The United States has the largest arable landmass of any
country in the world and is the 177th-most densely populated. The birth rate
has been below the rate needed to sustain the population since 1971 and has
just hit an all-time low. In a world of more fluid borders, too, where workers
were empowered to leave countries and regions where conditions were poor, it
would be easier to organize around improving global labor standards.
Institutions of the labor Left, such as the Industrial Workers of the World,
have a long history of supporting free migration on ideological grounds, as a
natural component of global worker solidarity and empowerment. Immigration is
not a problem: The hoarding of resources by the comfortable and greedy, in the
U.S. and around the world, is the problem. We should seek to abolish the
components of a system that is designed to police and punish the poor and
working class, and focus our energies on our real enemy.
On January 3, their first day in power, Democrats
passed a spending bill that included $1.3 billion in new border fencing, which
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer touted as
“smart, effective border security.” Sen. Kamala Harris has stated, “We can’t
have open borders. We need to have border security, all nations do.” Even Sen.
Bernie Sanders said, “We must continually modernize our border security
measures.” Sanders, Harris and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand briefly seemed to join
the call to “abolish ICE” in response to family separations in summer 2018, but
when pressed for detail, variously advocated replacing or restructuring the
agency. A bill by Reps. Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal to abolish the agency
went nowhere.The present debate over whether there should have a physical wall
along the border (Trump) or a “smart wall” of high-tech surveillance (Democrats)
is simply one of cost-effectiveness, not a real difference of opinion. Forty-two
Senate Democrats and Independents (including presidential contenders Bernie
Sanders and Amy Klobuchar) and 213 House Democrats gave in to Trump’s threats
of a second government shutdown and voted in February for a bill to increase
border funding.
When considering immigration enforcement, it’s important to
break it down into a concrete series of actions that occur in the real world
every day. Policymakers can talk in a general way about “carrots and sticks,”
but the stick means the use of military force to stop ordinary people from
crossing an imaginary line in the ground. Border militarization drives people
to attempt entry at more and more dangerous and remote southern crossings,
where many die in agony from intense desert heat. Enforcement means trapping
ordinary people in places of profound poverty and instability. Deportation
means physically ripping ordinary people away from their families. Detention,
surveillance and Kakfaesque immigration bureaucracies psychologically and
physically torture thousands every day. This is a system so fundamentally
inhumane that no compromise can be made with it. It is a system for the jailing
and exiling of humans who dare to try to live in a different place than the one
where they were born. The racist and nationalist dimensions of the present
immigration system are not detachable features: They are fundamental to the
premise of punishing people for their birthplace.
Xenophobic and fearmongering arguments against immigration
have become easier to discredit. There are no statistics to support Trump’s assertions
that immigrants disproportionately commit crimes. If you believe in human
equality, privileging the economic well-being of U.S.-born workers simply
because of their birthplace is arbitrary and unjustifiable. But even for those
who do seek to privilege US-born workers, the argument that immigration is
inherently “bad for the economy” is easily dispensed with. The American
Immigration Council estimates that immigrant-led households have $926.9 billion
in collective spending power, and immigrant business owners accounted for 20.3
percent of all self-employed U.S. residents in 2015. A 2014 Economic Policy
Institute analysis found that immigrants, though 13 percent of the population,
accounted for 15 percent of economic productivity.
Whether undocumented and guest workers under the present
system actually lower overall wages, and the extent to which they directly
compete against native-born workers, continues to be an unsettled question.
Some studies have concluded that increased immigration has negative wage
impacts for black and Latino men who did not complete high school. In a
meta-analysis of studies going back to the 1990s, the National Academies of
Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded that “particularly when measured
over a period of 10 years or more, the impact of immigration on the overall
native wage may be small and close to zero.
However, estimates for subgroups span a wider range.” The research noted
that native workers who have comparable skills to immigrants may experience a
lowering of wages, hours or employment rates, although “there are still a
number of studies that suggest small to zero effects.” There should be skeptism
of those commentators who blame immigrants for lower wages rather point to the
corporations that set those wages, as well as those who tout restricting
immigration as the best way to redress the black-white wealth gap rather than
reparations or other forms of investment in black communities. Currently,
little effort is made to ensure that anyone has access to wage and labor
protections. ICE’s 2018 budget for its enforcement and removal department was
$4.8 billion, while the Department of Labor’s 2018 budget for its wage and hour
department was $280 million. We spent 20 times the amount chasing unauthorized
immigrants than we did chasing unscrupulous employers. What if, rather than
putting resources into preventing unauthorized immigrants from entering the
workforce, we put resources toward ensuring that labor standards are actually
enforced for all workers?
Both the Republicans and the Democrats recognize that
temporary guest workers and undocumented laborers are important to a number of
industries, as well as services (including domestic labor and elder care), of
which politicians, donors and constituents personally avail themselves. In some
industries, like harvesting, fishing and summer resort work, immigrants are often
the only willing labor available. In the eyes of employers, the chief advantage
of immigrant labor is that immigrants are often easier to coerce and control
than citizens. The promise of available work encourages a large number of
people to immigrate, but Democratic policymakers are wary that appearing to let
too many people in will allow political opponents to stoke nativist sentiments.
So the United States pays Mexico (through the billion-dollar Merida Initiative)
to stop some people before they get to the border, then menaces and detains the
subset that U.S. Border Patrol apprehends in the act of crossing, and then
sends Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to round up and deport some of
those who get through. These brutal policies keep the unofficial workforce
stable, at around 8 million over the past 10 years, and keep undocumented and
guest workers fearful enough to refrain from availing themselves of workplace
protections. Even the most hardline Republican authored immigration bills avoid
imposing serious penalties on employers who use undocumented labor, and have
included provisions to expand the guest workforce while further cutting off its
access to labor protections. Pro-business open borders advocates like the Cato
Institute, envisions immigrants serving as a tier of second-class citizen
without access to public benefits. To be fair, some immigrants might prefer to
be second-class citizens in the United States rather than struggle in their
home countries, as libertarian economists frequently point out.
For those who would improve our immigration system, there
are two broad possible approaches. The first, bowing to concerns about
unfettered migration, is to replace our existing immigration bureaucracies with
better, fairer bureaucracies. The 2009 Ray Marshall plan adopted by the AFL-CIO
and Change to Win, for example, offered a blueprint for a centralized
government commission to assess domestic labor needs and offer visas to fill
labor gaps in various sectors. The stated goal was “more rational and flexible
flows of foreign workers.” The catch to any such bureaucracy is that, as long
as you are restricting where people can live and work, you must enforce those
restrictions. The Ray Marshall plan envisioned the continued use of deportation
and border policing, as well as the expansion of a biometrically integrated
system to keep track of immigrant workers—which represents, in effect, a vast
expansion of the surveillance state. Right now, we need to show passports or ID
cards at the border; under this new system, we would need our work papers
checked (or eyes scanned) anytime we wanted to apply for a new job, and
possibly anytime we wanted to enter our workplaces at all. The American Civil
Liberties Union is on record opposing the expansion of E-Verify, the existing
program to verify work authorization, on the grounds that it “creates a whole
new level of intrusive government oversight of daily life—a bureaucratic ‘prove
yourself to work’ system that hurts ordinary people.” The Ray Marshall plan
proposes amnesty for the current undocumented population but doesn’t
acknowledge that, as long as people’s legal work options are restricted,
unauthorized migration will inevitably continue, as it did after the 1986
amnesty. If the enforcement system is not dismantled, those new immigrants will
live in fear.
Immigration restrictions have devastating human consequences
that significantly overshadow the few, highly questionable benefits, and that
we should aim to do away with as much of the immigration enforcement system as
possible and in no way expand it. If you oppose jailing and deporting people
for immigration offenses, you must be in favor of significantly opening up the
border, because when negative consequences are reduced, people without
authorization will start to move more freely. The Right is well aware that for
most of the public, “open borders” triggers a xenophobic fear of invasion.
An easy start is for Democrats to put forward a bill
expanding humanitarian categories of immigration relief to encompass people
fleeing violence, extreme poverty and natural disasters, and people with
long-standing social or family ties to the United States. This is entirely in
line with international practice; courts in places like Canada and the EU, for
example, routinely use a “balancing test” to decide whether someone is
deportable, weighing their immigration offense against other compelling factors
in their favor. This approach is so commonsense that many Americans believe it
is how our immigration system already works, and that only “criminals” are
deported. Migrant-rights groups like Mijente, the Detention Watch Network and
United We Dream advocate making long-term shields from deportation—like
Temporary Protected Status (TPS), for people from war-torn or disaster-struck
countries and Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—into
permanent statuses.
The most urgent target for reform is toning down the wildly
disproportionate penalties that presently exist for immigration violations. One
of these penalties is detention. There should be a complete end to the jailing
or civil detention of people for immigration violations alone. Pilot community
programs have been shown to be very effective at getting immigrants to show up
for court dates, so that is an extremely flimsy excuse for the mass
incarceration of immigrants. Deportation is effectively exile, a penalty we
impose for no other crime and, in almost all cases, deportation is both cruel
and unnecessary.
“Pitting worker against worker is an age-old tactic of the
boss to distract us from the real issues, divide us and keep us poor—and we
will not fall for it,” read an AFL-CIO immigration policy statement issued in
2017. “The only way to stop the race to the bottom in wages and standards is
for working people of all races, religions and immigration status to stand
together and demand that corporate power be put in check. This will be done not
by deporting immigrants and scapegoating them for the precarious labor market.”
Taken from here
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