Immigration Reform, 2013

With the American Dream becoming a nightmare even for the native-born, what can immigrants expect?
Editor’s note: This article was excerpted from our sister publication, the Tribuno del Pueblo. As we go to press, the U.S. Senate passed animmigration reform bill with a vote of 68 to 32. Yet this is not the immigration reform millions fought for.Since 2006, millions of people took to the streets to demand a just immigration reform. “Citizenship for all,” the heart of their demands, is missing in the new proposed bill.What’s not missing is an additional $5.5 billion to “secure” the border. Corporations such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are lining up to take their cut.
Today’s immigration debates are occurring in an environment of enforced austerity at home, where even previously comfortable U.S. born workers are sacrificed to corporate profits. At the same time, the globalization of capitalism is displacing millions from their homelands and forcing them to emigrate to the U.S. or other countries.
For a long time it seemed like the U.S. was the land of opportunity. The U.S. seemed a beacon of hope and plenty to many from abroad. It appeared that the U.S. worker shared in the bounty and was part of a social contract between employers and workers. Many immigrants longed for this.
But this is rapidly changing.
The U.S. now has one of the highest income disparities of industrialized countries. We live in a time of unprecedented abundance and polarization of wealth, where the top one percent own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent. The social safety net is in tatters. Unions are weak.
Labor-replacing technology has caused this, because of who owns it—the one percent not the 99 percent. (In the hands of the 99 percent, the new technology would be a benefit, not a curse.). It is in this context that we look at the current immigration reform.
Immigrants seeking legalization are played as pawns in an enormous game of chess, in which immigration is only one part of the game plan. The extension of the guest-worker program from agriculture to industry is part of the politics of immigration reform. Jobs not yet taken over by robots are increasingly done by a temporary workforce.
If the American Dream is becoming a nightmare even for U.S. born citizens, what can immigrants expect out of immigration reform? On the positive side, polls show that a large majority of Americans support a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today. But even if legalized, immigrants will be excluded from receiving health care under Obama’s Affordable Care Act for up to 14 years. This occurs despite numerous studies showing that immigrants always paid more into social security than they collected in benefits. This year’s proposed farm bill would exclude half a million eligible people from food stamps—not counting the undocumented or those in the process of legalization, who are not even eligible. Seventy-five percent of those affected are children.
We are headed towards perilous times. Until U.S. born and immigrant workers see themselves as members of a unified, single class—with a right to full and equal access to the bounty that the modern world provides—there will be much suffering. But once we awaken to class consciousness—native-born and immigrant alike—we will be poised to achieve the good life for us all.