The patterns in the New York City apparel industry provide a partial basis on which to explain the paradoxes of employment in New York City as a whole, where new immigrants easily find jobs (at minimum wages) in spite of high official unemplyment and crippling job loss. Once again, in a time of national recession and local fiscal crisis, the cry went up in New York to "round up the usual suspects." The traits of workers were blamed for problems that the capitalist economy generated but couldn't solve. In our study of New York apparel, the no- tion that the undocumented were displacing "American" workers proved to be dangerously misleading. In New York apparel, competing forces of capital take advantage of a growing reserve of labor to impose deteriorating conditions on workers throughout the in- dustry. Historically, the industry has repeatedly replaced one immigrant genera- tion with another, and maintained a high rate of turnover in low-wage jobs. The allegation of "unfair competition" between workers obscures this continuous historical pattern. Even the Employment Standards Adminis- tration and the unions, while springing to the defense of undocumented immigrants for the benefit of the media, took up the same in- sistence that the characteristics of workers determine the state of industry. Both were convinced that the sweatshops and the un- documented go hand in glove. Thus, both avoided the more intractable cause of the degeneration of manufacturing and working class unemployment in New York City: the migration of capital to more lucrative sites. Politically disenfranchised and never really free from sudden deportation, undocumented workers are saddled with an objective vulnerability. First, the lack of a green card is one factor that serves to hold them in the lowest wage sectors of industry. Second, bosses can manipulate their illegal staus to ex- act favorable conditions over the terms of employment. If a boss threatens dismissal or disclosure to the INS, it is very difficult for these workers to resort to any legal recourse. Moreover, these workers suffer painful per- sonal anonymity and can be isolated socially and politically from other workers, adding one more potential division for a boss to make use of. Differences between workers can also be exacerbated by negative images of undocu- mented immigrants perpetrated by govern- ment policy. Legislative proposals, linked together under the 1977 Carter Plan (but which have surfaced whenever immigration reform is urged) were presented as an attempt to relieve the injustices suffered by the undocumented. In fact, these proposals fail to confront the 44 NACLA ReportNovlDec 1979 45 Detainees at INS detention center in Brooklyn. basic issues concerning undocumented im- migrant workers. The plan to greatly increase border en- forcement fails entirely to even consider that immigration has structural economic causes that go beyond individual desires and deci- sions. The government's lack of concern about these causes is reflected in its obsession to determine only the numbers of immigrants entering the United States illegally. Today, nothing less than a full-scale militarization of the border would be required to turn back immigrants who have found that the process of development in their own countries is con- demning them to economic death at an early age. From our interviews it was clear that the ef- fect of sanctions on employers hiring illegal immigrants would only be to drive this large labor force further underground, and to in- crease the costs of false documentation through black markets. Other proposals suggest the institution of temporary work permits, which would bring immigrants under the close control of the U.S. government. With these proposals the government would make a reality of the "il- legal alien" of the Labor Department's ominous descriptions: a segregated, second- class worker with limited civil and union rights and possibly even with fixed wages. Such workers could legally be engaged by employers to lower wage rates and undercut local workers, by the very terms of the govern- ment program. Only a full, unconditional amnesty for the undocumented, together with an immigra- tion policy which does not discriminate against labor migration or set workers against one another, will put an end to current in- justices. The full human and civil rights of immigrant workers should be recognized within the United States. But even amnesty for the undocumented will not put an end to the sweatshop in the South Bronx any more than it will eliminate the sweatshop in Hong Kong. The difficult reality of the movement of industrial capital is that it can be confronted with nothing less than the conscious organization of working people into powerful class organizations. Amnesty is only one step.
