Science Fiction From Below

by Dollars and Sense

On Saturday I got to see a terrific new movie, Sleep Dealer, written and directed by Alex Rivera. It's lefty science fiction, and deals with immigration, global sweatshops, militarism, and the corporatization/privatization of water resources, among other topics. The degree to which it is only barely fiction is a little scary. I recommend it highly.

Mark Engler (author of this article for us, among others), has just posted an interview with Alex Rivera over at Foreign Policy in Focus. He's also posted a clip from the movie on his website.

Here is part of the interview:

Science Fiction From Below

Alex Rivera, director of the new film Sleep Dealer, imagines the future of the Global South

By Mark Engler

Tapping into a long tradition of politicized science fiction, the young, New-York-based filmmaker Alex Rivera has brought to theaters a movie that reflects in news ways on the disquieting realities of the global economy. Sleep Dealer, his first feature film, has opened in New York and Los Angeles, and will show in 25 cities throughout the country this spring.

Set largely on the U.S.-Mexico border, Sleep Dealer depicts a world in which borders are closed but high-tech factories allow migrant workers to plug their bodies into the network to provide virtual labor to the North. The drama that unfolds in this dystopian setting delves deeps into issues of immigration, labor, water rights, and the nature of sustainable development.

Rivera's film drew attention by winning two awards at Sundance--the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best film focusing on science and technology. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote of the movie, "Adventurous, ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, Sleep Dealer... combines visually arresting science fiction done on a budget with a strong sense of social commentary in a way that few films attempt, let alone achieve."

Rivera spoke with Foreign Policy In Focus senior analyst Mark Engler by phone from Los Angeles, where the director was attending the local premier of his movie.

M.E.: How do you describe your film?

A.R.: Sleep Dealer is a science fiction thriller that takes a look at the future from a perspective that we've never seen before in science fiction. We've seen the future of Los Angeles, in Blade Runner. We've seen the future of Washington, D.C., in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. We've seen London and Chicago. But we've never seen the places where the great majority of humanity actually lives. Those are in the global South. We've never seen Mexico; we've never seen Brazil; we've never seen India. We've never seen that future on film before.

M.E.: Your main character, Memo Cruz, is from rural Mexico, from Oaxaca. In many ways, the village that we see on film is very similar to many poor, remote communities today. It doesn't necessarily look like how we think about the future at all. What was your conception of how economic globalization would affect communities like these?

A.R.: One of the things that fascinates me about the genre is that, explicitly or not, science fiction is always partly about development theory. So when Spielberg shows us Washington, DC with 15-lane traffic flowing all around the city, he's putting forward a certain vision of development.

Sleep Dealer starts in Oaxaca, and to think about the future of Oaxaca, you have to think about how so-called "development" has been happening there and where might it go. And it's not superhighways and skyscrapers. That would be ridiculous. So, in the vision I put forward, most of the landscape remains the same. The buildings look older. Most of the streets still aren't paved. And yet there are these tendrils of technology that have infiltrated the environment. So instead of an old-fashioned TV, there is a high-definition TV. Instead of a calling booth like they have today in Mexican villages, where people call their relatives who are far away, in this future there is a video-calling booth. There's the presence of a North American corporation that has privatized the water and that uses technology to control the water supply. There are remote cameras with guns mounted on them and drones that do surveillance over the area.

The vision of Oaxaca in the future and of the South in the future is a kind of collage, where there are still elements that look ancient, there is still infrastructure that looks older even than it does today, and yet there are little capillaries of high technology that pulse through the environment.

ME: How far into the future did you set the film?

A.R.: I started working on the ideas in Sleep Dealer ten years ago, and at that point I thought I was writing about a future that was forty or fifty years away, or maybe a future that might not ever happen. Over this past decade, though, the world has rapidly caught up with a lot of the fantasy nightmares in the film. That's been an interesting process.

But, you know, a lot of times we use the word "futuristic" to describe things that are kind of explosions of capital, like skyscrapers or futuristic cities. We do not think of a cornfield as futuristic, even though that has as much to do with the future as does the shimmering skyscraper.

M.E.: In what sense?

A.R.: In the sense that we all need to eat. In the sense that the ancient cornfields in Oaxaca are the places that replenish the genetic supply of corn that feeds the world. Those fields are the future of the food supply.

For every futuristic skyscraper, there's a mine someplace where the ore used to build that structure was taken out of the ground. That mine is just as futuristic as the skyscraper. So, I think Sleep Dealer puts forward this vision of the future that connects the dots, a vision that says that the wealth of the North comes from somewhere. It tries to look at development and futurism from this split point of view--to look at the fact that these fantasies of what the future will be in the North must always be creating a second, nightmare reality somewhere in the South. That these things are tied together.

Read the rest of the interview; see the clip.

Labels: Alex Rivera, immigration, Mark Engler, Sleep Dealer, sweatshops, water rights

 

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5/18/2009 08:49:00 AM 0 comments

 

Stimulus Package Limits H1-B Visas

by Dollars and Sense

Hat-tip to Arpita B.

Solve the Crisis by...Kicking Out the World's Best and Brightest?
Posted by Michael Clemens at 04:01 PM February 17, 2009

The global economic crisis is already creating pressure for the United States to further restrict skilled migration. The economic stimulus act that President Obama signs today limits the ability of many companies receiving stimulus money to freely employ highly skilled foreign workers on H-1B visas. (Read the Act yourself here.) In other words: If we can just kick out of the United States enough bright and highly skilled workers, many of them top U.S.-trained students from developing countries, the crisis will somehow ease.

That's just one example of a trend we can expect to grow: Last Friday at Columbia University I publicly debated one of rising number of Americans who feel that the crisis is a reason to welcome drastically fewer people to this country, even highly skilled workers. "Buy American", via immigration policy, is gaining credibility as a solution to the crisis.

This trend is unfortunate and shameful, for at least three reasons.

Read the rest of the post (including a great graph).

Labels: H1-B visas, immigration, recession, stimulus package

 

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2/20/2009 10:37:00 AM 13 comments

 

Immigrants Bring Big Bucks For Jails

by Dollars and Sense

The federal government pays sheriffs $90 a day to hold immigrants awaiting deportation. Some sheriffs are aggressively lobbying to have immigrants put in their jails. Local jailers receive $1.7 billion a year from taxpayers to keep people charged with overstaying their visas instead of releasing them pending trials.

From the Boston Globe:

In the newest wing of Bristol County jail, exclusively for immigrants facing deportation, inmates in sunshine-yellow uniforms pass the time in a stuffy dormitory playing cards, flipping through magazines, and chatting in Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew.

Anxiety and boredom fill the room. "It's been 10 months," one desperate-looking man told Sheriff Thomas Hodgson in Spanish during a recent tour of the only freestanding immigrant detention center in Massachusetts. "How long do I have to wait?"

The answer isn't clear. But Hodgson, and other sheriffs across the state, are glad to have them: For each immigrant, they receive an average of $90 a day.

Bristol and other cash-strapped county jails are increasingly embracing the immigration business, capitalizing on the soaring number of foreign-born detainees and the millions of federal dollars a year paid to incarcerate them. Bristol County alone has raked in $33 million since 2001, and has used the money to transform itself into a sprawling campus with a commissary, an ambulance communications center, and a "management accountability building" for regular meetings on jail operations.

"That money is a tremendous boost for us," said Plymouth County Sheriff Joseph D. McDonald Jr., whose jail houses 324 immigrants, up from 44 a decade ago, bringing in $15.6 million last year. "We aggressively try to market ourselves to get as many of those inmates into our doors as we can."

But advocates for immigrants say the government should dramatically reduce the number of detainees, by releasing them pending deportation. They complain about the burden on taxpayers - this year, the federal government budgeted $1.7 billion nationwide and $42.8 million in New England for detainees - and the risks to immigrants.

Read the rest of the story here.

Labels: immigrant detention, immigrants, immigration, prison crisis

 

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2/09/2009 11:36:00 AM 0 comments

 

Economics of Immigrant Detention in R.I.

by Dollars and Sense

This is a pretty horrifying piece from Saturday's Times--excellent reporting. We covered the Rhode Island ICE raids mentioned in the article in ICE Descends on Rhode Island, and our January/February issue will include a feature article by Tom Barry on the economics of immigrant detention.

Leaning on Jail, City of Immigrants Fills Cells With Its Own
By NINA BERNSTEIN | December 27, 2008

CENTRAL FALLS, R.I.—Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.

Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew's Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse.

After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt—only blocks from home, but in a separate world.

In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime—people caught in the nation's crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest.

If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion.

Wyatt offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work.

Last spring, The New York Times set out to examine this small city of 19,000 and its big detention center as a microcosm of the nation's new relationship with immigration detention, which is now sweeping up not just recent border-jumpers and convicted felons but foreign-born residents with strong ties to places like Central Falls. Wyatt, nationally accredited, clean and modern, seemed like one of the better jails in the system, a patchwork of county lockups, private prisons and federal detention centers where government investigations and the news media have recently documented substandard, sometimes lethal, conditions.

But last summer, a detainee died in Wyatt's custody. Immigration authorities investigating the death removed all immigration detainees this month—along with the $101.76 a day the federal government paid the jail for each one. In Central Falls, where many families have members without papers, a state campaign against illegal immigrants spread fear that also took a toll: People went into hiding and businesses lost Latino customers in droves. Slowly, the city awoke to its role in the detention system, and to the pitfalls of the bargain it had struck.

Read the rest of the article.

Labels: ICE raids, immigrant detention, immigrants, immigration

 

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12/29/2008 12:28:00 PM 0 comments

 

Financial Crisis Hits Immigration Debate

by Dollars and Sense

From MRZine:

The Financial Crisis Hits the Immigration Debate

by David L. Wilson

Part of the right wing routinely blames undocumented immigrants for just about everything. On September 24, nine days after the financial meltdown started in earnest, the National Review Web site carried an article by columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin blaming "illegals" for the crisis and the subsequent bailout of the banks. "The Mother of All Bailouts has many fathers," she wrote. "But there's one giant paternal elephant in the room that has slipped notice: how illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks, and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis."

Malkin's pieces often read like parodies of conservative punditry, and there's something distinctly comical about the idea that a few undocumented homeowners caused a multi-trillion dollar financial crisis. Less than a month after Malkin's article was posted, the Wall Street Journal showed that in fact mortgages bought by out-of-status immigrants have performed rather well. But the Malkin diatribe is a useful indication of how the immigration debate is likely to change over the next months.

Until this September, informed opinion was that whichever party won the November elections, Congress and the new president would move in 2009 to revive the "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" (CIR) package that was voted down in the summer of 2007. CIR (which started as the "McCain-Kennedy Bill" in 2005) would combine stepped-up enforcement, a limited program for legalization, and a greatly expanded guest worker program like the notorious "bracero" operation of 1942-1964.

It is no longer clear whether Congress will proceed with CIR; the politicians may put immigration on the back burner as they try to deal with more pressing economic issues. The crisis has taken much of the urgency away from "immigration reform." Undocumented immigration had already begun to decline as the U.S. economy slowed in 2007, and the employer associations that pushed CIR for the sake of the guest worker provision may be losing interest: there will be less desire to import easily exploited workers from abroad as the crisis creates a pool of jobless workers here at home.

Read the rest of the article.

Labels: financial crisis, immigrants, immigration, MRZine, National Review

 

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12/04/2008 12:20:00 PM 0 comments

 

Change Immigrants and Labor Can Believe In

by Dollars and Sense

By David Bacon
The Nation, web edition, November 26, 2008

Since 2001 the Bush administration has deported more than a million people--including 349,041 individuals in the fiscal year ending just prior to the election. It has resurrected the discredited community sweeps and factory raids of earlier eras, and started sending waves of migrants to privately run jails for crimes like inventing a Social Security number to get a job. Every day in Tucson 70 young people, including many teenagers, are brought before a federal judge in heavy chains and sentenced to prison because they walked across the border.

It's no wonder that Latinos, Asians and other communities with large immigrant populations voted for Barack Obama by huge margins. People want and expect a change. Ending the administration's failed program of raids, jail time and deportations is at the top of the list. National demonstrations have called for a moratorium on raids since the summer, and one big reason why Los Angeles turned out so heavily for Obama was the anti-raid encampment and hunger strike in the Placita Olvera, which electrified the city.

But the raids program has been rejected by more than immigrants alone. The election took place as millions of people were losing their jobs and homes. Yet while Lou Dobbs and the talk show hysteria-mongers tried to scapegoat immigrants for this crisis ("What about illegal don't you understand?"), most voters did not drink the Kool-Aid. In fact, every poll shows that a big majority reject raids and want basic rights and fair treatment for everyone, immigrants included. The political coalition that put Obama into office--African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, women and union families, expects change.

Read http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081215/bacon.

Labels: David Bacon, ICE raids, immigrants, immigration

 

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11/26/2008 04:02:00 PM 0 comments

 

The Job

by Dollars and Sense

This satirical short (The Job) was created by Screaming Frog Productions.

Labels: capitalism, day laborers, immigration, The Job

 

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3/31/2008 04:11:00 PM 0 comments

 

Our Community in the Streets!

by Dollars and Sense

Check out this exhibit of photographs by David Bacon, photographer, journalist, and frequent D&S contributor.


Our Community in the Streets!
Photographs by David Bacon

Celebrating International Migrants Day and the solidarity of working people in our community (December 7, 2007 - January 31, 2008)



Asian Resource Gallery
310 Eighth St.
Oakland, CA 94607
(Close to the 12th Street and Lake Merritt BART Stations)

Opening Reception &
International Migrants Day Celebration
At the Asian Resource Center Gallery
Monday, December 17, 2007
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.

Participating organizations (partial list):
National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy
Filipinos for Affirmative Action
Service Employees Union Locals 1877 and 24/7
Peoples Association of Workers and Immigrants
Oakland Sin Fronteras

Sponsored by East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation
With support from City of Oakland Arts & Culture, Alameda Co. Arts, & East Bay Community Foundation

FOR MORE INFO: dbacon@igc.org or call Greg Morozumi @ (510) 532-9692

¡Nuestra comunidad está en las calles!

Fotografías por David Bacon
Celebrando el Día Internacional de Migrante
Y la solidaridad de las y los obreros en nuestra comunidad
(Del 7 de Diciembre, 2007 al 31 de Enero, 2008)

En la galería del:
Asian Resource Gallery
310 Eighth St.
Oakland, CA 94607
(Cercas de las estaciones de BART de la Calle 12th y Lake Merritt)

Recepción de apertura y
Celebración del Día Internacional del Migrante
En el Asian Resource Center Gallery
Lunes, 17 de diciembre, 2007
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.

Organizaciones participantes (lista parcial):
National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy
Filipinos for Affirmative Action
Service Employees Union Locals 1877 and 24/7
Peoples Association of Workers and Immigrants
Oakland Sin Fronteras

Patrocinado por East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation
Con el apoyo de City of Oakland Arts & Culture, Alameda Co. Arts, & East Bay Community Foundation

Para más información: dbacon@igc.org o telefone a Greg Morozumi @ (510) 532-9692

Labels: David Bacon, immigration, International Migrants Day, migrants, refugees

 

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12/08/2007 01:26:00 PM 0 comments

 

Dreams and borders: Looking at immigration from the Mexican side

by Dollars and Sense

Chris Tilly and Marie Kennedy
April 14, 2007

This is the third in a series of posts by D&S comrades Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly, who are spending six months in Tlaxcala in central Mexico. Their first posting was about the recent increases in the price of tortillas in Mexico.

The raid came on a Friday night. Law enforcement officials swooped down on hundreds of undocumented immigrants who had not made it far past the border. That's when "the American dream," as so many migrants call it without irony, ended for over one hundred of them who were detained, some hospitalized with major injuries. "Everybody was running as fast as they could because the authorities were hitting them to force them to climb onto the pickup trucks," reported Teresa García, one of the ones who ended up in the hospital. "I slipped and fell, people were stepping on me and then I lost consciousness." One woman, she added, "was pregnant, maybe five months, and I was able to see them pulling her and hitting her to arrest her. It was very violent, there was a lot of yelling." It was the third major raid on migrants in this location in a month's time.

It was an all-too-familiar experience for Mexicans trying to cross into Arizona, California, or Texas. Except this raid did not take place in any of those states, but in Mexico's southern-most state of Chiapas. And those detained were not Mexicans, but Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and one Cuban.

Welcome to Mexico's other immigration problem. In the words of Isabel Vericat, a filmmaker working on a documentary spotlighting illegal immigration across Mexico's southern border, "The northern border of Mexico begins in the south." An estimated 350,000 undocumented immigrants—a majority Central American, but also including many from South America—crossed from Guatemala and Belize in 2005. They came not to seek a living in Mexico's sputtering economy, but to find a way to El Norte. Of the 350,000, it is estimated that about 40,000 made it to their objective. Another 10,000 ended up staying in Mexico. The rest were detained and deported.

Between Mexico's northern border problem and its southern border problem, Mexico is caught in a difficult squeeze. The Mexican government of Felipe Calderón complains that its US counterpart does not sufficiently take into account the needs nor respect the human rights of Mexican immigrants. But at the same time, Mexican authorities are implicated in brutal repression against migrants from farther south…at the behest of the US government.

Survival strategy

The number of Mexicans in the United States is estimated at 11-12 million, with about half a million crossing each year. The Banco de México (Mexico's central bank) claims that the real numbers are substantially larger than these official statistics, citing as evidence the fact that the population in a number of Mexican states has stopped growing despite no drop in the birth rate. Migration's impact on communities, particularly declining rural ones, is enormous. One window onto this is the family saga of our friend Angelina, a market woman in Michoacán's capital city of Morelia who lives in an agricultural town about one hour to the north. Her aging father has gone to el otro lado repeatedly to work in agriculture, injuring himself on the job there in 2004. Her husband was crippled there in a car accident. One sister crossed illegally, only to be deported. Four other siblings are working in Texas and Rhode Island. Her son just went to join relatives in Ohio and do yarda work, a Spanglish word meaning landscaping. Millions of families across Mexico have similar stories.

Border wall or not, immigration reform or not, nobody in Mexico expects this to change soon. (The only noticeable changes in recent years have been increasing rates of immigration from Mexico's more remote southern states, of women, and of unaccompanied children, many of them looking for their parents.) The Banco de México projected in February that even if Mexico achieves a 5% annual growth rate (higher than it has seen since 2000), the pay differential will continue drawing migrants to the north "for two or three decades." Héctor Rangel, the president of the board of Mexican bank BBVA Bancomer, remarked not long afterward that Mexico has been "unable to create the number of jobs necessary to hold onto our population."

NAFTA has been a bust for most Mexicans. The current example of trucking is indicative. In early 2007, with much fanfare, the Mexican government announced that Mexican truck drivers could now haul their loads into the United States. But a couple of weeks into the pilot program, the Mexican trucking association demanded that the agreement be scrapped and a new one negotiated. With long delays at the border plus fines for "safety" infractions, the operators said the current agreement is worthless. But the problem goes well beyond trucking. Overall, Mexico's average wage level is only marginally beyond where it stood in 1994 when NAFTA went into effect, and slow economic growth has driven millions into informal sector jobs, ranging from selling on street corners to sewing in the home. The maquiladora (export assembly) industry grew over the 1990s, but then shrank as cost-conscious transnationals shifted sourcing to Central America or China. Meanwhile, US agricultural imports such as poultry have swept the Mexican market, putting tens of thousands of small producers out of business. Looking ahead with dread to 2008, the deadline for removing all remaining restrictions on US corn, beans, and wheat (with low prices supported by US government subsidies), Mexican peasant associations and their allies have called for re-negotiating NAFTA, but the government remains staunchly pro-free-trade. Perhaps the only "bright" spot, according to researcher Huberto Juárez of the Autonomous University of Puebla, is that as Mexican wages stagnate and Chinese wages grow, Mexico's wage levels are becoming cost-competitive with Chinese ones in some manufacturing sectors.

In this context, the remittances sent home by Mexican's millions of migrants are vital not only for the economic survival of their families, but also for the economic survival of the country. Migration is Mexico's second largest source of export earnings (in this case, via the export of labor), yielding $24 billion US in 2006, second only to petroleum. But like Mexico's oil, which is projected to run out in twenty years or so, remittances can form a deceptive cushion that allows the government to shirk its job-creation responsibilities—temporarily. Raúl Delgado, director of the International Network on Migration and Development, criticizes governments of immigrant-sending countries for over-dependence on remittances at the expense of developing a well-rounded development policy "following alternative strategies" and "fighting to transform the asymmetrical and unjust relations that characterize the current global order."

The southern border

If the pay difference is a magnet for Mexican migration, it is an even stronger magnet for people struggling to survive in the poorer Central American countries, which over the last twenty to thirty years have been ravaged by civil wars, hurricanes, free trade, and the global coffee glut. Deals between corrupt border guards and polleros (traffickers whom migrants pay to escort them across) make it easy to cross the border itself. But once in southern Mexico, immigrants from Central America or farther south are easy prey for those same polleros and police, along with maras (Salvadoran gangs active in the border area), Mexican organized crime, and freelance robbers and con men. Migrants with money can pay to travel north by car or even plane. But most have no choice other than the train.

The train in question starts in Arriaga, Chiapas, 180 miles north of the border. (It began at the border until Hurricane Stan devastated a long stretch of it in 2005.) Migrants must walk for ten dangerous days to reach Arriaga. If they succeed, they climb onto train cars, holding on any way they can. The rail voyage to the northern border takes another 10 to 12 days.

That's if everything goes right. But usually it doesn't. In the 180-mile gauntlet from the border to Arriaga, in addition to deportation, migrants run the risk of extortion, robbery, assault, rape, and even murder. According to first-hand accounts from migrants collected by film-maker Vericat, the perpretrators are often the uniformed police who are charged with enforcing immigration law. Thousands of women, mostly young Central American mothers with one or more children to support, many under 18, have been lured or forced into prostitution in the Soconusco border region of Chiapas when the option of going further north evaporated. Vericat reports that Soconusco has become the third largest center of prostitution in the world, behind only border regions in Brazil and Thailand.

And getting on the train does not mean they are home free, either. The train ride is exhausting and dangerous. Mounting or dismounting—or falling—from the moving train can cause serious injury or death. Police raids are frequent (the February 10, 2007 raid described in the introduction to this article targeted the train in Arriaga; reportedly there were 500 migrants aboard). In that raid, one woman fell under the train and lost a foot. And of course, the travelers must sometimes get off to get food, water, a little sleep in some place where they don't have to hold on for dear life. Apizaco, in the state of Tlaxcala where we are spending six months, marks the halfway point in the journey. The Casa del Migrante in Apizaco, a charitable organization that provides assistance with no questions asked, reports that migrants are often out of money and desperate. Confused, some of them make the tragic error of re-boarding the train heading south instead of north. And of course, at the US border they face another set of obstacles. Even once on the job in the United States, they are not safe, as we saw in the March New Bedford, Massachusetts raid that nabbed hundreds of undocumented Central Americans. But many of those who are deported keep trying, again and again.

The immigration debates in Mexico

The policy discussion of immigration in Mexico is split. Looking north, everybody agrees that the US should allow more Mexicans to enter legally and that the border wall is a barbarity. Everybody recognizes the hypocrisy of the wealthy northern neighbor that depends on large numbers of Mexican laborers but insists on selectively enforcing a law that is completely out of step with reality. The only disagreement is between the Calderón administration, which is pressing the Bush administration in the most cautious of ways, and critics who call on the government to stand up more forcefully for opportunities for Mexicans.

The debate about the southern border is much more wide-open. Legislators from the center-to-right PRI and PAN parties, which make up a majority in congress, have called for stronger sanctions against undocumented immigrants from the south in phrases that could have come from US Republicans. But the government of Calderón (who was the PAN's candidate for presdident) has announced plans to decriminalize illegal immigration (that is, deport them but don't fine them, in order to decrease the incentives for extortion by officials) and to expand legal immigration channels, increasing the number of Guatemalans permitted to enter for agricultural work and issuing visas of up to five years for professional workers. At the same time, they have promised the US government to tighten up the "porous" southern border, by means they have yet to specify. And Mexico's federal agents continue to deal out violent treatment to migrants.

Meanwhile, a chain of Casas del Migrante located at strategic points in the migration from the south, such as Arriaga and Apizaco, offer temporary shelter, food, counseling, and small amounts of cash, defying legal restrictions. And many ordinary Mexicans offer the immigrants from the south a meal or place to sleep. In a highly publicized case, María Concepción, who lives in a community along the south-north train where it passes through the central state of Querétaro, was recently sentenced to two years in prison for human trafficking after being caught feeding supper to six migrants from Honduras in 2005. The government claimed to have witnesses who testified that Concepción worked for pay with a network of traffickers. Concepción and her family members insist she was just offering charity, and that everybody in the community "would give them a taco or some water," in the words of her daughter. Because they have concluded that for the government "it's a crime even to give them a glass of water, now we don't even give them a glass of water."

But for most Mexicans, unlike the issue of the northern border, the issue of the southern border remains a bit remote. Arturo, a neighbor of ours in Tlaxcala who runs a laundromat, commented, "Mexico is just a ‘trampoline' for the Central Americans, because there's nothing for them here, no jobs." Still, with the growing volume of migrants and increasing media coverage, there is growing consciousness of the human rights issues involved. On a visit to the hospital, Arturo had met a Guatemalan who had fallen under the train in Apizaco. "The police picked him up and beat him. He was at the hospital, under armed guard, and once he was better they were going to deport him. That's not fair, that's a violation of human rights! If the man wants to work, let him try to get a job."

Burning questions

The week leading up to Easter is a time of school vacations and colorful celebrations all across Mexico—not a time when many are thinking about the grim issues of immigration. But we saw the issues flare up—literally—at the Holy Saturday celebration (the night before Easter) in San Cristobal, Chiapas, about 80 miles from Arriaga as the crow flies. Mexico has a Holy Saturday tradition of burning los Judas, papier-mâché dummies named after Judas, often crammed with fireworks and representing the ills and evils the community would like to purge. San Cristobal hosts an annual Judas contest. This year the competition was brisk, with two effigies of George Bush (one as a rat, the other as a sea monster), two of President Calderón, two of environmental pollution and global warming, and two of a Grim Reaper-like figure of Abortion (conservative Mexicans are appalled that Mexico City is on the verge of decriminalizing abortion), among others.

But the winner was "El muro de la vergüenza" (the wall of shame), as Mexicans call the barrier the United States is erecting along the border. Less noticed, however, was an evocative sculpture showing a faceless figure with a club beating down a second faceless figure who was trying to clamber up onto a boxcar. "The plight of the Central American immigrant" said a simple label scrawled in chalk. We watched as they lit up the boxcar. The flames leaped up, the fireworks shot off, but as the fire died down again the crowd could see that the figures and the boxcar were still there. The celebrants tried twice more to relight the Judas, but it stubbornly refused to be consumed, and they finally gave up and moved on to the next one. For Mexico as for the United States, the treatment of migrants from the south will not be an easy Judas to burn.

Resources: Isabel Vericat, La otra frontera (México-Guatemala), Jornada Semanal, March 4, 2007; Casas del Migrante-Scalabrini web site.

Labels: Calderón, immigration, Mexico, PAN, PRI, remittances

 

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4/15/2007 05:45:00 PM 0 comments

 

Cafecito: discuss trade & immigration this Sunday in Newton

by Dollars & Sense

Sunday, February 4, 4 pm, at 624 Sawmill Brook Parkway in Newton

This Sunday, a friend of mine from Texas, Judith Rosenberg, is hosting a cafecito to discuss the connections between free trade, fair trade, immigration, the US economy, and anything else her guests can bring into the conversation.

I met Judith several years ago on a delegation from Austin Tan Cerca de la Frontera to the Comité Fronterizo de Obrer@s, which organizes maquiladora workers on the Mexico-Texas border. Judith still works with ATCF, which has expanded its delegations from U.S.-->Mexico to include Mexico-->U.S. tours as well, through their Women and Fair Trade program.

Judith brings this experience to the cafecito, as well as a copy of a new, award-winning documentary by Austin filmmaker Heather Courtney: Letters from the Other Side. The film interweaves video letters carried across the U.S.-Mexico border by the director with the personal stories of women left behind in post-NAFTA Mexico. The film gives an intimate look at the lives of the people most affected by today's failed immigration and trade policies.

Judith and her cousin Linda Stern hosted a similar event last Sunday, which I attended. The film and the conversation were both stimulating. The topic I remember best was our discussion of fair trade and the trouble its producers have finding markets. As we were discussing fair trade tours by producers as a partial solution to the market problem, one guest* expressed her discomfort with the "ethnic" angle to fair trade—as though buyers are saying, I'll pay a fair price for your goods, but first you have to show me that you're authentic as well as oppressed.
*—Tina, if you're out there, pipe up. I didn't get your last name.

As a partial response, Judith told us about the Maquila Dignidad y Justicia that the Comité Fronterizo de Obrer@s has founded, which is turning out fair-trade t-shirts and tote bags that it sells, with the help of North Country Fair Trade in bulk in the United States. Dignidad y Justicia hopes one day to produce blue jeans, as well.

Find out more at this Sunday's cafecito, 4pm, at the home of Judith's cousin, Linda Stern. To RSVP or for directions, contact Judith at chelrose at grandecom dot net.

Labels: fair trade, free trade, globalization, immigration, NAFTA

 

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2/01/2007 08:59:00 PM 1 comments