Shattering Myths About Immigrants: DECONSTRUCTING “OPERATION
RETURN TO SENDER”
By Margot
Pepper
The cities of Berkeley and
Oakland have adopted immigrant sanctuary measures disallowing the use of city
funds and staff time in aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
More than 60 sanctuary city initiatives
protecting immigrants have been promulgated in 21 states across the country.
Critics of immigration reform argue that sanctuary proposals send the wrong
message to immigrants who, they argue, are responsible for eroding
citizens’ living standards. They claim stiffer penalties and stronger
barriers are the answer.
Little
publicized is the fact that actually the opposite is true. Rather than posing a
monumental problem, undocumented migration is a desired outcome of unequal
international trade policies, boosting the living standards of U.S. citizens and
enriching a powerful sector of the U.S. economy. Rather than discourage
migration, dangerous but surmountable barriers and unenforceable, cruel laws
only contribute to the “illegal,” status of needed workers,
rendering them a cheap, profitable source of labor.
A Public Policy Institute of
California report (2/27/07) by University of California, Davis, economist
Giovanni Peri demonstrates that “During 1990-2004, immigration induced a
4 percent real wage increase for the average native worker. An increase in the
number of immigrants evidently increases the demand for tasks performed by
native workers and raises their
wages.”
“Between 1990 and
2004, as the percentage of immigrants in California’s labor force rose,
immigration helped boost natives’ wages as much as 7 percent, even giving
a tiny bump to native high school dropouts,” reports Kristin Bender in the
Oakland Tribune, (2/28/07.)
But U.S.
workers are not the biggest winners in the “immigrant sweeps-takes.”
The greatest beneficiaries of cheap immigrant labor, says Harvard economist
George Borjas, are employers. It is widely-known that undocumented immigrants
are less likely to hold union jobs and are willing to work for wages under the
minimum wage, without benefits and at jobs citizens are unwilling to accept.
During an immigration peak in the United States from the third quarter of 2001
to the present, the share of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) going to corporate
profits has soared from 7.0 percent to 11.6 percent, while the share going to
labor compensation declined by 2.4 percentage points, according to economist
Edwin S. Rubenstein.
One of the
sources of the immigration surge was the implementation of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the early 1990s. Thanks to protectionist
measures like NAFTA, over an eight year period, “Resource transfers from
the poor to the rich amounted to more than $400 billion,” reported
Massachussetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky in The Nation
(“Notes on NAFTA.”) “The World Bank reports that
protectionist measures of the industrialized countries reduce national income in
the South by about twice the amount of official aid to the region--aid that is
itself largely export promotion,” Chomsky states.
The losers in the game, of course are
working Mexicans. In Mexico, “Poverty has risen by more than 50% during
the first four years of NAFTA and wages in the manufacturing sector have
declined,” reports the Data Center.
A 2004 report published by the U.S.
House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means states that “At
least 1.5 million Mexican farmers lost their livelihoods to NAFTA.”
The situation is only expected to worsen in 2008 when Mexico is required to
comply with a NAFTA deadline to totally eliminate its corn and bean import
tariffs. A large sector of U.S. workers have also taken a big hit from NAFTA, as
union jobs are farmed out overseas to non-union labor, widening the chasm
between the rich and poor.
Many policy
experts predicted that the Mexican farmers displaced by NAFTA would migrate to
the United States. Indeed, a comparison of U.S. censuses of 1990 and 2000 shows
“the number of Mexican-born residents in the United States increased by
more than 80 percent,” states Jeff Faux in “How NAFTA Failed
Mexico,” The American Prospect (July 3, 2003.) “Some
half-million Mexicans come to the United States every year; roughly 60 percent
of them are undocumented. The massive investments in both border guards and
detection equipment have not diminished the migrant flow; they have just made it
more dangerous. More than 1,600 Mexican migrants have died on the journey to
the north.”
While NAFTA is
responsible for the latest “migration hump,” it is not the sole
culprit. Practices by bodies like the World Trade Organization, “along
with the programs dictated by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank,
have helped double the gap between rich and poor countries since 1960,”
reports Noam Chomsky in The Nation. The ensuing foreign debt deprives these
countries from accumulating capital to develop competitive industries and has
lead to mass migration northward. This trend has been in operation for hundreds
of years, as traditionally, there has been a migration trend originating in
colonized countries toward the source of the economic
disparities.
Given the fact that the
presence of undocumented workers enriches the corporate sector, particularly in
developed countries, it is not unreasonable to conclude that a powerful sector
of the U.S. economy would be severely harmed should undocumented workers gain
resident status. In other words, part of the success of programs like NAFTA is
the byproduct of cheap, undocumented labor, both native to Mexico and migrant.
A little known, but related, fact is
that draconian, unenforceable immigration policies, such as Operation Return to
Sender, are actually products of NAFTA. After NAFTA was passed by Congress in
1992, “the agreement raised concerns in the U.S. about immigration from
south of the border,” according to “NAFTA, The Patriot Act and the
New Immigration Backlash” by the American Anthropological Association. To
counter the predicted influx of Latin Americans, President Bill Clinton signed
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.
“The 1996 Welfare Reform bill included anti-immigrant and other measures
that eliminated many social services for undocumented immigrants,” the
report states. The latest wave of ICE raids are a result of these long term
policies.
The immigration reform
bill under consideration in the Senate only strengthens the trend toward higher
returns at the expense of migrant labor by cutting off family ties and creating
an even lower tier than today’s undocumented worker: the “guest
worker” or bracero, whose legal status can be revoked by any whim of his
employer. The bracero program was killed by labor organizers in 1964 spearheaded
by Ernesto Galarza, with the blessings of Cesar Chavez. According to
journalist David Bacon, “Chavez later said he could never have organized
the United Farm Workers until growers could no longer hire braceros during
strikes.”
Chavez and the UFW knew
that stemming the flow of immigration required offering a living wage, not only
to both documented and undocumented workers within the United States, but to
workers abroad as well.
Recently, the
deportation of 7-year old Gerardo Espinoza, a top student at Rosa Parks school
in Berkeley, whose only recourse to claim his right to education as a U.S.
citizen was to remain in Berkeley as an orphan, reverberated in various
newspapers and internet sites. The story struck a chord because the case
demonstrated that the vast majority of model immigrants who comply with current
immigration policy are destined for outcomes as tragic as the separation of the
Greek lovers Orpheus and Uridice.
Operation Return to Sender is nothing
more than another incentive to go underground. According to the Contra Costa
Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, thousands of people have been detained in
the Bay Area since the beginning of Operation Return to Sender, a campaign that
has resulted in over 18,000 arrests nationwide and the deportation of 800
immigrants in Northern California cities alone.
Yet this has not deterred the courageous
marches on May first by thousands of immigrants for the last couple of years.
By standing their ground, these
Americans have every intention of complying with the current
administration’s edict to “Return to Sender—” since the
“Sender,” or source of the “immigration problem” lies
not abroad, but on U.S. soil.
Margot Pepper is a former
Venetian and a contributor to the Beachhead. She is a poet, journalist and
author. Her memoir, Through the Wall: A Year in Havana, was a top nomination
for the 2006 American Book Award.
Posted: Sun - July 1, 2007 at 11:34 AM