David Bacon on Bush Immigration Reform

David Bacon has an article entitled “Time to Say No” in The Nation (12/26/05). http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20051226&s=bacon

Not surprisingly, the article is critical of the Bush immigration reform proposal and begins:

“Every new Republican proposal for immigration reform in Congress makes the prospect for winning legal status for the nation’s 12 million undocumented residents more remote. At the same time, Congress appears ready to pass measures that will increase border deaths, lead to wholesale violations of workers’ rights, and give the country’s largest corporations a huge new bracero program.  Supporters of immigrant and workers’ rights face a moment of truth. Can they defeat the rightwing reform offensive? Even more important, can they build a movement for a real alternative?  President Bush introduced his predictably corporate-friendly proposal for immigration reform in September. Echoing an proposals by the rightwing Cato Institute, and Senators Cornyn and Kyl, Bush called for contract labor programs that would allow corporations to recruit hundreds of thousands of workers abroad. They could stay in the country only while they work, for a maximum of six years.  Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has now proposed four separate reform bills, the first three mirroring Bush’s proposal. Bill one would would beef up border enforcement, even though the increasingly militarized border has forced migrants to cross in the most remote and dangerous areas of the desert. Hundreds die every year as a result. More enforcement will simply lead to more death.  A second bill would strengthen employer sanctions, the law that makes it a crime for an undocumented person to hold a job. The Department of Labor and the Social Security Administration would become immigration police, hunting and deporting those without papers. When prohibitions on hiring the undocumented have been heavily enforced, the workplace fear they engender destroyed unions and lowered wages instead.”

KJ