Not so fast supporting the Gutierrez Immigration Reform Bill!

[Neal...@aol.com]

 

 

 

On 11/20/09, Mark Day <mda...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Not so fast supporting the Gutierrez Immigration
Reform Bill! explore
all the options, says labor and immigration expert
David Bacon.  Please read below:

 

Dear Mark --

More discussion and house parties could be an important part of building a movement for immigration reform that's based on human rights and families, rather than more enforcement and corporate labor supply programs.  Unfortunately, Gutierrez is proposing the latter, as he has done for the last several years.  Jumping on his bandwagon is not going to get us what we want.  I'm attaching a comparison of Schumer's and Gutierrez' most recent proposals, since we're being told by the DC advocates that this is what's on the table, and this is what we have to live with.

In deciding whether to support the Gutierrez proposal, it's important to describe it accurately.  Gutierrez calls for increased enforcement, both on the border and E-Verify in the workplace.  That will result in the kind of firings we saw at American Apparel, and potentially workplace raids as well.  His proposal for an employment-based visa system for future flows is essentially the corporate program for contract labor, or guest worker programs.

How many people would be legalized with Gutierrez' bill is hard to tell.  First, he's not very specific about what the qualifications are.  And second, in Congress in recent years legalization proposals have wound up including huge fines, long waits, lots of disqualifications, and other barriers.

Lastly, there's no proposal for dealing with the source of migration -- NAFTA and the other economic policies imposed on countries like Mexico, to make it easier for big companies to make profits while displacing millions of people through increased poverty, agricultural dumping, privatization, job loss, and busted unions.  Without some effort to fix this, imposing more enforcement will simply create more undocumented people.

If we want something that really represents what we want and know will move us toward rights and equality, we have to build a movement to get it.  Getting stampeded into bills proposing guest workers and more enforcement, with the justification that "it's the only way to get something now," avoids the need to organize and fight for what we really want.  This is the same way many DC advocates have tried to force the corporate labor supply/enforcement bills as the only proposals for consideration for the last few years.

An immigration system based on providing employers a labor supply, with enforcement to make workers participate, is what corporations want, not what we want.  It's the same bad deal that was on the table in the Kennedy-McCain bill, and the other corporate immigration reform bills that died in the last several years.  Most of the draconian enforcement proposals we've seen implemented over the last several years were actually first proposed in those bills.  They were then supported by the rationale that the only way to get legalization was to agree to them.  That's what we're going to hear again -- in fact, we're hearing it already.

Why don't we fight for what we really want?

David