David Hanners of the Pioneer Press has a great story today about a lawsuit filed by two Latino men that accuses the owner of a downtown St. Paul McDonald's of refusing to hire them because they were born in the United States.
When the men were being interviewed a manager allegedly told them he only hired "Mexicans from Mexico" because American citizens of Mexican descent always quit.
This type of incident is probably relatively common, if rarely pursued through legal routes. Most people could agree that current immigration laws impact both native-born and foreign-born undocumented workers in negative ways; lowering pay rates and workplace standards. In fact, the only party that consistently benefits from the federal government's oversights seems to be business owners.
I'm not just spitting out empty rhetoric. A couple weeks back, up to 700 undocumented workers were swept up in a weekend of raids at meatpacking plants in Iowa. At least 300 people will serve prison time before they're deported, according to the Washington Post. As recently as last week, no charges have been brought against management or owners who hired illegal workers, and ignored the government's earlier notifications that up to 70% of their workforce was using invalid IDs.
On the bosses side, New York based owner Aaron Rubashkin denies that the company knowingly hired illegals. He says he pays his taxes, therefore it's the government's job to keep illegal workers out.
In the governments corner, Kelly Nantel, a spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement who conducted the raid, insisted on the difficulty of prosecuting employers to the Washington Post:
"Developing sufficient evidence against employers requires complex, white-collar crime investigations that can take years to bear fruit."
Wink.
The thing that relates to the above McDonald's story is that employers have been given such leeway by the government that they don't even bother to hide their violations, not to mention enforce labor standards for this newly precarious class of undocumented workers, the Post reports that workers were not paid regularly and that some were abused.
Also, it would be dishonest to pretend that American workers haven't been hurt by this influx of low-wage workers. Fifteen years ago, workers at these plants would have been in a union, and earned a decent wage and benefits. Remember Hormel?
But this issue transcends the right and left orthodoxies on immigration. Groups from the Iowa Civil Rights Commission to seven-term Republican congressman Tom Latham, are starting to see common ground. In a recent editorial, the Boston Herald called the Iowa debacle a "raid on fairness."
The fact is: If the government really wanted to slow or stop illegal immigration, than it would cut off the demand; bosses who hire workers for low-wages. Instead, it engages in theater, these drop-in-the-bucket raids that tear apart families and leave those who remain fearful and even more susceptible to the predations of unscrupulous bosses or criminals, sometimes one and the same.
By pursuing immigration in this manner, they please the wealthy industries that fund their campaigns while reassigning blame for their pissed off working class constituencies onto immigrants.
You thought McDonald's was greasy and made you feel sick.
Posts
i actually don't think it's an issue of winking and "not really wanting" to enforce exisiting immigration laws vis-a-vis bosses. (Obviously congress doesn't "want" to pass additional anti-illegal-hiring related legislation or, more holistically, do one of myriad pro-labor things it could do to make hiring undocumented workers less lucrative/alluring, but I'm talking about the "wants" of the enforcement end.) It's absolutely true that it's exponentially harder to successfully go after the bosses than the workers. Setting the "objective" complexity of proof of intent and so forth aside -- totally unnecessary when it's as simple as "you're not a citizen and you have no work papers" -- like everything else in our adversarial system get out of jail free cards in the form of savvy lawyers are generally available for the right price, which the kings of kosher are doubtless able to pay. It's structural. My guess is there's a corrolary between the whole conundrum of shitty corporate media reporting: I highly doubt DoJ prosecutors are sitting around laughing about how they're gonna let the bigwigs go, it's just infinitely harder to prosecute and have a reasonable chance of conviction given the nature of the twin beasts (the crime and the justice system) and they know it. It's akin to the well-meaning reporters working for US-based TV news who might want to produce a "controversial" story: if it would require a lot of background in order to deal with the shock of shattered expectations it will produce, it ain't gonna get made, and one can in a sense say truthfully it is for the prima facie apolitical reason of "time constraints". I mean, based on my recollection of the coverage of the Iowa bust in the NYT and WP at the time and in the days after, I bought that there is definite intent to go after the bosses in that case, if only because these dudes in particular were so crass and brazen about what they're doing.
ReplyDeleteAs a practical matter given the current political lay of the land, I wonder if a legislative coalition couldn't be built on a platform of, on the one hand, total amnesty and citizenship for everybody here and on the other stupid-silly berlin wall levels of border enforcement on the other. I kind of tend to think the left's insistence that there's no way to actually block the border is conditioned by the knowledge that those presently advocating doing so are pretty much all racist shitheads. Sure, it might be impossible to do it literally totally, but it's a comedy of errors right now. The thing is, everybody except a few zealots that are dealing with such matters [or would deal with such matters in an Obama admin] at high levels of the executive understand very well that at present the US economy and lots of campaign donors depend very much on a steady stream of undocumented workers. Which shapes budgets. And directives. But I don't think the footsoldiers are cognizant of (or, more properly, motivated by) that shit when they're going about the business of immigration enforcement. And I don't think there's enough legislators that are that in-the-loop on whatever de facto conspiracy exists to keep 'em coming for pro-business reasons. I think there's also room to exploit the same divisions FDR exploited amongst the owning classes, i.e. corporate enterprise with its preferences for predictability and what used to be called scientific management v. down-and-dirty, worker-rapacious small businesses.
*cross-posted to www.rhubarbarism.com-*
ReplyDeleteGood points, Toby. Especially the FDR thing. A couple responses and a little ranting.
To me, the leftist orthodoxy on immigration is pretty flawed because it ignores that a flood of cheap workers lowers everyone's wages and working conditions. That's not racist or xenophobic, that's the reality of a market economy. It's really disrespectful to working people for the largely white-collar progressive class to ignore the pain caused by lowered wages and benefits.
Easy example: kitchens. People I've worked with other the years told me you used to be able to make a pretty decent wage in kitchens, even at a bar. These days, bosses expect ridiculous commitments and you're lucky if they'll even spring for a shift drink. It's not that Americans don't want to do these jobs; it's that we don't want to do them for $6 an hour, 60 hours a week.
The continued criminalization of immigrants has the added benefit for the bosses of making it difficult for undocumented immigrants to organize unions (bosses call ICE if they hear union talk), which if anyone remembers, is supposed to be how we level the work playing field. I like immigration, I respect the history of it in this country, and the borders are pretty illegitimate (if you really want to start with that), but I think ignoring these sad realities of the immigration system undermines progressives and alienates working people.
In regards to bosses sucking up to industry by prosecuting workers instead of owners, I think it's less a conspiracy, than the fact that politicians rub shoulders with this owning class all the time. To piss them off would rile up the corporate owned media AND most of their financial backers. Also, if you were ICE and had a limited budget, would you rather get involved in long court battles against wealthy owners, and maybe lose? Or would you rather get the stats from prosecuting thousands of lawyer-less immigrants? It's the same reason we have two million low level drug dealers in prison instead of the couple hundred bosses (thanks, The Wire).
Obviously, the immigration thing is systematic and overwhelming, that's why it's such a hard thing for progressives to get a grasp on. But it's something that has a direct effect on the people in my neighborhood, on whether they're afraid to call a social worker or cop if they're getting abused or trafficked, on whether they, and me along with them, make decent money with decent benefits instead of experiencing the maximum exploitation that's so common. Some bitter progressives talk about lowering the standard of living in the United States until it's equal with Central America, but I prefer the idea of raising the normal worker's standard of living until the bottom rungs of the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans is down in the millions again, instead of one and a half billion. Where do you think all this excess profit is coming from anyway?
-Jon