This evening's reminder of modern-day American slavery

On a panel at the National Immigrant Integration Conference this morning, Saket Soni of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice shared these two stories:

On August 29^th this year, the 6^th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a group of undocumented immigrant workers met in a parking lot to receive their paychecks. Their employer, the only home-elevation industry contractor in New Orleans, had withheld their pay for weeks and had promised to deliver their paychecks to them at the meeting. Thousands of dollars of wage theft were represented by their meeting. When the workers arrived on-site, they were not met by their employer, as promised. Rather, they were met by Immigration, rounded up, arrested, and detained. Their employer had staged a meeting under false and cruel pretenses in order to conduct an immigration raid. The workers were deported, unpaid and silenced and their employer, who exploited their labor, refused to pay them, and turned them into Immigration, is somehow in the legal “right” and will continue this practice.

Take another example from New Orleans: Hundreds of immigrant laborers, mostly from India, were working on visas in a large factory. They were being paid $2/hour, and charged rent for their provided “accommodations” sleeping on the factory floor. They were threatened, abused, and if they tried to file a complaint, they would be fired and, since their work visa is a contract with a single employer, they would no longer be able to work in the U.S. The legally-employed live in indentured servitude under the threat of cancellation of their visa.

For many immigrant workers, there are two paths:

Work legally with a Work Visa in contract with a single employer, who can dictate your hours, wage, and living conditions. You are potentially are subject to indentured servitude and have no labor unions to organize under. Any attempt at organization or complaint often gets you fired, and you are sent back to your country of origin.

Immigrate “illegally” and work without legal authorization. In this undocumented state, you can’t turn to law enforcement or legal resources if you are suffering abuse from your employers for fear of deportation. You cannot organize, and you are not protected by a union. Your employer can refuse to pay you or can pay sub-standard wages because you have no voice to protest. You are vulnerable. You are disposable. If your employer decides your labor is no longer needed or he/she doesn’t want to pay you, they can turn you into Immigration.

In Alabama’s HB 56 (or or “Governer Bentley’s Disintegration and Persecution Law” or “American fascism and legally-condoned domestic slavery”) employers are heavily penalized for knowingly employing an undocumented immigrant. However, the bill states “This term [employer] shall not include the occupant of a household contracting with another person to perform casual domestic labor within the household.” In other words, if you are paying someone under-the-table [or not-paying someone] to do your house-work, yard-work, etc, you are exempt from this law. In other words, if you hire an undocumented immigrant as house-hold labor, without protection of labor-rights, with or without pay, you are in Alabama’s legal right.

Decades ago, the South wouldn’t get on-board with labor rights laws because they didn’t want to grant protections to African-American workers. Since they couldn’t legally exclude a group of people from labor laws based on their race, they instead excluded the fields of work that were mostly employed by African-American workers. They excluded domestic workers and farm laborers from union and labor rights, therefore excluding most African-American laborers from protection of labor laws. The same applies here – except in this case the intended target is the Latino undocumented immigrant.

Slavery is an active and common business practice in the United States. It is not merely an artifact of our past. It is an injustice of our present state.

Even though state law and policy may not explicitly state ‘Hey, slavery is okay!,’ slavery-like conditions exist and are permitted through legal avenues. Even though a bill may not explicitly state, ‘Brown people are not allowed the same rights and dignity as white people, and Latinos are not welcome here,’ legislation with racial implications exists and is enforced; “low-income housing areas,” “domestic workers,” “farm laborers,” “contract laborers,” “immigrant workers,” “foreign-born,” are markers of racial implications that often target Latino communities, esp. those of Mexican and Central American origin. Under programs like 287(g), AL HB 56, Arizona’s SB 1070, etc., law enforcement officers are mandated to act upon “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States,” (HB 56) without defining what qualifies for reasonable suspicion – i.e., if someone ‘looks Mexican,’ that is sufficient justification for apprehending them and demanding their papers.

We must read between the lines, speak beyond cleansed language, hold ourselves and our legislators accountable, and look behind the bars.

Current research in the NorthWest!

Hey all!

It’s been a while, and I’ll do my best to summarize my current work with few(er) words.

Classes started less than two weeks after I got back from Nogales, and I’ve been in the thick of it since. (For anyone interested in a quick summary of my summer border work, there’s an article in Whitman’s newspaper). I’m still working on immigration issues, but from a local perspective in this corner of Washington.

I’m in a politics research course this semester, “State of the State for Washington Latinos: Community-Based Research as a Democratic Practice.” It’s a mouthful, but basically we (the 15 of us in the class) work with community organizations in Eastern Washington to research problems affecting Latino communities in the surrounding counties. By the end of the semester, we develop a report that describes the problem, analyzes the factors at play, and gives recommendations to community organizations, service providers, and Washington legislators. This class/program has been going since 2005, and has provided a lot of needed information to community members and actually changed Washington State policy, and I’m honored to be a part of it. Most of our work is done with bilingual education programs, voting rights, and access to resources. BUT (this is where I get giddy-excited) my research group is looking at “Secure Communities,” a federal immigration program, and its impact on four different counties (Yakima, Walla Walla, Benton, and Franklin) since its local implementation this summer.

Secure Communities, or S-Comm, is an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program that was first introduced in 2008. S-Comm is a development of programs like 287(g) and CAP (Criminal Alien Program) that employ local resources to do the work of federal immigration agencies. Under S-Comm, the fingerprints of all individuals booked into a local jail are scanned and forwarded from the FBI database to DHS (the fed. organization that oversees immigration and security). At DHS, their fingerprints are checked against an electronic biometric database (IDENT) that has information on those who have applied for “immigration benefits,” those who have a visa/work permit/etc., travelers, and immigrants who have previously violated immigration law. The local jail receives an automated response if the person has a questionable immigration status, and they are placed on a “detainer” or an “immigration hold” (i.e. held because of their immigration status, regardless of the crime they may be charged with, convicted of, or witness to). Within 48 hours, ICE interviews them over a video conference system to determine whether or not they are “deportable,” after which they are transferred to federal custody, sent to a detention facility, and tried for deportation.

The program’s stated intent is to remove “dangerous criminal aliens” and to “improve accuracy and increase speed in identification” of un-documented individuals. The thing is, that’s not how the numbers play out. Of those who have been deported by S-Comm, 66% were charged only on immigration grounds – i.e., two-thirds “criminals” deported were criminal only because the broke immigration law. 19% were charged on other (minor) criminal grounds, such as traffic violations or minor theft. Only 8% were charged with an aggravated felony. S-Comm functions to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible, as rapidly as possible, with as little human interface so as to extend resources. (There are many more argument points on the un-stated intents of S-Comm, but I’ll save those for later).

S-Comm was originally designed as an optional program that counties could choose to adopt into their community. After the first year or two of the program, several participating counties asked to opt out of the program after they’d tried it out for a while, and they were denied. DHS re-defined “optional” as ‘you can opt in, but you can’t opt out.’ More recently they declared that all counties in the U.S. will be required to adopt S-Comm by 2013. S-Comm is more than just a ‘sweeping program’ to collect and deport more people without papers. It’s also a growing database and developing biometrics program. A sub-objective of S-Comm is to map the “criminal alien” and “illegal immigrant” populations throughout the U.S. in order to focus their attention and resources on larger undocumented populations (i.e. immigration raids and enforcement in immigrant communities). For a well-crafted, concise S-Comm report, see the Oct. 2011 report from the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute.

So why am I researching Secure Communities (other than to fulfill the need for compassionate, ethical knowledge-sharing)? This summer, four counties in Eastern Washington adopted the S-Comm. OneAmerica, an immigrant rights organization, came to our class asking for research on the affect of S-Comm on the Latino community and their relationship with local law enforcement. Many people fear racial profiling and increased deportation/family separation as a result of the program. I’ve been talking with Latino community members, leaders, and the local sheriffs and sifting through county records for the past two months, and will have a final report in December. My main questions are:

• ·      How has Secure Communities (SComm) affected the interactions between the Latino community and local law enforcement in Benton and Franklin counties, and how has SComm affected public perception of local law enforcement?
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• ·      What personal experiences with local law enforcement, detention, and/or SComm inform Latino residents’ perception of SComm within their community?
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• ·      What are the fiscal costs SComm and Tri-Cities residents’ perceptions of social costs and/or benefits to the community (i.e. community safety, community cohesiveness, increased or decreased violence, change in relationship with law enforcement)?
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• ·      What do county data show regarding the proportions of individuals who are booked into federal custody through Secure Communities, and/or who are deported through SComm, and/or who are not charged with or convicted of criminal offences, in comparison with pre-SComm data of immigration holds and detentions?

Today I’m in Seattle, WA at OneAmerica's National Immigrant Integration Conference. We’re sitting in on panels and talking with people about our early research. There are 600 dynamic, energized, loving people from all fields – education, healthcare, social work, community organizing, legislation, research, union work, etc. – in constant dialogue about immigrant issues and how to construct a more just, receptive democracy. Looking around the maple-walled conference room this morning, I feel urgency and relief. Urgency in that immigrant rights are a pressing, transforming area of aid/advocacy/work/education. Relief in that I am sitting with six-hundred people who working to change our society, to ensure immigrant rights. We are not alone in this struggle – this is a nation-wide, world-wide conversation, and there are strong networks of support and solidarity that we can rest in. This morning, the dark burden of the U.S. humanitarian border crisis does not slump so heavily on my shoulders. I can breathe a little deeper and walk a little lighter, knowing that there is power and care in our many hands.