por David Bacon
(Labor writer David Bacon, author of the controversial 2008 book Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, wrote a lengthy commentary for New America Media providing context to the nation’s Upcoming and 200ti immigrant protest marches. For Weekly Report readers, it is condensed into two pants).
OAKLAND, Calif.— On May 1 hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of U.S. immigrants and their supporters will fill the streets across the United States. Their May Day marches will make important demands on the Obama Administration: End the draconian enforcement policies. Establish a new immigration policy based on human rights and recognition of the crucial economic and social contributions of immigrants to our society.
May Day celebrates worldwide the contributions of working people. Three years ago a million people filled the streets of Los Angeles, with hundreds of thousands more in Chicago, New York and other cities and towns throughout the United States.
Again on May Day in 2007 and 2008, immigrants and their supporters coast to coast demonstrated.
One sign prominent in almost every march said it all: “We are Workers not Criminals!”
It stated an obvious truth. Millions of people have come to the United States to work, some with visas, others without them. But all are contributors to our society.
The protests are a result of years of organizing, the legacy of immigrant rights pioneer Bert Corona. He taught thousands of immigrant activists the value of political in dependence. Most of the leaders of the radical wing of today’s immigrant rights movement limwere his students.
In part, the May Day protests respond to a wave of measures that have criminalized immigration status and work itself. In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act made it a crime for the first time in U.S. history to hire people who lack papers.
Defenders argued that if people could not work legally they would leave.
Life was not so simple.
Undocumented people are part of the communities where they live. They cannot simply go, nor should they.
They seek the same goals of equality and opportunity that U.5. workers have fought for historically. For most immigrants there are no jobs to return to in the countries they left.
After Congress passed The North American Free Trade Agreement, six million Mexicans came here as a result of the massive displacement the treaty caused. Free trade and free market policies have similarly displaced millions more in poor eountries around the world.
In reality, the labor of 12 million undocumented workers is indispensable to this nation’s economy. The wealth created by undocumented workers is never called illegal. No one dreams of taking that wealth from the employers who profited from it. Yet the people who produce this wealth are called exactly that—illegal.
In a country with schools lagging behind the rest of the industrialized world, with bridges that fall into rivers and people living in tent cities for lack of housing, there is clearly no shortage of work to be done. If the trillion dollars showered on banks were used instead to put people to work, there would be plenty of jobs and a better quality of life for everyone.
Nativo López, president of the Mexican American Political Association and the Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, says, “Washington legislators and lobbyists fear a new civil rights movement in the streets, because it rejects their compromises and makes demands that go beyond what they have defined as ‘politically possible.”’
The price of trying to push out people who have coma here for survival is increased vulnerability for undocumented workers. This ultimately results in cheaper labor and fewer rights for everyone. Under Bush, that was the government’s goal—cheap labor for large employers, enforced by deportations, firings and guest worker programs. This is what millions of people want to change. The Obama administration was elected because it promised “change we can believe in.”
In past May Day marches many participants have put forward an alternative set of demands, which include tying legalization for 12 million undocumented people with jobs programs for communities with high unemployment.
All workers need the right to organize to raise wages and gain workplace rights, including the 12 million people for whom work is a crime. More green cards, especially visas based on family reunification, would enable people to cross the border legally, instead of dying in the desert.
Ending guest worker programs would help stop the use of our immigration system as a supply of cheap labor for employers. And on the border, communities want human rights, not more guns, walls, soldiers and prisons for immigrants.
This May Day, immigrants will again send this powerful message. Their marches have already rescued from obscurity our own holiday, which began in the struggle for the eight-hour day in Chicago over a century ago. Today they are giving May Day a new meaning, putting forward ideas that will not only benefit immigrant communities, but all working families. Hispanic Link.
(Next: The failed United States response.)
