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Congress
and Clinton
Okay More Immigrants to |
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SAN JOSE, CA — When Kim Singh left India
to become a contract worker in Silicon Valley, he thought he
would find a good job in the electronics industry. Instead, he
found a high-tech sweatshop.
Singh worked for three different companies.
Each got him an H1-B immigration visa, allowing him to work in
the U.S. as a software engineer. The first company, he says,
withheld 25 percent of the salary from each of its immigrant
engineers. "After each of us left, none of us received
the money," Singh alleges.
At the second company, "I worked seven
days a week, with no overtime compensation. And the only ones
required to work on weekends were the H1-B immigrants,"
he says. The third company rented an apartment for four H1-B
engineers in San Jose, charging each $1450 a month, while
holding onto their passports. This company "threatened to
send some back to India if they didn’t get contracts. These
workers were in tears. They were nervous wrecks, ashamed to
ask for money or help from their families back home."
This year, Silicon Valley electronics giants
pushed Congress to raise the cap on the number of H1-B visas
the industry could use to hire immigrant engineers. And in
October, Congress voted to give the industry what it wanted,
expanding the limit to over 200,000 workers a year. Only South
Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings voted against the proposal in
the Senate, and the voice vote in the House was unanimous. Not
long afterwards, President Clinton signed the bill into law.
Both Republicans and Democrats want the
industry’s substantial campaign contributions in an election
year. But while contract labor boosts corporate bottom lines,
it will have a devastating impact on workers.
ABUSIVE CONDITIONS
As Singh’s description makes plain,
conditions faced by these contract workers themselves —
even white-collar engineers — are abusive, and their
salaries are low. Meanwhile, African-American and Latino
engineers, who have waged a protracted effort to break down
discriminatory barriers in high-tech hiring, are also
protesting. Civil rights groups point out that increasing the
number of H1-B visas makes it more difficult to open up jobs
for engineers of color, in an industry where the percentage of
African-American and Latino engineers is very low.
For India and the Philippines, the source
countries for most H1-B workers, the continued loss of
high-skilled engineers recruited by Silicon Valley contributes
to brain drain. "These programs are stealing our human
potential," says Anuradha Mittal, Indian-born co-director
of Oakland’s Food First. "Our educational system
produces highly skilled workers, who then leave to become the
working poor in America, while breaking down our ability to
industrialize our own country. We wind up subsidizing U.S.
industry."
Countering these arguments, high-tech
lobbyists claim the industry faces a crippling labor shortage,
threatening U.S. economic growth. Employment figures don’t
show an absolute scarcity of labor in the high-tech industry,
however, but a shortage of people willing to provide high
skills at the salary industry wants to pay.
Industry also claims that U.S. universities
don’t turn out enough qualified graduates. But downward
pressure on salaries discourages young people from becoming
engineers. And, ironically, U.S. universities train many
students from abroad who then become H1-B workers.
FEAR OF UNIONS
AFL-CIO executive vice-president Linda
Chavez-Thompson asked why companies themselves don’t train
workers for vacant jobs. "They use this program to keep
workers in a position of dependence," she charges.
"And because these workers are often hired under
individual contracts, U.S. labor law says they don’t have
the right to organize."
For high-tech industry, that is a key
attraction of the H1-B program. U.S. engineers used to
consider themselves professionals, a cut above unionized
blue-collar workers. This year, however, thousands of Boeing
engineers mounted one of the most successful strikes in recent
history, using their hard-to-replace job skills as leverage to
increase salaries.
Silicon Valley is clearly loath to see those
events repeated. And contract labor is a good protection
against strikes and unions. Like other contract labor programs
for lower-wage farm and factory laborers, the H1-B program
gives employers the power not only to hire and fire workers,
but also to grant them legal immigration status. If workers do
something the employer doesn’t like, whether organizing a
union or filing discrimination complaints, they not only lose
their jobs, but their right to stay in the U.S. In effect, an
employer can deport those workers who stand up for their
rights.
For this reason, the late farmworkers leader
Cesar Chavez sought the end of the old bracero program, under
which growers brought contract farmworkers from Mexico during
the 1940s and ’50s. Chavez was only able to begin organizing
the United Farm Workers when workers became free of the
contract labor system.
'GUESTWORKERS'
But in Congress today, agricultural interests
have already introduced bills that would move us back toward
the bracero era. Other industries are also lining up. "We
have a vast labor shortage," declares Omaha meatpacker
Angelo Fili. "I think a guestworker program would be good
for our industry and good for the country." Nebraska’s
governor has joined in the call. Wages in meatpacking have
remained flat for two decades.
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Mothers
and grandmothers led a march in San Jose, CA, in August
supporting an amnesty to allow undocumented immigrants
to legalize their status. Photo ©2000, David Bacon,
Impact Visuals |
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Last February, the AFL-CIO proposed
far-reaching immigration reform to guarantee immigrant workers
their rights, especially the right to organize. The federation
proposed a general amnesty, to give undocumented families
already here the right to apply for legal status, and an end
to employer sanctions, to eliminate that section of the law
making it a crime for an undocumented worker to hold a job.
Hearings were held throughout the country in the spring and
summer to popularize the proposals, culminating in a
20,000-person rally in Los Angeles.
No bill was subsequently drafted and
introduced into Congress embodying these reforms, however.
Instead, the Clinton administration pledged support to much
more limited reforms, mislabeling them "amnesty."
For presidential candidate Al Gore, the absence of a real
amnesty bill in Congress was good news — he didn’t
have to open himself up to a Republican attack by supporting
such a proposal, or lose the Latino vote in states like
California by opposing it.
Nevertheless, when Congress reconvenes next
year, Chicago Representative Luis Gutierrez has pledged to
introduce a broad amnesty bill embodying the AFL-CIO’s
demands. Those proposals should be augmented to make legal
immigration and family reunification easier, so that
immigrants don’t have to choose between crossing the border
illegally and becoming contract laborers. The bill should also
set up a legalization process, not only for current
undocumented immigrants, but for those who will arrive in
years to come.
GIVE WORKERS EQUAL
RIGHTS
In the era of the global economy, immigrants
will continue to migrate to the U.S., driven from their homes
by war, poverty, and the corporate priorities of the
globalized economy. According to the UN High Commissioner for
Refugees, there are over 80 million people in the world today
living outside of the countries in which they were born.
Instead of turning these migrants into
indentured servants, immigration law should ensure that all
workers enjoy the same rights, free of discrimination and
second-class status. The best guarantee of a high-wage economy
is enforcing workers’ rights to organize and to become
politically active members of their unions and communities.
— David Bacon
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