Immigration is a human right

Immigrants intercepted aboard a makeshift boat on their way to Spain from Africa. (Photo by Santiago Ferrero)

     A new specter is haunting not just Europe but the entire planet Earth: the mass movement and migration of millions of people on a scale unprecedented in human history as a result of war, political conflict, and economic predation. The International Organization for Migration (IOM), an intergovernmental monitoring agency, estimated in 1992 that 100 million people were on the move; today their estimate is 200 million people moving under perilous conditions on well-traveled routes from the southern Americas to north Americas, from eastern Europe to western Europe, from Africa to Europe and the Middle East, from Asia to Africa, Australia, and the Americas. Many do not survive the dangerous trips, many are subject to violent crimes and disabling injuries along the way. Many are unaccompanied women and minors. All are escaping intolerable conditions and risking everything to find a better life for themselves and their families.
     On every route taken by undocumented migrants, human rights catastrophes are the norm. Governments in destination countries know full well what migrants are subjected to in order to gain entry to a country and they turn a blind eye to the often criminal misconduct migrants endure. In just a cursory review of some of the routes, there is substantial forced trafficking for debt bondage, slavery, and of women and children for purposes of sexual exploitation and violence. Where in previous migrations, men dominated, today there is a huge feminization of immigration, along with millions of unaccompanied minors. The migration of orphaned and abandoned children is perhaps most noteworthy between Mexico and the US and between Zimbabwe and South Africa. (Children from Mexico are often attempting to reunite with parents who already migrated.) These are particularly vulnerable groups to depredation and crime. Hundreds (some estimate as high as 1,000) of unidentified migrants die every year on the US-Mexico border from heat stroke, dehydration, hyperthermia, drowning. Hundreds are injured and dismembered  jumping on and off moving trains en route to the US border. Thousands die from traveling on overcrowded, rickety boats from Africa to southern Europe and from the Middle East to Australia. Thousands of Ethiopian and Somali migrants attempting to enter Saudi Arabia from Yemen suffer from diarrheal diseases, malaria, respiratory infections, snake bites, and exposure from sleeping in the open. Migrants everywhere are extorted for money, murdered, disappeared, raped, maltreated. Illegal trafficking of migrants–distinct from coerced trafficking for slavery or prostitution–is an operation with estimated earnings up to $11 billion per year. Many perform a service; many are predators.
     Todays mass migrations include millions of workers moving across country, between countries, and between continents to find work. There is scarcely a country unaffected by this massive movement of people in what is called a “transnational revolution” and what is not just an episodic phenomenon but will be a determinant factor in international politics for a long time. This global migration is a result of the economic, social, and political transformations of the post-Cold War period, particularly the globalization of capital and commodities, and to constant military ventures. Deteriorating economic conditions and effects of IMF structural adjustment programs have rendered many countries incapable of sustaining their populations and compel people to migrate.
     The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 made all 15 of its republics sovereign states and eliminated the social securities which, while inadequate, kept millions of people economically afloat. The ensuing economic and political chaos of that disintegration and  restoration of capitalism led to massive unemployment and a massive head-long rush of millions to western Europe. After the fall of the Berlin Wall over one million East Germans moved west in the first year alone.
     For purposes of immigration control, governments of destination countries make distinctions between economic immigrants seeking employment and political immigrants seeking asylum from persecution, civil conflict, and war. That distinction served a political purpose during the Cold War as a way to discredit communism by accepting its refugees. Now asylum seekers are fleeing from capitalist dictatorships and conflicts so new restrictions are placed on definitions of political refugees. Nevertheless, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants estimates the world total of asylum seekers as 62 million, with 32 million displaced by war and living in refugee camps set up throughout the world.
     Persons seeking asylum from war, coups, revolutions, repression, include especially those displaced by US military ventures in Southeast Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia. The US Gulf War against Iraq displaced millions of Iraqi citizens along with forcing the mass departure of an estimated 5 million foreign workers (from Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Palestine, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka). The US war against Afghanistan has displaced over 5 million refugees to Pakistan and Iran and has also internally displaced millions of Pakistanis fleeing US drone attacks. There are nearly 2 million Somalis displaced or seeking asylum from US bombing and war and 4 million experiencing famine. Asylum seekers in the 1970s included refugees from the US-backed coup in Chile, from apartheid in South Africa, political upheavals in several other countries. Colonization of Palestine by Zionist settlers from around the world not only dispersed millions of Palestinians to Syria, Jordan, Africa and other Gulf states but there are still 5 million living in refugee camps. The list of mass dislocations goes on and on.
     The migration within countries is often to find work in mining, agriculture, construction, or domestic service in other regions but the primary dislocation is from rural to urban slums. This is caused by the ruthless expropriation of small farm holders by agribusiness in league with the IMF and World Bank under the banner and defrauding of the “green revolution” in agriculture. This  change in agriculture is integral to neoliberalism and involves giant international food conglomerates like Monsanto, chemical companies like Dow, government agencies like USAID, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the structural adjustment programs of the IMF, and financing by the World Bank. The narrative used to promote this usurpation of land tenure is to increase world food production to overcome mass starvation. In fact, it is a program intended to undercut radical political proposals for agrarian reform that would serve farmers and not the oligarchs. Mexico, India, Latin America, and now Africa are the laboratories where this devolution in agriculture is being  carried out. The green revolution involves the production of cash crops for the global market, leaving countries unable to produce food for themselves and making them dependent on the global market; it involves herbicides, pesticides, chemical farming, and genetically modified crops which have caused land degradation, pollution, loss of biodiversity and depleted food quality; and it requires genetically restricted technologies making farmers dependent on outside companies for new seeds. The green revolution does not leave redistribution of land ownership and tenancy up for grabs but privileges international agribusiness so that food systems are firmly in their control. The food shortage has not thereby been solved but exacerbated. In a world where the majority of people depend on farming for their livelihood, that has meant dispossession and migration.
     Another result of this neoliberal process has been deforestation, hydroelectric projects, oil drilling, mining, massive water diversion schemes requiring the forced removal of people from traditional lands farmed by them for countless generations, the dispossession of millions of farmers and farm labor and their forced migration to urban poverty. There is no more cogent critic of this process in India than Vandana Shiva and no country which more glaringly exposes the neoliberal schemes and crimes against farmers than India, where about 17,000 small dispossessed farmers commit suicide every year. The indigenous peoples being forcibly removed from their lands to make room for agribusiness have not gone quietly but their resistance has been violently crushed militarily in every country.
     In the 20th century, US and European employers deliberately recruited foreign workers to work in agriculture, construction, domestic service. Temporary work migration programs were established to ensure and monitor migration. To the employer, this served a dual purpose: to acquire cheap labor and to undercut the organization and strength of domestic labor. Immigrants also served as convenient scapegoats in periods of economic downturn. Foreign immigrants became an irreplaceable component of the labor force. Regulation of immigration was first initiated during WWI and strengthened during the 1920s and 1930s but was relaxed after WWII with European and US guest workers programs. The organized labor movement has never practiced the concept of fellowship with immigrant workers. It has historically held to a racist and xenophobic program of seeing immigrant workers as competitors, refusing to organize them into unions or defend them against attacks. As a result, employers continue to use immigrant labor to weaken domestic labor. Unorganized immigrant workers are indeed competitors; there’s no getting around that. But while their representatives have often made initiatives to union officials to bridge this chasm and work together, outside of some recent ceremonial rhetoric by US union leaders, no initiatives have been pursued to organize immigrant workers and make labor a solid phalanx of unity and solidarity. And that is true in Europe as well as the US. Until that is done, immigrant labor will remain a lever to weaken the trade union movement and eventually to destroy it. There’s no way around that either.
     On the jobs, migrants have no rights that are respected. In Ontario, Canada, eleven Peruvian migrant workers were killed in an auto accident when the van carrying them between farm jobs was broadsided by a truck. In Canada, there have been several car crashes in the past decade involving deaths and serious injuries for migrant workers. A guest workers program brings 30,000 seasonal migrant workers to Canada mainly for agriculture; there are undoubtedly thousands more working without visas. All are most certainly their families’ main income earners. Like the US, Canada and the agriculture industry are quick to dispose of migrant workers who get injured on the job. Most often, they’re deported to their own countries without compensation, unable to pay for medical care, and unable to work. According to a Canadian farm workers rights group, migrants who get injured in the course of employment are entitled to the same rights & benefits as citizens but the accident was not declared a workplace accident. The men who survived the crash will likely lose worker’s compensation benefits and will certainly be deported. Recently, a 21-year old undocumented worker from Mexico, paralyzed in a construction job accident in Chicago, Illinois, was deported to Mexico where he died in a hospital unable to provide the necessary care and away from his family. In the US, child labor is illegal except for agricultural work where an estimated 800,000 immigrant children work with no protective laws. It is also common for employers to withhold wages from undocumented workers, knowing there is little legal recourse that could not lead to deportation.
     The unwillingness of trade unions to defend and organize immigrant workers has meant the unchecked growth of right-wing nationalist opposition to them. These white supremacist and often neo-Nazi formations mobilize and in some places engage in violent attacks on refugees. Under the influence of the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, immigrant rights became seen as a human rights issue. Whereas the Civil rights Movement weakened the hold of supremacist ideas, political inaction has made cultural differences–allegedly irreconcilable–dominate recent discourse. Allowing white supremacists to go unchecked has meant the creation of a fictitious nationalist ideal of cultural unity and homogeneity and the dominance of racism and xenophobia. From Arizona to Amsterdam, xenophobes fret about being overcome by immigrants and fixate on birth rates among immigrant women. In every election campaign, in every country of the past decades, immigration is a pivotal issue with politicians trying to outdo each other in animosity and viciousness, like proposing electrified walls and moats of alligators to keep immigrants out.
     Governments of course face a conundrum with their immigration policy. Immigrant labor is more vital than ever in the campaign to destroy organized labor at the same time as the economic crisis has increased their value as scapegoats and a way to undermine the Bill of Rights. A concern to the oligarchs is the rising militancy among immigrants in several countries, including France, England, the US where the second generation of immigrants protest discrimination, heavy-handed policing, racism, and unemployment. Thus there are new quotas, new restrictions, tighter border controls, new walls going up around the world, greater policing of employers, more work place raids by immigration officials, more detentions, and more deportations and this is true in every destination country. And of course, after 9/11, governments added a national security scare to justify greater surveillance and militarization of the borders.
     One of the ways in which immigrant labor is demeaned is by categorizing them as unskilled rural people. Ignoring that they’re more skilled than the average US politician, this category is a US Department of Labor classification of little descriptive value except to demean. Many migrate with considerable skills. Many have more or as much knowledge and training as the average US male who can apply for well-paid factory or trade jobs. The fact that they find work in agriculture fields does not mean that’s all they are capable of doing; that is where they are permitted to work. They are also not moving from “developing countries” to industrial countries. Many of their home countries have industrial plants doing the outsourced work US workers used to do for much more money. More importantly, the so-called industrial countries have no intention of allowing the “developing countries” to develop. They are a source of cheap labor and natural resources and that’s how they intend to keep them.
     To capitalists, globalization goes one way–to serve their profits and their need for cheap labor; globalization means free flowing, cross border exploitation and they respect no  impediments to their profiteering like national sovereignty. But when it comes to immigrants and their labor and human rights, they hold firm to national sovereignty and the sanctity of borders and the nation-state. Such nationalist fervor is not in the interest of working people. For us, globalization means only one thing: solidarity with other working people wherever they are from. This is not sentimental malarkey propagated by bleeding hearts but an essential program for freedom from the shackles of exploitation for everyone. Our solidarity and our wisdom begin with demanding the borders be opened, with opposition to US plunder abroad, and with campaigning within our unions and churches and political groups for the rights of undocumented immigrants.