the news did not influence the timing. Federal ICE spokesperson Paula Grenier told the AP that the e-mail was “something we typically do [which] is to pass on information.”

The timing of the e-mail had nothing to do with date of the raids, she said.

In June, DeStefano released a six-page document arguing that the raids violated constitutional rights, caused trauma among the young children and did not “follow protocol.”

Although Department of Homeland Security spokesman William “Russ” Kanocke told the News in June that ICE typically contacts “relevant” city officials before conducting raids, City Hall officials said local police and city officials were never contacted in advance.

According to a June City Hall statement citing sworn witness testimony, ICE agents did not have warrants to enter households and failed to receive proper consent from residents and to identify themselves properly. In a June 14 letter to Connecticut leaders, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff disputed these claims.

For months, ICE officials have denied that the raids were motivated by the ID program, saying that the raid was planned for months and the timing was merely coincidental. Kanocke told the News last June that DeStefano’s accusation was “bogus.”

“When you have a local official that makes the suggestion that an enforcement action is somehow correlated to the political views or policies of a community, it’s just bogus,” Kanocke said. “That’s not at all how it works, and it’s not even close to grasping the sophistication and the planning that goes into an ICE enforcement action.”

The raids were originally scheduled for April 20, 2007, shortly after national media started to cover the Elm City Resident Card program, Law School attorneys have said based on their correspondence with ICE officals.

The raids were then pushed to May 2, confirmed by a redacted letter released through a June 26 FOIA request to Law School professor Michael Wishnie ’87 LAW ’93, who is representing immigrants rights groups as well as the arrested immigrants. ICE officials told the News that the raids were pushed back to June due to problems with planning.

Wishnie told the AP that the e-mail does not indicate ICE officials “wanted to be prepared to respond to that expected attention.”

But, he said, “it certainly casts doubt on the statements that the raid had nothing to do with the ID program.”

Wishnie declined to the comment to the News on Sunday night.

ICE agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided at least four households in the predominantly Hispanic Fair Haven area on June 6 as part of “Operation Return to Sender,” a nation-wide ICE plan to issue deportation warrants.

On June 26, Wishnie and the Law School clinic attorneys, on behalf of JUNTA for Progressive Action and Unidad Latina en Accion, two local immigrant advocacy groups, applied for documents concerning the raids from the Conn. Department of Public Safety.

Citing a state FOIA law that prohibits the release of records concerning criminal investigations, the state Department of Public Safety refused to provide a portion of its records to the Yale attorneys representing the arrested residents in October. That prompted the attorneys to file an appeal, which was considered by the FOI commission on Nov. 1.

On Nov. 9, the commission ordered the DPS to release the raid documents Wishnie had requested. Attorneys then said they expected the new documents to strengthen existing evidence that the riots were reactionary.

Other than the list of 32 as-of-yet unspecified names, the documents requested by Wishnie include a 10-page operational plan for the ICE raids that the DPS received from Homeland Security on May 29. It is unclear whether Wishnie has received any documents since the Nov. 9 hearing, and he could not be reached for comment Sunday.

-The Associated Press contributed reporting.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Some illegal workers caught in area raids temporarily can stay in U.S.

Some illegal workers caught in area raids temporarily can stay in U.S.

Frank X. Mullen (FMULLEN@RGJ.COM)



The federal government will allow at least two dozen of the 56 immigrants swept up in a September raid of area McDonald's restaurants to temporarily stay in Nevada as it continues its investigation of businesses that hire illegal workers.

The 56 suspected undocumented workers were arrested Sept. 27 in raids of 11 Reno-area McDonald's restaurants. So far, federal authorities have agreed to allow 24 of those workers to remain in the U.S. under a temporary status agreement, according to the lawyer representing 28 of the workers.

"Some of the individuals will be allowed to stay temporarily under a policy called deferred enforced departure," said Woody Wright. "It's a discretionary thing while (the government) is in the process of an investigation. They will hold off on any immigration court proceedings for a period of time."

Those who received temporary status are allowed to work and those who find jobs can be issued special Social Security cards, he said. The process could extend their stay from one to two years, said Wright, who represented the workers for free with the help of Nevada Hispanic Services.

"To my knowledge, none of my clients have any criminal charges pending," Wright said, but he noted the workers will eventually have to go through civil deportation proceedings in immigration court.

"Basically these clients got lucky, but it's only short-term luck," he said. "They still have to go before a judge."

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the McDonald's restaurants after receiving a tip that a manager in the Fernley McDonald's was working under someone else's Social Security number.

The agency arrested 54 people at 11 area McDonald's and two elsewhere. At the time ICE agents said the raids were part of an effort "to focus on employers who build in hiring illegal workers as part of their business practice."

Agency spokeswoman Virginia Kice said Thursday the investigation is ongoing and the agency "is not going to speculate about the possible outcome."

No charges have been filed against Luther Mack, owner of the McDonald's restaurants. Mack said Thursday he had no comment on the case.

Kice said she could not confirm the number of workers who were given deferred enforcement status in the McDonald's cases.

"(But) I want to underscore that ICE conducts enforcement actions lawfully, professionally and humanely and takes extraordinary steps to identify, document and act on humanitarian concerns of the illegal aliens arrested for immigration and other violations," she said. "The enforcement action in Reno and the ongoing investigation are no exception."

Of the 56 workers identified during the raids, ICE released two on-site. They were mailed notices to appear at future immigration proceedings.

The other 54 workers were sent to a processing center where 29 were released on their own recognizance based upon "humanitarian concerns," Kice said.

At least seven workers have been deported to Mexico because they had been arrested in the past and already had been through administrative proceedings in front of an immigration judge, ICE officials said.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Federal review of Bianco raid ordered

Federal review of Bianco raid ordered

The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has pledged to review Immigration Customs and Enforcement's actions during last year's Michael Bianco raid, which politicians and immigrant advocates say caused a "humanitarian crisis" by tearing families apart.

Inspector General Richard L. Skinner has agreed to launch a general review into the concerns raised in a letter that Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., sent just four days after the March 6, 2007, raid, an agency spokeswoman told The Standard-Times Thursday.

Sen. Kerry requested a "thorough investigation" into the agency's handling of the raid after immigration agents stormed the leather factory and nabbed 361 illegal workers, mostly women with young children. Detainees were quickly shipped off to detention centers in Texas, where some languished for months before being released and reunited with their families. Those who were not deported face hearings before a federal immigration judge.

"I am very concerned that there was a systematic failure in preparing for and executing the New Bedford immigration raid," Sen. Kerry wrote in a March 10 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

"It is for that reason I am copying DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner on this letter and asking for a thorough investigation into how the raid was prepared and how it was executed," he wrote. "I believe the situation in New Bedford has become a classic example of what not to do in an immigration raid and I hope that we can have your agency's full cooperation in rectifying this crisis."

Tamara Faulkner, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security's Inspector General's Office, said it is "way too early to know what exactly will be the scope of the review."

While a general review does not have to meet the same standards as an audit, Ms. Faulkner said the office would "look at the issue as seriously and as deeply as we can."

It will start by putting "a team on the ground to talk to people" about the raid, she said.

The review will take about eight months to complete and will result in a published report, which could include recommendations for ICE, she said.

"I am pleased that the inspector general is taking this matter seriously and going forward with the investigation that I have requested," Sen. Kerry said in a statement. "Hopefully, we will finally get the truth about what happened in New Bedford. The families and community deserve as much."

ICE spokeswoman Pat Reilly defended the agency's conduct during the Bianco raid.

"We feel confident that the inspector general will not find anything remiss," she said. "We stand by what we did in New Bedford. We always comport ourselves in a professional manner."

Ms. Reilly noted that her agency has had no notification about the inspector general's review.

She described the Bianco raid as a "worksite enforcement that turns off the magnet for illegal immigration.

"We've done it throughout the country and we always do it to a very high standard," she said. "I think we've been very transparent about what we did at New Bedford and why we did it and what was subsequently done with the people who we arrested."

In November, following conversations with U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and U.S. Rep. William D. Delahunt, both D-Mass., ICE codified its guidelines for treating illegal immigrants and their families during raids involving more than 150 workers. The guidelines, which were distributed to ICE personnel, were not new rules, but rather existing rules pulled together into a single document, Ms. Reilly said.

Sen. Kerry's letter to Mr. Chertoff is loaded with questions about the treatment of detainees during and after the raid. He asks how soon detainees were given access to Department of Social Services representatives and whether any effort was made to keep them closer to Massachusetts. He questions what steps ICE took to make sure that children would not be stranded as a result of the raid.

The letter also raises questions about how much ICE knew about Michael Bianco Inc.'s contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense. Workers at the factory sewed backpacks and safety vests for the military under a federal contract.

"In addition to my concerns about the innocent children swept up in the aftermath of this raid, I also have significant questions about how a target of an ICE criminal investigation could also be the recipient of lucrative DOD contracts," Sen. Kerry wrote in the letter.

Contact Becky W. Evans at revans@s-t.com

Group outlines abuse claims in immigration sweeps

Jan. 18, 2008, 1:41AM
Group outlines abuse claims in immigration sweeps

Hate and bigotry among items cited in critical report as conference opens

A national immigrant advocacy organization on Thursday released a report that accused U.S. officials of stepping up workplace raids and immigration sweeps to "instill fear in communities."

The report's release coincides with the opening of a national conference for the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which will be held today through Sunday at the downtown Houston Hyatt. The California-based group outlined a wide range of alleged human rights violations in its 108-page report, "Over-raided, Under Siege," based largely on news reports and interviews with community leaders.

Arnoldo Garcia, the director of the Immigrant Justice & Rights Program at NNIRR, described a "climate of hate and intolerance and bigotry" against immigrants in much of America. He said the report raises important questions about the timing and legality of recent immigration raids, citing a sweep last year in New Haven, Conn., that was conducted two days after the city approved issuing a municipal ID card that would allow all residents — regardless of their citizenship — to access certain city services.

"When they do those raids, it's a scary thing for people to see," Garcia said. "It intimidates people into giving up their rights. It's very deliberate."

Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, disputed the allegations and said the raid in New Haven was planned more than a month in advance.

"ICE is a law enforcement agency," she said. "We are not trying to strike fear into anyone. We are enforcing the law. I think the American public has made it crystal clear that that is what they want."

Garcia said the conference organizers chose to hold the conference in Houston in part because of the city's size and diversity, and its location along the Gulf Coast.

Nestor Rodriguez, a University of Houston sociology professor and co-director of UH's Center for Immigration Research, said he plans to speak briefly at the conference this morning. He said such gatherings have great significance in helping to broaden the immigration debate.

"This is a key social issue for us today in this country, and something the presidential candidates and the public in general talks about," Rodriguez said. "The more we meet and discuss the significance of migration, the better off we are. I think the more informed we are, the better we're equipped to make decisions."

The conference will focus in part on developing a system to track and document human rights abuses and hold the government accountable for documented violations, Garcia said. Other goals include strategizing about the November political elections and crafting plans to lobby Congress to legalize the estimated 11 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

Garcia said the conference registration is near capacity with about 500 people. Those interested in attending the conference at the Hyatt Regency Houston, 1200 Louisiana, can e-mail NNIRR at conference08@nnirr.org. For information, visit www.nnirr.org.

susan.carroll@chron.com

IMMIGRATION MATTERS: Defending the Civil Rights of Immigrants

IMMIGRATION MATTERS: Defending the Civil Rights of Immigrants

Looking Back, Looking Forward

New America Media, Commentary, Maya Harris, Posted: Jan 18, 2008

Editor’s Note: 2007 was a grim year for many immigrants with the double whammy of failed comprehensive immigration reform and increased enforcement measures across the country. What's in store for 2008? Maya Harris is the executive director of the ACLU of Northern California, the organization’s largest affiliate in the country. She is the first African American and first Indian American to hold that position. IMMIGRATION MATTERS regularly features the views of the nation’s leading immigrant rights advocates.


Maya HarrisSAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – First-grader Kebin Reyes, a U.S. citizen who lives with his father in San Rafael, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, missed a field trip with his class one day last March. In the early dawn hours, armed agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stormed into the Reyes’ apartment, handcuffed Kebin’s father, and took both father and son into custody. The terrified six-year-old was locked in a room with his father for 10 hours, with nothing to eat but bread and water.

Kebin is one of our clients. A month after the raid, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the little boy for violation of his Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.

Kebin was just one of thousands of children across the country who were traumatized by the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Return to Sender” program last year, an initiative characterized not only by racial profiling and a disregard of constitutional rights, but by tremendous inefficiency. Though DHS chief Michael Chertoff claims that the ongoing campaign is aimed at capturing criminals and fugitives, less than one quarter of those arrested last year in Northern California had criminal records.

Despite the fact that Congress was unable to agree on a major immigration reform bill in 2007, state and local laws proliferated. This election year is sure to bring heightened rhetoric and even more draconian proposals. Some of these will be high-profile photo opportunities orchestrated to benefit politicians – like more neighborhood raids and an ever longer, stronger border fence. Others will be more subtle, contrived in the corridors of power, but whose influence will be felt sharply by families, students and workers.

Here are some priorities for the ACLU in the new year:

“No-Match” letters: In 2007, a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the AFL-CIO temporarily halted the federal government plan to punish employers who do not fire employees whose work authorizations are not in the Social Security database. The government has acknowledged that the database is rife with errors, and that more than 70 percent of the discrepancies are in records of U.S. citizens. The court predicted that the program could cause irreparable harm to more than 8 million workers and their employers. Nevertheless, the government intends to reintroduce its flawed proposal in March 2008.

REAL ID: Tucked away in a supplemental bill for the Iraq War and Tsunami relief in 2005, the REAL ID Act turns a driver’s license into a national identity card that everyone will need in order to travel by plane, enter government buildings or open a bank account. Under REAL ID, every person who applies for a driver’s license must prove to a Department of Motor Vehicles clerk that he or she is a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. This national database will not solve the problem of illegal immigration or enhance national security – it will, however, endanger the privacy of all Americans. Seventeen states have registered their opposition to REAL ID, and a measure to repeal it is now pending in Congress.

Citizenship delays: As a “national security” measure, the government expanded its use of FBI background checks in 2007 to include a “name check” for each applicant against every name that appears as a reference (as a victim, witness, or other relevant party) in an FBI investigation database. This practice, which results in “false hits,” has caused delays for hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country.

DREAM Act: The California Legislature passed a bill to ensure that all California high school graduates accepted into state public institutions of post-secondary education would be eligible for state-sponsored financial aid, regardless of their immigration status. Though the Governor vetoed the bill, it will be reintroduced this year in hopes that all California kids have a chance to fulfill their dreams of higher education.

Now for some good news. Last year, California became the first state to enact a law prohibiting landlords from checking the immigration status of tenants and prohibiting local governments from requiring such checks. The bill was sponsored by apartment owners who did not want to be put in the position of acting like Border Patrol agents. The California law, which was signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, was in direct response to local ordinances around the country that would ban landlords from renting to undocumented immigrants.

People often ask me, why is the ACLU involved in immigration issues?

There are very big reasons for doing so.

The ACLU was founded during the 1920s Palmer Raids, when our government ordered European immigrants detained and deported because of their political views. As the U.S. Supreme Court later established, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution apply to all persons in this country, not just to U.S. citizens.

There are also many small reasons. Like first-grader Kebin Reyes.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Seeking stability: Family believes raid was act of ‘selective enforcement’

NWAnews.com :: Northwest Arkansas Benton County Daily Record

Seeking stability : Family believes raid was act of ‘selective enforcement’

Posted on Sunday, January 13, 2008

URL: http://www.nwanews.com/bcdr/News/57611/

ROGERS — Serafina Reyes

still sheds tears when she

recounts the day she told her grandchildren their parents had been arrested. Dec. 10, 2007, started as a quiet day at the Reyes home at 2706 Creekside Drive. Quickly, it turned into chaos and confusion.

The change started with a dull thud — the sound of law-enforcement officers breaking through the door of the family’s home in a surprise raid, then ended with the petite matriarch holding her four eldest grandchildren as they returned home from school to find the floor of the home strewn with papers and clothing.

“ They said ‘ Mama ! Papa !’” she said through an interpreter.

In a near-simultaneous raid of multiple locations of the family’s Acambaro Restaurant chain, Garcia’s Distribution Center and the home, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers and local police arrested Reyes ’ son, Arturo Reyes Jr., 35, his wife, Silvia Reyes, 36, and Lucila Huaracha, 33, all of Rogers; and Armando Reyes, 33, of Lowell, on charges of harboring or shielding aliens for material gain.

The raids also yielded the arrest of 19 illegal immigrants working in the restaurants.

The arrests were made as part of the first large-scale action taken after formation of a regional immigrations task force operating under the federal 287 (g ) guidelines. The program gives local law enforcement the authority to detain suspected illegal immigrants, then check their citizenship status by accessing a federal immigration database. A total of 19 officers from the Springdale and Rogers police departments and Benton and Washington county sheriff’s offices are authorized for the program.

Arturo Reyes Jr. remains jailed awaiting a trial date. He was not released because he was judged to have the potential to flee to his family’s home in Mexico.

Silvia, who is three months pregnant and a mother of five, is out of jail on $ 25, 000 bond. She is under home arrest, with a monitoring unit strapped to her ankle.

Silvia and Arturo Jr. have worked in the United States as illegal immigrants for 14 years. Arturo’s parents are legal residents. The couple never sought legal status because the process of acquiring citizenship is cumbersome and the family’s children — all natural-born U. S. citizens — are not fluent in Spanish and would be uncomfortable living in an unfamiliar culture in Guanajuato, Mexico, where they would have to live during the process, she said. Memories of the raid

The monitoring bracelet on Silvia’s ankle alerts police if she leaves her home. She follows a handwritten list of times she’s allowed to leave the house to pick up her children from school and attend church. She clears doctor’s appointments related to her pregnancy in advance with police.

The raid has shaken up her children, she said. It’s difficult to be at home with so much uncertainty while her husband remains detained, Silvia said, but she knows it’s what Arturo wants her to do.

Daughter Josselyne, 3, who was present during the raid, now sleeps with the lights on.

Jessica, 14, wrote her mother a letter detailing her fears of ICE and her bad memories. The letter included a hand-drawn map showing where her parents, grandparents and siblings could sleep in one of the family’s other homes in Rogers. The move would help to avoid memories triggered by living where the raid happened, she wrote.

Serafina, 66, can still reenact every footstep of that morning. She was upstairs, giving her husband his heart medication, when she heard a loud sound like a gunshot at the front door. She walked into the atrium to find officers with weapons drawn. They had broken out a panel of the front door and forced entry into the home, she said.

Silvia, who wasn’t visibly pregnant at the time, remembers lying on the floor with Josselyne, covering her eyes to keep her from being afraid. ICE had already arrested Silvia’s husband at one of the restaurants, though she didn’t know it at the time.

The family doesn’t understand why force was used.

“ It would have taken one officer to arrest me, ” Silvia said.

Since the raids, rumors have also surfaced about inappropriate behavior by local police officers on the scene. Employees present at the raided restaurants claim officers mocked the seriousness of the event, putting on aprons and sombreros and dancing around, she said.

Sgt. Shane Pegram, public information officer for the Springdale Police Department, would not comment on the behavior of specific officers, citing the federal nature of the investigation.

Neither would Steve Helms, chief of the Rogers Police Department.

“ Any officer obviously is trained in etiquette and procedures, but I can’t speak directly to it, ” he said. “ We want our officers to act professionally, as any agency would. ”

A Homeland Security officer was present, supervising the process when the search warrant was executed at the residence, Helms said. Selective enforcement ?

Serafina, Silvia and Silvia’s brother, Isais Morales, 43, who works at the restaurants, agree that the raids were what some members of the twocounty Hispanic community have called selective enforcement.

Outside a recent court hearing, a group of several high-profile Hispanic business and community leaders distributed a document outlining plans to establish a fund for legal defense of local Hispanic business owners and diversity training for local officers involved in immigration enforcement.

Helms said the department already incorporates several forms of diversity training into basic training.

“ It’s basically preaching the Golden Rule: treat others as you would treat yourself, ” he said.

Pegram said the Springdale department hadn’t yet determined whether it would take part in training provided through the group’s fund.

“ It’s hard to say because we don’t know what that training would consist of, ” he said.

The Hispanic community group’s statement said officers “ unduly targeted the Reyes family for exceedingly harsh scrutiny and punishment. ”

“ Out of the thousands of businesses in NWA so far, ICE officials have targeted Hispanic-owned enterprises in their quest to rid NWA of ‘ undesirables, ’” said the statement, which was endorsed by Jim Miranda, a Hispanic activist, and Ana Hart, executive director of Just Communities of Northwest Arkansas.

Silvia agreed.

Officers could go into the kitchen of any northwest Arkansas restaurant, she said, and they would likely find illegal immigrants employed under the guise of false documents. The same could be said for large corporations, she said.

She denied knowingly employing illegal immigrants. Small businesses are not given the proper tools or training to determine that documents are authentic, she said.

Silvia said that when she first became involved with the business she had a soft approach toward documentation, because of her own lack of documentation. As the family learned more about the legal process, they took a more aggressive approach to investigating documents.

Under the more aggressive approach, when the company received notification of a questionable Social Security number from the Internal Revenue Service, managers would confront the employee. If the document was false, the employee would simply leave, she said.

In October, the family closed the restaurants for a few days when a group of employees — suspicious of people in what they believed were unmarked law-enforcement vehicles — refused to come to work out of fear of a raid. Many left the state, Silvia said. She said supervisors were unaware of the employees’ illegal status.

Of the 19 workers arrested in December, seven have been deported to Mexico and El Salvador, Morales said. Many of them left children behind, he said.

Federal authorities froze the restaurant chain’s bank accounts and seek to seize $ 3. 5 million worth of property allegedly purchased with money made from employing illegal immigrants — including the family’s four homes, five restaurants and a warehouse.

A federal complaint details suspicious financial activity at the businesses as an incentive for investigation, citing large cash deposits as evidence of potential wrongdoing.

Cash transactions are quite common in the Hispanic community, Morales said.

“ Am I supposed to tell a customer, ‘ No, you can’t pay me in cash’ ? ” he said through an interpreter.

Morales opened a vinyl bank bag, fanning out stacks of prepared deposits from Tuesday’s business at three of the restaurants. The records showed a total of $ 3, 179 in cash and $ 3, 075. 71 in creditcard or debit-card transactions. On Mondays, the chain would deposit a full weekend’s worth of cash from all of its restaurants, frequently a large sum, he said. A federal investigation

Morales said area immigration enforcement has been presented as a tool to rein in criminal activity. He doesn’t understand why his family, all involved in the business community, was the target of the first large-scale raid.

“ The police came here to take innocent people, ” he said.

Helms denies that the Reyes investigation was a misuse of local immigrationenforcement efforts. The investigation of the family originated with the Department of Homeland Security before local agencies secured 287 (g ) agreements, and before the task force was formed, he said.

“ The officers that were trained were brought in to finish that up, ” he said.

Bob Balfe, U. S. attorney for the Western District of Arkansas, would not speak on the specifics of the Reyes investigation. He denied accusations of targeting Hispanic business owners. Investigations are based on credible tips.

The Acambaro investigation has been ongoing since 2006, he said.

“ I strongly disagree with that characterization, ” Balfe said. “ We did not take out a Hispanic business directory and begin with the A’s. ”

Local officers were acting within the goals of the northwest Arkansas Immigration Criminal Apprehension Task Force, he said. The organization works with ICE to establish priority cases. The task force’s top priority is pursuing immigrants involved in violent crime. It next targets groups involved in other types of criminal activity such as document fraud and drug trafficking.

Because the first two goals involve reactive enforcement, which occurs once crimes are discovered, officers spend the remainder of their time focusing on larger investigations targeting the task force’s third goal — halting the hiring of illegal immigrants, Balfe said.

The region’s high job-creation rate draws the majority of illegal immigrants to northwest Arkansas. Employers frequently abuse illegal workers, denying benefits and pushing high overtime hours with substandard wages, Balfe said.

“ Until we hold these employers accountable, illegal immigrants are going to continue to be preyed upon, ” he said, speaking generally. “ We’re not focused on the race of the employers; we’re focusing on the criminality of the employer. ” The future of Acambaro

The future for the family and the restaurant chain remains uncertain, Morales said.

With a shortage of employees necessary to reopen all of the restaurants, the family has opened four of the seven locations. Even if the family is cleared of charges, Morales is convinced the attention from the legal proceedings may have a negative impact on the business.

The family, who has catered community events and fundraisers for years, has seen a swell of support from the community. Church congregations are praying for them, and patrons are returning to the restaurants. A white Bentonville couple, loyal customers for years, offered to attend a court hearing with the family, he said.

“ The first time they came back to the restaurant, they jumped up and down and said, ‘ I’m so glad you’re open !’” Morales said.

Francisco Ayala, managing editor of Noticias Libres, interpreted for this story and contributed to it.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

San Diego Minutemen adopt a freeway

San Diego Minutemen adopt a freeway

Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times

Opponents of the adoption say Caltrans ignored its own rule barring groups that advocate discrimination.

Caltrans grants a stretch of I-5 that includes a border patrol checkpoint to the foes of illegal immigration, a move some critics call "unfortunate."

By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 12, 2008

SAN DIEGO -- The Knights of Columbus have adopted a highway. So have the Japanese American Citizens League, biker groups, Indian casinos and the International House of Pancakes.

Now add the San Diego Minutemen.

Caltrans has granted an Adopt-A-Highway stretch of Interstate 5 to the ardent foes of illegal immigration -- and not just any stretch. The two miles of freeway the Minutemen will be charged with beautifying include the U.S. Border Patrol Checkpoint near San Clemente.

"How great is that," Jeff Schwilk, the group's founder, told his members in an e-mail.

Critics disagreed, saying the California Department of Transportation ignored its own rule that bars groups that advocate violence or discrimination from participating in the program.

"The Adopt-A-Highway program was designed to allow organizations to show pride in the state of California . . . and it is unfortunate that the Minutemen, whose approach . . . includes advocating violence, have been allowed by Caltrans into the program," said Tina Malka, associate director of the San Diego branch of the Anti-Defamation League.

Schwilk denied Friday that his group advocates violence and said no member has ever been arrested for immigrant-related violence.

Caltrans spokesman Edward Cartagena said the Minutemen got the stretch of I-5 purely by chance. The group submitted its application in November, he added, and it was reviewed and found to comply with the rule. According to the agency's website, it bars "entities that advocate violence, violation of the law, or discrimination based upon race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry" and other factors.

"The Department will not discriminate against groups that otherwise meet the program criteria based on the fact that some members of the public might disagree with the particular group's agenda or reputation," Caltrans said in a prepared statement.

The group's two signs -- one on each side of the freeway -- went up in late December. Members have been given a safety course on how to clean the freeway. Their first cleanup day is set for next Saturday.

Schwilk said Caltrans rules bar demonstrations, and he and his crew would just be beautifying the roadway. "We'll be out there in dorky-looking vests, hard hats and goggles, picking up trash," he said. "We're a community activist group, so why wouldn't we take other steps to help our communities?"

Enrique Morones, president of the Border Angels, a San Diego-based immigrant rights group, questioned the Minutemen's motives and called Schwilk's move a publicity ploy.

"They're desperate to get attention, even if it means sweeping the freeway," he said.

The San Diego Minutemen operate mostly in north San Diego County, where members often demonstrate at day labor sites and trade accusations of violent behavior with anti-immigrant groups. Schwilk says the group has 600 members. Others say membership has dwindled to no more than 30.

A former Marine, Schwilk says on his website that he worked alongside hardworking Mexicans in a carwash for more than three years in the 1980s and that his best friend in school was half Mexican.

Andy Ramirez, chairman of Friends of the Border Patrol, congratulated Schwilk on his great freeway location. It's entirely fitting, he said, that a group like his that supports the border patrol's mission be given the area near the checkpoint.


In fact, he said, "The irony is killing me. . . . Why didn't I think of that?"

richard.marosi@latimes.com


--

Friday, January 11, 2008

Local Police Taking On Immigration Enforcement

From NPR

Local Police Taking On Immigration Enforcement

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Demonstrators protest a program allowing police to act as federal immigration officers.
Scott Olson

Demonstrators protest a resolution to adopt a federal program called 287G in Waukegan, Ill., last July. The program allows local law enforcement agencies to take on the role of federal immigration officers, to demand people prove their citizenship status and start deportation proceedings. AFP/Getty Images

All Things Considered, January 11, 2008 · In the past decade, thousands of immigrants have settled among the rolling hills of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, finding jobs in poultry processing, construction and the service industry. When local police would find they had arrested an illegal immigrant for some crime, they would call Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But Rockingham County Sheriff Don Farley says that, as often as not, federal agents were so busy that the immigrant would make bail and disappear before they ever showed up, and there was nothing Farley could do.

"When I have to respond to my community about this problem," Farley says, "I don't want to say, 'Well I have a badge but it doesn't work on immigration problems; it only works on speeding and cats in trees and that type of thing.' I didn't feel good at all about that."

So last year, Farley joined nearly three dozen other police agencies that have signed on to a Homeland Security program that lets local officers hold people on immigration charges. Five of his deputies received five weeks of training in immigration law. That now lets them check the legal status of everyone booked at the county jail in Harrisonburg.

Homeland Security Program

Officers can take fingerprints and check them against the federal immigration agency database. If there's no hit there, they can interview the suspect and investigate his legal status. If someone is deemed to be illegally present, the sheriff's office can then detain him and start the paperwork for the deportation process. Sheriff Farley says that since August, his force has detained 69 illegal immigrants.

"We're not going and pulling people off the street because they have a foreign look about them," he says.

Farley says he has taken heat from all sides over the program; immigrant advocates are worried that he'll conduct random raids, while others have criticized him because he's not conducting such raids. Farley says he has no plans to target otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants who are simply providing for their families. For one thing, he has no space for them in his crowded jail.

"If someone wants to build me a 10,000-person jail, maybe I'll start looking at all the illegals," Farley says, "but that's not going to happen."

Instead, in addition to the checks at the jail, Farley's officers focus on immigrants who are suspected drug dealers and gang members.

Fear of Reporting Crimes

Up a steep hill in Harrisonburg, Deputy Sheriff Corrie Bauserman patrols a run-down trailer park of mainly Hispanic families, pointing out layers of graffiti sprayed by competing gangs. In theory, Bauserman has authority to check the legal status of anyone here, even if there are no criminal charges against them. He's done that once. He says a gang member he knew to be here illegally was implicated in crime after crime, but the victims were afraid to press charges.

"I said, 'This guy is a problem. He's associated with recruiting 12-year-old children, 10-year-old children. He's setting up the meetings, he's doing this, he's doing that. We need to get rid of him,'" Bauserman says.

Bauserman dismisses fears that his new powers make people avoid sharing information with him. In fact, he says, Latinos here are eager to help because they are often the victims of the crimes he targets.

But not everyone is convinced.

"To me, it's just a matter of fear-mongering," says Rick Casteneda, chairman of the Harrisonburg Area Hispanic Services Council. He says immigrants — even legal ones whose family members are undocumented — are indeed more afraid to report crimes now.

"I've had situations where people called me directly and said I had $1,000 or something stolen, and I have an idea who did it but I'm afraid to go to the police," Castaneda says.

Delegating Powers Controversial

Harrisonburg lawyer Aaron Cook says he appreciates that Sheriff Farley and his deputies exercise discretion. But he says the other local police forces that also use the county jail may not. Since everyone at the jail is checked, Cook says, longtime residents with jobs and families can be deported after minor infractions like reckless driving or petty theft.

Cook had one client that he says was wrongly arrested when she was a passenger in a car accident. Cook was able to get that charge thrown out, but because the woman's legal status had been checked at the jail, she was deported anyway.

Even within the law enforcement community, delegating immigration powers is controversial. Hubert Williams, head of the research organization Police Foundation, worries about racial profiling and about the burden local agencies bear with this new responsibility. Williams says studies show immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native born, so he believes this trend isn't as much about public safety as it is about politics.

"Right now (it's) being driven by impulse, emotions and fear of political backlash over the immigration problem," Williams says. "Over time, eyes will be opened, and people will give a lot more thought to the impact of this kind of decision."

Maybe. But right now, the movement toward local enforcement is so strong that the federal immigration agency has just set up a new office to coordinate it. The executive director is a former North Carolina sheriff, Jim Pendergraph, who says that every day he gets calls from other states interested in cooperating with ICE. In fact, demand is so great, Pendergraph has 90 local agencies on a waiting list to be trained in immigration enforcement.

"I don't see it reversing at all," Pendergraph says. "There have been too many people that have said immigration is a federal responsibility. Immigration is all of our responsibility, and it can never be successful without partnerships with state and locals."

Thursday, January 10, 2008

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MIGRATION

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MIGRATION
By David Bacon
New Labor Forum, June 2007

Note: This article previews an argument that will be made at book length in "Illegal - How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants," Beacon Press, Fall 2008

Mr. Sensenbrenner's Family Business

In December 2005, Wisconsin Congressman James Sensenbrenner convinced his Republican colleagues (and to their shame, 35 Democrats) to pass one of the most repressive immigration proposals of the last hundred years. His bill, HR 4437, would have made federal felons of all 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., criminalized teachers, nurses or priests who helped them, and built a 700-mile wall on the U.S. Mexico border to keep people from crossing.

Representative Sensenbrenner is more than just a leader of Congressional xenophobes, however. His family is intimately involved in creating the conditions that cause migration, and then profits from the labor it makes available. In fact, the Sensenbrenner family connections are a microcosm of the political economy of migration itself.

James Sensenbrenner's grandfather started Kimberley Clark, one of the world's largest paper companies, and Sensenbrenner and the family trust remain important stockholders. The company's Mexican counterpart, Kimberley Clark de Mexico, is a close associate of the Mexican mining giant, Grupo Mexico. One of K-C's former executives, J. Eduardo Gonzalez, sits on its board.

Grupo Mexico was a big winner in the neoliberal economic reforms that transformed the Mexican economy over the last twenty years. In the 1990s, the corporation became the owner of two of the world's largest copper mines, in Cananea and Nacozari, which were formerly nationally-owned enterprises. The mines lie just a few dozen miles south of the Arizona border.

In 1998, Grupo Mexico provoked a strike in Cananea, over moves to reduce its workforce and labor costs. Close to a thousand miners lost their jobs. Many were blacklisted and left for "the other side."

Then last year the mining giant prevailed on the Mexican government to depose the president of the country's miners union, Napoleon Gomez Urrutia. Gomez had accused the company of industrial homicide after the terrible Pasta de Conchos disaster, when 68 men died in a coalmine explosion. Grupo Mexico also didn't like his drive to raise mining wages beyond government-set limits.

Miners in Cananea and Nacozari stopped work for months to force Gomez' reinstatement. Finally, last summer, the government gave Grupo Mexico the green light to fire all 2500 miners in Nacozari. Since there are no other jobs in tiny Sonoran mining towns the displaced families had to leave to survive. With the border just a few miles north, many sought their survival by crossing it. The profits of Grupo Mexico and its business partners went up as they destroyed unions, terminated thousands of workers, and forced their families into the migrant stream.

During those very months when workers began to go north, Sensenbrenner organized a series of rump Congressional hearings to defend his bill. He fulminated against undocumented immigrants, claiming they had no place in the United States and should leave. No one asked the Congressman about those miners from Cananea and Nacozari, however. Where did he think they would go?

Other voices in Congress criticized the Representative, arguing that the labor of migrants was needed in the U.S. economy. Not even Sensenbrenner could deny this. Some 16 million immigrants live in the U.S. with documents, and 12 million without them. If they actually did go home, whole industries would collapse. Some of the country's largest corporations, completely dependent on the work of immigrants, would go bankrupt.

One of these dependent corporations is Mr. Sensenbrenner's family business.

Every year, Kimberley Clark, a large paper company, . converts tons of wood pulp into leading brands of toilet paper. Deep in U.S. forests thousands of immigrant workers plant and tend the trees that produce that pulp..

Every year, laborers from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean are recruited for this job. In towns like La Democracia, Guatemala, where the global fall in coffee prices has driven families to the edge of hunger, recruiters promise jobs paying more in an hour than a coffee farmer can make in a day. They offer to arrange visas to come to the U.S. as guest workers. For their services they charge thousands of dollars. Hungry families will mortgage homes and land, just to put one person on the airplane north.

In the U.S., recruiters hand the workers over to labor contractors. They, in turn, work for land management companies, who tend the forests for their owners. The landowners grow the trees, and sell them to the paper companies.

The debts of guest workers are so crushing that in 1998, 14 men drowned as the van carrying them to work careened off a bridge into the Alagash River in a Maine forest. They were speeding because it had rained the day before, keeping them from working. Carrying that load of debt, even one lost day puts a family in jeopardy.

No one gets overtime, regardless of the law. Companies charge for everything from tools to food and housing. Guest workers are routinely cheated of much of their pay. If they protest, they're put on a blacklist and won't be hired the following year. Protesting wouldn't do much good anyway. The U.S. Department of Labor sees no problem with this abuse. It almost never decertifies a guest worker contractor, no matter how many complaints are filed against it.

The paper industry depends on this system. Twenty years ago, it stopped hiring unemployed workers domestically, and began recruiting guest workers. As a result, labor costs in the forests have remained flat, while paper profits have soared. Mr. Sensenbrenner's family business didn't invent this, but the low price of labor allows landowners to sell their trees for less. Kimberley Clark certainly profits from that.

Displaced People - an International Reserve Army of Labor

In Latin America, the neoliberal system displaces workers, from miners to coffee pickers, who join a huge flood moving north. When they arrive in the U.S., displaced workers become an indispensable part of the workforce, whether they are undocumented or laboring under work visas, in conditions of virtual servitude.

The U.S. immigration debate needs a vocabulary that describes what happens to them before they cross borders - the factors that force them into motion. In this political debate, people like the miners or pine tree planters are called job seekers, rather than political refugees. It would be more accurate to call them migrants, and the process migration.

The miner fired in Cananea or Nacozari is as much a victim of the denial of human and labor rights as he or she is a person needing to find a job in the U.S. to survive.

This year, teachers and farmers left Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, seeking a viable economic future, after they were beaten in the streets for protesting that their state's government can't and won't provide one. Oaxaca's poverty is worse than almost anywhere in Mexico, and last year teachers struck, and the capital erupted in a virtual insurrection because of it. An intransigent political elite, benefiting from the existing order, not only refused to consider any change, but tried to stop criticism with police attacks, arrests and even assassinations.

Are the fleeing Oaxacans job seekers or refugees? They're both, of course. But in the U.S. and other wealthy countries, economic rights are not considered human rights. In this official view, hunger doesn't create political refugees. In effect, the whole process that pushes people north is outside the parameters of political debate.

The key part of that process is displacement, an unmentionable word in the Washington discourse. Not one immigration proposal in Congress last year tried to come to grips with those policies that uprooted miners, teachers, tree planters and farmers, in spite of the fact that Congress' members in many cases voted for them.

Whether acknowledged or not, displacement has been indispensable to the growth of capitalism. As early as the 1700s, the English enclosure acts displaced home weavers by fencing off the commons where they raised sheep for wool. Hunger then drove weavers into the new textile mills, where they became some of the world's first wage workers. The textile mills produced the wealth of the first British capitalists. At the same time, displacement created the beginnings of the British working class.

Not long after, Karl Marx called Africa "a warren for the hunting of black skins," describing the bloody displacement of communities by the slave traders. Uprooted African farmers were then transported to the Americas, where they became an enslaved plantation workforce from Colombia and Brazil to the U.S. south. Their labor created the wealth that made the growth of capitalism possible in the U.S. and much of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Displacement and enslavement produced more than wealth. As slaveowners sought to
differentiate slaves from free people, they created the first racial categories. Society was divided into those with greater and fewer rights, using skin color and origin. When Mr. Sensenbrenner called modern migrants "illegals," he used a category inherited and developed from slavery.

Today displacement and inequality are just as deeply ingrained in capitalism today as they were during the slave trade and the enclosure acts of English in the 1700s when the system was born. In the global economy, people are displaced because the economies of their countries of origin are transformed. That transformation enables corporations and elites to transfer value, or wealth, out of those countries. After World War Two, the former colonies of the U.S., Europe and Japan sought to stop that export of wealth. In countries like Iraq, Mexico and the Philippines, they embraced national economic development plans, which encouraged industries and enterprises producing for their own people. Creating stable jobs and income helped build a national market where workers and farmers could buy what was produced. Foreign investors were kept out, and important industries like oil were nationalized.

The economic reforms that followed the end of the cold war, imposed by rich countries and institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, destroyed those systems of national development. It was a very brutal and chaotic process for those at the bottom of the income scale, but for those at the top, immensely profitable. Mexico created more billionaires during the 1990s than the United States, while at the same time the government documented an official poverty rate of 40%, and an extreme poverty rate of 25%.

Mexican mines like Cananea and Nacozari, along with factories, railroads and other industrial enterprises were sold off to private investors. New owners then increased profits by attacking unions and laying off thousands of workers.

The oil industry, nationalized with the contributions of schoolchildren in the 1930s, no longer produced money for loans to small farmers or enterprises. Instead, in 1994 as the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, US President Bill Clinton demanded that Mexico use oil exports to pay off U.S. banks, who bailed out U.S. investors in Mexican government securities.

NAFTA rules required the Mexican government to dissolve the Conasupo stores. This government enterprise bought corn from small farmers at subsidized prices to enable them to keep farming and stay on the land. Then the stores sold tortillas made from the corn, along with milk and other farm products, to poor urban consumers at subsidized prices. NAFTA rules called this form of social welfare a barrier to the free market.

Without price supports or rural credit, hundreds of thousands of small farmers found it impossible to sell corn or other farm products, even for what it cost to produce them. When NAFTA pulled down customs barriers, large U.S. corporations (receiving U.S. subsidies) dumped agricultural products on the Mexican market at low prices. Rural families went hungry when they couldn't find buyers for their crops.

One company, Gruma, monopolized tortilla production, while the largest retailer in Mexico became Wal-Mart. In February the price of tortillas doubled. A small group of investors in both countries got even richer. But where did they expect the people displaced by this process to go?

Where Do Displaced People Go?

Displaced people become an indispensable and growing part of the workforce in this new world order. Not all cross borders. The explosive growth of export processing zones, where maquiladora factories produce for export, depends on migrant labor.

The creation of the original maquiladora program, the Border Industrial Program, on the U.S. Mexico border in 1964, was originally conceived as a way to absorb thousands of unemployed braceros, who had been laboring in the U.S. during the 22 year run of this contract labor program. In 1964, Chicano activists like Cesar Chavez, Bert Corona and Ernesto Galarza led a movement that convinced the U.S. Congress to repeal Public Law 78, which set the program up. The Mexican government then needed to find jobs for those workers, many of whom were living in burgeoning cities just south of the border.

To supply those jobs, it changed laws that had prohibited direct U.S. ownership of factories in Mexico, allowing investors to build plants taking advantage of lower Mexican wages, producing goods for the U.S. market. Over 40 years this model grew to include more than 3000 factories, employing two million people. Cities like Tijuana, Mexicali, Juarez and Matamoros mushroomed.

The maquiladora workforce was drawn from the south, from migrants displaced by the same economic changes - privatization, rural poverty, job elimination - that permitted construction of the maquiladoras themselves. A new labor regime was put in place to attract foreign investment, including the brutal repression of independent unions or challenges to the low-wage model.

Prior to the economic reforms, the U.S. Mexico border was a remote area, with a very low population, far from Mexico's industrial base and workforce. Without the simultaneous dislocation of workers from Mexican factories, and farmers from south Mexico's countryside, there would have been no labor force available to make maquiladora development possible.
This development model has since been reproduced in developing countries all over the world. In the early 1990s the U.S. Agency for International Development not only financed the construction of industrial parks in rural El Salvador and Honduras, but then contracted with Price Waterhouse to study ways of producing workers for the factories. The recommended the incorporation of women into the maquiladora workforce at ages as young as 14, taking them from school and family farms. To keep these young women at their machines through their most productive years, USAID taught the companies to distribute birth control pills to keep them from getting pregnant.

Attention has focused on the construction of the factories and industrial parks, while the dislocation that produced the workforce has been much more hidden. Yet maquiladora workers often later become migrants traveling far beyond the nearest export processing zone. When the maquiladoras are located a stone's throw from the border, crossing it is almost inevitable.

In developed countries migrant labor is even more important.

In the U.S., industrial agriculture has always depended on it. The farm labor workforce in the U.S. southwest was formed from waves of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Mexicans, and more recently, Central Americans. A growing percentage of farm workers are now indigenous people speaking languages other than Spanish, an indication that economic dislocation has reached far into the most remote parts of Mexico's countryside. On the U.S. east coast, migrants come from the Caribbean as well, joining large numbers of African Americans displaced from rural, or even urban communities.

In other industrial countries, a rising percentage of the rural workforce is now made up of migrants. Industrial agriculture based on migrant labor has expanded to developing countries also. Large corporations like Dole and Del Monte draw a workforce from displaced and impoverished rural communities, like those of AfroColombians in Colombia, or Oaxacans in Mexico.

Migrants now dominate the service industry workforce in most developed countries. As the most recent job seekers, they begin in the most marginal and contingent jobs. Day laborers on California street corners arrive from Mexico and Central America, while in Britain they come from Romania and Africa.

But migrant labor doesn't remain at the fringe of the economy. The world's oil industry is completely dependent on it. The oil kingdoms of the Gulf states - Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi - have many more immigrant workers than native-born ones. It was no coincidence that Halliburton Corporation brought migrants from Bangladesh and the Philippines into Iraq in the wake of the advancing U.S. invading force in 2003, intending to use them to replace Iraqi workers on the oil rigs and pipelines. Only organized action by the Iraqi oil workers forced Halliburton to retreat, and prevented the company from taking control of their industry.
Once the oil is put aboard tankers, more migrant workers guide them to their destinations. The seafaring workforce in large scale shipping today comes overwhelmingly from the Philippines and Indonesia. Migrant workers provide the world's oil and transport its goods to market.

What's In It for Employers?

Employers gain great advantages from this system, particularly lower labor costs and increased workforce flexibility. Large meatpacking companies in the U.S. Midwest, for instance, hire a workforce in which immigrants make up a majority. A steady stream of migrants crosses the border, finds its way to small meatpacking towns, and gets jobs.
Over the last 20 years, the industry's wages have steadily fallen behind the manufacturing average, a major accomplishment, from the companies' point of view. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1980 slaughtering plant wages were 1.16 times the manufacturing average. After twenty-five years, they are now .76 times that average. US manufacturing wages certainly haven't soared - in fact, they've fallen behind inflation. But meatpacking wages, in relative terms, have fallen faster.

Companies depend on this river of labor - not just on the workers in the plants themselves, but on the communities from which they come. If those communities stop producing workers, the labor supply dries up.

Seeking to keep wages low, meatpackers don't want to pay the social cost of maintaining communities that supply workers to the plants. In the tiny Mexican and Guatemalan towns that now provide workers for the plants, that cost is very low, and getting lower as economic reforms take hold. Free-market and free-trade policies have eliminated rural credit, the Conasupo system and the other subsidies.

The government budget in Guatemala's Santa Eulalia, for instance, does not provide any healthcare system for the town's residents. In public schools parents and teachers must buy the paper, pencils, books and other materials. If a road needs repair, residents can't expect a government repair crew to fix it.

The cost of all these services is now borne by workers themselves, in the form of remittance payments sent back from jobs in Nebraska slaughterhouses. Former Mexican President Vicente Fox boasted that in 2005 his country's citizens working in the U.S. sent back $18 billion. Some estimate that in 2006 that figure reached $25 billion.

The real beneficiaries of this huge flow of money are the companies that employ the labor in the U.S. Meatpackers already pay a low wage in U.S. terms. From it, workers pay not only for their own subsistence, but for that of their families thousands of miles away. Indirectly, the companies pay a much lower cost for the production of a new generation of future workers than they would if their families were living in Iowa or Nebraska. No company pays directly for a single school or clinic, nor do any pay taxes in Mexico or Guatemala that could provide those services.

At the same time, companies dependent on this immigrant stream have great flexibility in adjusting for the highs and lows of market demand. U.S. employers historically have treated immigrant labor as a convenient faucet, easily turned on and off. In the depression of the 1930s, Mexican workers were rounded up and deported by the thousands when the unemployment rate went up. When World War Two started, the U.S. government negotiated their return as braceros, when growers needed workers, but didn't want to raise wages to draw them from cities.

Guest worker and employment-based visa programs were created to acommodate the labor needs of employers. When demand is high, employers recruit workers. When demand falls, those workers not only have to leave their jobs, but the country entirely. Disabled guest workers, injured because of high line speed on the killing floor, can't stay in the community around the plant, making demands for treatment. They have to go back to hometowns where there is virtually no medical care at all. The employer doesn't have to provide compensation for those forced out of the country.

The rule of this new system, which the British government calls "managed migration," is that immigration policy and enforcement should direct immigrants to industries when their labor is needed, and remove them when it's not. As President George Bush puts it, the government should "connect willing employers with willing employees."

As guest worker programs expand, large corporations become even less responsible for the conditions of their workforce. The pine tree planters don't work directly for the paper companies, but for labor recruiters and contractors. The paper corporations control labor costs indirectly, through the price they pay for harvested trees or wood pulp. This has been the employment model in the garment and janitorial industries and in agriculture for decades, industries that depend completely on immigrants.

As these conditions are established, they expand to other industries. In the 1970s, production workers in Silicon Valley electronic plants worked directly for big manufacturers. Today women working on the line assembling printers for Hewlett Packard work for Manpower, a temporary employment agency with an office in the plant itself. Sometimes they do the same job they did when they worked for HP directly, but now without healthcare or other benefits. They get a lower wage, and can be terminated at any time. Most are women from the Philippines, Mexico and the countries of Latin America and the Asian Pacific rim.

Immigrants and Unemployment

It's no wonder that native born workers and settled immigrant communities look at the growth of this employment system with alarm. This system fosters competition among workers for jobs, and uses it to expand the section of the workforce with lower wages and fewer rights. It's not hard for people to see the system's impact on their own lives, even if they can't always identify its cause.

One of the biggest mistakes made by immigrant advocates in the last decade was arguing that immigrants have no impact, or only a positive impact, on the wages or jobs of people in the communities around them, or that immigrants are just taking the "abandoned" jobs others won't do. This denies a reality workers can easily see for themselves. More important, advocates thus stop making clear the real causes of migration, unemployment, low wages and job competition, and no longer point to the system and corporations responsible.

The first targets of competition are other workers of color. In Los Angeles in the early 1980s, the janitor's union was driven out of the city's office buildings when contractors dumped their union workers, most of whom were African American. New janitorial contractors appeared, with no union, hiring the wave of refugees flooding into LA from repression and civil war in Central America.

Contractors and building owners thought they'd found a docile, low wage workforce, but they miscalculated. Immigrant workers used popular education and the militant union traditions of Central America, making common cause with the national organizing department of the Service Employees International Union. Together they built the first Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles. Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Mexican janitors poured into the streets, confronted building owners and the LA Police Department, and eventually won new union agreements. The campaign became a model for organizing immigrant workers across the country, and rebuilt the presence of SEIU in building services. SEIU head John Sweeney became president of the AFL-CIO, using this campaign as a symbol of his commitment to organizing and revitalizing the labor movement.

But the African American community has faced a color line keeping employment very low in janitorial services in Los Angeles ever since, despite the high Black unemployment rate. In San Francisco hotels, where a similar demographic transformation took place, the percentage of African American workers is falling as industry employment grows. African Americans now make up less than 6% of the San Francisco hotel workforce, and only 6.4% of the LA hotel workforce.

In 2005 the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University found that between 2000 and 2004, jobs held by immigrants rose by 2 million. At the same time, the number of employed native-born workers fell by 958,000, and of longtime resident immigrants by 352,000. According to the report's authors, "the net growth in the nation's employed population between 2000 and 2004 takes place among new immigrants, while the number of native-born and established immigrant workers combined declines by more than 1.3 million."
Black unemployment nationally has grown at a catastrophic rate - from 10.8% to 11.8% in May of 2005 alone. Nearly half (172,000) of the 360,000 people who lost their jobs in June, 2005, were African American, although they were just 11% of the workforce. In New York City, only 51.8% of Black men from 16 to 65 had jobs in 2003, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For Latinos it was 65.7%, and for whites 75.7%.

Very little of the rise in African American unemployment is a result of direct displacement by immigrants. It's caused overwhelmingly by the decline in manufacturing and cuts in public employment. In the 2001 recession 300,000 of 2,000,000 Black factory workers lost their jobs to relocation and layoffs.

But demographics in the workplace changed during a period of massive plant closings, which eliminated the jobs of hundreds of thousands of African American and Chicano workers in unionized industries. Through the postwar decades, those workers broke the color line, spent their lives in steel mills and assembly plants, and wrested a standard of living that supported stable families and communities. In the growing service and high tech industries of the 80s, those displaced workers were anathema. Employers often identified them with pro-union militancy, according to sociologist Patricia Fernandez Kelly.

In the face of this reality, the unity needed by workers today to rebuild unions and working-class political strength can't be achieved by stirring speeches. Concrete problems affect relations between immigrant and non-immigrant workers. Trying to solve these problems unites people.

Unions Struggle to Respond

The age-old question confronting the U.S. labor movement, and increasingly those of other industrial countries, is inclusion or exclusion. In the past decade, U.S. unions made real progress in organizing immigrants, and connecting migration issues to the effects of free trade and free market policies.. This was a significant change from the cold war period, in which unions supported U.S. foreign and trade policy abroad. They ignored its disastrous impact on workers of developing countries, and even assisted the destruction of the most militant sections of their labor movements.

During the cold war, unions clung to an official ideology of partnership with large corporations, maintained discriminatory policies towards women and people of color, and viewed immigrants as job competitors. In 1986 the AFL-CIO's supported the Immigration Reform and Control Act because it contained employer sanctions, which prohibit employers from hiring workers without papers. If those workers couldn't get jobs, the argument went, they'd leave.

The impact of the law was disastrous, however, especially for those unions trying to organize new members in industries like janitorial services and garment manufacturing. The new law made it a federal crime for an undocumented immigrant to hold a job, and employers used it to fire union supporters. Eventually, when organizing new workers became a higher priority, the AFL-CIO changed its position at the Los Angeles convention in 1999. It called for repeal of employer sanctions, amnesty for all undocumented people, immigration based on family reunification, and expanding the organizing rights of immigrant workers. The federation already opposed expanded guest worker programs, because of their long record of abuse and exploitation.

Unions began to see inclusion as the key to their survival. Labor support for immigrant rights was not a moral issue, but a pragmatic one. Immigrants today are the backbone of organizing drives from the Smithfield pork plant in North Carolina to Houston janitors and Cintas industrial laundry workers. The unions that are growing are mostly those that understand the willingness of many immigrants to fight and join. As a result, immigrants have gained a growing base in union leadership, and now speak out on political questions from the war in Iraq to immigration and labor law reform.

This was not an easy process. Often newly organized immigrants found themselves members of established organizations that wanted their dues and numerical strength, but not necessarily their participation in leadership. Some union leaders still see immigration itself as a threat. The 2006 national convention of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers invited Lou Dobbs as its keynote speaker, whose anti-immigrant tirades rival James Sensenbrenner.
On the other hand, two unions, SEIU and UNITE HERE, abandoned their support for the position they won at the 1998 AFL-CIO convention. Instead, together with national advocacy organizations like National Council of La Raza and the National Immigration Forum, they joined an alliance dominated by the country's largest employers. Employers' main purpose is convincing Congress to set up new guest worker programs.. Two farm worker unions, the United Farm Workers and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, signed union agreements with guest worker contractors.

The meatpacking industry started lobbying for guest workers in the late 1990s, when companies organized a shadowy group, the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (EWIC). Today it encompasses over 40 huge employer associations, including Wal-Mart, Marriott, Tyson Foods and the Associated Builders and Contractors. They recruited the Cato Institute to produce guest worker recommendations, which President Bush repeats almost word-for-word. The hard-right Manhattan Institute provides additional cover.

The corporate lobby made other inroads. John Gay, who heads the National Restaurant Association and EWIC, became board chair of the National Immigration Forum, a major Washington lobbying group. The list of corporate sponsors for the National Council of La Raza includes Wal-Mart and 14 other multinationals. They all set up umbrella groups to advocate the EWIC agenda, including the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform and the Fair Immigration Reform Movement.

While Republicans are strong guest worker supporters, the bills in Congress creating the programs have been bipartisan, with active participation from liberals like Senator Edward Kennedy and Congressman Luis Gutierrez. Their immigration proposals would have allowed corporations to bring in almost a million guest worker a year, and expanded the kind of immigration enforcement that has led to workplace raids around the country. The Bush administration proposed scrapping immigration based on family reunification (an achievement of the rights movement) for a point system favoring skills desired by large corporations. Liberals justify these proposals by arguing that employer support was necessary to gain some kind of legalization for 12 million undocumented people. Guest worker and enforcement programs were the price for that support. The Senate finally failed to approve an immigration reform bill in 2007, but it is highly likely that employers will make similar proposals after the November, 2008 elections. And after the bill failed, the administration began implementing some of the most repressive enforcement provisions by administrative order.

Meanwhile, unions have failed to formulate a bill that would unite the needs of workers across race and national lines, and campaign in Congress to pass it. Winning amnesty and greater rights for immigrants could be linked to the creation of jobs programs to reduce unemployment in those communities where it exists at crisis levels. This was the approach taken by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who introduced a proposal to grant amnesty to undocumented immigrants and simultaneously establish job training and creation programs in communities with high unemployment.

Some unions have tried to link these issues together in bargaining. In San Francisco hotels, UNITE HERE Local 2 already has strong contract language protecting the rights of its immigrant members. In the 2006 negotiations, it added new language requiring hotels to set up a diversity committee to increase the percentage of African American workers. This could become a step toward an affirmative action program requiring hiring reflecting the diversity of San Francisco's overall workforce, benefiting immigrants and non-immigrants alike.

But unions trying to grapple with the impact of migration have to decide with whom they want to build alliances to win power. Winning affirmative action and jobs programs, linking them to amnesty and immigrant rights, would help build an alliance between workers - immigrants and native-born, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans and whites. But some unions see an alliance with employers as the key, and are willing to give them new guest worker programs. This would increase job competition, put downward pressure on wages, and make affirmative action in hiring impossible. Concrete gains in jobs and wages would become much harder, and unity among workers more difficult to achieve.

Alternatives to Growing Inequality

In all industrial countries the problem of unity between immigrants and non-immigrants is becoming much more important. The anti-immigrant riots in the UK, France and Germany are a window on what the future could be in the U.S., if unions and working communities don't make progress in resolving it. Understanding the importance of community and equality is they key to making that progress.

Migration is a complex economic and social process in which whole communities participate.. Migration creates communities, which today pose challenging questions about the nature of citizenship and equality.

Migrants are creating transnational communities all over the world. They exist at different stages of development in the flow of migrants from Algeria to France, Turkey to Germany, Pakistan to the UK, South Korea to Japan, and from developing to developed countries worldwide. According to Migrant Rights International, over 180 million people live outside the countries in which they were born - a permanent factor of life on the planet.

Today US immigration policy (and that of other industrial countries) is institutionalizing this global flow. Increasingly, the mechanisms for managing it are guest worker programs. In the Hong Kong negotiations of the World Trade Organization, corporations tabled a proposal regulating migrant labor, called Mode 4, which would establish a new, international guest worker scheme.

Conservative governments of developing countries, which have abandoned national development policies and have adopted the free market framework, see big advantages in a deal with corporations. They would gain access to workers' remittances, already the top source of foreign exchange for many, and could use them to finance services formerly financed by taxes. They could even eliminate those paid by their own elites. This would institutionalize not only inequality between migrants and non-migrants in developed countries where they work, but would divide even further the rich and poor in their countries of origin. It would create whole new forms of inequality.

Inequality is the most important product of US immigration policy, and a conscious one. Washington's current reform proposals all assume that immigrants should not be the equals of the people around them, or have the same rights. This assumption denies the reality that the migration of people is as much a product of the global economy as the migration of capital. At the same time, the philosophy these proposals reflect would reverse a 400-year history of struggle in the US to expand the rights of all people.

US immigration policy doesn't deter the flow of migrants across the border. Its basic function is defining the status of people once they're here. And a policy based on supplying labor to industry, at a price it wants to pay, has inequality built into it from the beginning.
Immigrant communities from Latin America and Asia face a hypocritical exclusion, which demands that people give up their culture, language and identity, while maintaining a color line that denies them equal social status. Chinatowns and Manilatowns owe their existence, not simply to the desire for community and group identity, but to a century of social segregation. Filipino farm workers were forbidden from marrying women of other races. Chinese immigrants were brought as debt-enslaved workers on railroads, and then prohibited from owning land. Braceros were recruited from Mexico from 1942 to 1964, on temporary work visas, contracted to western growers. The objective was the same in every case - the creation of a mobile, rootless low-wage labor force.

The roots of this inequality lie in slavery. The current concept of the "illegal" person has its roots in the Black Codes, used to define who could be enslaved and who couldn't. It reinterprets the idea that a slave counted as only three-fifths of a person.

Calling someone an "illegal" doesn't refer to an illegal act or the violation of a law. It is the existence, the status of the person that is illegal, or illegitimate. This justifies exclusion from the rights and social benefits accorded people in the surrounding community. Braceros called themselves illegal, even though they had temporary visas, because they used the word in this sense of exclusion.

Illegality is a social category. Workers forced into it receive a smaller share of the value they produce, an additional exploitation. The value they produce, but don't receive, is a source of additional profit for companies dependent on that labor. Inequality is profitable.

An immigration policy that denies community inevitably produces rootless people, vulnerable to exploitation. It undermines workplace and community rights, affecting non-immigrants as well. It inhibits the development of families and culture.

The alternative is a policy that recognizes and values communities, and sees their creation and support as desirable. It reinforces indigenous culture and language, protects the rights of everyone, and seeks to integrate immigrants into the broader society.

The UN's International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families proposes this kind of framework, establishing equality of treatment with citizens of the host country. Both sending and receiving countries are responsible for protecting migrants, and retain the right to determine who is admitted to their territories, and who has the right to work.

Predictably, the countries that have ratified it are the sending countries. Those countries most interested in guest worker schemes, like the U.S., have not. In the global migration of labor, the countries sending migrants have little influence over the conditions facing their citizens in the places they go to work, or the rules under which migration is possible.

In evaluating the various proposals for immigration reform in Congress and elsewhere, labor and immigrant rights activists need clear criteria to decide which promote equality and community, and which don't. Some ideas for criteria include:

- A long-term perspective. Some proposals help to prepare for longer-range efforts to change a system that produces insecurity and inequality. Others, like guest worker programs or increased enforcement of employer sanctions, create a playing field on which progressive movement becomes even more difficult.
- Greater equality, which itself is the prerequisite for unity among workers across race and national lines. Proposals to deny people rights or benefits because of immigration status move away from equality. Equal status itself is a common ground, a goal uniting many diverse communities.
- Immigration status must not be linked to employment. That link is one main characteristic of guest worker programs, and the common thread running through exploitative schemes going back a century. Workers can't be free if they have to leave the country if they lose their jobs. Healthy immigrant communities need employed workers, but they also need students, old and young people, caregivers, disabled and those who don't have traditional jobs.
- More protection for the right to organize. To raise the low price of immigrant labor, immigrant workers have to be able to organize. Given half a chance, immigrant workers and their communities will organize for better jobs and wages, schools and healthcare. When they gain political power for themselves, other working class communities around them benefit. Measures like permanent legal status make it easier to organize. Employer sanctions, enforcement and raids, even as a price for legalization, make organizing much more difficult.
- Linking trade and migration. Modern migration is a "problem" because so much of it caused by forcible dislocation. Changing corporate trade policy and stopping neoliberal reforms is as central to immigration reform as gaining legal status for undocumented immigrants.
- Greater solidarity between workers and unions. U.S. workers have been forced into a global labor market. They have a direct interest in helping workers abroad to organize and raise living standards, fighting privatization and the plunder of developing countries, and stopping U.S. wars and military intervention. They need not minor protections in trade agreements, but unity with workers globally to scrap those agreements, and to change the economic and political structure of which they're a part.
- Protecting the right to move. Freedom of movement is a human right. Even in a more just world, migration will continue. Families and communities are now connected over thousands of miles and many borders. Links between people will grow - they are part of the human potential. Immigration policy should make movement easier, without selling workers to employers as a price for it.
- Creating common ground between immigrants and other workers. It's not possible to win major changes in immigration policy without making it part of a struggle for other goals. To end job competition, workers need the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act. To gain organizing rights for immigrants, all workers need the Employee Free Choice Act.

Congress isn't deciding "what can stop immigration?" With over 180 million people in the world living outside their countries of origin, nothing can. The real question Congress is deciding is the status of people here. Outside the Washington beltway, community coalitions, labor and immigrant rights groups are advocating alternatives that would give immigrants far more rights and equality than employment-based visas. Congress could, for instance,

- Give permanent residence visas, or green cards, to people already here. Those visas don't require people to stay, but give them the chance to come and go - to work, study, or take care of family in the U.S. or their home country. Green card holders can't be deported if they lose a job.
- Expand the number of green cards available for new migrants, opening the door to legal immigration far enough to accommodate those now coming illegally. Most immigrants already come through family networks. Eliminating the years-long backlog in processing family reunification visas would help them, and strengthen communities.
- Allow people to apply for green cards, in the future, after they've been here a few years. The U.S. wouldn't develop the huge undocumented population it has today.
- Stop the enforcement program that has led to thousands of deportations and firings, and a border so heavily militarized that migrants cross, and die, in the most dangerous areas.
- Prohibit companies from recruiting outside the U.S. - formerly a traditional part of US immigration policy. At Ellis Island, having a pre-arranged job was grounds for being sent back. Companies can always hire immigrants with green cards (or anyone else) living here, and green card holders are in a much better position to demand rights and higher wages.

It's not likely that many corporations will support such a program. That's why those who claim to represent the interests of immigrants in Washington must choose whose side they're on.
Today working people of all countries are asked to accept continuing globalization, in which capital is free to go wherever it can earn the highest profits. By that same token migrants must have the same freedom, with rights and status equal to those of anyone else. People in Mexico, Guatemala, China, the US and every other country need the same things. Secure jobs at a living wage. Rights in our workplaces and communities. The freedom to travel and seek a future for our families. The borders between our countries should be common ground to unite us, not lines to divide us.


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