Every year thousands of poor people from Latin America attempt to cross the border between Mexico and the US, in search of work so they can support their families.

Most of these people are victims of economic policies imposed by the US government and international capitalism. Because of the free trade agreement NAFTA and the policies of organisations like the WTO, millions of poor farmers around the world have been thrown off their land so it can be used for corporate agribusiness. International policies mean that poor countries are unable to put any kind of protection on their domestic industries, or enact laws that protect workers’ rights. This means that it can be very hard to find a job in countries like Mexico, and if you can it will be so low paid it will be hard to feed your family.

Latin American people who find themselves living next door to the richest country on Earth have little choice but to try and use any means necessary to cross into the US to find work. But the US border is one of the most militarised on Earth, with armed border police using the latest technology aimed at finding immigrants and preventing them crossing.

It’s also a very hostile environment-much of the border runs through desert, and huge numbers die every year of dehydration or exhaustion. Others are attacked by human predators, waiting to abuse, steal and murder immigrants. There’s little choice for most people but to hire a coyote, a professional people smuggler, to help them get across. But these people will often charge the equivalent of your life savings, and even then there’s no guarantee they won’t just take your money and run.

The ridiculous thing about the harsh enforcement regime is that it actually increases the numbers of illegal immigrants in the US, because if after all that you succeed in getting to a job in America, you’re unlikely to want to leave it and go home, knowing what would be involved if you ever tried to come back.

In short, life is not easy for people migrating to the US from Latin America. Once they’re in, they usually do the lowest paid, most menial jobs in the economy, such as cleaners, or farm labourers. The oppressive immigration laws imposed by the US government means that many have to live illegally, and are therefore in little position to take action to defend their rights, form a union or try and get their wages raised.

The only people that benefit from this state of affairs are the rich, who get super cheap labour within the US. The inability of immigrants to fight for their rights at work also helps drive down wages for workers born in the US as well. In the last few years, so many people have been impoverished by capitalism in Latin America, that the US is being transformed by Latino immigration. The centre of American manufacturing and industry has shifted from the North and Northeast to the South, and Southwest, where there are the most immigrants available.

Reform of the immigration system, so that immigrants can begin to play a full role in US society, is an absolute priority. In recent years immigrants have begun to organise a huge mass movement, capable of putting hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, and in 2006 they organised the incredible national one day strike known as ‘The Day without Immigrants.’

The weekend before last, when the US media was consumed by what was happening in Congress with Obama’s healthcare reforms, and the only protests being covered were the insane right wingers outside shouting abuse, there was another, much bigger protest taking place in Washington. Over 200, 000 people flooded into the city to demand the government take action on immigration reform, as part of the March for America. People who had come to the US from all over the world, not just Latin Americans, took part. If you look at the footage below, you’ll see the huge participation by Asian Americans, with signs in Chinese and Korean, for example.

Obama directly addressed the march through a video link, and pledged to “fix the broken immigration system.” Many on the march were greatly heartened to hear they have the support of the President. However, unfortunately, yet again Barack Obama’s government is talking progressive whilst failing to live up to his own rhetoric.

The Obama supported proposals that are likely to go to Congress, known as the Schumer/Graham proposals after the Senators who drew them up, still stand by the idea of being “tough on illegal immigrants.” These so-called reforms may actually make things worse for many immigrants.

Most importantly, the Schumer/Graham plan completely ignores the role of US policy in creating the flow of immigrants in the first place. It does nothing to tackle the unfair trade agreements impoverishing people in Latin American and round the world.

Under the plan, immigrants would be forced to carry a biometric Social Security card, which would be swiped by employers to confirm their identity. This will do nothing to stop people coming to the US illegally, but it would mean more and more people getting caught and getting sent to privately-run, for-profit immigration prisons.

The proposals treat people coming North as a labour supply rather than human beings. They propose “guest worker” programmes that would allow employers to temporarily bring in people for a limited amount of time. These immigrants would have few rights, and would be totally at the mercy of their employers. The Southern Poverty Law Centre has called the existing guest workers programmes “close to slavery.”

The central demand of the immigration reform movement is that those people already living and working in the US are legalised, so that they can begin to take a full part in American society. Schumer and Graham are arguing that people that came to the US illegally must first of all “admit that they broke the law”, and face up to the consequences-fines, community service or even prison. They then will have to “get to the back of the line”, in their words, and prove their worth as part of a lengthy process of achieving citizenship that could take years.

Crucially, the plan includes increased funding for the border patrols, greater militarisation of the border, and increased raids and policing of immigrant communities. It pledges huge sums of money for high-tech attempts to clamp down on illegal immigration. This comes after the news this week that plans to create a “virtual fence” along the Mexican border have had to be abandoned because they didn’t work.

Dubbed “the great wall of Boeing,” SBInet was a plan to create a vast chain of towers along the border, equipped with long range cameras, infrared thermal imaging, motion sensors and seismic sensors to measure people moving along the ground. This would have been supported by aerial robots scanning the border from the skies. All information would then be sent to “command centres”, where the deployment of border control agents would be controlled.

After the US government spent $1.1 billion on commissioning Boeing to develop this system, it’s emerged that it’s a bit of a high tech fantasy that won’t actually work. Huge sums of money have been wasted on the project with nothing to show for it, unless you’re a Boeing shareholder. However, leaving aside the criminal waste of public money this project represents, it’s good news that the Department of Homeland Security has finally come to its senses on the issue and cancelled it.

Another piece of good news this week is that the anti-immigrant, racist, vigilante group the Minutemen has disbanded. The Minutemen were armed groups who go out into the border crossing area to try and prevent immigrants from reaching the US. The group has taken part in many documented cases of violence, and two Minutemen members are about to go on trial for the murder of a little girl and her father when they broke into their homes.

It’s stuff like this that has led the group’s President Carmen Mercer to declare it disbanded. The Minutemen faces increasing legal costs from having to defend the actions of their members, at a time when its leaders have attempted to become more respectable, and take part in lobbying and the political process. In an internal conflict that in many ways reminds you of some of the fights that have taken place inside the BNP over here, the leaders have found it difficult to control the many members who are drawn towards far-right violence and paramilitary politics. Unfortunately, it’s likely that many of these people will keep up their campaign of racist violence under another banner.

Check out this insane recruiting video for the Minutemen, which features a mix of a ridiculous song that sounds like it was made up by South Park, chilling footage of vigilante violence, and people dressing up as if they were in a Western:

And if you doubt the racism that motivates the group, check out this footage, filmed by a man of Mexican origin, at a Minutemen protest:

In the face of organised racist violence, and their fake supporters in Congress and the White House, the need for a strong, organised movement defending immigrants in the US has never been greater. What’s crucial is that as the movement goes forward, it uses the power of workers that are already mobilised to make their own demands, and not just accept the proposals coming from the Obama administration. Here’s a few ideas that could really “fix the broken immigration system in the US”:

-Repeal all the unfair trade agreements, such as NAFTA and CAFTA that force people into poverty and migration in the first place.

-Make it quick and easy for immigrants to get legal citizenship. End the huge backlogs of cases that have kept people waiting years for a decision.

-Protect the rights of all workers, enforcing legal requirements on employers to provide decently-paid and safe jobs. Stop workers from being fired for standing up for their rights.

-Allow people to come to the US with visas that are not tied to them working, and end the near-slavery conditions of the “guest worker” programmes.

These are all things that the US Congress could do right now, that would make a huge difference to the lives of millions of Americans, and would benefit everybody, not just immigrants. But in the longer term, we all have to start asking why it is that the global elite have the right to move their money, or the production of goods, anywhere around the world they want, but working class people are restricted in where they can go.

Historically, the restrictions now placed on immigration in most countries were enacted in the 20th century. The rise of immigration controls goes along with the rise of generally accepted “scientific” racism. The reason they exist is so that states can control the ethnic make-up of their own people, and they are inherently racist. If in the future socialists and others are successful in building a more equal and fairer society globally, it’s to be hoped that more people won’t be forced to leave their homes because of poverty. But as things stand, everyone in the world has a right to survival, and to go wherever and do whatever it takes to ensure they can feed themselves and their families.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.