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Originally posted by lord of the mark
1. Requiring employers to check for proof of legal residencyis already part of immigration policy in the US.
2. US Foreign policy, from loan guarantees to Mexico, to trade policy with the Carib and Central America, to the 94 intervention in Haiti is clearly influenced by migration concerns, IMHO.
1. Requiring employers to check for proof of legal residencyis already part of immigration policy in the US.
2. US Foreign policy, from loan guarantees to Mexico, to trade policy with the Carib and Central America, to the 94 intervention in Haiti is clearly influenced by migration concerns, IMHO.
Let’s take a look at California’s not too distant history with regard to the employment of Spanish speakers of Mexican descent, or recent Mexican immigrants.
In 1970, two and a quarter million Mexican-Americans lived in California, and at the time, 90 000 crossed the border with passes to look for work.
Only relatively recently had they formed agricultural unions to improve the working practices and conditions which they were subject to.
Norman Lewis, in the Sunday Times dated 1st February, 1970, wrote:
‘Poverty in the richest state in the richest land is more abject than anything to be seen, in, say, Northern Europe. A grape picker works 82 days in a year, and the average migrant’s income is.... less than half the amount a U.S. family requires to live above the poverty line. Until recently some workers were kept behind barbed wire...
U.S. citizens of Mexican origin are a very much depressed minority... Eighty per cent of them are housed in slums. Their children average two years less at school than the children of Negroes and four years less than the children of whites, and they are still punished for speaking Spanish within earshot of their teachers...
Later they are likely to find that, whatever their scholastic achievements, only menial employment will be offered them....
The picture of exploitation on the Victorian model is completed by the presence of child labour. When I was in Delano, last November, the local paper, the Fresno Bee, reported the case of Teresa Arellano, a girl of eight, who worked a 70 hour week on a grape ranch... by my own experience the spectacle of young children at work in conditions which are arduous and even dangerous for an adult is commonplace indeed...
When the Guimarra Vineyards-largest of the growers- was tried and convicted on nearly forty violations of child labour and health laws, it was fined a total of U.S. $ 1,000 by the Kern County Superior Court- and the fine was suspended.
(Cesar Chavez on the conditions of grape picking)
‘It’s degrading. Dehumanizing. After an hour or two everybody gets in such a mess you can’t tell a man from a woman.’
It is rare in the fields for proper drinking water to be available, or any form of latrine provided. More seriously, in recent years growers have taken to the use of toxic sprays that have caused innumerable cases of severe illness and some deaths. Workers are housed in compounds on company property which members of Chavez’s organization are frequently prevented from inspecting, and are said, at worse, to resemble concentration camps.’
Referring to another investigation, the report in the Sunday Times had this to say:
‘Of nearly 800 workers interviewed, practically all showed signs of poisoning, and 163 reported five or more of the following symptoms:
vomiting, abnormal fatigue, abnormal perspiration, difficulty in breathing, loss of fingernails, loss of hair, itching in the ears, nose bleeds, swollen hands and feet, and diarrhoea.
The first field worker I spoke to in Delano was a cook in one of the immigrant camps- I noticed that the man’s hands looked like a leper’s at the stage just before the fingers drop off.’
(The cook explained he had been out in the fields when an aeroplane sprayed the vineyards, but the spray wasn’t vaporizing properly and fell in droplets).’
In any case, the worker would not have been able to tell what pesticide fell on him, because there were court orders (!) forbidding the agricultural commissioner from revealing the composition of some of the pesticides used.
When the grape pickers went on strike, the then governor, Ronald Reagan, called the strike ‘immoral’ and an ‘attempted blackmail of free society’.
'you mean like we all eat tacos? '
And no, by culture, I don't mean just tacos. If I had meant only cuisine, I would have said so.
And please, don't get me started on the sorry history of U.S. foreign policy and intervention in Central and South America.
Even recently, from Guatemala in the 50s to Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 70s and 80s, lawful migration was the least of their concerns- else why prop up brutal regimes that cause people to flee their homelands in thousands?
Oh wait, I'm getting something- a cheap labour pool, scared of immigration, that'll work for peanuts in atrocious conditions.
Now that sounds familiar.
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