As the Senate prepares to vote on comprehensive immigration reform, it’s important to remember that workers and immigrants have never made significant progress in gaining civil and human rights in the United States without a fight. The same is true today.
No political party or Gang of Eight can bestow upon undocumented immigrants rights that can only be won through an organized social movement. President Barack Obama would not have issued an executive order to defer the deportations of undocumented students had not these courageous youths fought those deportations, staged protests, and proposed their own immigration reform – the DreamAct.
The Senate’s proposed bill, however, does not reflect the reality in which most immigrants live, starting with the reasons why people come to the United States to begin with. This bill will not stop the flow of undocumented immigrants, its stated purpose, because it does not address the root causes of migration. The North American Free Trade Agreement alone displaced millions of Mexican workers and farmers, forcing them to leave their country. When it went into effect, 4.6 million Mexicans lived in the United States. Today, 13 million people do – 11 percent of Mexico’s population.

Instead, the Senate bill seeks to channel that flow in a way that benefits those industries dependent on cheap labor, much more than it benefits immigrant communities themselves. The bill features guest worker programs and increased enforcement. These measures will not stop the flow of people across the border, nor are they designed to protect immigrant rights. But they do further transform our immigration policy into a corporate labor supply system.

This transformation has been going on since the immigration reform of 1986. In just the past few years, the United States has deported 400,000 people annually. At the same time corporations have recruited annually 250,000 guest workers in formal labor programs, and many thousands more using other visa categories.

This reverses an important achievement of our civil rights movement. In 1965 the bracero program, an earlier huge guest worker program, was abolished. In its place, a family preference system became part of our immigration policy, allowing families to reunite here in the United States. The new Senate bill, however, restricts family based immigration. It makes the labor needs of employers more important than family relationships.

There are no assurances that the blatant abuses of guest workers in today’s programs will cease under the new law. Just recently, at a seafood processing plant in Beau Bridge, LA, an employer blocked the plant’s doors so women guest workers could not take bathroom breaks. When they protested the owner threatened violence against their families in Mexico. Fortunately, community protests came to the women’s aid.

For guestworkers, unemployment means deportation. That’s why labor and immigrant rights group favor giving migrants permanent resident visas instead of forcing them to come as guest workers. Residence visas guarantee rights and don’t punish immigrants for losing jobs.

The Senate bill criminalizes immigrants and migration. It expands the border enforcement budget by $5.5 billion, while sequester cutbacks are closing child care centers and laying off teachers at schools. It further militarizes the border by deploying drones, and spurs the construction of more privately-run immigration prisons.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers have already been fired because U.S. law makes it a crime for them to work. But instead of decriminalizing work the new bill makes it mandatory for all employers to check their workers’ status through the E-Verify database and requires photometric ID to get a job. This will lead to an even larger wave of firings.

A large percentage of the 11 million who need legal status will not qualify because of the bill’s restrictions, especially its income requirements that penalize the poor. This E-Verify database will make them even more vulnerable to pressure, since they will have to work “off the books.”

Families and communities will suffer, and the number of immigrants forced to live in the shadows will grow. Millions of people hope to gain legal status and eventual citizenship, and create an environment for progressive political change. But the current bill is not a sure path. In recent years immigrant communities and unions have proposed far more progressive alternatives.

Organizations among indigenous Mexican migrants seek to get rid of trade agreements that displace their home communities in Mexico. Fired workers from Silicon Valley to San Diego want to end E-Verify, firings and the criminalization of their work. Organizers in Washington and Mississippi want an end to guest worker programs, and activists in Mexico agree, saying that the recruitment system corrupts politicians and plunges people into debt.

They all seek a progressive alternative that would end the treatment of immigrants as commodities valued only as cheap labor, and not as human beings worthy of dignity and respect.

David Bacon is the author of Illegal People–How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, and the forthcoming The Right to Stay Home, both from Beacon Press. Rosalinda Guillen is director of Community2Community, a women-led grassroots organization in Washington State. Mark Day is the executive director of the San Diego Day Laborers and Household Workers Association. They are all active supporters of the Dignity Campaign for Immigration Reform Based on Human and Labor Rights.

The Western media is currently full of articles reporting Google’s denial that it cooperated in a government program to massively spy on American and foreign citizens by accessing data from Google’s servers and those of other U.S. software companies.
The mainstream media has, however, almost completely failed to report that Google’s denial, and its surface concern over ‘human rights’, is historically belied by their deep involvement with some of the worst human cobrights abuses on the planet:
Google is, in fact, a key participant in U.S. military and CIA intelligence operations involving torture; subversion of foreign governments; illegal wars of aggression; and military occupations of countries which have never attacked the U.S. and which have cost hundreds of thousands of lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere.
To begin with, as reported previously in the Washington Post and elsewhere, Google is the supplier of the customized core search technology for ‘Intellipedia, a highly-secured online system where 37,000 U.S. spies and related personnel share information and collaborate on their devious errands.

Agencies such as the so-called ‘National Security Agency’, or NSA, which is implicated in the current ‘spying on Americans’ scandal, have also purchased servers using Google-supplied search technology which processes information gathered by U.S. spies operating all over the planet.

In addition, Google is linked to the U.S. spy and military systems through its Google Earth software venture. The technology behind this software was originally developed by Keyhole Inc., a company funded by Q-Tel http://www.iqt.org/, a venture capital firm which is in turn openly funded and operated on behalf of the CIA.

Google acquired Keyhole Inc. in 2004. The same base technology is currently employed by U.S. military and intelligence systems in their quest, in their own words, for “full-spectrum dominance” of the planet.

Moreover, Google’s connection with the CIA and its venture capital firm extends to sharing at least one key member of personnel. In 2004, the Director of Technology Assessment at In-Q-Tel, Rob Painter, moved from his old job directly serving the CIA to become ‘Senior Federal Manager’ at Google.
As Robert Steele, a former CIA case officer has put it: Google is “in bed with” the CIA.

Google’s Friends spy on millions of Internet Users

Given Google’s supposed concern with ‘human rights’ and with user-privacy, it’s worth noting that Wired magazine reported some time ago that Google’s friends at In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, invested in Visible Technologies, a software firm specialized in ‘monitoring social media’.

The ‘Visible’ technology can automatically examine more than a million discussions and posts on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, and so forth each day. The technology also ‘scores’ each online item, assigning it a positive, negative or mixed or neutral status, based on parameters and terms set by the technology operators. The information, thus boiled down, can then be more effectively scanned and read by human operators.

The CIA venture capitalists at In-Q-Tel previously said they will use the technology to monitor social media operating in other countries and give U.S. spies early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally, according to spokesperson Donald Tighe. There is every possibility that the technology can also be used by the U.S. intelligence operatives to spy on domestic social movements and individuals inside the U.S.

Finally, Obama during his recent meeting with Chinese president Xi, again more-or-less accused China of cyber intrusions into U.S. government computers. There has, however, been a curious absence from the statements emanating from Google, from U.S. government sources, and from U.S. media reports of truly substantive evidence linking the Chinese government with the alleged break-in attempts. Words like ‘sophisticated’ and ‘suspicion’ have appeared in the media to suggest that the Chinese government is responsible for the break-ins. That may be so. But it is striking that the media has seemingly asked no tough questions as to what the evidence behind the ‘suspicions’ might be.

It should be noted that the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies have a long history of rogue operations intended to discredit governments or social movements with whom they happen to disagree. To see how far this can go, one need only recall the sordid history of disinformation, lies, and deceit used to frighten people into supporting the Iraq war.

Whether the past attacks on U.S. government systems, Google email, et al originated from the Chinese government, from the U.S. intelligence operatives, or from elsewhere, one thing is clear: A company that supplies the CIA with key intelligence technology; supplies mapping software which can be used for barbarous wars of aggression and drone attacks which kill huge numbers of innocent civilians; and which in general is deeply intertwined with the CIA and the U.S. military machines, which spy on millions, the company cannot be motivated by real concern for the human rights and lives of the people in the U.S. and on the planet.