Guest Column
U.S. debate: Do migrants have rights?
- By Fred Rosen
- The Herald Mexico
- April 02, 2006
Last weekend, over 500,000 people rallied in Los Angeles in favor of immigrants´ rights. Another 100,000 marched in Chicago, and large, boisterous, pro-immigrant rallies - mostly with a Mexican-American flavor - were held in at least a dozen other U.S. cities.
On the following Monday, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, in a pointed rebuke to the "protect-our-borders" demagogues who had muscled a punitive, anti-immigrant measure through the U.S. House of Representatives in December, voted 12 to 6 to approve a bill that would ease the legalization of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants now working in the United States.
Of the 10 Republicans on the committee, four voted in favor.
It was the House bill sponsored by House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner that provoked the demonstrations.
The Sensenbrenner bill would subject undocumented workers to immediate deportation, and would mete out fines and even jail terms to those who had assisted them in the United States, including clergy, union organizers, doctors, teachers and, of course, their employers.
Not surprisingly, the clergy, especially California´s Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the labor movement, especially the unions that organize immigrants, encouraged participation in the massive demonstrations.
Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles went so far as to advocate civil disobedience against the Sensenbrenner bill, should it become law.
ROAD TO CITIZENSHIP
The Senate bill, sponsored by Republican John McCain and Democrat Edward Kennedy, would pave the road to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who held jobs, had no criminal background, learned English and paid a modest fine for having been in the country illegally.
The McCain-Kennedy proposal would also create a "guest worker" program that would permit about 400,000 migrants per year (approximately the number that annually enter from Mexico) to enter the country provided they had jobs waiting for them. These guest workers could also work toward their eventual citizenship.
There is no question but that last weekend´s massive demonstrations - overwhelmingly supported by the urban Latino communities whose votes have been coveted by the Bush political machine and publicly backed by the normally conservative Catholic hierarchy - have changed the dynamics of the U.S. immigration debate from "how do we keep them out?" to "how do we protect their rights?"
Republicans have been divided all along, and it is this division that, up until last weekend, made the headlines and dominated the talk show debates.
On the one hand, traditional big-business Republicans employ a large part of the immigrant labor force and like the downward pressure the low-wage migrants exert on the general wage level. They opposed Sensenbrenner.
On the other hand, the "moral-values" populists who have been so crucial to the ascendancy of Republican power easily mobilized their constituencies with campaigns to "protect our way of life" from cross-border migration. These campaigns have played well in the atmosphere of the war on terror.
PRO-UNION DEBATE
Until last week´s massive, family-like outpouring of the Latino community, whose principal symbol of protest was the U.S. flag, the debate between Republican moderates and hardliners was the only one that caught the attention of the press - including the Mexican press.
Now that the McCain-Kennedy bill has been voted out of committee, the press is paying attention to an interesting pro-union, pro-immigrant debate over the desired contours of a guest worker, or any other migrant labor program.
The New York Times, for example, last week highlighted a public disagreement over McCain-Kennedy between Eliseo Medina, vice president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the second-largest union in the United States and the most active organizer of immigrant workers, and Donald Kaniewski, political director of the Laborers International Union of North America, also a major organizer of immigrant workers.
Both support the legalization of the country´s illegal workers, but Medina, a Mexican-American former farm worker, feels the McCain-Kennedy proposal, with its allowance for workers to change jobs, bargain collectively and enter a path toward citizenship and upward mobility, is a humane alternative to the present situation and probably the best that labor - and the greater NAFTA workforce - can hope for.
Kaniewski, on the other hand, argues that the entrance of 400,000 new workers a year through the guest worker program will exert a permanent downward pressure on wages in many sectors of the economy.
In this, he agrees with the Republican corporate sector we mentioned a few paragraphs back. But unlike the corporate employers, he would like to change this.
It is worth paying close attention to the way that debate develops as McCain-Kennedy is debated in the full Senate, and as the Senate modifies, rejects or simply ignores the Sensenbrenner bill passed by the House.
The key point here is that the debate has shifted from "the immigrant threat" to "immigrant rights" over one eventful weekend.
Contact Fred Rosen at: frosen@cablevision.net.mx
http://www2.eluniversal.com.mx/pls/impreso/web_columnas_sup.detalle?var=30185
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