Home > 000- ENGLISH - MATTER AND REVOLUTION > Immigrant Workers – The Most Exploited Workers in Society

Immigrant Workers – The Most Exploited Workers in Society

Sunday 1 September 2013, by Robert Paris

Immigrant Workers – The Most Exploited Workers in Society

Immigrants, with or without legal status, have just as much of a right to be in this country as anyone else. But their legal status is held over their heads as a threat. The combination of intimidation, harassment and lack of access to resources forces immigrants into some of the worst, dirtiest, and hardest jobs in the country.

A Desperate and Dangerous Journey

Currently there are about 40 million immigrants living in the U.S. – twelve percent of the population. About 11 million immigrants are undocumented. These workers make up some of the most exploited people in our society, struggling to survive, under constant threat of arrest and deportation.

Half of the undocumented immigrants are from Mexico, while another 23 percent are from other Latin American countries. Ten percent come from Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Eastern Europe. Over one quarter of undocumented immigrants live and work in California.
As economies worsen in their home countries, and as border security becomes more militarized, entering the U.S. becomes more desperate and more dangerous. In 2012, there were 477 recorded deaths of people trying to cross the border with Mexico. This is the second highest year of deaths ever recorded – about five migrants die every four days.

The Dirtiest, Most Dangerous Jobs

The average immigrant makes half as much as an American-born worker. For example, on big U.S. farms, 85 percent of all workers are foreign born, making an average of between $5,000 and $7,000 per year while nearly one third make as little as $2,500. Immigrant farm workers have between 60 and 70 percent higher rates of certain cancers due to the pesticides they work with. This is one of the worst examples but the story is not so different in most other industries with a majority of undocumented immigrant workers.

Lives Ripped Apart by Deportation

Immigrants live in constant danger of harassment by police and federal authorities. In 2003, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department (or ICE) was set up to intensify attacks on immigrants through increasing raids and imprisoning and deporting undocumented immigrants at record levels. Since 2003, ICE has imprisoned over 1.8 million people using 350 different prisons and detention centers – this number is expected to reach two million deportations under the Obama administration. That will be as high as all of the deportations between 1892 and 1997 combined. Over 30 percent of prisoners in federal prisons are undocumented immigrants – mostly in jail for their legal status. In 2009, 33,000 people were deported to their country of origin. In 2012 there were over 400,000 deportations, the highest in any year ever recorded. About a quarter of the total deportations between July 2010 and the end of September 2012 involved parents of children who are U.S. citizens. And between 2008 and 2012 more than 1,300 children were held captive in federal detention centers in the U.S., many held for months at a time, with no contact with their parents.

At the same time, the threat of deportation has always been used as a stick to pressure workers to accept dangerous working conditions and extremely low pay. ICE raids have been used to break up attempts of undocumented workers to organize and join unions. Often the raids are called by the company to target specific individuals who stand up at the workplace. The raids are often timed to keep production going, only targeting workers in their homes after they get off work. Raids on many businesses are done semi-frequently just to keep people in fear.

Immigrants Fight Back

The biggest mobilizations of working people in the last ten years have been immigrants fighting against the attacks of the government. On May 1, 2006, over a million people all over the U.S. demonstrated against a federal bill that would make undocumented workers federal criminals. Over half a million people demonstrated in Los Angeles and Chicago. Businesses which rely on immigrant labor were shut down completely. On May 1, 2010, thousands of immigrants, families, friends and others across the country came out to demonstrate their opposition to the Arizona law, SB 1070 and all other harassment of immigrants. And over the past year thousands of undocumented immigrants have organized protests in front of detention centers and immigration buildings against the increased deportations and raids. Many of those protesting are young people who are part of the estimated 1.8 million immigrants in the U.S. who came to the country as young children (the so-called “Dreamers”). These immigrants have spent most of their lives here, growing up going to U.S. schools – for many this is the only home they know. These protests are a part of a growing refusal of undocumented immigrants to accept the horrific, exploitive conditions that they are subjected to because of their immigration status.

This System of Exploitation Must Go

We live under capitalism – a world economic system that is organized against our interests, that puts the making of profit above our own well-being and the lives of our families and friends. The use of national borders to control and threaten workers is a key component of this system. Under this system, the bosses will always force us to work for them in whatever country and situation is the most profitable to them. The more difficult our lives are, the more the bosses think they can exploit us. Our livelihoods, the lives of our families and friends, requires an end to this system of exploitation and domination.

The Immigration Bill: A Pathway to More Exploitation

Supporters of the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act” claim the bill offers a pathway to citizenship and benefits. This is a complete lie. The purpose of this bill is to further militarize the border, increase deportations, and essentially force immigrant workers to be the captives of their employers.

It’s no surprise the biggest supporters of this bill are those who stand to get the biggest payouts. Employers from Microsoft and Google to McDonalds and Walmart are supporting this bill because they say they can’t find enough people to work. This is a move to get more temporary workers to use as a disposable underclass, and as a way of keeping wages as low as possible for everyone.

Linked to the bill’s passing is a requirement that could increases border security by $46 billion. As there have been massive cuts to important social programs, like health care and food stamps, billions of tax dollars are being handed out to security companies and private-prison corporations to target immigrants. Immigration enforcement has more funding than every federal law enforcement agency combined.

The additional funding will include 20,000 more Border Patrol agents, 700 more miles of fencing, and billions more for drones, high-tech surveillance, and more privately-run, for-profit, immigration prisons. None of this will stop desperate families coming here for their survival, and it’s not intended to – but it will make crossing more deadly.

The so-called “pathway to citizenship” will take a minimum of 13 years to complete and is on track to have the first legalizations completed by the year 2028. During the first phase of the application process, an immigrant will only be granted provisional status. To even apply you must have arrived before December 31st, 2011 and be able to prove that you have never left. So anyone who visited family back home in the last two years is disqualified before they even apply. Once this is proven, you have to pay thousands of dollars in fees, penalties, and all back-taxes that the government decides you owe. This is a way to price people out of being able to qualify, to punish the poor for being poor.

And even for those who are able to complete this process, what they get is not citizenship but a 10-year probation period, which can be taken away at any time. And while on provisional status, even though taxes must be paid, immigrants won’t have access to most public programs that those taxes would pay for. And if at any time the conditions of probationary status are not met, immigrants could be deported – and even more easily since now they would be completely out in the open.

If any immigrant becomes unemployed for more than 60 days, or if their income falls below 125 percent of the federal poverty level (about $24,000 for a family of four) they are automatically disqualified. Someone working full-time earning minimum wage with two children would be kicked out. Many day laborers and seasonal workers won’t even get a chance to make the cut. Immigrants who speak up about working conditions and or low pay could not only lose their job but then would violate their probationary status. Meeting these conditions will be impossible for millions of immigrants, and their citizenship would out of their hands and controlled by their bosses.

Even after waiting over a decade on provisional status, those who somehow make it this far will then only be able to apply for a green card, not citizenship. After more fines, fees, penalties and taxes, and meeting all the work requirements, many won’t even be able to apply for a green card because of all the restrictions still being added.
Currently undocumented immigrants would also be required to learn English, the only section of immigrants forced to do this. They also must wait until the existing legal immigration backlogs are cleared. In Mexico City some applicants have been waiting for family reunification visas for over 20 years. For those coming from the Philippines the line is even longer.

None of this will even matter if law enforcement doesn’t arrest 90 percent of those crossing without documents and of those who overstay their visas because then no one will get legalized. In the end, the Congressional Budget Office has predicted that only a little more than half of those who apply will actually get citizenship. The border is only one of the many barriers being proposed that are contained in this bill.

Disguised as reform, this bill is being used as a way to benefit employers and to exploit an immigrant workforce with little to no rights. This new bill is not a path to citizenship – it’s just a path to greater exploitation.

Everyone is an Immigrant

Everyone living in the U.S. is an immigrant. Every one migrated to this region of the world, whether it was 5 years ago, 50 years ago, 500 years ago, or 15,000 years ago. People migrated for many reasons – poverty, escaping from intolerable conditions, looking for a better life, or as captives.

The original inhabitants of North America, the Native Americans came to this continent 15,000 years ago by traveling across a bridge of land connecting Asia with North America. Like all human beings, Native Americans were one of many immigrant populations who left Africa thousands of years ago looking for new environments.

Native Americans lived on this continent for generations, with a variety of cultures from hunter-gatherer tribes to early civilizations. But their lives were ruined by a new wave of immigrants – Europeans who began colonizing the Americas in the 16th century. Millions of Native Americans were killed by disease or violence. By the early 20th century, the original population of Native Americans had been reduced to 250,000 from twelve million.

The colonies were run by elites from Europe, but the people who did the work were poor Europeans forced to immigrate because of poverty. Many Europeans who arrived in North America were “indentured servants”, people who signed a contract to work for an employer for a number of years. Immigrants were the labor force which did the work of the colonies. In the South, the huge agricultural plantations were developed using a different immigrant labor – an estimated 600,000 African slaves taken captive and sold into slavery.
During the 19th century, the U.S. Expanded its territory to the West Coast, creating a market for U.S. industry. Immigrants were brought to the U.S. to do the most difficult work of building and working in factories, building the railroads, settling new territories. Between 1840 to 1850, almost 20 percent of Ireland’s entire population was brought to the U.S. to work. At the same time hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrated looking for work, creating whole communities in cities such as New York and San Francisco.

In 1848 the U.S. fought a war to expand its empire seizing the entire northern part of Mexico and making it part of the U.S. The states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona were created and the 200,000 original inhabitants found themselves in the United States.

After the Civil War, U.S. industry expanded even more, and wave after wave of immigrants were brought to the country. Immigrants came form everywhere – from Germany, Scandinavia, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, and many other countries. Between 1882 and 1914, twenty million immigrants came to the U.S. to work in the factories.

The latest wave of immigrants to the U.S. has been overwhelmingly those who come from Latin America. These immigrants have been forced to leave their home countries, many of which have been plundered by the U.S. Between 1960 and 2000 the number of Latin American immigrants to the U.S. has tripled, with nearly 21 million people coming from various countries. These immigrants work in the hardest, dirtiest and lowest paid jobs – sweatshops, factories, construction, meatpacking, and other jobs.

Looking at the history of North America, there can be no mistake. We are all immigrants. And the vast majority of us have been brought over to do the work which creates the wealth of this society. The divisions in culture, language, and history have been used by politicians and employers to divide us and to make one population of immigrants hate the other. But this is absurd. We may come from different places and have arrived on this continent at different times, but there is nothing which makes any one of us truly different. What we have in common is that we are the ones who do the work of this society. Workers in this country, and around the world gain nothing from being divided by race, language, and culture. We have every interest instead to struggle to put an end to the system of exploitation which uses our differences to divide, conquer and exploit us.

Any message or comments?

pre-moderation

This forum is moderated before publication: your contribution will only appear after being validated by an administrator.

Who are you?
Your post

To create paragraphs, just leave blank lines.