Senate fast tracks punitive immigration reform

by James Frickey / June 2007 issue of Socialist Action newspaper

U.S. capitalism has forced its most influential representatives in Washington to reopen the debate over an immigration reform geared to increase their rate of profit in basic industry. A Senate coterie of Republicans and Democrats emerged from a 48-hour secret negotiation with President Bush on May 17 to announce that they had reached a "great compromise" on immigration reform.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid immediately moved to fast-track debate on the bill, originally aiming for a floor-vote by May 25. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi all but promised to block her opponents from issuing alternative legislation. The employer lobby expressed guarded optimism, while its partners—the Service Employees International Union, UNITE-HERE, and the National Council of La Raza—congratulated the effort and set about to "fix" its most objectionable parts.

The AFL-CIO came out against the bill and was joined by the League of United Latin American Citizens, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the American Friends Service Committee, the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and a host of civil liberties and grassroots immigrant organizations.

"Unfortunately," stated AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, "the immigration deal announced today does not address the roots of the immigration crisis. And it abandons long-standing U.S. policy favoring the reunification of families and protecting workers by limiting the size and the scope of guestworker programs—which frequently amount to virtual servitude, where workers’ fates are tied to their employers and their workplace rights are impossible to exercise."

A travesty of amnesty

Under the tutelage of Latino lobbying groups in Washington, the government has skillfully devised a plan that divides the immigrant masses into separate groups, pitting earlier waves of immigrant workers against newer and future arrivals for visas. The inhumanity of U.S. policy, with its grinding bureaucracy, has served to magnify a thousand-fold the perceived significance in the slightest turn of a wheel.

There are immigrants with green cards who have waited 22 years for federal authorities to process their requests to bring a relative to the U.S., a process known as family reunification. If the reform passes, they can expect an answer from the government within the next eight years. In the meantime, the government intends to use the excuse of family reunification to force millions of otherwise eligible immigrant workers in the U.S. to wait eight years for a green card. And the head of the family would have to depart the U.S. just to apply.

No sooner did the government promise to clear the backlog of family reunification visas than it proposed replacing the visa system based on family ties, the norm since 1965, with one that favors highly skilled and highly educated workers. Weakening family bonds are expected to isolate the immigrant worker over time.

Under the reform, a steadily increasing number of permanent visas would be awarded through a "merit" system based on points granted for English-language proficiency, education, and job skills. Siblings and adult children of legal immigrants will be ineligible to apply for visas under the reform. Parents and small children will see their options severely limited. Most guest workers would be barred from bringing their families.

If the government eliminates the family visa program, it would leave no legal channel for its stream of millions of immigrant workers than to register for the guest-worker program.

Media outlets repeat in English and Spanish the official claim that the hour of mass legalization has finally struck. But the legalization promises are empty, starting with Sen. Specter’s immediate "probationary" legalization for 12 million workers that takes effect once the bill becomes a law.

This is a transparent attempt to cover Homeland Security’s military buildup on the border and its capacity for mass roundups in the interior. The telltale sign is the official assurance that no formal legalization process would begin until the border militarization is complete. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid expects the transition to take 18 months.

Obstacles, expenses, and endless frustration are built in to the temporary legalization plan that masquerades as an amnesty. Immigrant workers would need to document three years of residence in the U.S. and pass a criminal background check whose terms are yet to be determined. They would also have to pay thousands in fines and processing fees—costs that are already prohibitive in many cases and liable to increase when the bill moves to the House. The whole process must be repeated when the temporary visa expires in four years.

The pathway to permanent legalization opens to workers who can document six years of U.S. residence. It would require payment of thousands more in fines and processing fees, not to mention English-proficiency, a criminal background check of the entire family, and the departure of the head of the household to the country of origin to file the paperwork. Meanwhile, workers in the U.S. for less than three years would have no choice but to remain fugitives in a brave new world of state persecution.

New means of repression

In the meantime, the government is preparing a military buildup to enforce its new immigration policy and keep its volatile immigrant underclass under control. The U.S. intends to post 18,000 new agents on the Mexico border, construct 370 miles of triple-layered border fencing and 500 miles of vehicle barriers, install 70 ground-based radar and camera towers, deploy four unmanned aerial drones, and set up checkpoints on roadways near the border.

Iraq War profiteers are lined up for government contracts. Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon and Ericsson are vying for the dollars budgeted for the Secure Border Initiative. Halliburton’s Kellogg, Brown & Root has already signed a $385 million option contract with Homeland Security to construct holding centers in the case of an immigration "emergency."

A specialty prison industry for immigrants would be a corporate giveaway. Meanwhile, the immigration reform notes that military veterans recently discharged from active duty will be welcomed to serve as enforcers at the border and in the interior.

Constant fear of arrest and removal would pursue all immigrants who don’t have a valid work visa. The immigration reform calls for hiring 11,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents over the next five years and constructing at least 20 detention facilities in the U.S. that can hold 30,000 immigrants at once. Prime locations for these immigrant prisons, as stated in the bill, are the military bases slated for closure under the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990.

The crime for being a worker without papers is up to six months in jail for the first offense, two years for the second. Jail penalties multiply with minor infractions. Names of offenders are entered into a national database, or blacklist, that disqualifies them from obtaining future work visas or green cards.

Workplace raids are likely to become more common. The bill specifies that at least 25 percent of ICE’s new energy and resources would go to enforcing workplace compliance with immigration law. Fines for employers who hire undocumented workers are also slated to increase, though their risk would no doubt be transferred onto the workers. The government plans to issue an ID card to immigrant workers that contains their genetic information. It is based on a voluntary pilot program that ICE has made available mostly as a handle for employers to bust union drives.

Guest workers—a method to depress wages

Guest workers have historically been wards of their employers, beholden to them for livelihood and legal status. Their rights to form unions and improve working conditions are virtually non-existent, except at great personal risk.

The guest-worker program is first and foremost a move to artificially depress wages. "The proposal does not appear to require that the wage rate be set in accordance with any collective bargaining agreement," writes the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law.

Nor does the proposal abide by the regional wage minimums as specified in the Davis-Bacon Act. Employers would instead have a free hand to qualitatively lower wage rates and encourage speed-up across entire industries, leaving non-immigrant workers at a severe competitive disadvantage in the labor market.

The employer lobby criticized an amendment passed in the Senate in May that reduces the guest-worker quota from 400,000 to 200,000 visas per year and removes its "market-based" system for determining visa increases. But the guest-worker program itself survived by a 64-31 margin a gesture to strike it dead and again by 49-48 an attempt to limit its life to five years. That fact outweighs the bosses’ temporary dissatisfaction. If the guest-worker program is born underweight, it can grow in due time.

By all accounts, the reform proposal will escape the Senate intact and reach the House for a more acrimonious debate in July. President Bush hopes to sign the bill into law by September.

The most daunting hurdle that remains in the Senate is the Coryn amendment, which would disqualify any immigrant who used a false Social Security number from applying for temporary legal status. If this amendment passes, the oasis of legalization will prove to millions of workers to have been a mirage.

It is essential to strip away the bill’s progressive facade, reveal its ruthless implications, and organize immigrants and all working people and friends of civil liberties for a mass-action fightback in time to defeat the proposal.