Vol. 76/No. 21      May 28, 2012

According to the Wall Street Journal, ICE agents have spoken at conferences of capitalist farmers and announced an expected “40% increase in the number of employers inspected this year.”

The silent raids have been increased fivefold since Obama took office. The administration has also continued to expand E-verify, which allows bosses to reference employee work status records online.

The tougher enforcement of anti-immigrant measures combined with effects of the economic crisis have caused a shift in immigration from Mexico.

A study released by the Pew Hispanic Center April 23 estimates that the number of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. without papers declined from a peak of nearly 7 million in 2007 to some 6.1 million in 2011, although those with papers increased slightly.

The Pew study notes that “immigration from Mexico dropped after the U.S. housing market (and construction employment) collapsed in 2006.” Hundreds of thousands of workers have returned to Mexico over the last few years, often with their entire families, including U.S.-born children. The resulting decline “may become the first sustained loss since the 1930s, when the Mexican-born population shrank during the Great Depression,” the report says.

From 1929 to 1934, as many as 500,000 Mexicans returned to Mexico, amid falling wages and rising deportations, according to the Texas State Historical Association.

After the Depression ended the capitalists again needed cheap labor power. In 1942 Washington implemented the bracero program, which at its peak brought in more than 400,000 Mexican workers a year, mostly to work in the fields, with few rights.

Today, 30 percent of immigrants in the U.S. were born in Mexico.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is challenging state anti-immigrant laws passed in Alabama, Arizona and Georgia, asserting that they interfere with federal enforcement decisions.

The Supreme Court heard arguments on the challenge to Arizona’s SB 1070 law April 25. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted injunctions last year against four parts of the law, including a requirement that cops question the status of anyone they suspect is undocumented and a provision allowing police to arrest those individuals without a warrant.

U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said the government has no objection to Arizona engaging “in detention in support of the enforcement of federal law,” but that decisions on who to prosecute or deport “needs to be an exclusive national power.”

“I don’t see the problem” with SB 1070 provisions, Chief Justice John Roberts told Verrilli. This “is not an effort to enforce federal law. It is an effort to let [the federal government] know about violations of federal law.”

Obama appointee Judge Sonia Sotomayor indicated that she thought Verrilli’s arguments were weak, suggesting, “Why don’t you try to come up with something else?” The court is expected to rule in June.

The day the hearing took place, hundreds of immigrant rights supporters demonstrated in Washington, D.C., and Phoenix against the Arizona law.
 
 
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