Below is part of an interview by Mark Karlin with David Bacon about Bacon's new book 'The Right To Stay Home,' investigating the circumstances, the effects and attitudes of and towards the huge migrant labour force, particularly in the USA.
Find the whole interview and details of the book here
Mark Karlin: When people become economic pawns instead of
looked upon as human beings with dignity, they often lose their "right
to stay home," you argue. Given the massive government, corporate and
global trade forces that create dire economic circumstances in Mexico
and Central America - particularly with indigenous populations - where
does resistance begin as you discuss in your last chapter?
David Bacon: Resistance begins in the home communities of
migrants themselves. The book describes one of the most important
organizations that is calling for resistance and the right to stay home -
the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations. They were able to get
the first non-PRI [dominant political party] governor of Oaxaca to make
a commitment to development that could give people some alternative to
forced migration. But this demand is also now being put forward by
migrant, especially indigenous migrant organizations throughout Latin
America, in the Philippines, and we’re now hearing it in the alternative
People’s Global Agenda on Migration gathering that will take place in
New York next month during the UN’s high-level dialogue on migration.
NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) allowed the dumping of corn, meat and
other agricultural products in Mexico at low prices by huge corporations
whose costs in the US are subsidized by the US farm bill. They did
this in order to take over the market, and today one company, for
instance, Smithfield Foods, sells 25 percent of all the pork in Mexico.
That made it very difficult for Mexican farmers to grow crops or raise
animals and sell them at a price that would pay the cost of producing
them. When they couldn’t survive as farmers, they had to leave home
looking for work.
There are today work visa programs for
agricultural workers (H2A), lower-skilled non-agricultural workers (H2B)
and higher-skilled workers like nurses, teachers and high-tech workers
(H1B). All of these visas require someone to work in order to stay, so
losing a job means having to leave the country. And they all are based
on employers recruiting workers in other countries.
Employers like these programs because they all allow them to hire
workers at low wages, lower than what they’d have to pay if they hired
people already living in the US, whether citizens or immigrants. And by
paying low wages and keeping those workers insecure, they also put them
into competition with workers already here. For the guest workers, there
is a long history of employer abuse, including cheating on the terms
they promise workers when they’re hired, and not paying legal wages or
providing the legally required conditions. The Southern Poverty Law
Center calls them close to slavery.
The extraction, agricultural and food processing
industries are exploiting workers within Mexico and are also polluting
indigenous lands making it more difficult to exercise the right to stay home. One of the biggest examples explained in the book is the huge complex of pig farms in the Perote Valley built by
Smithfield Foods. The waste from the one million animals raised each
year there made the valley almost uninhabitable because of the stink,
flies, the pollution of the water table, and disease. Many residents
believe that the swine flu of a few years ago began because of the huge
concentration of pigs.
Big Canadian mining companies, also profiled in
the book, have had a similar devastating impact on the environment in
other rural indigenous committees. The contamination itself is a factor
pushing people to leave. But the way the economy has been reformed in
order to "welcome" foreign companies by violating land rights, paying
low wages and fighting unions have deepened poverty and displaced many
people.
Their need to work and
the poverty of their families forces them to accept low wages, both in
Mexico and in the US. The book then describes the way US immigration law
is used against them. In many cases, like the union drive at
Smithfield Foods in Tarheel, North Carolina, when the immigrants make
common cause with workers here and try to organize unions or protest bad
wages and conditions, employers then fired them with the cooperation,
and sometimes at the orders of, the US government. So in that sense
they become dispensable, at least to their employers.
Illegal People, and now The Right to Stay Home,
trace the development of the idea of illegality - how we got the idea
that a human being could be "illegal." The roots are clearly in slavery,
because the status of a slave, the property of another person, made the
slave illegal - the most terrible and brutal form of illegality. But
after slavery was formally abolished, these same ideas of inequality and
illegality were applied to others - the Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos
and Mexicans. Immigration law has become one important way in which that
illegal status is forced on people.
Employers want to pay low wages and look for the
tools that will keep workers vulnerable and force them to accept these
conditions. The displacement of Mexicans by reforms and trade agreements
creates a huge number of people who have no alternative to migration,
and then to accept work on whatever terms an employer offers. There are
so many migrants from Mexico that agriculture, meatpacking and other
industries depend on these workers, and employers reap high profits from
the low wages they pay. When those workers organize unions to push
their wages up, employers fight those efforts out of the simple desire
to keep profits high and to control their workforce. That antiunion
policy is used by employers against workers in general, not just
immigrants, and part of that policy is the effort to keep immigrants and
people already here insecure and pit them against each other.
Also the Mexican government has an
incentive not to try and improve the economy for the poor and more than that, it uses the
remittances sent home to make up for the cuts in the budget for social
services in order to make debt payments, which go overwhelmingly to US
banks. You could say that the remittances also indirectly subsidize US
banks. This is a labor export policy, and other countries are also doing
it.
The
fact that the US administration deports 400,000 people a year, fires
thousand from their jobs, and then negotiates trade agreements that
displace people, forcing them to migrate, makes no sense unless you’re
deliberately trying to create a huge number of very vulnerable, low-wage
workers. It is an inhuman, brutal policy.
The Right to Stay Home looks at Mexico
and the US not because these two countries are exceptional, but because
by looking at them closely we can understand a process that is going on
all over the world. There are over 213 million people living in
countries they weren’t born in, 58 million more than 20 years ago. While
about 45 million live in the US, you can see this is something
happening on a global scale. So the forces driving it are global, and
unfortunately the kinds of policies pushed in the US debate - especially
criminalization and guest worker programs - have become global ones
also.
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