Immigrant Daily

The Nation: Immigration Clampdown Reality Checks

Reality check one: Workers who lose their jobs won’t leave the country. Immigrant communities are deeply embedded in the social fabric of this country, not only in cities like New York and Los Angeles but also in tiny towns like Bridgeton, New Jersey, and Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. To get here, migrants often take out loans on homes in their countries of origin. Losing a job here can mean losing that home. Family members living there, dependent on remittances from the States, would go hungry. And for many who emigrated because they were hungry themselves, going back is simply not an option.

Not only will these people not leave, but many small towns and cities that are being revived thanks to influx of immigrant labor don’t really want people to leave.  Or at least shouldn’t.

Reality check two: When Bush and many Congress members push for new free-trade agreements, and implementation of NAFTA and CAFTA, they are creating the very conditions of poverty that are driving people north. With 200 million people in the world living outside the countries where they were born, the flow of migration is not stoppable. Anti-immigrant measures like raids and no-match checks create human misery, but don’t stop the movement of people.

I think  that Free Trade can be a positive thing, but it should be coupled with certain labor standards.  A good entrepreneur should not succeed at the cost of other people’s misery.  Where have ethics gone?

Reality check three: Firing millions of undocumented migrants won’t create jobs or raise wages for other workers, or end discrimination against workers of color. When Operation Vanguard railroaded thousands of immigrant workers out of Nebraska meatpacking plants in 1999, there was no wave of hiring that followed in Omaha’s African-American neighborhoods. A de facto color line–reflecting a common belief among employers that blacks and Chicanos will be more inclined than white workers to fight for better wages and organize unions–keeps them out of many US workplaces. At Smithfield, where black workers did organize, no-match firings and deportations intimidated into silence immigrants who were active in the campaign and created such fear that in-plant activism virtually stopped.

Has anyone really suggested that discrimination in hiring is a byproduct of immigrant labor availability?  This reality check confuses me.  These are two unrelated issues – I don’t think that the immigration crackdown is happening to protect the jobs of U.S. minority citizens or that anyone really even suggested this officially.  In my opinion the crackdown is happening to appease white people from red states. 

Reality check four: Employers complain about the no-match regulation, and many are sincerely concerned about its impact on business and workers. But some employers will benefit. Increased fear and vulnerability makes immigrant labor cheaper, by making it riskier to protest bad conditions or ask for higher wages.

 I am not so sure that any employer will benefit from the immigration crackdown.  They may get a tool to frighten workers who are not documented, but they also face steeper fines and the risk of imprisonment.  Furthermore, these regulations have always been around and so I am not sure how this is a change.  Employers always had these tools and Social Security Administration has always issued “no-match” letters.  Anyway these new regs are unenforceable as I previously discussed.

 Full article can be found here.