Beacon Broadside

Let's Stop Making Migration a Crime

David Bacon is a writer and photographer. He is the author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants and the forthcoming The Right to Stay Home: Ending Forced Migration and the Criminalization of Immigrants. His photographs and stories can be found at http://dbacon.igc.org.

This post originally appeared at TruthOut.

A scene from the million-person march in Los Angeles in 2006. (Photo: David Bacon)

We need an immigration policy based on human, civil and labor rights, which looks at the reasons why people come to the U.S., and how we can end the criminalization of their status and work. While proposals from Congress and the administration have started the debate over the need for change in our immigration policy, they are not only too limited and ignore the global nature of migration, but they will actually make the problem of criminalization much worse. We need a better alternative.

This alternative should start by looking at the roots of migration - the reasons why people come to the U.S. in the first place. Movement and migration is a human right. But we live in a world in which a lot of migration isn’t voluntary, but is forced by poverty and so-called economic reforms.

Our trade policy, and the economic measures we impose on countries like Mexico, El Salvador or the Philippines make poverty worse. When people get poorer and their wages go down, it creates opportunities for U.S. corporate investment. This is what drives our trade policy. But the human cost is very high.

In El Salvador today, the U.S. Embassy is telling the government to sell off its water, hospitals, schools and highways to give U.S. investors a chance to make money. This policy is enabled by the Central American Free Trade Agreement, whose purpose was increasing opportunities in El Salvador for U.S. investors. It was imposed on the people of that country in the face of fierce popular opposition.

Alex Gomez, a leader of Salvadoran public sector unions, came to San Francisco in February to explain what the consequences of this latest free trade initiative will be. He says if these public resources are privatized, tens of thousands of workers will lose their jobs, and their unions will be destroyed. They will then have to leave the country to survive. 

According to Gomez, four million have already left El Salvador. Two million have come to the US, not because they love it here, but because they can’t survive any longer at home. These migrants come without papers, because there are no visas for two million people from this small country.

The North American Free Trade Agreement did even more damage than CAFTA. It let U.S. corporations dump corn in Mexico, to take over the market there with imports from the U.S. Today one company, Smithfield Foods, sells almost a third of all the pork consumed by Mexicans. Because of this dumping and the market takeover, prices dropped so low that millions of Mexican farmers couldn’t survive. They too had to leave home.

Mexico used to be self-sufficient in corn and meat production. Corn cultivation started there in Oaxaca many centuries ago. Now Mexico is a net corn and meat importer from the U.S.

During the years NAFTA has been in effect, the number of people in the U.S. born in Mexico went from 4.5 million to 12.67 million. Today about 11% of all Mexicans live in the U.S. About 5.7 million of those who came were able to get some kind of visa, but another 7 million couldn’t. There just aren’t that many visas. But they came anyway because they had very little choice, if they wanted to survive or their families to prosper.

Our immigration laws turn these people into criminals. They say that if migrants without papers work here it’s a crime. But how can people survive here if they don’t work? We need a different kind of immigration policy - that stops putting such pressure on people to leave, and that doesn’t treat them as criminals if they do.

What would it look like?

First, we should tell the truth, as the labor-supported TRADE Act would have us do, which was introduced into Congress by Mike Michaud from Maine. We should hold hearings as the bill says, about the effects of NAFTA and CAFTA, and collect evidence about the way those agreements have displaced people in the U.S. and other countries as well.

Then we need to renegotiate those existing agreements to eliminate the causes of displacement. If we provide compensation to communities that have suffered the effects of free trade and corporate economic reforms, that were intended to benefit U.S. investors, it would be more than simple justice. It might give people more resources and more of a future at home.

It makes no sense to negotiate new trade agreements that displace even more people or lower living standards. This administration has negotiated three so far, with Peru, Panama and South Korea. It is now negotiating a new one -- the Trans Pacific Partnership. These are all pro-corporate, people-displacing agreements. We should prohibit these and any new ones like them. Instead, we need to make sure all future trade treaties require adequate farm prices and income in farming communities, promote unions and high wages, and don’t require the privatization of public services. 

Increasingly these international agreements, like Mode 4 of the World Trade Organization, treat displaced migrants as a cheap and vulnerable labor force. Our trade negotiators call for regulating their flow with guest worker programs. This is exactly the wrong direction. We should ban the inclusion of guest workers in any future trade agreement or treaty instead.

When diplomacy doesn’t work, U.S. military intervention and aid programs are to support trade agreements, structural adjustment policies or market economic reforms. This has been U.S. policy in Honduras and Haiti, for instance. This also must stop. If the U.S. Embassy is putting pressure on countries like El Salvador to adopt measures that benefit corporate investors at the expense of workers and farmers, the Ambassador should be recalled and the interference halted.

Finally, we should ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and Their Families. This international agreement would give us an alternative framework for recognizing the rights of displaced migrants, and the responsibility of both sending and receiving countries for their protection.

The failure of successive U.S. administrations to even present this agreement to Congress for ratification highlights the unpleasant truth about the real effect of our immigration policy. When millions of migrants arrive here, they are criminalized because they lack immigration status, especially when they go to work.

Labor and civil rights advocates often fondly remember the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act because of it had an amnesty, signed by President Ronald Reagan, which gave legal status relatively quickly to almost four million people. But the law also contained employer sanctions for the first time, which we often forget. That provision says that employers will be fined and punished if they hire undocumented workers.

This provision was promoted by those who said that if work became illegal, then undocumented migration would end. This clearly failed, since the number increased many-fold in the years that followed. Compared to the pressure to leave home, criminalizing work was not a deterrent to those who sought work here so that their families at home would survive.

This provision sounded like a law against employers, but it was not. It became an anti-worker law. No boss ever went to jail for violating it. The fines were not great. When the government agents seek to enforce it, employers who cooperate with them are forgiven. But over the last four years alone, tens of thousands of workers have been fired for not having papers. The true objects of punishment under this law have always been workers, not employers.

Now Congress is talking about a new reform, and we have to use this opportunity to push to repeal this law. Some think that since a new legalization will hopefully give many undocumented workers legal status, sanction won’t really affect anyone anymore. 

But even the most positive predictions about a new legalization still assume that millions of people will not quality because of stringent qualifications, high fees and decades-long waiting periods. Those people will still be subject to the sanctions law. And the day after a new reform passes millions more people will come to the U.S. because of the same pressures that caused past waves of migration. This is especially true if a new immigration reform ignores the need to renegotiate trade agreements and eliminate the huge displacement of people.

These future migrants are not strangers. They are the husbands and wives, parents, and cousins of people already here - people who are already part of our communities. They come from the same towns, and are linked to neighborhoods here in the U.S. by the ties that have been created by migration, work and family. They will work in our workplaces, participate in our organizing drives, and belong to our unions. We need to keep the sanctions law from being applied to them, making it a crime for them to work. Unfortunately, however, Congress members aren’t talking about getting rid of sanctions. In fact, they and the administration want to make the current application even worse.

So let’s do a reality check. Let’s tell the truth about how has this law been used. 

One method for enforcing sanctions happens when an employer uses it to screen people it is going to hire, using an error-filled government database called E-verify. Congress and the administration are calling for making it mandatory for all employers to use this database, and refuse to hire anyone who it flags as undocumented. 

For people who are currently working now and have no papers, what it means is that if they lose their jobs, it will be much hard to find others. That will make people fear taking any action that offends their boss, like joining a union or complaining about illegal conditions. That’s good for the boss, but bad for the workers.

Employers today not only use this database to screen new hires - they also use it to reverify the immigration status of people who are already working. This is a violation of the law. Once it accepts the form filled out by a job seeker (called the I-9), along with their ID, the employer can’t reverify it all over again at some point in the future. But they do. Sometimes it’s convenient to get rid of workers who have accumulated benefits and raises over years of service, and replace them with new hires at lower wages. 

Reverification just happened, for instance, to three workers who belong to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union at Waste Management, Inc. in San Leandro, California. The union has gone to the Oakland City Council to protest these illegal firings, because WMI operates under a city garbage contract.

Employers sometimes announce they intend to begin using the E-Verify database when their workers start to organize. That’s what managers announced at the Mi Pueblo supermarkets in northern California. There E-Verify checks are being used to terrorize workers to keep them from supporting a union, Local 5 of the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Another method for enforcing sanctions against workers is even more widespread. Immigration agents, working for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), go into the personnel records of an employer. They then compare the information given by workers on the I-9 form to the E-Verify database, looking for workers who don’t have legal immigration status. ICE then makes a list of those workers and sends it to the company, telling the employer to fire them.

This is what happened at Pacific Steel Castings in Berkeley, California, last year. Two hundred and fourteen workers were fired as a result. Some had worked in the foundry for over 20 years. Many lost their homes, and their children’s dreams of going to college were destroyed. 

Over last four years, hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs in these enforcement actions, called I-9 audits. Almost five hundred janitors in San Francisco, and over a thousand in Minneapolis. Thousands of workers doing some of the hardest work imaginable in meatpacking plants around the country. Farm workers. Construction workers. But the employers all given reduced fines, and many immunity from punishment entirely, if they cooperated in firing their own workers.

If unions and communities mount a fight that exposes the terrible human cost of these firings, it is possible to stop them. The young Dreamers showed that this is possible. These courageous young people convinced the administration to stop deporting students brought to the U.S. without papers as children. They forced the administration to change the way it enforces immigration law. It can be done for workers too, if there’s a fight.

But we must also change the sanctions law. Otherwise, our experience over the 25 years since it passed shows that immigration authorities will simply find another method for making working a crime for people who don’t have papers.

The other unpleasant truth about sanctions is that they are linked to the growth of guest worker programs. One of the main purposes of making it a crime to work without papers is to force people to come to the U.S. with visas that tie them to their employers and recruiters. These workers are often more vulnerable than the undocumented, since they get deported if they lose their jobs or get fired. Guest worker programs have been called Close to Slavery by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others who have documented their extreme exploitation. The sanctions law functions as a way to pressure people into choosing that path to come to the U.S. to work.

When employer sanctions are used to make workers vulnerable to pressure, to break unions or to force people into guest worker programs, their real effect is to force people into low wage jobs with no rights. This is a subsidy for employers, and brings down wages for everyone. The sanctions law makes it harder for all workers to organize to improve conditions. This doesn’t just affect the workers who have no papers themselves. When it becomes harder for one group to organize, other workers have a harder time organizing too.

Some Washington lobbyists accept as a fact of life that the sanctions law will continue, or even worse, that E-Verify will become a mandatory national program for all employers. But for unions and workers who have had to deal with its effects , it would be much better to immediately repeal it, and dismantle the E-Verify database. 

The use of the sanctions law against workers and unions is what led the California Labor Federation to call for its repeal as early as 1994, a position it continued to adopt in successive conventions. Other unions joined it including the garment unions and service employees. Finally labor councils in California and then around the country passed resolutions making the same call, and sent them to the historic AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles in 1999. This led to an historic debate and the adoption of a new, pro-immigrant policy. Delegates at that convention believed that we have to stop enforcing immigration law in the workplace, because its real effect is to make workers vulnerable to employers, and to make it harder for all workers to organize to improve conditions.

In addition to repealing the national sanctions law, we should also prohibit states from enacting copycat measures. These laws have passed not just in Arizona or Alabama or Mississippi. California passed a state employer sanctions law before the federal law took effect in 1986.

What would really help workers to raise wages and improve conditions is much stricter enforcement of worker protection and anti-discrimination laws, for everyone. Funding used for immigration enforcement on the job should be given instead to the Department of Labor, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Labor Relations Board and other labor law enforcement agencies. It will be a good day for all workers when ICE agents instead become wage and hour inspectors.

Threats by employers who use immigration status to keep workers from organizing unions or protesting illegal conditions should be a crime. That makes it necessary to overturn two Supreme Court decisions, Hoffman and Sure-Tan. In these cases the court said that if workers are fired for union activity and have no papers, the boss doesn’t have to rehire them or pay them lost wages, because the sanctions law makes it illegal to employ them to begin with. But when there’s no punishment for violating labor rights, workers have no rights. This also hurts other workers in the same workplace who want to organize a union, since it makes the undocumented so vulnerable. Instead, we should increase workplace rights by prohibiting immigration enforcement during labor disputes or against workers who complain about illegal conditions.

To ensure that in the workplace we all have the same rights we also have to eliminate the way undocumented people get ripped off by funds like Social Security and unemployment. All workers contribute to the Social Security fund, but because undocumented people are working under bad numbers, they pay in but can never collect the benefits. This will come back to haunt us when those workers need disability payments or get too old to work - something that happens to us all. This is the reason we set up the Social Security system to begin with - because we don’t want old people eating dog food, regardless of where they were born.

Instead today the Social Security number has become much more a means to check immigration status, harming workers instead of providing them the benefits that were its original and true purpose. There is a simple solution to this problem as well. Social Security numbers should be made available for everyone, regardless of immigration status. Everyone should pay into the system and everyone has a right to the benefits those payments create. By the same token all workers should be able to receive unemployment benefits regardless of status, since they and their employers pay into the funds. 

In the end, we need an immigration policy that brings people together, instead of pitting workers against each other, as our current system does. During a time of economic crisis especially we need to reduce job competition, rather than stoking fears. In 2005 Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston made an innovative proposal that would have set up job creation and training programs for unemployed workers at the same time that it would have given legal status to workers without papers. This proposal put unemployed workers and immigrants on the same side, giving them both something to fight for whether they were out of work, or working without immigration status. 

This proposal, and the others made here, are part of the Dignity Campaign, a plan for immigration reform based on human, civil and labor rights. In the last three years, local unions and labor councils in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Alameda County adopted resolutions supporting the Dignity Campaign, arguing that trade policy is linked to the increasing vulnerability of immigrant workers because of the sanctions law and guest worker progrsms. The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement adopted a similar resolution.

An immigration policy that benefits migrants, their home communities, and working people here in the U.S. has to have a long term perspective. Instead of just trying to please interest groups well-represented in Congress, we need to ask, where are we going? What will actually solve the problems that we experience on our jobs and in our homes with current laws and policies? 

We need a system that produces security, not insecurity. We need a commitment to equality and equal status - getting rid of color and national lines instead of making them deeper. We need to make it easier for workers to organize, by getting rid of what makes people vulnerable -- to end job competition we need full employment, and to gain organizing rights we need labor law enforcement together with eliminating sanctions and firings. It’s not likely that many corporations will support such a program, so the politicians who represent us have to choose whose side they’re on. 

Working people in Mexico, El Salvador, the Philippines, the US and other countries need the same things. Secure jobs at a living wage. Rights in our workplaces and communities. The freedom to travel and seek a future for our families, and the ability to stay home and have a decent future there too. The borders between our countries, then, should be common grounds that unite us, not lines that divide us.

 

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David Bacon: A Year in Labor Stories

David Bacon is a writer and photojournalist based in Oakland and Berkeley, California. He is the author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, and his new bookbook about migration and work will be published by Beacon Press in 2013. 

Bacon writes about labor, immigration, and international politics for The Nation, In These Times, American Prospect, TruthOut, among other publications, and he regularly appears on KPFA and KQED radio. The East Bay Express described his work: "As the US labor movement has come under near constant attack in recent years, the Oakland journalist is one of the last of his breed in the country." 

For Labor Day, we've collected some of Bacon's stories about labor as a snapshot of a year in workers' rights. 

All photos copyright David Bacon, used by permission of the author.

 

UpFront on KPFA: (August 22) David Bacon interviews a house cleaner about California's Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights (which passed the California Assembly this past week). Interview starts at 18:15.

UpFront - Drones, Castlewood, Vote Suppression - August 22, 2012 at 7:00am

Click to listen (or download)

 

"In early April, an anti-immigrant bill like those that swept through legislatures in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina was stopped cold in Mississippi." How Mississippi's Black/Brown Strategy Beat the South's Anti-Immigrant Wave The Nation, April 20.

"Employers say they’re 'independent contractors.' Drivers call that a legal trick to deny them their rights–a nice-sounding label obscuring an ugly reality." Seattle Port Strike Challenges "Independent Contractor" Lie In These Times, February 21.

"Migrant rights activists, artisans and public officials spoke about the important role migration continues to play in Oaxaca's economic, social, political and family life. The state in southern Mexico is the source of one of the largest waves of migration from Mexico to the United States." "Oaxaca's New Government Calls for Migrant Rights," TruthOut, January 5.

"A bruising 16-year battle, the fight brought together African American, white, and Mexican immigrant workers, who were able to find common ground despite the company’s attempts to use racial division and immigration enforcement to try to defeat them." "Common Ground on the Kill Floor: Organizing Smithfield," Labor Notes, April 20.

Can the Triquis Go Home?

Today's post is from David Bacon, a former union organizer and a fellow at the Oakland Institute. Bacon is the author of Illegal People and the forthcoming The Right to Not Migrate. This post originally appeared at New American Media.

OAXACA, MEXICO -- Just before Christmas, the women and children who'd spent 17 months living on the sidewalk outside the governor's palace in Oaxaca announced they were going home. In the spring of 2010, these refugees abandoned their homes in San Juan Copala, the ceremonial center of the Triqui people. Many houses were burned after they left.

Stringing tarps and ropes across the palacio's outdoor colonnade, they set up their planton, an impromptu community of sleeping and cooking areas across the sidewalk from the zocalo, the plaza at Oaxaca's heart. It looked hauntingly similar to the settlements of the Occupy protesters that spread across the United States last fall, but rather than fighting to remain in their tents, the Triqui families in the planton were fighting for the right not to live there, for the right to go home.

Finally, this December, they announced an agreement with representatives of Gabino Cue, elected governor last July, who promised to protect the families if they returned to San Juan Copala. Still, many question whether they can really go back safely. Even more importantly, they ask what can bring an end to the violence that has claimed the lives of at least 500 people over the last two decades.

This question is not just debated on the sidewalk by the zocalo, or only in Oaxaca. It is asked, albeit in whispers, by migrant farm workers in Baja California and Sinaloa, in northern Mexico, and in Hollister and Greenfield, in California's Salinas Valley. 

Indigenous Triqui children march through the streets of Oaxaca on December 19, 2011, to protest a wave of killihngs in their home community of San Juan Copala.

Mixtecos have been leaving Oaxaca for decades, driven mostly by the endemic poverty of the Mexican countryside, says Gaspar Rivera Salgado, a Mixteco professor at UCLA and past coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations. Yet for many years the Triquis, who were equally poor and live in the same region, stayed put. Their migration only began when the violence in their communities made life unbearable.

Once displaced, they began to migrate within the Mixteca region, then within Oaxaca, and then within Mexico. They traveled north, following other Oaxacans to San Quintin in the 1980s, and then in the 1990s, to California. 

Triqui migrants might have escaped the violence, but not the political presence of the groups they were fleeing. Wherever they went, the Movement for the Unification of the Triqui Struggle (MULT) and the Social Welfare Group of the Triqui Region (UBISORT) sent agents, requiring people to pay monetary quotas and participate in mobilizations.

In the 1980s, Triqui activists organized MULT. "It was a grassroots organization to fight the caciques (rural political bosses) over control of land, forests and other natural resources," says Rivera Salgado. "The caciques were so violent that MULT members had to arm themselves. Eventually, those armed men became a paramilitary group. The caciques were overcome, but what began as a grassroots organization became something different. There was no transition to a civil society form of organization."

A Triqui boy carries a sign that says, "We want justice for the widows, the orphans and our injured.

Eventually MULT itself fractured into factions. One faction became UBISORT, which began fighting MULT for political control of Triqui communities. Oaxaca's repressive state government used the conflict to enhance its own control. 

UBISORT was organized with the support of then-governor Jose Murat, and became a political support base for Oaxaca's old governing party, the PRI (Party of the Institutionalized Revolution). MULT organized its own political party, the Popular Unity Party. But behind the parties were the guns.

"A civil war went on between them," Rivera Salgado says. In 2006, Raul Marcial Perez, a leader of UBISORT, was assassinated. Then in October, 2010, Heriberto Pazos, the founder of MULT, was gunned down in the streets of Oaxaca city. 

In the only municipio that remained in Triqui hand, San Martin Itunyoso, Antonio Jacinto López Martínez, a MULT leader, was elected president in 2004, but then couldn't take office because of threats, and fled to the nearby city of Tlaxiaco. Last October, as he was crossing the street there with two members of his family, a gunman shot him in the head. Many others were killed in years of violence and retribution.

The Triquis attempted to create an autonomous town in San Juan Copala, and were expelled by paramilitary gangs.  They carried crosses with the names of people who were killed.

The High Cost of Migration

For Triquies, migration has had a high cost - they've had to fight for survival wherever they went.  "They faced tremendous racism and prejudice," Rivera Salgado charges. "They're always the outsiders, treated like savages."

Over the course of some 25 years, so many have fled the political murders plaguing their homeland that they've formed towns like Nueva Colonia Triqui, or New Triqui Town, in Baja's San Quintin Valley. In that colonia, or in California's Triqui neighborhoods, people ask whether peace is possible, and if it were, would they go home too?

"People left looking for a better future, but they worry about the safety of their families at home," says activist Elvira Santos (whose name has been changed), pointing to the fear that many Triquis share of reprisals for speaking publicly not only against themselves, but also against their families in Oaxaca.  "They'll think twice before going back because the conflicts and the same armed groups are still there."

In north Mexico, migrants found farm labor camps with dirt floors and no electricity. When they wanted homes for children and families, Triquis and other indigenous migrants had to mount land invasions, building houses on Federal land, and then awaiting the police sent to evict them. 

The march called on the governor, Gabino Cue, to guarantee their safety when they try to return to the town and to arrest those responsible for the killings.

In one of the most celebrated cases, Julio Sandoval, a Triqui leader from Yosoyuxi, was imprisoned for two years in the penitentiary in Ensenada for helping families settle in Cañon Buenavista.

When Triqui migrant farm workers arrived in Greenfield, the local police and legal system condemned them for cultural practices like home births or early marriages, or for drinking in public, a normal activity at home. Eventually they reached agreement with the local police chief, who even set up a desk in the police station for a Triqui leader to provide translation. 

Then town residents, who saw the migrants as unwelcome invaders, tried to fire the chief. The Triqui community by then numbered at least 3,000 people. Helped by the United Farm Workers, migrants marched through town to assert their right to live there.

Roots of the Violence

Adelfo Regino Montes, a Mixe indigenous leader and writer for Mexico's leftwing daily, La Jornada, traces the violence in the Triqui region to "political submission, territorial disintegration, economic exploitation, racial discrimination and exclusion in every aspect of daily life." 

Triqui men joined the women and children in the march.

After Mexico won its independence, Triquis controlled three municipios, or counties, where they were the majority. That gave them some degree of political power. After the Mexican Revolution, however, two of the municipios were dissolved, and much of the community's autonomy was lost.

"San Juan Copala itself was no longer a municipio," Santos explains. "Many mestizos [people of mixed indigenous and Spanish ancestry] didn't want Triquis to have power. They introduced alcohol and arms in order to gain control of the land and resources." Those caciques  ruled Triqui towns using repression and violence.

"[Triqui municipios] were dispersed into districts where non-indigenous people are the majority," Regino Montes said in a 2010 Jornada column. "The big majority of Triqui communities have been excluded from any decisions that affect their lives and destinies, undermining their autonomy and freedom to make their own choices. Those decision remained in the hands of the caciques, the state and federal governments, and the party leaders of the PRI."

In the only municipio that remained in Triqui hands, San Martin Itunyoso, Antonio Jacinto López Martínez, a MULT leader, was elected president in 2004, but then couldn't take office because of threats, and fled to the nearby city of Tlaxiaco. Last October, as he was crossing the street there with two members of his family, a gunman shot him in the head.

The women carry a banner that says, "Neither forgive nor forget, punishment to the assassins.   Autonomous town of San Juan Copala."

"The violence is created by a lack of the assertion of the rule of law. But the government has excused its failure to stop it with such racist ideas as 'Triquis are savages and uncivilized,'" Rivera Salgado charges.

Indigenous self-government

Looking for a way out themselves, in 2007 Triqui activists created the autonomous municipio of San Juan Copala, inspired by the experiences of the Zapatistas in nearby Chiapas. "They recreated the system of indigenous self-government," Regino Montes wrote, "the only real possibility for peace in the region."

"They were looking for a political alternative," adds Rivera Salgado, "and they used the political process.  They weren't armed. And they won in a clean election."

Those activists had roots in another splinter from MULT, called MULT Independiente, or MULT-I. UBISORT and MULT united against them, and eventually laid siege to the town, which went on for months. A number of residents were killed. 

A Triqui girl carries a sign that says, "Long live the autonomy of the native people of the planet earth."

On April 27, 2010, a caravan of Mexican and European human rights activists set out for San Juan Copala.  They were stopped at a roadblock, and gunmen began shooting. Beatriz Alberta Cariño Trujillo, a Mexican human rights activist, and a Finnish supporter Tyri Antero Jaakkola, were murdered. The others fled into the hills.

Human rights lawyer Gabriela Jimenez Rodriguez said she was captured by hooded men who told her they were from UBISORT and MULT. "They told us than no one could pass here, that it was their territory."  Finally she and others were released. Police recovered the two bodies, but never tried to enter the town.

On August 22, three more people were killed and two wounded, as they drove to nearby Santa Cruz Tilapia, where residents were also trying to establish an autonomous municipio. One was the town leader, Antonio Ramirez Lopez, 78 years old. 

Then in September, 500 paramilitaries surrounded San Juan Copala and told supporters of the autonomous municipio they had 24 hours to leave. "That wasn't just a threat," Reyna Martinez, one of the town's leaders, told La Jornada. "They did the same thing in San Miguel Copala, where they killed twelve of our colleagues in the city hall. Neither state nor Federal authorities dare even to come into San Juan Copala.

Women and children walked past the street vendors selling toys in the city's main plaza, with the star and masked figure on their banner showing their connection to the Zapatista movement.

No need for protective measures?

Oaxaca's governor at the time, Ulisses Ruiz, notorious for his violent suppression of the teachers' strike of 2006, said there were no gunmen, deaths or disappearances in the Triqui region, and no need for protective measures for residents. By that time, families who'd fled were already living in the planton outside his office, and some had gone to Mexico City to set up a similar planton there. "They got us to leave," said another leader, Marcos Albino Ortiz, "but that doesn't mean we've given up."

Last July, however, Gabino Cue, who Ruiz defeated in the election of 2004, beat the PRI candidate for governor. UBISORT campaigned for the PRI. MULT's PUP ran its own candidate, viewed largely as an attempt to draw votes from Cue. After the election, Cue put Region Montes in charge of the state Secretariat of Indigenous Affairs. Rufino Dominguez, former coordinator for the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, was appointed director of the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants.

The women in the planton didn't stop demonstrating against the government, however, and the violence continued. In August three MULTI members were killed in Agua Fria. Their bodies were brought to the planton for a public funeral. In October, Reyna Martinez was arrested with two dozen others for occupying a piece of land near the airport, in an act of civil disobedience. They demanded that the new state government provide protection to allow their return to San Juan Copala, pay for the destruction of peoples' homes there, and arrest those responsible for the killings. And in December women and children in bright red huipils marched through Oaxaca city, demanding the government accept the conditions.

In response to the pressure, Rufino Juarez, a UBISORT leader, was arrested in May for killing MULTI activist Celestino Hernandez Cruz a year earlier. Cue's administration then issued arrest orders for a number of others, but so far none have been detained, with one exception. Authorities did arrest a MULTI founder and retired teacher, Miguel Angel Velasco, accusing him of arranging the disappearance of two young women from MULT in 2007.

The planton in front of the governor's palace on the main square in Oaxaca.

Nevertheless, Marcos Albino Ortiz, says that the state government "has fulfilled about half of what it agreed to. We're going back to San Juan Copala, and we're talking with the communities there to ensure they support our decision. Our objective is to pacify the region." He predicts that the state and federal police will provide an escort, along with representatives of the Interamerican Commission for Human Rights, which has issued orders of protection for many of the activists. Some 135 families have received some restitution for their burned homes, he says.

Can Triquis go home?

To ensure peace in San Juan Copala, however, some police presence there is unavoidable, at least in the short run, Rivera Salgado believes. "The litmus test is whether the government will create the conditions in which people can go home," he says. "You can't change overnight a situation that's existed for 30 years. In the short term they have to disarm the armed people. This can create political space. But military occupation is not a long-term solution. People need to become a force for change themselves."

Following the ambush of the caravan, Regino Montes asserted, "The solution must be the recognition and respect, in law and in action, for the process of Triqui autonomy." Now he is a responsible official in a government that has the power to implement that recommendation.

Peace in Oaxaca may encourage Triqui migrants to return, but going home won't be easy. No one can afford to go back to Oaxaca, just to take a look. 

A child sleeps in a planton set up by the Triquis in Mexico City's zocalo, or main square.

Triqui migration hit the U.S. after the amnesty of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, so most people have no legal immigration status.  They can cross the border into Mexico, but coming back to the U.S. is a much bigger problem. It's expensive -- $2500 for a coyote for the crossing is two months wages for a farm worker. Plus, it's more dangerous every year, as people get pushed by increased enforcement into the most remote sections of the border to cross. 

Going back home is a permanent decision, not a temporary visit. Nor has the fear of violence there diminished. In the last few years, five Triqui families even won political asylum, helped by San Francisco's Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. Nevertheless, "most migrants get much harsher treatment now," according to Rivera Salgado. "The current enforcement policy is based on excluding them, through violence and jail at the border, and isolation and fear in their community. The idea is to make life so hard for them in the U.S. they'll have to leave.  But where are they supposed to go?"

"I think a lot of people would go home if they could," Santos believes. "Our land is very productive, and as farm workers here we've seen new crops that we could grow in Oaxaca. But we need jobs and schools there, and especially security. Right now, we don't know if we can even hope for that. Some of us have lost hope. Our governments have made these promises before. It would be good if it were true this time, but we have to see if their actions match their words.""

"And where is home?" asks Rivera Salgado. "Lots of Triquis have grown up in San Quintin or Greenfield by now. Yet the first generation still yearns for connection to San Juan Copala. It is part of their identity and sense of belonging.  Everybody needs that."

Public Workers: A Visual Reality Check

David Bacon is the author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. He is a writer and photojournalist based in Oakland and Berkeley, California. 

In California cities like San Jose, voters this election passed ballot measures to weaken the retirement system for public workers.  These are the same kind of measures that have brought workers into the streets of France for weeks in protest.

Beyond the ballot initiatives, the election season of 2010 was filled with rhetoric blaming public workers for the economic woes of cities and states.  It's hard to understand, in an era of foreclosures by banks that pay their executives bonuses of millions of dollars, while getting bailouts from the Federal government, why public workers should be held responsible for the current economic crisis.  Who contributes more to the welfare of our communities - a teacher or a hedge fund manager?

But perhaps the most important thing to remember is what these workers do.  These photographs are meant to inspire some obvious questions.  Can people do this work, if they're then cast adrift once they're too old?  What would happen to all of us if they didn't do these jobs?  

All photos © David Bacon.

Sam Johnson, a worker for the City of Burlingame, prepares to tap a water main to provide water service to a home.

Protestors Demand Immigrant Rights and Condemn SB1070

Today's post is from David Bacon, author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org, and read more about Beacon's immigration titles at "Beyond SB1070" on Beacon.org.

 In San Francisco and Oakland, immigrants and community activists protested Arizona's SB 1070, which would require police and local law enforcement to check the immigration status of people they suspect might be undocumented, on the day the law took effect.  A day earlier Federal Judge Susan Bolton invalidated much of the law, but demonstrations involving thousands of people took place against the law around the country nevertheless.

In San Francisco demonstrators also protested cooperation between police and immigration agents in arresting people for deportation, in front of the office of California Attorney General Jerry Brown.  Brown, a candidate for governor, ruled that San Francisco could not opt out of the Secure Communities program, which mandates such cooperation and would invalidate San Francisco's sanctuary city ordinance.  Protestors then went into Brown's office and told one of his assistants about their objections to his action.

Renee Saucedo, an attorney with La Raza Centro Legal and a leader of the protestors, said:  "It's no coincidence that Arizona has this outrageous law, because all the proposals from Washington on immigration reform encourage the same criminalization, racial profiling and discrimination.  Immigrant communities are demanding an end to these policies and laws, including "Secure Communities" and "E-Verify."  We deserve a new direction from Washington, with real change, including legalization and workers' rights."

How NAFTA Produced Mexican Migration

Today's post is from David Bacon's Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. David Bacon spent thirty years as a labor organizer and immigrant rights activist. In the excerpt below he looks at how NAFTA and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies forced Mexicans into the migrant stream. For more information about Beacon Press books on immigrant rights, we invite you to visit our home page.

Beginning around 1980, the World Bank and the IMF began imposing a one-size-fits-all formula for development, called structural adjustment programs. These required borrowing countries to adopt a package of economic reforms, such as privatization, ending subsidies and price controls, trade liberalization, and reduced worker protections. After more than two decades, there is no strong evidence that this approach has achieved its stated goal of stimulating growth, while the toll on working people has been staggering. The IRCA commission report acknowledged the potential for harm by noting that "efforts should be made to ease transitional costs in human suffering."

The North American Free Trade Agreement, however, was not intended to relieve human suffering.

David Bacon: We Need a Better Alternative for Immigration Reform

Today's post is from David Bacon, author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. Bacon spent thirty years as a labor organizer and immigrant rights activist. His articles appear in The Nation, American Prospect, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he hosts a weekly radio show on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California.

Senators Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham announced Thursday their plan for immigration reform. Unfortunately, it is a retread, recycling the same bad ideas that led to the defeat of reform efforts over the last five years. In some ways, their proposal is even worse.

Schumer and Graham dramatize the lack of new ideas among Washington powerbrokers. Real immigration reform requires a real alternative. We need a different framework that embodies the goals of immigrants and working people, not the political calculations of a reluctant Congress.

David Bacon: The Human Face of Budget Cuts

Today’s post is from David Bacon, author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. Bacon spent thirty years as a labor organizer and immigrant rights activist. His articles appear in The Nation, American Prospect, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he hosts a weekly radio show on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California. This post also appeared on Truthout.

OAKLAND, CA -- Cesar Cota was the first in his family to attend college. "Now it's hard to achieve my dream," he says, "because the state put higher fees on us, and cut services and classes." Cota, a student at LA City College, was encouraged by the internship program of the LA College Faculty Guild to describe the human cost of budget cuts in he community college system.

David Robinson, who's worked since he was 14, hoped he'd get automotive mechanic training, and a good job at the end of it. "But by cutting these programs and raising fees," he says, "you're cutting opportunity for a lot of people who need it."

Another endangered student is Tina Vinaja, a mother of three teenagers whose husband took a weekend job to help pay her tuition hikes. Monica Mejia, a single mom, wants to get out of the low-wage trap. "Without community college," she says, "I'll end up getting paid minimum wage. I can't afford the fee hikes. I can barely make ends meet now."

LA City College even suspended its sports programs for a year. The school had a legendary basketball program that gave low-income students a pathway out of poverty. JaQay Carlyle says City College basketball sent him to UC Davis and on to law school.

Living Under the Trees: Indigenous Mexican Farm Workers in California

Today’s post is from award-winning photojournalist David Bacon. Bacon spent thirty years as a labor organizer and immigrant rights activist. His articles appear in The Nation, American Prospect, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he hosts a weekly radio show on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California. He is the author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. The photos in this essay are from his photography project, Living Under the Trees, and are used here with the photographer’s permission.

In 2006, Mexico experienced profound social turmoil. Dramatic political and economic conflicts uprooted and displaced thousands of families, forcing many to consider leaving home. Teachers struck in Oaxaca, and after their demonstrations were tear-gassed, a virtual insurrection paralyzed the state capitol for months. Economic desperation lies at the root of these political and social movements — one major basis of the pressure on people to migrate north. But repression brought to bear on those movements also leads to migration.  It's no accident that Oaxaca is one of the main starting points for the current stream of Mexican migrants coming to the U.S.

About 30 million Mexicans survive on less than 30 pesos a day — not quite $3. The minimum wage is 53 pesos a day. The federal government estimates that 37.7% of Mexico’s 106 million citizens — 40 million people — live in poverty. Some 25 million, or 23.6%, live in extreme poverty. In rural Mexico, over ten million people have a daily income of less than 12 pesos — a little over a dollar. In the southern state of Oaxaca that category of extreme poverty encompasses 75% of its 3.4 million residents, according to EDUCA, an education and development organization. That makes Oaxaca the second-poorest state in Mexico, after Chiapas.

The majority of Oaxacans are indigenous people — that is, they belong to communities and ethnic groups that existed long before Columbus landed in the Caribbean. Oaxacans speak 23 different languages, and among Mexican states, Oaxaca has the second-highest concentration of indigenous residents.
Thousands of indigenous people leave Oaxaca's hillside villages for the United States every year. They leave, not only for economic reasons, but also because a repressive political system thwarts the kind of economic development that could lift income in the poorest rural areas. Lack of development pushes people off the land. And as they find their way to other parts of Mexico or the United States, the money they send home becomes crucial to the survival of the towns they leave behind.

"Migration is a necessity, not a choice," explained Romualdo Juan Gutierrez Cortez, a teacher in Santiago Juxtlahuaca, in Oaxaca's rural Mixteca region. "There is no work here. It is a very daunting task for a Mexican teacher to convince students to get an education and stay in the country. It is disheartening to see a student go through many hardships to get an education here in Mexico and become a professional, and then later in the United States do manual labor. Sometimes those with an education are working side by side with others who do not even know how to read."

This is an era of indigenous migration, when the numbers of migrants from communities and cultures which long predated Columbus, have now swelled to become the majority of people working in the fields. While dispersed inside Mexico and the U.S. as a result of migration, the movement of people has created, in a sense, one larger community, located in many places simultaneously. Settlements of Triquis, Mixtecs, Chatinos and other indigenous groups are bound together by shared culture and language, and the social organizations people bring with them from place to place.

At first glance, they seem to be living in some of the most difficult conditions imaginable. But these communities have strong cultural bonds holding people together, creating a support network that provides food and companionship for migrants just arriving from the south, with no work and no money.

Near Sebastopol, a community of Chatinos takes shelter under blue tarps, strung from tree to tree, setting mattresses on shipping pallets, to keep blankets and clothing out of the dirt. In the nearby town of Graton they stand on the sidewalk in front of little bookstores and cafes, hoping a labor contractor will pick them up for a day’s work on a neighboring farm.

Purepecha migrants from the Mexican state of Michoacan make up the majority of the hundreds of families living in two enormous trailer parks, on a US Indian reservation in the remote desert near the Salton Sea. The Coachella Valley's rich citrus, grape and date crops all depend on their work.
Migrants living near Del Mar, one of San Diego's most affluent suburbs, harvest tomatoes, strawberries, oranges and avocados, the county's principal crops. Formerly they camped under the trees on hillsides within sight of new housing developments. Last year their settlement was forcibly removed after the Minutemen destroyed an altar built by the workers for the Catholic mass. County authorities then evicted the community.

Just as this San Diego community was moved out of sight and out of mind, so the communities of indigenous migrant farm workers all over California have been banished from sight. Sometimes invisibility has been forced on them. But often it has been by choice or caution on the part of migrants themselves, anxious to avoid hostile neighbors, the authorities, or other threatening outsiders.       
Living Under the Trees seeks to document the experiences and conditions of indigenous farm worker communities, including: housing problems, especially for migrants and new arrivals and families struggling with lack of space, and difficult working conditions. The project's purpose is to win public support for policies supporting those communities by: putting a human face on conditions, and providing a forum in which people speak for themselves. It focuses on the social movements in indigenous communities, and the way indigenous culture helps communities survive and enjoy life.

The communities documented are locacted in San Diego, Coachella, Arvin, Oxnard and Santa Paula, Santa Maria, Fresno and Selma, Salinas and Greenfield, and Santa Rosa. They include Mixtecos, Triquis, Zapotecos, Chatinos, and Purepechas. They also include farmworkers who don’t self-identify as members of indigenous communities, but who live and work in similar conditions.

The photographs focus on the relationship between community residents and their surroundings, and their relations with each other. They document many aspects of community life, including cooking and eating, housing, working conditions, social and cultural activities. They present situations of extreme poverty, but they also present people as actors, capable of changing conditions, organizing themselves, and making critical decisions. The images seek to convey a sense of intimacy, and emotional connection.

Read other posts by David Bacon on Beacon Broadside.

The project is a partnership between David Bacon, documentary photographer and journalist (The Children of NAFTA, UC Press, 2004, and Communities Without Border, Cornell/ILR Press, 2006), California Rural Legal Assistance, especially its Indigenous Farm Worker Project, and the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB).

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