Anti-Immigrant Debate Nested In Capitol Hill,
While Arrests and Deportations Terrorize Immigrant Communities
By Carlos Marentes, Border Agricultural Workers Project (El Paso, TX)
While national debate on immigration reform continues after a disasterous hault in negotiations on Capitol Hill, the US Department of Homeland Security has intensified a campaign to hunt, arrest and deport undocumented workers and their families.
The debate on the so-called “immigration reform” has been mainly controlled by the anti-immigrant legislators and corporate interests. For this reason, most of the proposals in Congress include both the criminalization of undocumented people and the tightening of the border, as well as a temporary workers program to secure cheap labor for certain industries, especially for industrial agriculture.
Despite false claims that the latest bill offered amnesty, both Congress and the Bush administration have refused to even consider the demands by migrant rights groups to approve a program to legalize the millions of undocumented workers and their families already in this country.
Meanwhile, as everyone argues about what to do with immigration, at least legislatively, the undocumented workers and their families are facing today the most terrible national campaign of persecution and deportations in many years.
Hundreds of immigrant families, many of whom have been living in this country for many years, have been captured in the last several weeks and deported to their place of origin during raids conducted by officers of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In the most recent case, ICE agents arrested 31 immigrants in a largely Hispanic neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut. Coincidently, this raid took place two days after the city had approved an ordinance to make official identification cards available to all undocumented immigrants. Similar raids have taken place recently in Texas, Oregon, New Jersey, Arizona and other states. While in some places the local authorities and communities have criticized the raids and deportations of long time residents, other state and local governments have assisted ICE. In Colorado, law enforcement authorities provided 15,000 names of suspected undocumented workers to federal authorities.
This campaign against immigrants will set a new record of apprehensions and deportations in comparison with last year. In 2006, ICE deported nearly 195,000 undocumented workers, a 13 percent increase over the numbers for the previous year, and 27,500 more immigrants were sent to detention centers.
Meanwhile the terrible economic situation in Mexico continues to push people to the North seeking means of survival. The increasing unemployment and poverty south of the border, especially in rural Mexico, as a result of neoliberal policies in both countries, continue to ruin communities and displace people who are no longer able to survive in their homeland. The immigration is now of such magnitude that more than 500 thousand Mexicans leave their families and their communities to cross the US border seeking employment.
For example, as a result of the implementation of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it is estimated that two million Mexican farmers have been displaced, mainly due to the increase of US agricultural imports. According to a recent official report of the National Population Council (Conapo), the crisis in the countryside has resulted in a decline of the rural population, from 24.7 million in 2000, to less than 24.4 million by 2005. The entrance of the next faze of NAFTA in January 2008, with the total removal of tariffs and quotas for corn, bean, powered milk and sugar, will inevitably increase the displacement of more rural people thus increasing migration.
Arriving illegally, in debt to coyotes, or even legally indentured through the guest worker program, immigrant workers in this country are subject to the worse of possible circumstances. The estimated 2.5 million farm (vastly immigrant) workers in the United States are exhibit A for exploitation. Legal or not, they have no real worker protections or health care in hazardous, back breaking jobs. As big agribusiness benefits from cheap, unorganized labor, farmworkers must face not only the daily perils of unprotected work, but the fear of being separated from their families.
As legislators on Capitol Hill engage in rhetorical banter, they seem to captivate the American people in a superfluous debate aimed at the perfect solution. But the crisis we are dealing with on the ground has everything to do with entrenched policies nobody wants to challenge or even mention. The most recent failed attempt at reform in the Senate was one of the worse reform bills we’ve yet to see; it would have made a bad situation even worse. And, like all the others in the past decade, it failed to address the trade policies which provoke thousands of people to leave their families, their communities and their land to escape poverty and hunger.
