Immigrant
Labor and Identity politics, George Lipsitz (1998)
[ In 1994 60% of the California electorate voted for Prop 187, designed to deny medical treatment and education to undocumented workers and their families. ]
Political opportunism accounted for much of the campaign on behalf of Proposition 187. During his first term in office, California governor Pete Wilson saw his approval ratings in public opinion polls drop below 20 percent as the state suffered from a devastating economic recession. Less than 20 percent approval represents a nadir for any incumbent, much less for Pete Wilson, a career politician lavishly subsidized throughout his career by contributions from wealthy attorneys, developers, and bankers in his successful previous races for mayor of San Diego, U.S. senator, and governor. To improve his chances for election, Wilson attempted to deflect anger away from himself and toward some of the most powerless and defenseless people in California. In a state where government allotments to single mothers raising two children already fell $2,645 below the official poverty line, Wilson successfully advocated reducing payments so that these women and their children would be even poorer. He showed himself to be motivated more by spite and contempt than by fiscal restraint when he explained that the new payments should not produce hardships for welfare mothers and their children because the cuts simply meant "one less six pack per week." . .
. . His commercials repeatedly broadcast a film showing a dozen Mexican nationals running past U.S. border guards as a voice-over narrative seething with racist contempt intoned, " They just keep coming." Wilson's speeches and statements in support of his own campaign and on behalf of Proposition made special and nearly obsessive mention of the relatively small number of Mexican immigrant women who give birth to children in California hospitals, taking advantage of stereotypes of Mexicans as sexually unrestrained--as if forming families is an illicit activity, as if childbirth is an unnatural and perverse practice of the poor, and as if anyone would be better off if expectant mothers and their children were denied prenatal care or childbirth under safe conditions.
Undocumented workers pay far more in taxes than they receive in services. In addition, they benefit the U.S. economy as productive low-wage laborers, ineligible for direct welfare assistance, and vulnerable as "illegal" immigrants to employers who can mistreat them-and in some cases run out on paying them any wages at all-secure in the knowledge that the workers' undocumented status makes it all but impossible for them to file complaints with the legally constituted authorities. To be sure, not all of the federal taxes paid by undocumented workers return to California, and it is true that city, county, and state agencies bear primary responsibility for some of the medical and educational expenses of immigrants. Yet Californians also enjoy the overwhelming majority of the economic benefits in the form of lower prices for goods and services created by the hard work and legal vulnerability of largely unregulated low- wage immigrant labor
Particular sectors of the California work force may well be hurt by the influx of undocumented workers, especially members of other minority groups competing for unskilled low-wage employment. One can see clearly that jobs cleaning and maintaining office buildings, hotels, and restaurants that used to go routinely to African Americans now seem increasingly to be the domain of Central Americans. Immigrants are sometimes favored by employers over blacks because those doing the hiring suffer from racist preconceptions about African American workers. Employers also generally prefer to hire workers who do not speak English, who are unfamiliar with U.S. labor laws, and whose noncitizen status makes them reluctant to become trade union activists, to file grievances on the job, or to complain to state and federal agencies about viola- tions of labor laws or health and safety regulations. This change is part of a conscious strategy by employers nationwide to create a "union proof" work force, a strategy in evidence from the rise of prison labor in the United States to the emergence of low-wage data-processing jobs in India, from the entry of Central Americans into jobs as janitors in Los Angeles office buildings to the recruitment of longshore workers in the Persian Gulf as replacements for unionized dock workers in Australia, from increases in part-time employment in the poultry industry in the Midwest and South to the development of computer- generated automation as a means of turning high-paying, high-skill jobs into low-skill, low-wage employments
Proposition 187 and the plethora of anti-immigrant measures that have emerged in its wake draw on a long history of laws designed to insure the unimpeded importation of low-wage labor in order to drive down wages for all workers while blaming the resulting social and economic catastrophes on the immigrants themselves. . . The proponents of Proposition 187 articulated their concerns in unambiguous language when the leader of the campaign to pass the measure described his group as the "posse" and Proposition 187 as "the rope." Key architects of Proposition 187 received funds from the well-known white supremacist Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to research in eugenics purporting to prove the superiority of the white race and the threat posed to it by interaction with people of color. In television and newspaper advertisements, in public pronouncements and privately circulated propaganda, supporters of Proposition 187 relied on racist and sexist stereotypes, on the "menace" posed by Mexican women coming to California to have babies at taxpayers' expense. This argument has little basis in fact; the amount of public funds spent on prenatal care and childbirth for undocumented immigrants is both minimal and cost effective. Yet by feminizing and infantilizing the enemy, by connecting the social transgression of nonwhite immigrants coming to California with the fear of unrestrained "Latin" sexuality and procreation, the advocates of Proposition 187 "played the race card, evoking powerful stereotypes that are especially well suited for concealing the real social relations between undocumented immigrants and California's white voters.
. . . The low-wage women workers demonized as parasites by Pete Wilson actually do much of the hard work on which middle-class prosperity relies. They clean offices, hotel rooms, and homes. They plant, harvest, prepare, and serve food. They sew clothes they cannot afford to buy. For all their hard and under-rewarded work, they find themselves hated and defamed as lazy dependents living off the largesse of the very people whose lives they make easier and more remunerative. The hypocrisy of Proposition 187's supporters did not need to be well hidden. During the election campaign reporters discovered that millionaire senatorial candidate and Proposition 187 supporter Michael Huffington had long benefited from the work done for him and his family by an undocumented immigrant housekeeper, and little more than a year after the election the Washington Post reported that Pete Wilson himself employed as his house- keeper an "illegal alien" from Tijuana.
. . [I]nvestment in whiteness seeks support for transnational capital by promising to confine its worst effects to communities of color while preserving and extending the benefits of present and past discrimination enjoyed by European Americans. At the same time, it works as a wedge against the welfare state in general, using the denial of benefits to "un- worthy" recipients Re illegal and later legal immigrants as the prelude to future campaigns to "privatize" education and health services for everyone, effectively reserving them only for the rich. The portrayal of massive immigration to the United States from Mexico as a consequence of the desire of individual immigrants for welfare benefits completely disregards the neoliberal 'reforms" imposed on Mexico by U.S. and transnational capital that have made flight from that country a necessity for many formerly self-sufficient workers and farmers.
The U.S. government insists on free trade and unlimited mobility for U.S. capital; works to lower wages, cut social spending, and disrupt traditional economies in poor nations; encourages the growth of low-wage jobs in North America; and then expresses shock and dismay when these decisions all lead to increased immigration to the United States.
The rhetoric that demonizes low-wage workers for crossing international boundaries slides the existence of the most important border crossers in the Southwest, the U.S. firms that use special tax breaks and the provisions of international trade agreements to set up maquiladora plants on the U.S.-Mexico border. Instigated and sustained by tax breaks that offer subsidies to U.S. firms who abandon workers in the United States by fleeing to locations of low-wage labor like Mexico, maquiladora zones provide opportunities for large profits for California businesses and investors. By moving across the border, such U.S. firms as Xerox, RCA, Chrysler, ITT, IBM, and Eastman Kodak have employed
nearly a half million workers in their Mexican plants at a savings of between $16,000 to $25,000 per worker per year. Low wages, low taxes, weak unions, high unemployment, and nonenforcement of environmental protection laws make maquiladora plants the locus of terrible exploitation and disruption in mexico.
Corporations gain state-subsidized advantages over workers in both the United States and Mexico by crossing the border. For example, in 1992, the Smith-Corona Company closed a typewriter plant in Cortland, New York, dismissing eight hundred workers from their jobs. The company then relocated its operations to Tijuana, Mexico. Management abuses motivated the Mexican workers to go on strike in October 1994. When the employees announced their work stoppage, the Smith-Corona Company in Mexico "disappeared from the social security records as if it had been shut down," according to Mary Tong of the San Diego Support Committee for Maquiladora Workers. The workers still made the same products at the same plants, but they could not find out the identity of their employer in order to bargain with management. At least six- teen companies "disappeared" in Tijuana in this way in 1994, sometimes simply sneaking out of town, abandoning plants built with subsidies from the Mexican government, and avoiding all payroll and tax obligations including the severance pay required in such situations by Mexican law.
Unconstrained by Mexican environmental laws that are not enforced, companies in one Tijuana industrial park release unlawful and dangerous concentrations of lead, copper, cadmium, chromium, zinc, and arsenic into drainage ditches, polluting sources of drinking water for some two thousand people who live in the colonia nestled beneath the industrial park. One study showed that more than 40 percent of the people in this neighborhood suffered from pouution-related illnesses and learning disabilities. Between 1993 and 1995 alone, nine women in this colonia gave birth to anencephalic babies (babies born without brains). Corporate and government officials denied that pollution caused these birth defects, attributing the poor health of mothers and children to deficient amounts of folic acid in the diets of the workers and their families. Yet these workers subsist largely on corn and beans, two food with high levels of folic acid.
The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 compounded already depressed conditions in Mexico's agricultural sector, promoting massive migration to cities Re Tijuana. For their maquiladora plants, transnational companies seek out young women workers, whom they believe will be more obedient and less militant than men or older women, and whom they intend to workhard for a brief period and then replace with other willing recruits fleeing the devastated economic conditions in the agricultural regions of central and southern Mexico. Because Mexican law leaves to companies the responsibility for prenatal care and childbirth expenses for women workers, the firms ttry to force pregnant women to quit their jobs. In one plant owned by a Japanese firm, management put a pregnant worker in a fume-filled soldering room with no ventilation in hopes of making her quit her job. She remained at work because she needed the money. Her baby was born anencephalic.
Maquiladora plants offer great advantages to investors, owners and their families in the US, especially California. They make products that can be sold for less because of their lower labor costs, whil ethe practice or event the possibility of runaway shops constrains the demands of U.S. workers. Chaos in Mexico insures a steady flow of desperate immigrant workers across the border; the undocumented status of some of them insures greater exploitation, forcing wages and working conditions for all workers even lower.