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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 18, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Record deportations

A wall by any other name

T

By John Catalinotto

Washington has a two-pronged approach toward its borders with Mexico.

On the one hand, it demands treaties like NAFTA to ease the flow of capital and commodities as much as possible. On the other, it raises walls to keep people out.

A U.S.-based construction firm has just finished building a quarter-mile stretch of 14-foot-tall wall separating Nogales, Ariz., from Nogales, Mexico. On orders from the U.S. government, the architects had to design an impassable wall that looked like a welcoming arch.

They failed. The wall has windows that allow anyone to look across the border. But even if miniature statues of liberty popped up every 500 feet, no one on the Mexican side could mistake the wall for anything but a strong message to stay out of the territory the U.S. seized from Mexico 150 years ago.

Currently much of the U.S.-Mexico border not marked by the Rio Grande river is blocked by iron fences made from Vietnam War scrap metal. Their harshness, similar to barbed-wire barricades, hurts the image Washington and Wall Street try to project.

Now they may be replaced by a Nogales-style wall to give the illusion of freedom.

For those who make it into the United States without official papers, Washington has also stepped up the repression. At a news conference at the end of October, Attorney General Janet Reno said that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had deported 111,794 people without immigration documents so far in 1997.

She boasted it was the highest number in history. And in fact, immigration raids—in the growing fields of Florida and Michigan and New York, in the sweatshops of Chicago and Los Angeles—are nearly a daily occurrence.

Besides those expelled, the INS says another 76,844 were returned to their home countries without formal proceedings. And 1.3 million were stopped and turned away at the border.

INS Commissioner Doris Meissner claims the estimated population of people illegally in the United States is between 4 million and 5 million. She described them as criminal aliens.

A look at some California wage statistics shows, however, who the real criminals are.

A UCLA study determined that undocumented workers contribute about 7 percent of California’s $900-billion gross economic product, or $63 billion. With about 1.4 million undocumented people there, that means each one—including in this average those not working—contributes about $45,000 to California’s economy.

Most of these workers are paid at or near minimum wage, or about $8,840. That amounts to only about 20 percent of what they contribute to the economy.

All workers are exploited—that is, paid far less than the value they produce. But few get such a low percentage as do these immigrant workers.

And their wages are still decreasing. UCLA Professor Goetz Wolff says the hourly wage for women’s-apparel workers in Los Angeles fell from $6.37 to $5.62 between 1988 and 1993. This sweatshop-based industry employs 120,000 workers, almost all immigrants and most undocumented.

Perhaps it’s for these reasons that 20,000 immigrant workers have walked off their jobs or taken part in organizing campaigns since 1990 in California. They are a backbone of militant trade unionism in the state.

The real criminals are the U.S.-based capitalists who take advantage of the immigrants’ shaky legal status and insecurity, and whip up anti-immigrant panic so they can super-exploit these workers.

The U.S. government’s persecution of immigrants is not limited to those without documents. As of September, about 750,000 legal immigrants have been denied food stamps to which they were formerly entitled.

This anti-immigrant attack was part of Congress and Clinton’s assault on the poorest and most oppressed sector of the working class with the 1996 welfare "reform" law.

Now the food-stamp cuts are sending children and adults to bed hungry.

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