Thread: Immigration and The Jean Refugees

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Immigration and The Jean Refugees

Dr. Daryn Glassbrook - 9/18/2006
There are three kinds of complaints involved in the current anti-immigration backlash in the United States. First, there are legitimate concerns about alleged attempts by terrorists to cross the U.S.-Mexican border undetected or disguised as migrant workers. Second, there are grievances that are based on myth, hearsay, and disinformation—such as the false claim that undocumented workers are a drain on the economy. Then there are the complaints that are symptomatic of the tragically narrow perspective many ordinary Americans bring to bear on the world we live in. It is this kind of complaint that most politicians and pundits are unwilling to confront in any serious way, because it would mean acknowledging the unconscionable depravity at the root of our economic system.

It must be difficult to experience the kind of cultural upheaval that Euro-Americans are facing throughout much of the South and Southwest. But this cultural upheaval pales in comparison to what many indigenous communities of Mexico went through a decade ago, in the aftermath of the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA led to the proliferation of Export Processing Zones (EPZs) in the cities and along the northern border of Mexico, areas where contractors set up makeshift work centers, or maquiladoras, for brands such as Levi Strauss, Tommy Hilfiger, General Electric, and Panasonic. The Mexican government offers tax exemptions to these contractors and grants them wide latitude on environmental and workplace regulations so they will be tempted to stay in Mexico for the long term. While NAFTA includes a labor side agreement that is intended to protect the rights of workers, the Mexican government has lacked the will to hold EPZ contractors accountable to the law.

The promise of new jobs at the maquiladoras brought thousands of migrants from indigenous towns in rural areas, most of them young women and children. The city of Tehuacán in central Mexico, where many brand name jeans are assembled cheaply and quickly by maquiladora workers, has seen its population rise by more than 100%, to 360,000. Meanwhile, the cultural and economic foundations of the migrants’ hometowns have been decimated. In an article for the Maquila Solidarity Network, human rights activist Martín Amaru Barrios Hernández writes, “The towns of the Sierra were left without the new blood needed for agricultural labour, but also for the perpetuation of their own identity and culture. Many no longer wanted to follow their parents’ way of life: planting, tilling, watering and harvesting the maize field.”

Such a flow of labor should not be rationalized as the free choice of a forward-looking generation, for the maquiladora migrants were lied to and exploited. In an interview with journalist David Bacon, Julia Quiñonez of the Border Committee of Women Workers (Comité Fronterizo de Obreras) states that the Mexican government’s prediction of job growth and higher salaries in the NAFTA era “was a big lie [...] The salaries have not gotten better; in fact, the salaries continue to be completely insufficient for anybody to live on [...] The cities are overloaded and don’t have the services or the infrastructure to be able to provide for them. It’s a disgrace. There are large transnationals such as Alcoa and Delphi operating in these cities yet workers are living in conditions where they have to construct their houses out of cardboard, out of materials taken from the factories.” Furthermore, each downturn in the U.S. economy leads to hundreds of plant closings and massive layoffs, no matter how sweet a deal the contractors are offered by the Mexican government. Naomi Klein observes that, lacking job security, benefits, and the right to form unions, “zone workers in many parts of Asia, the Caribbean and Central America have more in common with office-temp workers in North America and Europe than they do with factory workers in those Northern countries.”

Some of these migrants make their way further north, by means legal or otherwise, across the U.S.-Mexican border. Are they the lucky ones? Maybe, maybe not. Behind them are twelve-hour workdays, mandatory overtime shifts without extra pay, and beatings from overzealous supervisors. Awaiting them are minimum wage service and construction jobs in an English-speaking foreign country whose gun-toting citizens have been stoked into a xenophobic frenzy.

Before we Americans complain about unsightly yards and overcrowded housing in poor immigrant neighborhoods, we should think about how the waterways in the Tehuacán Valley have been dangerously contaminated by toxic chemicals used to treat the designer jeans that we love so much. Before we resent the free public school education that children of illegal immigrants are entitled to, we should consider how many children in Mexico are taken out of school to work alongside their mothers, providing us with affordable apparel, electronics equipment, and automobile parts. Before we accuse immigrant workers of undermining the bargaining power of American unions, we should be mindful that union activity at the maquiladoras where our goods are assembled is often suppressed with the kind of deadly violence that American union workers haven’t faced since the thirties. And once we have broadened our awareness in these ways, let’s commit ourselves to fair trade policies for the common good of humanity, even if we ave to pay a few dollars more for our jeans.

Dr. Daryn Glassbrook is a former university lecturer. He received his Ph.D. Purdue University.

Dr. your writing is good. You have successfully pointed out the depravity of US big business illegal employers and exactly what corruption in governments causes in terms of pain to its people. In other words, you have probably described the condition of the USsA of the future. However, the citizens of American did not cause pollution by our love of jeans, and
by focusing the blame on the citizens, you have missed the point. I feel sorry for a lot of people, people from all around the world. I find it insulting that you would put the blame on the American citizen worker in order to condone the presence of the illegal masses on US soil. Had you put the blame where it belongs, your article would have been excellent, but because of your very flawed logic, you get a C minus.