Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684)

by Chomsky, Aviva

  CHAPTER 6

  Working (Part 2)

  If the US agricultural system has relied on Mexican labor as it developed over many decades, meat processing and construction are two industries that shifted to heavy use of Mexican and Central American—and, in particular, undocumented—immigrants at the end of the twentieth century. This shift coincided with the trend of outsourcing, when manufacturing plants began to shift their labor-intensive production abroad. Manufacturing employment declined from a high of 20 million in 1979 to 11 million in 2012.1 Meatpacking and construction couldn’t exactly be moved abroad. But meatpacking could be moved out of heavily unionized urban centers like Chicago into the rural Midwest. Construction boomed in new regions, with employment doubling between 1970 and 2006 to a high of 7.7 million.2 Both industries increasingly employed immigrant, and undocumented, workers.

  CONSTRUCTION

  While the manufacturing sector was shrinking in the last decades of the twentieth century, construction was expanding. But this industry was also changing profoundly. Unionization plummeted, from 40 percent in the 1970s to only 14 percent in 2011. Unions lost ground especially in the high-growth area of residential construction, which was being buoyed by low interest rates and subprime loans through the first decade of the new century. But as employment rose, working conditions and wages deteriorated. Immigrants and especially undocumented workers increased their presence in the workforce.3 The low wages of undocumented workers helped contribute to the housing bubble by making building costs artificially cheap.4

  In Las Vegas, the population doubled to almost 2 million between 1990 and 2007, and the share of immigrants in the city’s population also doubled during the same time span from 9 percent to 19 percent. Many of the newcomers worked in hotel construction and tourism-related services in the booming city: half of the state’s construction workers were Latino immigrants. By 2008, Nevada had the largest percentage of undocumented workers of any state, 12 percent.5

  Houston’s 1970s oil boom likewise spurred a jump in construction. “The record-breaking construction of office buildings, shopping centers, storage facilities, apartment projects, and suburban homes in the 1970s and early 1980s created an insatiable demand for Mexican immigrant labor. Undocumented workers from rural and urban Mexico became a preferred labor force, especially among construction employers who paid low wages and offered poor working conditions.”6 The Greater Houston Partnership estimated that 14 percent of Houston’s construction workforce was undocumented in 2008, more than any other job category.7

  In Texas as a whole, one in thirteen workers—about a million total—labored in the construction industry as of 2013. Half of them are undocumented. A study by the Workers Defense Project in Austin showed that 41 percent of Texas construction workers are subject to payroll fraud, including being illegally classified as independent contractors instead of employees. Employers use this method to evade their legal responsibilities for payroll taxes, minimum wages, working conditions, and benefits. Working conditions are so dangerous that one in five construction workers in the state will require hospitalization for job-related injuries. “More construction workers die in Texas than in any other state,” the study discovered.8

  In New Orleans, only days after Hurricane Katrina hit, the federal government waived employer sanctions provisions, allowing employers to hire workers without documents. Soon after, it waived prevailing federal wage standard requirements for contractors working on federally funded reconstruction projects. These exemptions set the stage for an influx of low-paid, undocumented workers.9 US census figures showed that some one hundred thousand Hispanics moved into the Gulf Coast after Katrina. Hispanics made up half of the labor force working in reconstruction, and half were undocumented. Undocumented workers formed “the backbone of post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction,” reported USA Today.10 Curiously, while the workers remained undocumented, it was ostensibly not illegal for them to work, at least during the first month and a half, because of the employer sanctions waiver.

  Overall, undocumented workers made up a quarter of the workforce in New Orleans in the months following the hurricane.11 Almost 90 percent were already in the United States and moved to New Orleans from other areas, primarily Texas (41 percent) and, to a lesser extent, Florida (10 percent).12 Unsurprisingly, undocumented workers faced lower wages and poorer working and living conditions than those with documents.

  When Hurricane Ike hit southeastern Texas in 2008, undocumented immigrants performed a significant portion of the cleanup work. “All across southeast Texas, roofs need repair, debris must be discarded and towns hope to rebuild. Hurricane Ike’s destruction is sparking one of the largest rebuilding efforts the state has seen in decades, but at the same time is highlighting a thorny facet of the region’s labor force: A lot of the recovery work will be done by illegal immigrants,” reported the Houston Chronicle.13

  When the housing boom went bust after 2008, strangely, statistics showed that construction wages began to rise. What was actually happening was that the lower-paid newcomers were the first to lose their jobs, so that the rise in wages was more apparent than real. Individual workers weren’t receiving better wages; there were just fewer construction workers employed overall.14

  MEATPACKING

  Like construction, meatpacking is an industry that is very difficult to outsource. In some ways, the work process in meatpacking more resembles that of other large manufacturing plants than it does construction, in which most workers are employed by small companies and contractors. But while industries like textiles or electronics can transport the raw materials and the finished products over long distances to save on the costs of production, this strategy is not practical for dealing with a perishable, bulky, and sometimes cantankerous product. So like construction, meatpacking has relied on bringing immigrant workers to the point of production, rather than sending production to countries where it is cheaper.

  Lance Compa summarizes how in-sourcing happened in Nebraska, in a process repeated throughout the Midwest:

  From its founding as a territory in 1854 until the late twentieth century, Nebraska was mostly populated by white Americans of European origin, joined by a minority of African-Americans. Omaha was always an important meatpacking center because of its proximity to livestock and feedlots. Immigrant workers from southern and eastern Europe made up most of the meatpacking labor force in the early twentieth century. In the 1940s and ’50s, the children of these immigrants, along with African-American coworkers in key roles, formed strong local unions of the United Packinghouse Workers. As happened in the industry generally, in the 1980s and 1990s, many meatpacking businesses closed plants that provided good wages and benefits. Following closures, company owners often relocated plants to rural areas. In Omaha, some companies later reopened closed factories employing low wage, new immigrant workforces without trade union representation.15

  Wages in meatpacking fell 45 percent between 1980 and 2007. The downgrading of meatpacking jobs proved “devastating to the standard of living for workers in an industry that once sustained a blue-collar middle class.”16 As both wages and working conditions deteriorated, immigrant workers became the mainstay of the labor force. By the late 1990s, fully a quarter of meatpacking workers were estimated to be undocumented. 17

  In the climate of heightened calls for immigration enforcement, the meatpacking industry attracted attention. In 1999, the INS launched Operation Vanguard in Nebraska, subpoenaing the employment records of every meatpacker in the state. After reviewing all 24,000 employee records received, the agency identified 4,700 cases in which the employee’s legal status was in doubt. It presented employers with the list and required all of the “suspects” to appear for interviews with the agency. It seemed clear to the meatpackers that “INS’s intention was not to apprehend potentially unauthorized employees, but to ‘chase off’ those workers who were present in illegal status.”18

  In chasing them off, the operation succeeded. Only one tho
usand of the workers dared to appear for their interviews. The others simply left their jobs. Overnight, the state’s meatpacking industry lost 13 percent of its workforce. Meanwhile, of the one thousand interviewed, thirty-four were determined to be unauthorized to work and were arrested and deported. “Meatpacking company officials . . . believe that a substantial number of these employees [who disappeared] were authorized to work but chose not to appear because of the intimidation inherent in any such interview (for example, from questions such as ‘are you or any members of your family not authorized to be present in the United States?’).” The Nebraska Cattlemen’s Association estimated that its members lost $5 million and the state economy as a whole lost $20 million as the result of the operation.19

  Operation Vanguard ended in 2000, but in 2006 a new enforcement effort began, focused on workplace raids. On December 12, 2006, ICE agents descended on six Swift meatpacking plants in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, Colorado, and Utah, arresting thirteen hundred of the company’s seven thousand day-shift workers. Swift was also part of the industry pattern of shifting from urban to rural, and employing large numbers of new Latin American immigrants, many of them undocumented. In several Swift plants, researchers drew a direct connection to the Bracero Program. Two small communities in the Mexican states of Michoacán, Villachuato and La Huacana, which had begun to send recruits northward as braceros, had now become major sources of migrants to Swift plants. These workers were later joined by Central Americans. In Swift’s Cactus, Texas, plant, most of the workers were Maya Quiche Guatemalans, many of them undocumented.20

  In an eerie replay of previous roundups and deportations of Mexicans like Operation Wetback, ICE agents relied on appearance to determine who to detain. One American citizen of Mexican origin at Swift’s Nebraska plant recounted that “when they said all the US citizens come over to this place, I went up there and I stood right by my boss. My boss showed his driver’s license and then he was free to go. I showed my driver’s license and my voting registration card and that was not enough. He [the ICE agent] said, no, you need either your passport or citizenship certificate.”21 Most of those arrested in the raids were charged not with the civil violation of unauthorized presence in the country, but with criminal charges of fraudulent use of Social Security numbers and/or identity theft.

  The raids affected more than just those arrested, as family members and others were afraid to show up to work in the aftermath. The Center for Immigration Studies looked at what happened in the devastated plants over the following months. All managed to replace the hundreds of workers who were arrested, but none improved working conditions or wages, and none shifted back to employing US citizens. The companies scoured the United States for workers willing to accept the jobs, and most of the lost workers were eventually replaced by immigrants from Burma and different parts of Africa who held refugee status and thus had legal authorization to work.22

  THE POSTVILLE RAID

  Another devastating raid took place at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, in May 2008. Agriprocessors represented a cross between in-sourcing and a new industry. Although meatpacking in general was an old industry that was moving into new rural areas, kosher processing had been a local, small-scale industry before the late twentieth century. “In the 1980s, before the Postville plant had opened, almost all fresh kosher meat had been sold through local butchers. It came in raw quarters from slaughterhouses that were rented out by rabbis, and it rarely made it beyond major cities on the coasts.” 23

  The Rubashkin family changed all that. Locating their new plant in the small town of Postville, Iowa, they proposed to turn kosher meat into a nationally available, mass-produced product. “The Rubashkins created a world in which it was possible to buy fresh kosher beef and poultry in ordinary supermarkets across the country, even in places that had few Jews. . . . The changes brought about by the Rubashkins did something more than expand the reach of kosher meat. They brought an entirely new customer base to kosher food: the secular Jews and even non-Jews who never would have stopped at a butcher shop. The expansion also allowed Orthodox communities in places that had never had them.”24

  Agriprocessors also differed from other meatpackers in choosing the tiny town of Postville as its location. Most meatpackers moved to medium-sized towns of thirty thousand to sixty thousand when they left the urban centers. Postville, with a population of fourteen hundred, was “a town with no stoplights, no fast-food restaurants and a weekly newspaper that for years featured the ‘Yard of the Week.’”25 Most of the workers were recruited from two small villages in Guatemala. Over 75 percent of the workers were undocumented, and some were minors.26 Working conditions at the plant were abysmal.

  “One of those workers—a woman who agreed to be identified by the pseudonym Juana—came to this rural corner of Iowa a year ago from Guatemala,” said one newspaper account. Since then, she has worked 10-to-12-hour night shifts, six nights a week. Her cutting hand is swollen and deformed, but she has no health insurance to have it checked. She works for wages, starting at $6.25 an hour and stopping at $7, that several industry experts described as the lowest of any slaughterhouse in the nation.”27

  In May 2008, ICE agents descended on the plant and arrested 389 of its 900 workers, most of them Guatemalan. As their lengthy saga of incarceration and deportation began, the rest of the town’s immigrant population panicked. “Within weeks, roughly 1,000 Mexican and Guatemalan residents—about a third of the town—vanished. It was as if a natural disaster had swept through, leaving no physical evidence of destruction, just silence behind it.”28

  The Agriprocessors raid in May 2008 was “the largest single-site operation of its kind in American history.”29 Because one of the court interpreters, Erik Camayd-Freixas, wrote a detailed protest about the irregularity of the procedures, which circulated widely on the Internet and was later submitted to Congress, the public obtained access to an unusually complete picture of the process. According to Camayd-Freixas’s account, “The arrest, prosecution, and conviction of 297 undocumented workers from Postville was a process marred by irregularities at every step of the way.” The government charged the workers en masse, and without any evidence whatsoever, of the criminal charge of “aggravated identity theft.” Prosecutors then coerced them into a plea bargain for a lesser but still criminal charge of misuse of a Social Security number.30

  The Guatemalan workers knew that they were in the country without legal permission. But that’s a civil violation, not a crime. The only punishment should have been removal. Through their own networks, most of the undocumented immigrants know that they have few rights in the immigration court system. Most of them had no idea what the criminal charges meant, and when pressured to accept a plea bargain, most of them did so. Many acquiesced out of desperation, since as the sole support for their families, they could not afford to remain in detention awaiting trial. They believed they would quickly be deported. Instead, they had signed up for a five-month prison sentence.

  Camayd-Freixas described the heart-wrenching scenes as court-appointed lawyers tried to explain the criminal charges and advise those arrested. One conversation illustrates the utter disconnect between the world of the workers and the legal system they were caught in.

  The client, a Guatemalan peasant afraid for his family, spent most of that time weeping at our table, in a corner of the crowded jailhouse visiting room. How did he come here from Guatemala? “I walked.” What? “I walked for a month and ten days until I crossed the river. . . . I just wanted to work a year or two, save, and then go back to my family, but it was not to be. . . . The Good Lord knows I was just working and not doing anyone any harm.” This man, like many others, was in fact not guilty. “Knowingly” and “intent” are necessary elements of the [criminal] charges, but most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security number was or what purpose it served. This worker simply had the papers filled out for him at the plant, since he could not read or write Sp
anish, let alone English. But the lawyer still had to advise him that pleading guilty was in his best interest. He was unable to make a decision. “You all do and undo,” he said. “So you can do whatever you want with me.” To him we were part of the system keeping him from being deported back to his country, where his children, wife, mother, and sister depended on him. He was their sole support and did not know how they were going to make it with him in jail for 5 months. None of the “options” really mattered to him. Caught between despair and hopelessness, he just wept. He had failed his family, and was devastated. I went for some napkins, but he refused them. I offered him a cup of soda, which he superstitiously declined, saying it could be “poisoned.” His Native American spirit was broken and he could no longer think. He stared for a while at the signature page pretending to read it, although I knew he was actually praying for guidance and protection. Before he signed with a scribble, he said: “God knows you are just doing your job to support your families, and that job is to keep me from supporting mine.”31

  Like Swift, Agriprocessors looked to other sources of marginalized, immigrant workers in the wake of the raid. “In one of its most desperate moves, Agri recruited 170 people from the Micronesian island of Palau—whose status as a former US protectorate means its citizens can work legally in the United States. In September 2008, the Palauans traveled 72 hours and 8,000 miles on planes and buses before arriving in Postville with little more than flip-flops and brightly colored shorts and tops.”32