councilor.org
| Source | Dave Anderson |
| Date | 14/12/05/02:52 |
| www.boulderweekly.com
Hick clueless on guest workers By Dave Anderson DO WE WANT to create a permanent underclass of non-citizens in the United States? That is a crucial question in the immigration reform debate. Gov. John Hickenlooper’s answer is “yes” judging by his flippant remarks in a national newspaper. On the day before Obama announced his executive action on immigration, the governor told The Wall Street Journal that it would “be very combustible.” He said: “What’s amazing to me is, a lot of young Latinos, the vast majority don’t care about a pathway to citizenship. They want to be able to get on an airplane and get down to Mexico City and visit their grandparents. And they want to get a job and be able to get paid over the table. Why don’t we just take the pathway to citizenship and say, ‘We’re not going to worry about it.’ Let’s have a robust guest worker system where everybody gets five years and we secure the border and we actually hold business accountable if they’re going to pay people under the table.” Latino and immigrant rights groups were shocked and enraged. Julie Gonzales, board chair of the Colorado Latino Forum, said, “We are so disappointed in John Hickenlooper because the things he said in The Wall Street Journal article weren’t the things he said three weeks ago when he was running for re-election. Immigrant communities for so long and Latino voters have held a pathway to citizenship as a cornerstone, as a marker to determine whether the bills being proposed are meaningful or not. And to see Governor Hickenlooper try to bargain away comprehensive immigration reform’s pathway to citizenship before we even have a bill on the table, I don’t even have words to describe how frustrating that is.” The idea that undocumented immigrants should just become “guest workers” is outrageous. Guest workers are a caste of indentured serfs. In a report titled “Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States,” the Southern Poverty Law Center described the H-2 guest worker program, which provides temporary farm workers and non-farm laborers for a variety of U.S. industries, as “rife with labor and human rights violations committed by employers who prey on a highly vulnerable workforce. It harms the interests of U.S. workers, as well, by undercutting wages and working conditions for those who labor at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.” Bound to a single employer and without access to legal resources, guest workers are: • routinely cheated out of wages; • forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs; • held virtually captive by employers or labor brokers who seize their documents; • forced to live in squalid conditions; and • denied medical benefits for on-thejob injuries. President Obama has taken an important step forward with his executive action. But this came after years of confrontational nonviolent activism in which undocumented immigrants reached out to the public and told their stories — which made them vulnerable to arrest, detention and deportation. Today, vulnerable Wal-Mart and fast-food workers are using the same risky, courageous tactics in fighting for a $15-per-hour minimum wage. This is not a coincidence. Labor reporter Josh Eidelson argues that undocumented immigrants and guest workers aren’t on the fringes of our society but are the “bellwethers.” They are the canaries in the coal mine. Eidelson says they “represent what’s happening to U.S. work in three critical ways. First, precarity: Workers lack job security, formal contracts or guaranteed hours. Second, legal exclusion: Labeled as “independent contractors,” “domestic workers” or otherwise, they’re thrust beyond the reach of this country’s creaky, craven labor laws. And third, the mystification of employment: While a no-name contracted company signs your paycheck, your conditions are set by a major corporation with far away headquarters and legal impunity. These linked trends are both causes and consequences of the ongoing de-unionization of the United States.” Right-wingers manipulate the anxiety many Americans feel about their increasingly insecure lives and try to direct their justified anger at undocumented immigrants. The Republicans — and some Democrats like Hickenlooper — push for an expanded system of indentured servitude. That would be a step back in history. We already abolished slavery. If we are bamboozled by them, all of our lives will become meaner as we fight each other over the crumbs. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho