If approved, such legislation would create a category of workers dependent on an employer to keep their legal status and subject to deportation once their visas expired. It would give federal authorities a list of immigrant workers they could keep track of. And it would make it easier for the ruling class to carry out mass deportations in the case of a depression.
While many undocumented immigrants are expected to take a risk and apply for the temporary worker visas, hoping to obtain a measure of protection even if only for a few years, the measure is designed to defend the interests of the employers at the expense of the rights of working people, particularly immigrant workers.
The plan, one of several legislative proposals on immigration that are likely to be debated in Congress over the coming months, is a response to the needs of U.S. capitalists in the face of the unprecedented increase in the number of immigrant workers who have been drawn to this country by U.S. imperialism.
Many sections of the U.S. economy rely heavily on the superexploited labor power of immigrant workers mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia. These include agriculture, hotels and restaurants, garment and textile, construction, and meatpacking.
The U.S. employers do not seek to drive out undocumented workers. Rather, their goal is to reap added profits and foster divisions in the working class by establishing a pariah layer with few rights and subject to superexploitation. At the same time, the huge influx of immigrants has led to a burgeoning underground economy and has made it more difficult for the employer class and the government to keep track of and control all these working people. Estimates of the number of undocumented workers in the United States today range from 8 million to 12 million—three to four times higher than 1986, when a major immigration bill was enacted under the Reagan administration.
The aim of the bill proposed by the White House and its supporters in Congress is to regularize the status of a substantial section of the working class that is undocumented by turning them into temporary workers, while giving authorities tighter control over them.
The main provisions of the proposed bill are:
Employers, he added, “must report to the government the temporary workers they hire and who leave their employer so that we can keep track of people in the program and better enforce our immigration laws.”
Homeland security offensive
The proposed legislation is intended to reinforce the “homeland security” offensive that the U.S. government is carrying out to restrict workers rights in the name of “fighting terrorism.” In his January 7 announcement, Bush argued in favor of the proposed legislation by saying, “Illegal entry across our border makes more difficult the urgent task of securing the homeland. The system is not working.”
In a related move, the U.S. government has begun fingerprinting visitors to the United States from all but 27—mostly European—countries. Homeland Security Secretary Thomas Ridge said the new regulation was “part of an effort to make sure our borders are open to visitors but closed to terrorists.”
The proposal is also part of the U.S. rulers’ preparations for depression conditions, in which immigrant workers will be further scapegoated for growing unemployment. The proposed immigration bill would subject workers to deportation if they lose their jobs. Employer groups have “welcomed the plan as a way to create a stable workforce and alleviate labor shortages for low-wage and dangerous jobs,” especially “in agriculture and the hotel, health, restaurant and construction industries,” the Washington Post reported January 8.
“The economy can’t expand unless we have workers to fill available jobs,” Randel Johnson, a vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the Post.
“We’re unable to fill the jobs we’re creating,” said Lee Culpepper of the National Restaurant Association. Joseph McInerney, head of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, told USA Today that hotel industry owners will draw on immigrant workers to fill an estimated 700,000 additional jobs by the end of the decade.
With its proposed bill the White House is outflanking Democratic politicians, who have not offered any fundamentally different immigration legislation. It is offering a concrete law allegedly benefiting immigrants, while continuing to act under the banner of “homeland security,” which politicians from both big-business parties have rallied behind.
Immigrant rights organizations have criticized some of the most glaringly reactionary aspects of the proposed legislation, but many accept its framework and look for ways to improve it.
Margie McHugh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, called the White House plan “significantly less than what was on the table before September 11.”
Would strengthen hand of bosses
Labor organizations have criticized the fact that the measure would tie workers to their employers and undercut their ability to defend their rights under the threat of being deported.
In a January 8 statement, the New Jersey-based Farm Worker Support Committee, CATA, said the bill was designed “to ensure an underclass of cheap labor for employers.” While it “may provide a certain measure of relief to undocumented workers in no longer being pursued as criminals,” the legislation would leave workers “at the whim of the employers with few protections if their visas were canceled.”
“You tell me, will these ‘willing workers’ have the right to speak up or organize on the job when they need to be sponsored by willing employers? I doubt it,” said May Chen, international vice president of the garment and textile workers’ union, UNITE.
Given the prospect of several-year delays in being granted permanent residency, some groups point to the prospect of immigrants being deported when their temporary visas expire, even while waiting to be granted more permanent status.
For their part, right-wing politicians and commentators who oppose any relaxation of immigration restrictions loudly criticized the proposal. New Jersey Star Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine fumed that this is “an amnesty on the installment plan.”
Columnist Steven Sailer argued that the intention of the Bush plan “is to use the global ‘reserve army of the unemployed’ to grind American working-class citizens’ pay down to the minimum wage.”
Some commentators have described the new immigration proposal as another “guest worker” program. Such programs have been arrangements between the U.S. and Mexican governments to guarantee a stable, cheap workforce to U.S. agribusiness. They have similarities to the latest proposal in that they sharply limit the rights and mobility of workers, but the White House proposal is much broader because it is aimed at all undocumented workers.
In 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act was passed under the Reagan administration. In another measure to stabilize the workforce by regularizing the status of a layer of undocumented workers, it granted amnesty to nearly 3 million undocumented workers.
At the same time, the 1986 law instituted sanctions against employers hiring undocumented workers. These sanctions, of course, have been used to strengthen the hand of bosses, who can hire undocumented workers and then threaten to call the immigration police if workers seek to organize a union or otherwise defend their rights.
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