FREMONT CONTROVERSY IGNORES LABOR/CAPITAL ROLES

By Juan Montoya
Fremont, Neb., has been thrust into the national spotlight, ostensibly because of immigration issues there.
But with Hispanics making up only 10 percent of the population, it's obvious that there are other dynamics at work.
The liberal knee-jerk reaction is that the town people are racist. The conservative voices will say that locals are only protecting their way of life.
Incredibly, as usually happens with this knotty issue, both may be right to a degree.
Immigration has become the country’s hot-button issue that has split both conservatives and liberals, often against each other.
On the one hand, industry spokesmen say the United States’ aging population cries out for an infusion of young workers willing to work at baseline wages. And even the most ardent conservatives concede that those immigrants (both legal and illegal) in low-wage scale service jobs and in the meat-packing industry are doing jobs no one else wants.
On the other hand, anti-immigrant groups and conservative politicians complain of porous borders and a decreasing quality of life – and blame the undocumented for both. And despite a lack of credible proof, they raise the specter of Middle East terrorists carrying weapons of mass destruction filtering through southern borders among the undocumented.
How did this country get to this point? Increasingly, these emotional reactions cloud the capital-labor dynamics shaping the issue.
And how has this situation become so divisive and politicized that no middle ground can be found to come up with a solution acceptable to all?
In the early 1960s, when the end of the Bracero Program (Temporary Worker) was being considered in congress, many proponents for its continuation argued that stopping it would result in dire consequences for the workers and for their employers.
But these proponents were not spokesmen for advocacy or ethnic organizations. Instead, it was farmers’ groups and agribusiness organizations that predicted the dire future of farming and mass manufacturing if the cheap labor provided by these workers was removed.
In the early 1940s, when the U.S. labor pool was drained by World War II, these screams from industry and manufacturers for cheap labor led Mexico and the United States to enter into the Bracero Program. In the period from 1942 to 1964, at least four million Mexican workers were imported into the U.S. as “guest workers” to work temporarily on contract to U.S. growers and ranchers.
These workers came to work in the fields leaving their impoverished ranches and rural communities to chase the rumor of economic boon in the United States.
Some older border residents can still remember trains filled with Mexican workers bound for agricultural fields in the interior of the U.S.
The program fueled a migration north that changed the social fabric and altered the economic environments of border cities. From Brownsville to El Paso, and westward. Mexican workers – those with a bracero contract and those without – crowded communities on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border for a chance to grab onto the brass ring of economic opportunity.
The program provided dirt-cheap labor to large agricultural interests from South Texas to the West and Midwest and established annual migrant streams to these areas. U.S.-born migrants often worked side by side with their Mexican counterparts, albeit without the protection the bi-national agreement granted the Mexican workers under the program.
Less than 10 years later after the program was abandoned, these same industry and manufacturing advocates found a more convenient way to have the U.S. government subsidize their need for cheap labor while at the same time guaranteeing them access to the U.S. market. They simply convinced the U.S. Congress to grant them favorable tax breaks and “incentives” that would allow them to transfer the labor-intensive section of the process offshore and – once the product was assembled – bring the items back to the U.S. tariff-free. Thus the “in-bond,” or “twin plant (maquila)” method of labor exploitation began.
Overnight, communities such as Ypsilanti and Saginaw, Michigan, where automatic steering-gear assemblies were manufactured, saw their once-secure economic structures crumble as these industries “ran away.”
In their wake, they left thousands of unemployed workers who had pegged their future to these companies and state economies suddenly found themselves with the burden of caring for the unemployed with a vastly reduced tax revenue resulting from the loss of those jobs.
Where U.S. workers were earning salaries approaching $15 or more per hour, the new workers in the maquiladoras on the Matamoros side of the Rio Grande were earning the equivalent of $8 to $10 a day. Once the product was finished, it was trucked back to Brownsville or other border towns and a label attached to the product indicating that it had been “finished” on the U.S. side, thereby exempting manufacturers from paying tariffs on these goods.
Border residents on the U.S. side could hardly complain about the low wages offered by local businesses. If they did, the employers would simply point to the abundance of people who would work for less than minimum wages across the river in Mexico. Many young people left – and continue to leave – the region seeking better-paying employment.
The “beauty” of the scheme, industry proponents would say, was that U.S. manufacturers could compete on a global scale by simply transferring the labor-intensive part of the production process offshore and then offering the competitively-priced goods to U.S. consumers. It was a win-win situation, they argued.
Not quite.
Somewhere along the line, someone – the U.S. Congress, a string of administrations, and dormant labor advocates – overlooked the fact that the thousands of jobs that were leaving the nation were depriving U.S. workers of meaningful employment. Retraining schemes thrown as a sop to workers resulted in assembly-line workers who had mortgages to pay and kids to put through college flipping hamburgers at the local fast-food places at minimum wage. Even that starving wage was partly subsidized by federal money through local workforce councils.
When advocates raised the alarm about the exportation of good jobs to countries paying slave wages, with hideous working conditions, and even child and prison labor exploitation, industry proponents assured them there was nothing to worry about.
As long as the affected workers were poor whites and minorities, no one took these complaints seriously. Exporting labor-intensive jobs would make U.S. companies more competitive, leading to increased capital investment and higher living standards here, they said.
They urged U.S. workers to adapt, to become better educated and skilled enough to thrive in a new world of employment where technology and the ability to process information would be the crucial components. Many did.
But once the idea caught on and other industries followed suit, the alarm spread as white-collar and clerical jobs were exported wholesale to Latin America, India, Asia, and now, China.
Now even white-collar workers with IBM and similar blue-chip companies – well-educated employees and whizzes at information management – have become expandable and are joining their factory brethren in low-wage work, and even the unemployment line.
The Wall Street Journal reported that IBM and other large corporations – ATT, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, etc. – have jumped on the offshore bandwagon. Suddenly, it’s not just the blue-collar jobs on the chopping block. Everyone’s job, it seems, is now fair game for these global competitors.
As these multinationals export these jobs to India or the Philippines, anti-immigrant groups such as the Minutemen and demagogic politicians have focused on undocumented workers as the bogeyman for the nation’s ills. Yet, no one disputes the fact that these workers fill the ranks of the most undesirable jobs in this country.
A Department of Labor survey indicates they make up 24 percent of dishwashers, 25 percent of the poultry and meat-processing industry, 27 percent of the drywall and ceiling installers, and 25 percent of the low-end construction workforce.
So why are manufacturers and large industry supporters pushing for a Temporary Worker program? They know that without them, the poultry and meat-processing industry in the Midwest (such a Fremont, and nearby Worthington, Minn., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, etc.) would collapse, construction firms would have to pay a living wage, and business leaders – an important part of the Republican political base – would cry “foul.”
“In short,” writes researcher Justin Akers, “U.S. capital depends on immigration laws to ensure that immigrant labor remains cheap – but unlike the anti-immigrant activists, they also want it to remain plentiful.”
Industrialists have sought and found ways to get the cheap labor they need offshore while getting the tax breaks from this government to compete with industries that remained here employing residents for a decent wage. At the same time, anti-immigrant groups blame undocumented workers for taking jobs away from U.S. citizens and right-wing politicians hitch their wagons to that racist star while continuing to support the offshore breaks for large corporations.
As long as the undocumented worker remains the bogey man and is assigned the role that Jews were given in Nazi Germany, we will be blind to the true villains in this tragedy – voracious multinational corporations that are sapping the lifeblood from the U.S. economy with the acquiescence of our elected representatives.