Journalist, activist, artist and author David Bacon's latest book is The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration (Beacon Press).
JOE BIDEN SHOULD ROLL BACK EXPLOITATIVE GUEST WORKER PROGRAMS
By David Bacon
Jacobin, 3/9/20
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/biden-guest-worker-program-immigration-farmworker
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2021/03/joe-biden-should-roll-back-exploitative.html
Members of the Yakama Nation of Native Americans join farmworkers and other immigrants to celebrate May Day in 2017 and protest continued deportations and detentions. (Photo (c) David Bacon)
The current guest worker system prioritizes agricultural growers' profits over immigrants' and workers' rights. Joe Biden should seek a different way: building an immigration system based on family reunification, community stability, and immigrant workers' rights to decent wages, health, and housing.
The intention of the US guest worker program for agriculture, called the H-2A program, couldn't have been stated more clearly than it was by agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue in a January 2020 speech to growers. He wanted, he said,
to separate immigration, which is people wanting to become citizens, [from] a temporary, legal guest-worker program . . . That's what agriculture needs, and that's what we want. It doesn't offend people who are anti-immigrant because they don't want more immigrant citizens here. We need people who can help US agriculture meet the production.
By separating the immigration of families, in which migrants become community members and eventually citizens, from the recruitment of migrants solely for their labor power, in which they work and then leave, Perdue was restating a goal of US immigration policy that has existed from its inception. In opposition to that goal, the civil rights movement among Mexican and Asian Americans proposed an alternative vision to guide our immigration policy, one that favored unifying families and strengthening immigrant communities, and forced Congress to enact a law in 1965 that enshrines that vision.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was a high point, however. In the subsequent years, US agriculture's use of migration as a labor supply program has grown enormously, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The Trump administration, however, made the H-2A program's growth a priority. While ending family-based migration through an emergency executive measure, it issued order after order making the H-2A guest worker program more attractive to agribusiness.
The Biden administration must decide not only which of those administrative orders it intends to revoke, but if it will pursue a different direction for US immigration policy in general.
Regulating Migrant Flows for Capital
The movement of people from country to country, displaced by war, insecurity, and neoliberal economic policies, is enormous and growing. The US government, like all others, develops its policy within that context. The US Congress and presidential administrations do not debate the means for ending this flow of people, despite the often-poisonous anti-migrant rhetoric. Nothing can stop this global movement, short of a radical reordering of the world's economy and politics. Instead, US political debate centers on how directly this flow should be used for its ability to create wealth for those who employ it, and over the legal status and rights of migrants themselves.
US industrial agriculture has its roots in slavery and the brutal kidnapping of Africans, whose labor developed the plantation economy, and the subsequent semi-slave sharecropping system in the South. For over a century, especially in the West and the Southwest, industrial agriculture has depended on a migrant workforce, formed from waves of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Mexican, and, more recently, Central American migrants. Today, a growing percentage of farmworkers are indigenous people speaking languages other than Spanish, an indication that economic dislocation has reached far into the Mexican countryside's most remote parts.
Repeated waves of immigration raids and deportations are not intended to halt migration. Immigrant labor plays such a critical part in the economy that the price of stopping migration would be economic chaos. The intention of immigration policy since the Chinese Exclusion and Alien Land acts of the late 1800s is managing the flow of people and determining their status in the United States in the interest of employers.
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Two interviews with franknews: The Right to Remain http://www.franknews.us/interviews/415/the-right-to-remain Beware of Pity http://www.franknews.us/interviews/525/beware-of-pity Interview with Sylvia Richardson, Latin Waves, Toronto, Canada Organizing during COVID, the intrinsic value of the people who grow our food https://latinwavesmedia.com/wordpress/organizing-during-covid-the-intrinsic-value-of-the-people-who-grow-our-food/  WORK AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: The David Bacon Archive exhibition at Stanford Libraries On exhibit through May 9, 2021 in the Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford. Access to campus libraries is currently limited to Stanford ID cardholders due to COVID-19; however, the online exhibition (https://exhibits.stanford.edu/bacon), which includes additional content not included in the physical show, is accessible to everyone, and is part of an accessible digital spotlight collection that includes significant images from this body of work. For a catalog: (https://web.stanford.edu/dept/spec_coll/NonVendorPubOrderform2017.pdf) An In-Conversation with David Bacon, Kevin De León, and Ignacio Ornelas Rodriguez on October 29, 2020. IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH Online Exhibit, May 29 to August 2, 2020 Los Altos History Museum https://www.losaltoshistory.org/exhibits/in-the-fields-of-the-north/ VIRTUAL TOUR OF THE EXHIBITION - IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH History Museum of Tijuana RECORRIDO VIRTUAL DE LA EXPOSICIÓN - EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE Museo de Historia de Tijuana https://www.facebook.com/542258639265202/videos/659536991515786 TARTINE HARDSHIP FUND Newly organized Tartine Bakery workers in the Bay Area need your help and assistance! This fund, supported by the International Longhsore and Warehouse Union, will help hose workers unable to collect unemployment insurance. The exhibitions in the following list were scheduled before the current COVID-19 crisis. Public gatherings are not now taking place and these exhibitions have now been postponed or rescheduled. Stay healthy! IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH / EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE March 21, 2021 - May 23, 2021 Carnegie Arts Center, Turlock MORE THAN A WALL - THE SOCIAL MOVEMENTS OF THE BORDER Spring, 2021 San Francisco Public Library DEPORTATIONS Rescheduled for a date when the gallery reopens Uri-Eichen Gallery, Chicago In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte Photographs and text by David Bacon University of California Press / Colegio de la Frontera Norte 302 photographs, 450pp, 9”x9” paperback, $34.95 (in the U.S.) order the book on the UC Press website: ucpress.edu/9780520296077 use source code 16M4197 at checkout, receive a 30% discount En Mexico se puede pedir el libro en el sitio de COLEF: https://www.colef.mx Los Angeles Times reviews In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte - click here "The Criminalization of Migration: A Socialist Perspective" with David Bacon and Rafael Pizarro. http://ouleft.org/wp-content/uploads/David-Bacon-The-Criminalization-of-migration.mp4 A video about the Social Justice Photography of David Bacon: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14TvAj5nS08ENzWhw3Oxra4LMNKJCLF4z/view En los campos del Norte documenta la vida de trabajadores agrícolas en Estados Unidos - Entrevista con el Instituto Nacional de la Antropologia y Historia http://www.inah.gob.mx/es/boletines/6863-en-los-campos-del-norte-documenta-la-vida-de-trabajadores-agricolas-en-estados-unidos Entrevista en la television de UNAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdSaBKZ_k0o David Bacon comparte su mirada del trabajo agrícola de migrantes mexicanos en el Museo Archivo de la Fotografia http://www.cultura.cdmx.gob.mx/comunicacion/nota/0038-18 Trabajo agrícola, migración y resistencia cultural: el mosaico de los “Campos del Norte” Entrevista de David Bacon por Iván Gutiérrez / A los 4 Vientos http://www.4vientos.net/2017/10/04/trabajo-agricola-migracion-y-resistencia-cultural-el-mosaico-de-los-campos-del-norte/ "Los fotógrafos tomamos partido" Entrevista por Melina Balcázar Moreno - Milenio.com Laberinto http://www.milenio.com/cultura/laberinto/david_baconm-fotografia-melina_balcazar-laberinto-milenio_0_959904035.html EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE: Farm worker photographs on the U.S./Mexico border wall http://us7.campaign-archive2.com/?u=fc67a76dbb9c31aaee896aff7&id=0644c65ae5&e=dde0321ee7 Entrevista sobre la exhibicion con Alfonso Caraveo (Español) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJeE1NO4c_M&feature=youtu.be THE REALITY CHECK - David Bacon blog Books by David Bacon Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008) | |
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