What is the current climate for immigrant worker rights?

We are entering a period that is not particularly good for immigrants in the US. We are in economic crisis, which makes immigration reform unlikely. With rising unemployment, employers are able to choose from a larger pool of unemployed workers and higher skilled workers are transitioning into what could be considered low-wage industries. Recessions only bolster anti-immigrant sentiment.

However, while the trend of disproportionate ICE funding going to border control may continue, I think there will be a pullback from the more intense raids that we saw during the Bush administration. What we've seen in the past few weeks is an Obama plan for dealing with immigration. Instead of massive raids, he is going after employers by auditing their records and finding undocumented workers. Then, then ICE simply tells the employer that they have a certain amount of time to fire those workers and some employers are fined, depending on the results of the audit. This might appear to be a more benign policy because workers aren't immediately deported and separated from their families, but it is essentially going to force many workers to deport themselves. Furthermore, it is a particularly insidious policy, because it looks like Obama is being less severe with undocumented immigrants (more human, etc), when in fact this is just a more covert, but nonetheless dirty, policy of dealing with undocumented immigrants.

Do you see any prospects for immigration reform under the Obama administration?

Immigration reform, including legalization, was not a part of Obama’s platform during his campaign, and it’s not likely to be on his agenda as president. It doesn’t make a lot of political sense to take up this issue in the middle of an economic crisis, when it wasn’t really part of your platform in the first place.

This is unfortunate because people have been waiting for so long for something to happen. Politically, most people in the immigrant rights community take the same position as unions: Democrats are going to have a better position than Republicans, even if they don’t have a specific program for immigration reform or immigrant rights.

What are some of the effects of immigration policy you have seen in your own life?

I have 5 undocumented students this semester; one is undergoing deportation hearings right now. One of them has family members going through deportation hearings. Two have had to drop out of school mid semester because they just can’t afford it. One of them was told by the registrar that undocumented people can’t go to college, which is not actually true. There are over 2,000 undocumented students in the system and that may be an under-count.

A lot of students do fall through the cracks. They came here when they were 5 or 6 years old. If they finish high school and want to go to college they are in serious trouble because many public universities will not allow undocumented students to pay in state tuition. Even when they are paying in-state tuition, it’s still $6,000-$20,000 peryear—they have no access to Pell grants, loans or financial aid. So these are out of pocket expenses—it could mean taking 8 years to complete college, because they have to keep dropping out to work in the low-wage economy. You have to be a pretty committed student to go through that. What’s worse, of course, is what do high school students do when you know you are going to end up in a low-wage job? What’s the point of completing high school if you know you don’t have access to financial aid and resources. And then if you graduate college, you are still undocumented. At that point, you hope to find ways to get a visa or employer sponsorship.

I had a student who got into a bunch of universities. She’s a single mother, until recently was undocumented, did her bachelor degree in 5-6 years and got accepted into different graduate programs. She ended up going to a large, private university in the South because they offered her the most money. Now that she’s documented, she can take out student loans. She is going to funnel those loans to her best friend, who is undocumented, so that her friend can go to college. You see the complications and the humanity of a lot of these undocumented students in how they help each other out.

In terms of actual immigration policy, family reunification exists in the US. This is highly unusual because it does not exist in most countries. The problem is that they are trying to get rid of it in the US. The other problem is that families are split apart in deportations and raids. To put things in perspective, immigrants can request family members. That being said, there are tons of cases of mothers being deported after a raid, while their small children are in school, which obviously has huge impacts on children and families. There’s all kinds of terrible things that happen because we live in a capitalist society. For example, In New York, day care is so expensive that many immigrants can’t afford it. A lot of Chinese immigrants that migrate to the US put their names on waiting list for public day care centers, but send their babies back to China to have family members take care of them until the day care center in NYC has a slot for them. That can take 4-5 years. This is an example of the conditions under which immigrant women work, often in low-wage jobs with no benefits that don’t allow you to afford day care—so these women are detached from their children for years. When their children return, they no longer recognize their mothers (NY Daily news). While this isn’t a direct effect of immigration policy itself, it’s connected to the life that immigrants have in the US and the role of the welfare state in providing support for the social reproduction of labor and the attacks on poor people of color.

What would immigration reform look like?

Well, there is “fair” and “less fair.” Prior to the 1940s, there was a relatively porous border. It allowed Mexican workers who were in crappy job situations in the US to go back to Mexico for a while and try again in a few years. Since the 1980s, the stakes of crossing the border have been raised: immigrants must pay a lot of money and it’s very dangerous. It’s also more difficult to return. This creates a vulnerable low-wage labor force in the US, which is essentially trapped because there’s no longer a porous border. This is good for some employers for obvious reasons.

As an internationalist, I think the nation state is a huge problem that poses a lot of restrictions on people. If we are thinking big picture, after a revolution, abolishing the nation state would loosen things up for peoples’ mobility. We would hope that a revolution would abolish the kind of structures that force migration and also help to equally distribute resources across the globe. But we aren’t there yet—it’s hard to even conceptualize. So, the question becomes a lot more complicated when you move form the level of abstraction to our realities. Most socialists would say ‘we should have open borders in the US.’ Maybe I’m not a good socialist, but that’s a tricky business without worldwide revolution. Without that, the main structures behind immigration still exist. For example, neoliberal policies of globalization, structural adjustment policies of the IMF and World Bank—all of the causes of migration - are still in place, which raises legitimate question of resources in the US and job displacement. My perspective may be different than other socialists on this issue.

In the US, absent revolutionary changes that address these root problems, a fair immigration reform would include some kind of amnesty program without guest worker stipulations that strengthen and expand the existing family reunification system and gets rid of employer sanctions. That would be the best case scenario in the context that we live in. Given the state of the movement, I’m not optimistic that we can win that.

How have US unions responded to the concerns of immigrant workers?

Unions have been paying attention to recent immigrant workers since about the mid-1990s. Some unions, like the building trades, still have a long way to go, however there’s been an important shift. Even those unions touted for organizing immigrants are not directly confronting these questions, and when they are forced to, often side with bad immigration reform that accepts guest worker style legislation.

How have unions and immigrant workers fought back?

While I worked with the UCLA Labor Center in California, employers at union shops were getting Social Security no-match letters. When asked by the employers how to respond, the Union said that they had to fire the workers referenced in the no-match letters!

The union was well-intentioned, but did not know anything about this issue. We developed trainings for unions about these letters. In fact, some of the unions were in the middle of contract bargaining and won language in their contracts regarding how employers should respond to no-match letters that defended the rights of undocumented workers.

What are some strategies for fighting back?

If only I knew the answer! We are in such a state of disorganization. In 2006, there was a glimmer of hope with the massive protests, but they didn’t turn into a big movement as everybody expected. Obviously, we need to organize and fight back on multiple levels: in the workplaces and at the level of federal policy, etc. I’m at a loss, because we don’t have massive movements around this now, which is what you need to affect large scale systematic policy.

Dan Clawson has argued that movements come in waves and are cyclical. If you accept that argument, we are waiting for the next big wave. I think that people should obviously be involved wherever they can be, and I’m glad we have people like Dan Clawson who are hopeful.

Students have been organizing around the DREAM Act for in-state tuition for undocumented students—while less than ideal, it’s very important. The way that people begin to organize not around simply issues but a livelong commitment to organizing is to participate in struggles in their workplace, community, etc. Obviously, winning victories in different struggles encourages long term participation in movement building. If we are at a low point in a movement, it’s important to participate in smaller struggles like the DREAM Act because small victories help engage people on a deeper level which is necessary to build larger movements.

Could you say more about the organizing behind the 2006 immigrant rights protests?

In LA, they weren’t totally spontaneous. MIWON, a coalition of worker centers, had been doing May Day marches for 5 years before 2006. They had a thousand people the first year. By 2005, they had 15,000 people. The organizing that led up to 2006 played a role, but other factors contributed. The Sensenbrenner bill produced a lot of outrage and gave a lot of the Latino and Chicano community organizations something to sink their teeth into. And then of course, even the corporations and the media came out against the bill. The radio stations played a huge role in turning people out for the 2006 May Day events. Labor was ok on this front—at least in LA.

However, a lot of the groups had drastic differences—some opposed guest worker programs, others were ok with them. Nobody could agree on basic principles. You couldn’t get Change to Win, AFL-CIO and mainstream immigrant rights organizations to agree to basic principles. Groups have different interests, and frankly, immigrants themselves were all over the map. The most vulnerable have the most stake in getting (legal) status, which can influence what one is willing to settle for.

How can you build a movement with so many different kinds of coalitions and interests? Latino legislators, who want to be re-elected, aren’t going to take the most radical positions, and the mainstream immigrant rights groups like the National Council of La Raza get funded by big corporations. Movements are most successful when people can agree on a common agenda, which is why the workplace is so powerful. If you are working in a factory and the boss doesn’t let you go to the bathroom when you want, everybody can agree it’s an issue of respect. People can unite around a common agenda when you have concrete workplace issues like wages, working conditions, respect or community issues like tenant rights.

Could you tell us about your book?

The book is about two factories owned by Tortimundo, a transnational Mexican company. It’s a twist on studies on globalization that usually focus on US corporations in the global South. I examined a factory in California and one in Baja California, Mexico in order to compare working conditions and examine the State’s role in shaping how managers exert control over workers.

The factory in California employed 75% men, half of whom were undocumented, all of whom were Latinos, predominantly Mexican. The workforce of the factory in Mexico was 75% women. They weren’t confronted with problems of immigration status, but 90% of the women had migrated internally to the border area from different parts of Mexico.

My main argument is that the State still matters. In the US, the Mexican employers use immigration policy as a central mechanism for control by pitting undocumented workers against documented workers; forcing undocumented workers to work the night shift, take lower wages, and do the least desirable work. These policies racialize and feminize those men. Management used Social Security Administration “no-match letters” and legal decisions like the Hoffman Plastics v. NLRB against undocumented workers.

While state policy is complex, the book discusses the role of the IMF, the World Bank and NAFTA in liberalizing the corn market, which was flooded with American corn, displacing people from their farmlands. People who are currently migrating are almost forced to do so, due to the effects of globalization. As a result, many women and their families migrated to border areas to work in maquiladoras, which have since been leaving Mexico for other countries. So these women looked for work in national industries as their husbands migrated across the border to the US.

In Mexico, the politics of globalization have created an unstable, feminized labor market, where employers prefer to hire women. Shaky Mexican labor law and the disappearance of maquiladoras have left women workers facing intense sexual harassment. They basically had to be willing to stick it out because the alternatives are worse.

Immigration policy is thought of as a US issue, but it impacts both sides of the border. In Mexico, current border policy maintains a trapped labor pool where it is more and more difficult for workers to emigrate to the US. Of course, it also plays an important role in shaping the job market and working conditions in the US. We need a just immigration policy that is not just going to build walls, because that is not a solution.