Last year 409,849 people were deported from the United States by the administration of President Barack Obama.
According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency of the Department of Homeland Security, current deportations average 30,791 per month, including over 8,500 parents of US citizen children.
The US Federal government spends more today on border and immigration enforcement than on all other law enforcement agencies combined.
In each of the last five years, ICE has audited the records of over 2000 employers, ordering them to fire workers who lack legal immigration status, a requirement under US law since 1986.
While the firing of those without papers increases, so does the number of “guest workers” brought to the US on visas that tie their ability to stay to their jobs.
Between 700,000 and 900,000 migrants on temporary work visas are working in the US at any given time.
The most notorious of these visa programs, H2A and H2B, have been called “close to slavery” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which documented extensive abuse of worker rights.
This apparent contradiction was explained by Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, as “closing the back door and opening the front door.”
Heavy enforcement would deter undocumented migration, and would force migrants into contract labour programs, he asserted.
Heavy enforcement and contract labour programs are features of all the “’comprehensive immigration reform” (CIR) plans put forward by both the Bush and Obama administrations.
Yet another CIR bill, S. 744, was passed by the US Senate in April, expanding guest worker programs, and setting up a point system for awarding visas based on skills desired by corporate employers.
A similar proposal remains stalled in the US House of Representatives.
And despite Congress’ inability to pass any of those bills, successive US administrations have used their executive powers to unilaterally implement increased enforcement and deportations, and greater use of guest worker programs.
UN HLD
In early October the UN High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development (UN HLD) convenes in New York City.
The grassroots organisations of the Peoples’ Global Action on Migration (PGA) will meet simultaneously to propose a progressive agenda for migrant rights.
These gatherings highlight the inability of the US Congress to revamp the nation’s immigration laws, while making it clear that Congress and the administration are moving backwards, as migrant communities in the rest of the world are trying to move forward.
A July 2013 report from the UN Secretary General, for example, voices much more concern for the enforcement of migrants’ rights than what is typically displayed in Congress.
At the same time, however, the report reflects the desire by many countries to treat the money migrants send home as a source of economic development, making up the shortfall as neoliberal economic reforms cut the budget for basic.
The assumption is that migrants should serve as an international labour supply.
“Member States should mainstream migration into national development plans, poverty reduction strategies,” the report urges. These are euphemisms for a labour export policy in developing countries, and guest worker programs in developed ones.
The report also calls for expediting the transfer of remittances as one of its major reforms.
The PGA, on the other hand, breaks with the view of migrants as a labour supply, and criticises the emphasis on labour schemes and market policies for regulating “legal channels of migration.”
Instead, it puts forward a “critique of the circular migration/temporary labour model, which includes guest-worker and labour export programmes as an economic development model, reliance on remittances and models that treat workers as commodities.”
Both the UN and the PGA agree that migration should be decriminalised, but the PGA’s solutions are more radical, including ending mass deportations and detentions, and a heavier emphasis on workers’ rights.
The PGA also calls for including “push factors” in defining migrant rights.
In Mexico, for instance, migrant organisations like the Binational Front of Indigenous Organisations have called for the “right to not migrate” – for economic development that provides an alternative to forced migration, and for political change to make this possible.
Basic protections
Some basic protections for migrants are already codified in UN and ILO conventions, especially the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrants and their Families which extends basic human rights without distinction to all migrants and their families.
It supports the right to family reunification, establishes the principle of "equality of treatment" with citizens of the host country in relation to employment and education, protects migrants against collective deportation, and makes both origin and destination countries responsible for protecting these rights.
All countries retain the right to determine who is admitted to their territories, and under what conditions people gain the right to work.
No US administration has ever submitted it to Congress for ratification.
Instead, the reform debate in the US Congress pits advocates of comprehensive reform, including increased enforcement, guest worker programs, and limited legalisation for the undocumented (the liberal alternative) against advocates of harsher enforcement, even more guest worker programs, and no legalisation (the conservative alternative).
Progressive alternatives based on protecting the rights of migrants are dismissed as politically impossible.
The Senate bill S. 744, further criminalises migration and makes it mandatory for all employers to check their workers’ immigration status through an electronic database and requires photometric ID to get a job.
At the same time, it erodes the family reunification system that was a product of the US civil rights movement, making the labour needs of employers more important than family relationships.
The bill does have a legalization program, which conservative Republicans in Congress oppose. But a large percentage of the 11 million who need legal status would not qualify because of restrictions including income requirements that penalize the poor.
If enacted as written, millions of workers ineligible for legalisation would be prohibited from working legally, and subject to the increased enforcement schemes.
Workers vulnerable because of their undocumented or guest worker status would find it harder to organise, giving employers greater leverage to demand low wages.
Republican proposals
The Republican proposals in the House of Representatives are even worse.
Several would remove the few existing restrictions on current guest worker programs – lowering wages, removing housing mandates, and ending requirements that employers hire local workers before contracting outside the country.
Another bill would allow any state to pass its own penalties for undocumented status, and use local police to enforce them, creating a virtual reign of terror for immigrant communities.
Democrats and Republicans are in deadlock over their legislative proposals.
And while the Congress is paralyzed, the deportations and firings continue.
The AFL-CIO, along with many other organisations, has collected signatures asking the administration to halt deportations while the debate is going on.
“The ongoing deportation crisis leaves millions of low-wages workers subject to abuse by greedy employers while tearing apart families and communities,” says AFL-CIO President Richard L Trumka.
In Washington DC, national immigrant advocacy organisations and national unions are urging an all-out push to force Republicans to allow a vote in the House on a bill similar to S. 744.
The last-minute inclusion of $48 billion for greater border and greater workplace enforcement in the Senate bill angered many organizations, however.
One was Community2Community, a farm worker advocacy and organising project north of Seattle, near the Canadian border.
“We will not accept a bill that benefits corporate interests by penalising immigrants for wanting to work and searching for a job,” it said, and criticised ”our political leaders for creating a legal second class immigrant group with no benefits and no access to citizenship; yet demanding they pay taxes.”
Other organizations have advocated a different political strategy.
“We think not just about our need for legalisation, but that we’ll have another 25 years of enforcement and more guest workers,” warns Lillian Galedo, Director of Filipino Advocates for Justice and an activist in the Dignity Campaign, which proposes an alternative agenda much like that of the PGA.
“Because we’ve lived with those costs we believe the best starting point for immigration reform is a discussion of what immigrant communities actually need and want, and what we know will actually solve the social problems around migration.”
The PGA and UN HLD also present alternatives to the deadlock in the US Congress.
Consideration of progressive alternatives could play a vital function in the US debate.
What Congress and the administration call political realism is actually a set of earplugs, making them deaf to voices around the world calling for greater rights for migrants, and for treating them as full human beings instead of a corporate labour supply.
On a world scale, those voices are the majority, the 99 per cent.
