People Not Profit

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE

The United States has become home to a large number of people born outside its borders—there were some 40 million as of 2010, according to various estimates. That was up from approximately 20 million in 1990. Last year 409,849 people were deported from the United States, bringing the total to about 2 million for the first five years of the Obama administration. According to the Department of Homeland Security, current deportations average 30,791 per month, including more than 8,500 parents of U.S. citizen children. The government spends more today on border and immigration enforcement than on all other Federal law enforcement agencies combined.

The immigration debate in the United States usually treats the migration of people into this country as something unique. But it is not. The United Nations estimates that 232 million people worldwide live outside the countries where they were born—3.2 percent of the world's population. In 2000 it was 175 million, and in 1990, 154 million. The number of cross-border migrants has grown by 78 million people in just over 20 years—enough to fill 20 cities the size of Los Angeles.

Even the  Tea Party faction of the Republicans and Democrats find common ground. They may disagree on legalization for the undocumented, but they agree on the other basic elements of what is called “comprehensive immigration reform.” Both support trade policies benefiting corporations, while turning a blind eye to the havoc and displacement they cause. And their shared “solution” is to channel displaced people into labor programs, while coming down hard on those who migrate outside the approved framework. Authorities annually audit the records of more than 2,000 employers, ordering them to fire hundreds of thousands of workers who lack legal immigration status. And while firings of those without papers increase, so does the number of workers brought to the United States by employers with visas that tie their ability to stay to their jobs—“guest workers.” A recent report by the Global Workers Justice Alliance, Visas Inc., says between 700,000 and 900,000 migrants are working in the United States on temporary work visas. The most notorious of these visa programs, H2A and H2B, are called “close to slavery” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The European Union also calls for preventing the employment of undocumented people, and “a humane and effective return [deportation] policy,” in the European Council's “Return Directive” of 2008.  France today, with about 66 million inhabitants, has 8.3 million migrants, up from 5.9 million 20 years ago. Italy went from 1.4 to 4.5 million in the same period. In the United States, France, Italy and other developed countries, migrant workers are an essential part of the economy, laboring in the lowest-paid and least secure jobs.

In 2012 worldwide remittances reached $401 billion, 5.3 percent higher than 2011. Top recipients include India ($69 billion), China ($60 billion), the Philippines ($24 billion) and Mexico ($23 billion). They are rising even during a worldwide recession. Countries dependent on remittances become labor reserves, exporting people to make up for the lack of sustainable economic development that could give them a future at home. This is called “circular” migration, since migrants aren't supposed to settle in their destination countries—just work there, send money home and eventually return.
In a contribution to a UN publication Douglas Massey, professor of Sociology at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University writes that “international migrants are not desperately seeking to escape abject poverty but are purposeful actors acting strategically to improve their lives and adapt to change using one of the most accessible tools at their disposal.”
A report by the  UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon  reflects the desire by many countries to treat remittances as a source of economic development, and assumes that migrants should serve as an international labor supply. In other words, poor countries should send people to rich ones in organized labor (guest worker) schemes, and then use the money earned by those workers to alleviate poverty or develop economically. “Member States should mainstream migration into national development plans [and] poverty reduction strategies,” he writes. These are euphemistic arguments for a labor export policy in developing countries, and guest worker programs in developed ones. Ban Ki-moon cautions against some of the most extreme anti-immigrant provisions being considered by Congress, and by right-wing parties in Europe. “Migrant workers, irrespective of their status, should be protected from abuse and exploitation,” he writes, with steps that include “enforcing child labour laws, enabling migrant workers to change their employers after arrival in the destination country, and ensuring equal treatment in terms of wages and working conditions.”

The Peoples' Global Action on Migration (PGA), a coalition of civil society groups from different countries advocating for migrant rights, broke with the view of migrants as a labor supply.  In its “Declaration and Recommendations”it put forward a “critique of the circular migration/temporary labour model, which includes guest-worker and labour export programmes as an economic development model, reliance on remittances and models that treat workers as commodities.” According to Monami Maulik, Executive director of New York City's DRUM-South Asian Workers Center and the Global South Asian Migrant Workers Alliance, “We challenge the focus on remittances within this neo-liberal model of managed, circular migration. We call for people over profits and a focus on human rights.”

The International Migrants Alliance (IMA), also opposed the policy of the export of labor through guest worker programs, often called “managed migration.” With member organization in many of the developing countries that send migrants to developed ones, the IMA declaration emphasized that “Poverty, unemployment, political conflict and general displacement of peoples, including displacement due to environmental factors, are the major causes of migration.”

 Migration, in other words, is fueled by the need to survive.  The impact of trade agreements, and the danger of the growth of new international guest worker programs, may mean a decade from now, the world we live in will be one we will hardly recognize. Poverty will deepen in developing countries, the gulf between migrants and residents will widen in developed ones, and hundreds of millions of people will be trapped in a global labor system in which migration as low-paid labor is the only way to survive.

Cathi Tactaquin, executive director of the Oakland-based National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, told the High Level Dialogue that hundreds of civil society organizations worldwide want to “make migration more genuinely a choice and not a necessity. “We support the right to migrate, and the right to remain at home, with decent work and human security,” she says.

Full article can be read at the In These Times website