3-31-09, 10:41 am

Immigrants in the United States, as well as activists supporting immigrant workers’ rights, are wondering what the impact of the current national and world financial crisis will be on immigration, and on efforts to get a better deal for immigrant workers, with or without papers, under the new administration.

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano noted this week that the number of undocumented immigrants coming to the United States has dropped a bit, in her opinion due to the credit freeze that has hit the housing construction industry, where so many undocumented workers have been employed.

The financial crisis, however, is not likely to cause all 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States to return to Mexico and their other countries of origin. Nor is stepped up “enforcement,” which began in the second half of the Bush administration, and now is awaiting a decision by the Obama administration as to whether it will continue or not.

In the first place, as the US economy spirals downward, the same thing is happening to the rest of the world, including Mexico, 80 percent of whose foreign trade is with the United States, and its neighbors. In February, Mexican Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, Javier Lozano Alarcon, announced that more than 128,000 jobs were lost in his country in January alone, and that more than half a million Mexicans have lost their jobs since November. Mexico has 1/3 of the population of the US, so, to give an idea of the scale of the impact, that is equivalent to a loss of nearly 400,000 jobs in the US in January, and nearly 4,900,000 US jobs since November.

As in the US and elsewhere, the disappearance of jobs is likely to exert a downward pull on wages and working conditions. And the existing social safety net in Mexico is far smaller and weaker than the US equivalent. As they say, “when the USA sneezes, Mexico gets pneumonia.” Similar things are happening in other poorer countries.

This is likely to increase, not decrease, the number of people who want desperately to get to the United States to find work, and with it their motivation to accept any old job under any working conditions. To the extent that some do “self-deport,” it will exacerbate conditions in the countries to which they return, because there are no jobs (and in some cases, no families or government social supports) waiting for them.

Furthermore, as the number of undocumented immigrants in the country has grown over the last two decades, more and more of them have built lives here by marrying, having children (there are estimated to be between 4 and 5 million US citizen children with one or both parents undocumented), getting mortgages, buying homes, and even starting businesses. There are many reported cases of undocumented immigrants who were brought here as babies and only find out they are undocumented and not born US citizens when, as teenagers, they discover they cannot get Social Security numbers or go to college – or when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) grabs them and deports them to a country where they may not even speak the language.

Such people are not going to just leave the families and lives they have started here. They are going to do everything they can to stay here, as they should.

A repressive policy is not viable under these conditions. It only creates suffering, not only for undocumented immigrants, but also for their relatives, friends, co-workers and neighbors. It encourages racial profiling and hiring discrimination against all who appear to be Latinos, or just foreign. It worsens instead of improves wages and working conditions for US workers, because it makes immigrant workers more desperate. The more desperate they get, the less willing they are to stick their necks out by joining a union, marching on a picket line, or calling OSHA to complain of dangerous working conditions.

In spite of the lip service which George W. Bush paid to “comprehensive immigration reform,” in the last years of his administration federal policy turned harshly anti-immigrant, and the abuses carried out by ICE, and at privatized prisons where immigrants awaiting deportation are held, shot up sharply.

A new study by the Migration Policy Institute (read a related article here) shows that resources which ICE got for the specific purpose of going after dangerous criminal immigrants were massively diverted to rounding up immigrants whose only crime was being in this country without legal authorization. ICE agents, part of the scores of enforcement teams that have been set up around the country to go after people in their homes and neighborhoods, have themselves complained about being given quotas of immigrants to round up.

The Migration Policy Institute points out that such quotas encourage agents to seek easy targets rather than going after dangerous people. So they round up people on the street, at bus stops, even coming out of medical care facilities.

This will get us nowhere. Rather, we should convince the Obama administration to take the following immediate steps:

*Cancel the quota system and direct all ICE resources to going after dangerous felons, drug smugglers and terrorists.

*Stop workplace and neighborhood immigration raids until comprehensive immigration reform can be crafted (this demand for a moratorium on raids is shared by many groups supporting immigrants’ rights). At the same time, increase workplace enforcement of labor laws, especially laws regarding child labor, wages and hours, and occupational health and safety. Unscrupulous employers only favor undocumented immigrants over other workers because they think that with terrorized immigrants – terrorized by the government’s own enforcement policies – they can get away with other kinds of labor law violations.

*Withdraw the draconian new rules for Social Security 'no-match' letters proposed by Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, which are currently held up in federal court by an AFL-CIO lawsuit that alleges the rules will lead to the firing of workers who are legally here. For the same reason, withdraw plans to make E-Verify (an automated check of federal records) mandatory for employers.

*Repeal 1996 legislation that took away the discretionary authority of immigration judges to give people facing deportation a break based on the probable impact on their US citizen spouses and minor children. US Representative Jose Serrano (D-NY), has introduced legislation that would party accomplish this (HR 182). This bill should be publicized and supported.

*Get back to crafting comprehensive immigration reform legislation, entailing a humane, fair and practical program of legalization. The need for this has been increased and not decreased by the current financial and economic crisis.

*And last but not least, we need to understand that mass labor migration, which goes on all over the world, is largely the product of neo-liberal trade and economic policies aggressively promoted and imposed on the poorer countries of the world by our own corporate and government leaders, as well as those of other wealthy countries. Those policies need to be replaced by a respectful process of cooperation with our neighbors. We need policies that set realistic goals for legal immigration based on an understanding of the real trends in labor migration, and we need to avoid the guest worker programs so dear to the heart of the US Chamber of Commerce.