Feature Page: Bush’s new ‘bracero’ program: Temporary work, starvation wages

by Joaquin Bustelo

A very pretty piñata with nothing inside. That’s how the leader of one Latino immigrant organization characterized the immigration reform proposal presented by President Bush on Jan. 7. Hearing Bush speak, you would have thought those fighting for full rights for immigrants had won a new ally.

“As a Texan,” Bush said, “I have known many immigrant families, mainly from Mexico, and I have seen what they add to our country. They bring to America the values of faith in God, love of family, hard work, and self reliance—the values that made us a great nation to begin with.…

“As a nation that values immigration, and depends on immigration, we should have immigration laws that work and make us proud. Yet today we do not. Instead, we see many employers turning to the illegal labor market. We see millions of hard-working men and women condemned to fear and insecurity in a massive, undocumented economy....

“Their search for a better life is one of the most basic desires of human beings. Many undocumented workers have walked mile after mile, through the heat of the day and the cold of the night. Some have risked their lives in dangerous desert border crossings, or entrusted their lives to the brutal rings of heartless human smugglers. Workers who seek only to earn a living end up in the shadows of American life—fearful, often abused, and exploited.

“When they are victimized by crime, they are afraid to call the police, or seek recourse in the legal system. They are cut off from their families far away, fearing if they leave our country to visit relatives back home, they might never be able to return to their jobs.

“The situation I described is wrong. It is not the American way. ... We must make our immigration laws more rational, and more humane.”

Although this is hardly likely to have been his intention, these statements by Bush, telling some of the truth about immigrants and the oppression they face, can and will be used as a weapon by fighters for the rights of undocumented workers to counter the chauvinist propaganda about “illegals” who “steal American jobs” and the racist hysteria that sees in any person with brown skin or a foreign accent a likely terrorist.

But an examination of Bush’s proposal shows that Bush was just being a demagogue, and has no intention of living up to the humanitarianism he proclaimed.

The centerpiece of his proposal is the temporary workers program. Undocumented workers currently in the country would be allowed to apply for this status, which would expire after three years. The president said this status would be renewable, but he did not say for how long or under what conditions.

What he was categorical about is that, after the permit expires, the workers would have to return to their native countries, even if the conditions there that had forced them to come to the United States to survive had not improved one iota.

In the future, only workers abroad would be allowed to seek temporary worker status. Undocumented workers already in the United States would be ineligible after an initial period.

This is really just an updated version of the infamous “bracero” program of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Under this program, more than 4 million Mexican farm laborers came to the United States as temporary workers. “Nothing short of legalized slavery” is how U.S. Department of Labor official Lee G. Williams described it. He would have known. He was the last administrator of the bracero program.

Just like what Bush is proposing today, braceros had part of their wages withheld, which were supposedly to be given to them when they returned to Mexico. Most never saw a penny. The purpose of the Bush program is not to end the second-class status of undocumented workers, but to perpetuate it under a new name.

What the corporate interests that run the U.S. government want with all their laws against “illegal aliens” is not to drive them out of the country, but precisely to keep them “illegal”—an untouchable caste who, like Blacks in the slave era under the Dred Scott decision, had “no rights which any white man was bound to respect.”

Bush now proposes this under a different name, “temporary worker,” except that the bracero program was limited to agriculture, whereas Bush’s program will make temporary workers available to all employers.

Bush claims that these workers would have the full protection of U.S. labor laws. That is a lie. By tying your right to remain in the country to employment, all an employer has to do is fire you and have the immigration cops pick you up for deportation.

Bush says that “reform must begin by confronting a basic fact of life and economics: some of the jobs being generated in America’s growing economy are jobs American citizens are not filling.” But the “basic fact of life and economics” that Bush is trying to get around is that if an employer can’t find workers willing to accept the pay and conditions, that employer will be forced to offer more. He wants to short-circuit the functioning of the labor market by flooding the country with cheap labor and thus driving down wages for all workers.

What Bush is proposing is to have the government recruit workers abroad for chiseling employers who want to offer starvation wages, no benefits, and no job security for back-breaking work—instead of the employer being forced to offer better wages and conditions.

This represents a threat to the standard of living of all working people. Using government-imported temporary workers as a club, the bosses will drive down wages in industry after industry. That is precisely how employers already use undocumented immigrants in industries like agriculture. What Bush proposes is to have the government organize it for them on a national scale and apply it to all facets of the economy.

Bush claims that temporary workers who wanted to would be eligible to apply for permanent residency and eventually citizenship. However, they would have to stand in line behind all the people currently applying, as well as behind all those who come in the future with a higher priority under the law. With green cards rationed to 140,000 a year, Bush’s promise is completely empty.

There are now in the United States between 8 million and 14 million undocumented workers, a figure that is growing by several hundred thousand people a year. If we take the lowest estimate, and assume only one quarter want to stay, it would take nearly 15 years for all of them to get green cards—assuming no one else in the world was allowed to immigrate to the United States in the meantime. So what happens when the temporary work permits expire?

The idea that millions of people would simply pack up and leave is ludicrous. If that were to happen, the U.S. economy would be thrown into a terrible crisis, because for all the rhetoric about immigrants “stealing” American jobs, the truth is immigrants create jobs. They, too, have to have a roof over their heads, they eat food, buy clothing, go to movies. Such a drop in consumer demand would send the country into a catastrophic depression. What will really happen is that people will stay, undocumented as they are today, except that the government will know who they are and where they live. And these newly “illegal” workers will be all the more vulnerable.

Ruthless employers will feel even freer to abuse and exploit them, and the workers will have no choice but to put up with it, knowing the government will supply the boss with more temporary workers if they say no. Bush in his speech talked about American history, and his proposal would send the country back in time—not to the epoch of the great waves of immigration from Europe but to the days of indentured servitude when workers were treated as slaves.