let's talk for a minute about this development, which i read about as front page news in the
new york times this morning:
Bush Would Give Illegal Workers Broad New Rights
President Bush will propose a sweeping overhaul of the nation's immigration laws on Wednesday that could give legal status to millions of undocumented workers in the United States, senior administration officials said Tuesday night.
Under Mr. Bush's proposal, which effectively amounts to an amnesty program for illegal immigrants with jobs in the United States, an undocumented worker could apply for temporary worker status here for an unspecified number of years, with all the employee benefits, like minimum wage and due process, accorded to those legally employed.
the conventional wisdom on this proposal, abundantly on display in this article, is that this is an election year move to court the hispanic vote, and in any event is unlikely to get past hardline anti-immigration republicans in congress.
i believe that this is ultimately not at all about the legalization of illegal immigration.
we've seen all too often recently how the conventional journalistic wisdom is, if not outright wrong, at least lazy and superficial. let's look a little deeper at this shall we? this announcement brings to mind all the times bush has announced a new "compassionate" measure that ends up having the exact opposite result of what its stated purpose is: americorps, no child left behind, clean skies initiative, healthy forests... the list of bush's bait-and-switch initiatives grows ever longer.
my inner cassandra tells me this is a trojan horse, and a big one...
let's look at it a little closer. let's read between the lines in the article at the administration rhetoric.
Mr. Bush's proposal, one administration official said, would "match willing workers with willing employers" and would "promote compassion" by fixing what one called "a broken system."
indeed it is a broken system. for all their divisive rhetoric about how immigrants are destroying the country and stealing jobs from "real americans", republicans are singularly unwilling to cut off the supply of illegal immigrant labor. illegal immigrants mean cheap labor for factories like tyson chicken and the textile plants of the carolinas. cheap disposable labor for the kitchens of every restaurant in america. hard-working but subservient nannies and cleaning ladies for the rich suburban enclaves. desperate eastern europeans willing to work all night on the cheap cleaning office parks and wal-marts. these are the ugly truths of the low end of the labor market in the US. many of these workers are unaware that they are already covered by the labor laws of many states, or else know complaining will only lose them their only paying gig. so the talk of adding rights and legal protections is a red herring, doubly so when you look at one of the cornerstones of the proposed policy.
what does it mean that they will match "willing employers" and "willing workers"? if you've been following the story of tyson chicken's immigration law troubles and the various stories about immigrants being smuggled in from mexico and china in containers, you already know there are people matching willing workers and willing employers, but they're doing it on the sly. in mexico these men are known as coyotes.
Under Mr. Bush's proposals, an undocumented worker and an employer would have to apply for the guest worker program hand in hand, with the employer serving as the sponsor for the worker. There would also be a fee to register for the program, but officials would not say how much that would be.
currently coyotes charge a couple thousand a head, and it looks like the government wants a piece of that action. and what is this "sponsor" action? currently the employers hold all the cards and are able to underpay and exploit their workers and violate workplace standards like OSHA's because illegal laborers have no recourse. not only will they lose their job, they will also be deported. but the new proposal just appears to codify this arrangement. if a worker is already listed in the INS database, he doesn't even have the option of sneaking away and getting a different job as he does now, because the INS will know where he lives. so the employers still hold all the cards.
but they'll at least have to pay those workers minimum wage, right? well, even assuming the GOP's agenda doesn't include abolishing the minimum wage in 2005, employers currently have a number of mechanisms for getting around this at their disposal. for decades poor black women have been working hard in the textile factories of the carolinas and getting paid on a "piece-work" basis that works out to less than minimum wage. if you've ever worked in a restaurant you know that mimimum wage doesn't always apply. and finally there's the old "salaried employee" trick: "you boys not only get a good job in an american factory, you'll actually be a valued salary earner! $200 a week. just make sure you put in your 80 hours each week, not counting breaks, amigo." if you don't like it, or complain about working conditions, your "sponsor" tears up the agreement and it's back to guatemala you go, hombre.
the more i think about what's being said in code here, the more it reminds me of the indentured servant arrangement - a form of limited slavery that brought many europeans to these shores under british colonial rule.
now how about its chances of getting passed in congress. thankfully that's still slim, right? don't count on it. if as i suspect this is really a trojan horse designed to benefit the robber baron crowd, you'll see a slight shift in the political landscape. the money of the cheap-labor lobbyists will start talking behind closed doors and on caribbean junkets. certain republicans will start to change their tune. for some it will be because they've "got to get behind the president." others will cloak themselves in the mantle of christian charity and they'll talk about how poor immigrant families came to plead with them, and while it may not be popular in this district, it's the right thing to do before god, and so forth. others will talk about how it's the right thing to do to keep industry strong, or how it's doing right by the people who mow our lawns and bus our tables, etc. congresscritters in the most hard-core anti-immigration districts will still continue to oppose it, but when the day comes to stand up and be counted, those voices will fall short by one vote. exactly one vote, i predict.
hopefully democrats won't get suckered into going along with this initiative out of some feel good helping immigrants and hispanic voters impulse. because it's not legalization of immigration. it's legalization of exploitation. and will pave the way for future exploitation of all americans.
