"If I ever met the Immigration Service, even if I knew they were go- ing to send me back to Haiti, I would have to speak with them. I would make them tell me why they are sending away Haitians, other people of the Caribbean, Latins. Because this country has always had immigrants, and they weren't deported. The Germans, theJews, the Italians came in the last hundred years. Why now are they sending away Haitians? We are closer, we come from the same continent, and we are doing the work here. Is it because of the color of the skin, or for some other reason? Even if they sent me back, they would have to answer my question." Colette (Haiti) Late in 1974 the Commissioner of the Im- migration and Naturalization Service (INS), General Leonard Chapman, exercising his duty to preserve the nation's sovereign border, issued a dire revelation. "The United States is being overrun by illegal aliens," he asserted, adding that the invasion had only just begun.' Chapman toured the states, arousing the press, to propagate the alarm. This was bad news to a country which, hav- ing barely recovered from an economic slump in 1970, was slipping again into recession, with no convincing explanations forthcoming from the Federal Government. In January 1975, unemployment hit 7%. That same year New York City lost its credit rating on the municipal bond market. A flagship American city was stumbling toward bankruptcy. The news was also disturbing because vir- tually no one except General Chapman seemed to have a clear idea of who an "illegal alien" could be, or how one might act. The chilling term denoted a category of people both strange and lawless, stopping at nothing to enter the country to steal American jobs. In the five years after Chapman initiated the "illegal alien" scare, the politics around the issue hardened. President Jimmy Carter established his position in August 1977 when he proposed a plan to restrict illegal immigra- tion which synthesized all the major ap- parently liberal proposals which had emerged in Congress. The Carter Plan called for sanc- tions on employers hiring workers without papers, and stepped up enforcement of labor standards; greatly strengthened patrol of the border, particularly to the south; and in- creased aid to immigrants' home countries, primarily Mexico. In addition, the plan called for a limited amnesty, which would have provided permanent resident status to immigrants who could prove they had lived in the United States continuously for seven years, and a five-year work permit to those who had been here more than seven months. The rest (a group which could include hun- dreds of thousands) would be deported. This essentially protectionist plan was designed to mend what the Carter Ad- ministration put forth as the worst conse- quence wrought by "illegal aliens": the threatened livelihood of American workers. The one major sector vigorously backing the White House on the plan was organized labor through the AFL-CIO. A resolution passed at the 1977 convention of the Confederation read, "Illegal alien workers take jobs from Americans and undermine U.S. wages and working conditions. Their status places them at the mercy of unscrupulous employers who rely on the threat of deportation to keep them from protesting low wages and intolerable working conditions."' Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall was large- 2 NACLA ReportNov/Dec 1979 ly responsible for the proposal. Researchers at the Department of Labor and the University of Texas, where Marshall had been tenured, had developed a scenario for the impact of "illegal aliens" on U.S. labor markets which justified the Carter Plan. Recently, Ray Mar- shall told the Los Angeles Times that the unemployment rate in the United States could be reduced to less than 4% if it were not for the presence of illegal aliens. 3 The broader views behind this assertion proclaimed that il- legal status determines, above all, the role these workers play in the U.S. economy. Burderned by the consequencs of illegality, the argument goes, they grow docile, anxious to please, willing to tolerate any exploitation to avoid deportation. They must take what- ever job they can find, no matter how menial and poorly paid. Knowing this, competing employers prefer to hire these workers over American citizens who, it is assumed, have full recourse to the Labor Department and to labor unions to fight abuse. Deterioration of wages and con- ditions results. Says Vernon Briggs, of the University of Texas at Austin, "It is a self- fulfilling prophecy for employers to hire il- legals and then to claim simultaneously that no citizen workers can be found to do the same work. Hence, it is clear that illegal im- migration hurts all low income workers. Poor blacks, poor Anglos, poor Chicanos, poor Puerto Ricans, and all others are adversely affected."' David North, a researcher for the Labor Department, concludes the argument when he says, "At bottom, a decision to permit the entry of large numbers of illegals into the work force sanctions the creation of an economically, socially and politically disparate two-class society of legal, advan- taged citizens and illegal disadvantaged workers." This social impact, in his view, makes illegal immigration "a threat to America as an egalitarian society."s Armed with this analysis, the Carter Ad- ministration rushed to intervene in a sup- posed battle between American workers and an almost invisible enemy from within their own class: undocumented immigrants engag- ing in unfair competition. While defending the Americans, Carter's statements also ex- pressed a pious concern for the exploitation of the immigrants. For the latter, however, the solution would be harsh: eliminate the ex- ploitation by sooner or later eliminating most of the workers. THE USUAL SUSPECTS The assertions behind the Carter Plan were made amidst a widely acknowledged dearth of information about the dimension and character of illegal immigration on a national scale. Nevertheless, the plan publicly legitimized the dark image of the "illegal alien." Obscured are the historical con- tinuities of immigration to the United States. Immigrants traditionally supply low-wage labor in times of economic growth and take the blame for the nation's most painful economic ills in a recession. As unemploy- ment rises, the same foreign workers once considered indispensible suddenly are seen as highly expendable. This is a divisive, national chauvinism which time after time has pitted workers in the same industries and localities against one another on the basis of country of origin. Giving "illegal aliens" the more accurate name of undocumented immigrant worker, helps bring into focus that what the United States is now experiencing is nothing more or less than a new wave of labor immigration, primarily from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, which escalated around 1965. Legal immigration has shown regular in- creases (from 296,697 in 1964 to 388,613 in 1976), while illegal immigration has soared, according to the only available indicator, INS apprehensions of "deportable aliens." Most of these are made at the border with Mexico and by 1978, with no substantial increase in INS enforcement capability, these detentions had risen to over one million, from only 212,057 in 1968.s The INS currently estimates that there are four million undocumented im- migrants in the United States. But these general figures confuse as much as they clarify, since it isn't known how many escape detention for every one caught, how many come and go after short stays, or how many stay long-term. No longer limited to the Southwest and California, undocumented im- migrants can now be found in large numbers in the factories of Chicago, the restaurants of Denver, the fields of Ohio, as well as the streets of New York. Whatever the background causes of the new immigration to the United States, the year 1965 marked the beginning of a series of congressional actions which forced working class immigration into illegality. It was the year after the termination of the Bracero Pro- gram, which engineered the importation of Mexican farm laborers into the American Southwest, involving nearly 178,000 workers in its final year. Under this program wages were agreed upon between the Government and the growers, with no effective input from labor. It ended amid union and community outrage that local farmworkers were being forced out of work. This closed a major (but highly oppressive) channel for legal immigra- tion of low-wage laborers, without opening virtually any other expedient access. (A modified version of this scheme was resur- rected through the use of Section H-2 of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, under which limited numbers of agricultural workers are brought into the United States, theoretically in situations of proven labor shortage.)' In 1965, Congress also imposed a strict ceil- ing on permanent resident visas at 290,000 annually for the entire globe, with a limit of 120,000 from the Western hemisphere. These visas authorize immigrants to work and are otherwise known as "green cards." Again by 1977, the law was revised, setting limits per country in the Western hemisphere. This came as a particular blow to Mexico which, in 1976, had sent close to three times as many legal immigrants as the new ceiling allowed, as well as hundreds of thousands of un- documented workers. 8 Legal channels were progressively denied to working class immigrants in spite of ample evidence that immigration from the under- developed countries was rising rapidly. Within three years after the end of the Bracero Program, INS apprehensions of un- documented workers had nearly doubled.' Cigar-toting crew bosses coordinate enganches-work gangs-going by train from San Antonio to Pennsylvania's Bethlehem Steel mills in 1920s. Southwest growers, as well as more and more urban industrial and service employers, still had an abundant supply of low-wage laborers -- without the inconvenience of Federal mediation or scrutiny. Held to a paltry budget compared to its mandated task, the INS Border Patrol harrassed immigrants as they ran the border, but never definitively prevented many from entering; while in the cities INS agents terrorized undocumented workers without really cutting into the overall illegal workforce.' 0 The hypocrisy of this policy became so egregious that even Leonel Castillo, successor to General Chapman as INS Commissioner, attacked it as a "half- open door" when he resigned from his post in August 1979. Illegal workers, he said, "are not even second class citizens. .. they may be more closely compared with indentured workers." " The 1977 Carter Plan only succeeded in bringing the political usefulness of the im- migrant as worker into conflict. As a result, by 1979, the plan had suc- cumbed quietly in Congress, with no friends to resuscitate it. Employers, both big and small, articulated their interests through the press, objecting to possible sanctions for hir- ing the undocumented, and revealing their "dirty little secret," that a work force deprived of legal benefits and protection was exactly what they had ordered." Some relatively new voices were raised in opposition. The Mexican-American com- munity achieved broad unity in rejecting any partial amnesty or employer sanctions that might unleash discrimination against them. The Mexican government, suddenly influen- tial because of newly publicized oil finds, was cold to any attempt to forcibly return Mex- icans to their home economy, with its endemic, large-scale unemployment. NovlDec 1979 5.NACLA Report DOCUMENTING IMMIGRATION Given this political background, this NACLA Report has a two-fold purpose. First, it will challenge the conceptions supporting the "illegal alien" bugaboo, as both false and tendentious. This stigma, pinned by present U.S. policy on a segment of the immigrant population, makes undocumented workers appear to the public as being in a class by themselves. In effect, it both punishes im- migrants for being exploited, and makes them the perpetrators of their own exploita- tion. It puts them into a falsely portrayed competition with others laboring alongside them in factories, restaurants, and other workplaces. The idea of the "illegal alien" will be shown to be more of a political manipula- tion than a reflection of economic and social reality. The second purpose of the Report is to document the systematic exploitation of these workers in New York. As immigrants, they in- crease a reserve of labor in the city, which gives employers greater flexibility in imposing their terms oni wages and working conditions. As the undocumented, their vulnerability is accentuated because they are barred from government aid and from exercising their due legal recourse against abuse. Nevertheless, NACLA's research will verify that undocu- mented workers are by no means docile or passive, but rather sharply aware of their situation and often ready to resist it. BAD APPLE The presence of undocumented workers in New York City only emerged as a political issue in the past two years. For one thing, debates on this topic long dwelt on Mexican migration into the Southwest, to the virtual exclusion of other migrant streams. Today, however, the Department of City Planning of the "Big Apple" estimates there are at least 850,000 undocumented immigrants in the New York Metropolitan area (a figure based, by official admission, on "intuition"), or one for every ten counted residents.' These im- migrants hail from a wide range of countries in Europe and Asia, as well as the Americas. From the latter, since 1965, the City has seen an important influx of Dominicans, Colom- bians, Jamaicans, Haitians and Ecuadoreans, to name only the largest groups. Dominicans and Colombians, for example, are estimated to number 250,000 each, with perhaps half undocumented. In New York City, the stage is fully set for resentment and irate accusations over un- documented labor. The 1975 brush with bankruptcy was a fiscal emergency rooted in a larger crisis of blue-collar employment. Be- tween 1950 and 1974, New York manufactur- ing jobs declined by a full 41%, or a total of 430,400. In 1974, one out of every four city jobs was in factory production; only five years later it's down to one in six. The city has been losing its blood: $3.5 billion in manufacturing wages between 1958 and 1976." Its tax base shrank while demand for services by the unemployed expanded. Today, New York unemployment is at 8.2%, with the rate for minorities over 12% .1 New Yorkers are restive from the massive lay-offs from government jobs and the gutting of many key services that followed the fiscal crisis. In one city subway station, in the sum- mer of 1979, an anonymous writer scrawled, "Save taxes, deport illegal aliens," on eleven different columns. In March, the New York Times had called for federal help "to cope with the aliens who have already penetrated our defenses,"saying "Forgiveness may be more human than deportation, but it offers little consolation to Americans who need jobs." 6 However, the recent large influx of working class immigrants poses a paradox for New York. In spite of the dizzying job loss, the signs of unemployment among new im- migrants are lacking. How do they find jobs at all? Why do they continue to come? To begin to answer these questions, NACLA interviewed 50 undocumented workers in New York City (18 Dominicans, 12 Ecuadoreans, 7 Colombians, 6 Haitians, 3 Salvadoreans, 2 Nicaraguans, 1 Panama- nian and 1 Mexican). All of them worked primarily in manufacturing jobs. The 26 women had been in New York for a median of five years, the 24 men a median of four. The interviews cast light on the experience of the growing number of undocumented im- migrants who are finding their way into in- dustrial jobs in U.S. cities.
