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The new guest worker program NCLR supports, in proposed House and Senate legislation, will embrace all the faults of its bracero predecessor. It will create a large desperate, defenseless immigrant workforce vulnerable here to the same kinds of abusive exploitive practices corporate giants inflict on their overseas workers - denying their right to organize, receive fair wages and benefits or be guaranteed basic civil and human rights everyone should have by law. These rights can only come through legislation guaranteeing all immigrants permanent legal residency, a fairly defined path to citizenship, and provisions for family members to immigrate so they all can be together.
Immigrant and other civil rights groups also need to lobby and protest for repeal of the 2006 Deficit Reduction Act denying immigrants the right to receive Medicaid that's also harming tens of thousands of poor US citizens having trouble complying with new requirements. They include showing passports or a combination of an original or certified copy of a birth certificate and driver's license proving their legal status in the country. This is another example of the Bush administration's racist war on Latinos and the poor with Congress going along in a long-term bipartisan effort to roll back the country's social safety net till nothing in it remains. It's time human, civil rights and other progressive organizations of all stripes mounted a combined effort to fight back, no longer being willing to see the social state destroyed in service to wealth and privilege at the expense of society's most vulnerable that includes the immigrant population giving America back much more than it receives and now getting even less.
They may also have to take on another potential opponent - the nation's oldest and best known environmental group, the Sierra Club founded in 1892 by noted naturalist writer and wilderness preservationist John Muir, that's up to now been neutral on immigration but no longer. It's leadership split on the issue with one side called Support US Population Stabilization (SUSPS) focusing on population control that includes restricting immigration to preserve the environment. So far, there's no resolution and internal debate continues, but it needs watching as it's a slippery slope from advocating responsible world population growth to one focusing on US immigration that always means those of color, the most vulnerable, and mainly desperate and impoverished Latinos forced here by made-in-the-US predatory trade and other neoliberal policies leaving them no other choice. That should be the Sierra Club's target, not the innocent victims of bad policies coming here to survive them.
In the Meantime - Terror Raids in the Workplace Continue
Workplace assaults targeting immigrants continue as part of a generational war on labor including the right of workers to organize and bargain on equal terms with management. They're also part of the Bush administration's campaign for a government-controlled (exploitative) new bracero guest worker program explained by DHS secretary Michael Chertoff's message (through the media) to Congress for the need for "stronger border security, effective interior enforcement and a temporary-worker program (because) businesses (needing) foreign workers....can't otherwise satisfy their labor needs (so government must help out with) a 'regulated' program." He also told reporters in Mexico City February 16...."total immigration reform (addressing) migrants is actually an enforcement enabler because it lets us focus more on the people that we don't want....criminals and dangerous folks" - racist code language aimed at Latinos. It's meant to sanction DHS/ICE detentions and deportations and allow employers the right to abuse and fire Latino workers on any pretext as part of an endgame strategy, Operation Wetback-style.
The plan is a shocker. It's to mass-remove an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants by 2012 while allowing others under captive contacts to stay as exploitable guest workers. This was what immigration reform legislation was all about in 2006 to be repeated when debate begins again in both Houses and a final bill emerges showing both parties support corporate interests and will affirm their right to exploit all working people, starting with guest workers. Part of it includes Chertoff and ICE assistant sectretary Julie Myers unleashing a paramilitary-style reign of terror against so-called illegals or undocumented immigrants in the workplace aimed at easy-to-target Latinos. Both parties want to assure businesses have a large exploitable documented temporary worker pool they can use as needed, abuse as they wish, underpay, deny benefits and above all use as a wedge to destroy organized labor and the rights of all working people in the country.
This is what the racist war on immigrants is all about. It's to empower employers by creating a workplace of unempowered serfs including US citizens with few or no rights or job security at the mercy of business to hire and fire at will and treat their employees as they wish written into the law of the land. It's to create a "bracero America," corporate America's wet dream.
The Bush administration is using high-profile workplace assaults as a sinister strategy to get it. Complicit with them are the corporate media trumpeting the message that desperate Latinos here for jobs to replace ones NAFTA destroyed are threats to national security. It happened last December 12 in the largest ever workplace raid when ICE storm troops swooped in on Colorado-based Swift & Company targeting six of its plants. Agents rounded up 1282 allegedly undocumented immigrant workers, including 170 accused of identity theft, detained them at the plants, then bussed them across state lines to be processed with most later released far from home. The raids were vicious and racist as are all others around the country targeting immigrants of color. The Hispanic National Bar Association reported December 18 "non-Latinos and light-skinned employees were provided blue wristbands which exempted them from questioning, while Latinos, persons perceived to be of Hispanic or Latino origin, underwent immigration processing (the notion being that) all persons perceived to be Latinos are illegal."
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