Bean, Frank D., Rodolfo O. de la Garza, Bryan R. Roberts, and Sidney Weintraub, eds. At the Crossroads: Mexico and U.S. Immigration Policy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. Tables, index, 322 pp.; hardcover $66, paperback $25.95.
Cravey, Altha J. Women and Work in Mexico's Maquiladoras. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Maps, tables, index, 176 pp.; hardcover $52, paperback $19.95.
De la Garza, Rodolfo O., and Jesús Velasco, eds. Bridging the Border: Transforming Mexico-U.S. Relations. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. Tables, index, 208 pp.; hardcover $68.50, paperback $26.95.
Hart, John Mason, ed. Border Crossings: Mexican and Mexican-American Workers. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1998. Notes, index, 243 pp.; hardcover $55, paperback $18.95.
Staudt, Kathleen. Free Trade? Informal Economies at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. Photographs, maps, tables, index, 256 pp.; hardcover $59.95, paperback $19.95.
Mexican labor is the linchpin of U.S.-Mexico economic integration. Today, more than one million Mexican workers labor in some three thousand maquiladora plants that manufacture auto parts, electrical appliances, televisions, computer equipment, furniture, and garments for sale in the U.S. market. Most of these workers are employed directly by U.S. companies or indirectly by firms contracted to U.S. companies. By 1997, maquiladora exports totaled $53 billion and accounted for over half the value of U.S. imports from Mexico.
Although maquiladoras have been around since the late 1960s, their expansion in the 1990s was nothing short of phenomenal. In 1990, annual maquiladora production stood at just $14 billion and employed less than half as many workers as it does today (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica 1990, 1998). As Martin (1995) has noted, under NAFTA Mexico is rapidly becoming "the low-cost manufacturing center for North America." In addition, Mexico's approximately 7 million farm laborers produced around $5 billion worth of agricultural exports to the United States.
Mexican immigrant workers play an important economic role inside the United States as well. They constitute a significant portion (8 percent) of the total U.S. manufacturing work force; their presence is much greater in certain large industries, such as garments (19 percent), food and kindred products (15 percent), and furniture and fixtures (12 percent) (Spener and Capps 2000). Outside of manufacturing, Mexican immigrants dominate in a variety of occupations that have traditionally received them. In California in 1996, for example, 91 percent of farm workers, 76 percent of maids, 64 percent of construction workers, and 58 percent of nannies were immigrants, the bulk of them from Mexico (Cornelius 1998, 127).
As immigration to the United States accelerated in the last decade--by 1996 about 7 million Mexican immigrants resided in the United States, up from just over 4 million in 1990--Mexicans have become a newly significant presence in states beyond California, including Kansas, Nebraska, Kentucky, Iowa, the Carolinas, and Georgia. There they have found employment not only in agriculture but also in construction, poultry processing, meatpacking, carpet production, and personal services.
The simultaneous trends of the maquiladora boom in Mexico and the flow of Mexican immigrant workers to the United States at the end of the twentieth century reflect the surplus labor pool that has been building up in Mexico since the 1970s. As Enrique Dussel Peters reports, between 1980 and 1996 the economically active population in Mexico grew by 17 million workers, from 22 million to 39 million. During this same period, only about 2 million formal jobs were added to the nation's economy, nearly half in maquiladora expansion. This left 15 million new workers to find employment either in the burgeoning informal economy or north of the border in the United States (Dussel Peters 1998, 66). In another article (1996), Dussel Peters estimates that the Mexican economy would have to grow at an impossibly high 10 percent annually to absorb new labor force entrants in the coming years. Thus, Mexico's labor surplus seems destined to last well into the new century.
This demographic reality, coupled with the declining fertility and advancing age of the U.S. population, will therefore continue to drive the U.S.-Mexican economic relationship as more U.S. manufacturers avail themselves of abundant, low-wage labor south of the border and more Mexican laborers attempt to cross north of the border in search of jobs. The status of Mexican labor, then, stands at the very center of U.S.-Mexico relations. The five scholarly works reviewed here address this question in varying degrees.
HISTORICAL PATTERNS, CONTEMPORARY CHANGESThe contributors to Border Crossings: Mexican and Mexican-American Workers remind us that U.S. capitalists and consumers have relied extensively on Mexican labor to meet their needs for more than a century. Seen in historical perspective, today's intensification of labor and product market integration represents a change in degree, perhaps, but not in kind. As John Mason Hart notes in his introduction, Border Crossings attempts to explain the historical "continuities" between the Mexican and Mexican American working classes. (As used in this collection, the category "Mexican American" includes all persons of Mexican ancestry living and working in the United States--immigrants as well as U.S.-born persons of Mexican background.) Of particular interest are four chapters on Mexican American workers in Texas, Arizona, Chicago, and California in the first half of the twentieth century.
Several common themes emerge across these chapters. Key economic sectors depended on Mexican labor. In Texas, Emilio Zamora notes, 300,000 Mexicans worked in agriculture by 1940 and formed an extremely important component of the railroad work force. In San Antonio, most of the city's 12,000 pecan shellers were Mexicans or Mexican Americans; they produced about half the national output of pecans by the 1930s. With labor shortages in World War II, Mexicans around the state entered the garment, meatpacking, construction, shipping, aircraft repair, and oil industries in large numbers.
In Arizona, where copper mining was the dominant industry between 1920 and 1950, Antonio Rios Bustamante reports that Mexicans formed the majority of miners. In Chicago, Gerardo Necoechea Gracia writes, Mexicans accounted for less than 1 percent of the population in the 1920s, most having arrived on railroad crews. At mid-decade, though, 11 percent of the 66,000 workers in the city's 15 largest industrial plants were Mexican-born. Many had found jobs as replacement workers during the 1919 steel strike and the 1922 meatpacking strike. In California, Devra Weber details how Mexican immigrants by the 1930s formed the backbone of the work force in cotton production, the state's leading industry at the time. In all four states, Mexicans workers stood at the bottom of the class hierarchy and were heavily exploited by employers based on their race and nationality.
Self-help was a response to poverty, exploitation, and limited social mobility for these workers. In Texas, this took the form of mutual aid societies. These groups not only offered material aid in the form of insurance, emergency financial assistance, and help in finding jobs, but also helped maintain Mexican cultural identity by sponsoring patriotic holidays. In Chicago, Mexicans used their kinship and compadrazgo ties to find work and also relied on charitable organizations, such as the Cruz Azul. In the California cotton fields, Mexican contractors recruited work crews from among their family and kin. On this latter point, Weber notes that workers often hired on with contractors their families knew in Mexico and "as a result, workers migrated in clusters and developed multilayered relationships and obligations stretching back to their home communities" (p. 218).
A related theme is that of periodic Mexican labor militance as a response to exploitation. As Weber explains, Mexicans were important participants in a wave of 37 strikes by California farm workers in the early 1930s, culminating in a September 1933 strike by 18,000 cotton workers associated with the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. In Chicago factories, Mexicans frequently engaged in spontaneous work stoppages to protest ill treatment, joined trade unions in steel mills and meatpacking plants, and participated in a number of important strikes. In Arizona, Mexicans braved violent repression by the copper companies in their unsuccessful efforts to unionize, from early in the century through the 1930s. In Texas, San Antonio's 12,000 pecan shellers struck in 1938 for higher wages and more humane working conditions.
A great deal has been written over the last 20 years about Mexico's shift from an import-substitution industrialization model to an export-led, neoliberal economic model. Similar attention has been paid to the dramatic rise of women's employment in maquiladora production, which has accompanied the economic shift. Clearly, this has marked a new historical stage in U.S.-Mexico labor relations. Altha J. Cravey's Women and Work in Mexico's Maquiladoras attempts to integrate these related but too-often parallel discussions. Cravey employs Burawoy's concept of the factory regime, which refers to the institutional regulation of production and the organization of the labor process (Burawoy 1985). Cravey addresses the central questions for Mexico of how the labor process is being restructured, and how the reorganization of production and the gendered reorganization of social reproduction influence each other. Cravey answers these questions by comparing two case studies of "factory regimes" in Mexico, one representing the old industrialization model and the other representing the new, "maquilized" model.
Ciudad Madero, a leading oil and petrochemical production center in the state of Tamaulipas, exemplifies the state-led industrialization model that predominated in Mexico from 1930 to 1976. This type of factory regime prevailed in a few "heavy industry" centers, especially in and around Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey. At the level of strategy, it involved state-led import-substitution industrialization with production directed to the domestic market. In terms of productive practices, it consisted of a combination of state-owned enterprises, state subsidies to domestic capital, state support for official unions, strong regulation of the labor-capital relation, and a male, fully proletarianized work force, stably employed and earning a relatively high family wage. At the level of reproductive practices, the regime featured a nuclear household, domestic labor performed by a housewife, and state subsidies or direct provision of medical care, childcare, pensions, and housing. Of particular concern to Cravey is how this regime fostered "traditional" gender relations, featuring a male, full-time worker who supported his dependent wife and children with the assistance of an activist state that guaranteed his family's standard of living.
The Ciudad Madero case study demonstrates the many ways in which the state was active in social reproduction during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in Mexico. Direct provision (from the federal government to individuals) was channeled through IMSS health care plans and INFONAVIT housing programs. A more complicated but direct state provision was funneled through the state-owned enterprise, PEMEX, and STPRM, its union affiliate, which provided a comprehensive health plan and housing plan, as well as schools, libraries, and daycare centers for the community. Besides these activities, the state actively supported unions and workers in their struggle for good working conditions and livable wages. These state interventions translated into more political power and a better standard of living for workers during the state-led period of industrialization. (pp. 69-70).
Following the macroeconomic crises of the 1980s, the Mexican government retreated from its commitment to state sponsorship of industry and provision of social welfare. Ciudad Madero illustrates this shift especially well, for it was here that the new administration of Carlos Salinas crushed the independent power of the petrochemical workers' union by jailing its leader Joaquin Hernández Galicia ("La Quina") in 1989.
Just as Cravey regards Ciudad Madero as quintessentially representing the "old" factory regime, she takes Nogales, Sonora, to represent the new regime. By the late 1970s, maquiladora production there dominated the local economy. It continued to expand rapidly in the 1980s, so that by 1989 nearly 23,000 workers labored in the city's export-processing zone. The new regime, which first emerged along Mexico's border with the United States, features market-led, export-oriented production, at the level of strategy. Production practices consist of a low-wage, largely young, female, and non-union work force, employed directly or indirectly by transnational capital, that resorts to informal economic activity to supplement its wage income. The government subsidizes foreign capital in the form of tax breaks. At the level of reproductive practices, households take a variety of extended and group-quarter forms, in which a variety of male and female members may provide and contest domestic labor. The state plays an extremely limited role in the provision of social goods.
Thus, under this new factory regime, the state has retreated simultaneously from intervening on behalf of labor in the workplace and from subsidizing or directly providing social goods in the domestic sphere. The male industrial worker as breadwinner has been supplanted by a younger, often female worker whose earnings are insufficient to support a dependent spouse and children. As a result, workers have had to restructure their households to include multiple wage earners.
The state's failure to provide subsidized housing for workers has forced maquiladora employees to find their own housing, frequently in squatter settlements. In addition, household members often seek nonwage income in the informal sector. Both of these responses to state retreat from social welfare guarantees have enabled transnational capital to pay less than the full cost of reproduction of the maquiladora labor force. Meanwhile, new household arrangements and women's entry into the paid labor force have had a substantial and conflictive impact on the gender division of domestic labor, with men now having to participate in traditionally "feminine" activities, such as childcare, cooking, and cleaning, more regularly.
Cravey also finds that in the new maquiladora regime, the social goods formerly supplied or subsidized by the state are now sometimes supplied by the employer. These goods can include health- and childcare, transportation, and food. In a novel development, she also finds companies in Nogales operating single-sex dormitories to house their workers, who are recruited on a temporary basis from elsewhere in Mexico. The quality and adequacy of these social goods are inferior to those the state once provided. More important, Cravey notes that as social reproduction becomes "ever more tightly bound to the employment relationship," the balance of power between employer and employee tips dramatically in favor of the employer. This is especially evident in the example of company-run dormitories in which worker-residents are routinely monitored by company guards and discipline is imposed through a system of reprimands for such "offenses" as coming in late or not reporting a destination when leaving the building. The gender dimension of this discipline is reflected in the immediate expulsion of women who become pregnant.
Kathleen Staudt's Free Trade? Informal Economies at the U.S.-Mexico Border analyzes developments in the same geographical territory as Cravey's study. The specific locale here is the Ciudad Juárez-El Paso metropolitan area, which has been an important staging ground for the labor and migration transformations that have most recently characterized U.S.-Mexican relations. It is home to the largest concentration of maquiladora plants, production, and employment in North America, and the site where the U.S. government began its most recent border crackdown with Operation Blockade in September 1993. It is also a place of grinding poverty, where many residents on both sides of the border engage in informal economic activity for subsistence in the absence of stable jobs in the formal labor market. It is to the prevalence of this informal activity, as manifested by street vending, cross-border smuggling of consumer goods, and the self-construction of housing in irregular settlements, that political scientist Staudt turns her attention.
Castells and Portes define informal economic activity as "a process of income generation" that is "unregulated by the institutions of society in a legal and social environment in which similar activities are regulated" (1989, 12). It would be impossible to speak of a distinction between formal and informal economic activity in a pure market economy because all economic activities would be unregulated by the government. That economic activity remains tightly regulated at the U.S.-Mexico border, NAFTA or no, is reflected in the question mark in the title of Staudt's provocative monograph. How "free" is "free trade," after all, if myriad aspects of people's everyday productive lives on the border are subject to regulations in the form of taxes, zoning ordinances, vending permits, customs and immigration inspections, and the like?
Although she recognizes that people engage in these activities largely because the "legitimate" economy has failed to provide them an adequate income and infrastructure, Staudt also sees informality as a type of resistance to state surveillance and regulation of poor people. She applies a Gramscian political framework to understand the informal economy as a set of counterhegemonic practices the poor develop.
Self-sufficient behavior is a skill people need to exercise as global economic players pull their strings, which will perhaps be tighter before they get looser. Self-help offers protected space, or refuge, from increasingly relentless hegemonic controls.... these informals are not victims. They are not pacified through hegemonic institutions of social control and propaganda. While surveillance spreads into everyday life, people identify the cracks in the surveillance machinery and make the most of them until new mechanisms develop, at which point the cycle begins again. (p. 167).
Staudt illustrates her point with a variety of examples, including the undocumented women from Juárez who cross the international boundary illegally to work as domestic servants in El Paso, the unauthorized vendors plying wares on downtown streets in both cities, and the fayuqueras who make shopping trips into El Paso to purchase goods for resale on the Mexican side, including used clothing, the sale of which in Mexico is illegal. Staudt adds that in most instances, the income generated by such activities exceeds what the same people could earn in the formal economy, where Mexican wage policies are designed to keep maquiladora manufacturing costs low and U.S. immigration policies are intended to deny Mexican workers the possibility of increasing their earnings by crossing the border.
At the same time, Staudt's approach recognizes how informals' self-help activities can actually feed grander hegemonies. Their petty commerce, cottage industries, and building their own homes absolve both the state and private sector employers of the responsibility to provide for the social reproduction of the labor force. Perhaps more troubling, individuals' participation in informal economic activity typically fails to challenge the broader political arrangements that made their informal activities necessary in the first place.
LABOR RELATIONS AND IMMIGRATIONBelying its title, Bridging the Border: Transforming Mexico-U.S. Relations focuses not on U.S.-Mexico border issues but on the evolution of Mexican foreign policy toward the United States since the 1980s. Although only one of its essays is concerned primarily with labor issues, the question of Mexican labor migration to the United States concerns several contributors. Two chapters in particular analyze the Mexican state's evolving relationship with its diaspora north of the border.
Carlos González Gutiérrez, director of community affairs for the Program for Mexican Communities Living in Foreign Countries (PMCLFC), describes the growth of Mexican "consular activism" in the United States as a response at least partly to the burgeoning Mexican immigrant population in this country, and that population's working-class character. The consular agenda includes representing the interests of Mexican nationals who run afoul of U.S. immigration and criminal statutes, organizing adult basic education and literacy programs in Spanish, running health awareness campaigns, and sponsoring mutual aid organizations based on Mexican town or state of origin. It also includes an effort by the Mexican government to protect the interests of its citizens in the face of rising anti-immigrant sentiments in the United States, as embodied in such initiatives as California's Proposition 187.
In his chapter, Rodolfo de la Garza offers contrasting views. He characterizes the PMCLFC as "a coherent and continuous effort conducted within the United States designed to have American political actors influence U.S. policies to make them compatible with the preference of the Mexican government" (p. 85). In this regard, he notes how the Mexican government mobilized major Mexican American organizations in support of NAFTA. Although he describes the PMCLFC as an effective effort by the government to institutionalize, expand, and improve relations with the Mexican diaspora, here, too, he sees self-interest. The PMCLFC's purpose is not so much to help the diaspora preserve its mexicanidad as to quell political opposition that emerged among Mexicans in the United States during the 1988 presidential campaign, and to ensure the continuance of remittances and other forms of direct financial investment that U.S.-dwelling Mexicans supply to their communities of origin.
The only chapter in this volume that directly addresses labor issues is Edward J. Williams's thoughtful essay on the lack of meaningful cross-border labor union cooperation, either under the auspices of NAFTA or in response to it. Whereas NAFTA has fostered cooperation among business, government, and environmental groups, labor union cooperation is most notable by its absence. Williams blames this partly on the longstanding nationalism of both countries' trade union federations, each of which has tended to see U.S.-Mexico free trade as a "zero-sum jobs" game. The AFL-CIO strongly opposed NAFTA out of fear of losing union jobs if production shifted to Mexico. The CTM (Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos) favored the agreement in the expectation of industrial job gains in Mexico, which could be organized by its unions. Indeed, the NAFTA side agreement on labor issues was largely born of this logic, in the sense that it was offered by the Clinton administration as a palliative to the AFL-CIO's allies in Congress who feared the erosion of U.S. jobs, wages, and working conditions.
In this light, Williams argues, it is not surprising that the labor side agreement "has virtually nothing to do with labor unions cooperating to do much of anything" and lacks "protocols designed to nurture international proletarian collaboration" (p. 171). The agreement, moreover, does not allow labor unions to be parties to the resolution of complaints brought under its auspices; only the governments are actors in the proceedings. As Williams notes, the labor side agreement's "basic principles define a stateled process designed to reduce conflicts that threaten commerce" rather than seeking to promote real cross-border union-government cooperation in defense of labor rights (p. 170).
Although U.S. participation in NAFTA and other country-specific trade agreements demonstrates this country's willingness to grant special economic treatment to certain countries for geopolitical reasons, its immigration policies grant no such treatment to the nationals of individual nations. The contributors to At the Crossroads: Mexico and U.S. Immigration Policy argue that, given the uniquely close geographic, historical, economic, social, and cultural ties to its southern neighbor, the United States should develop new immigration policies that reflect its special relationship with Mexico. This argument is made most succinctly by Peter H. Smith, who criticizes the United States for "reaching out to Mexico with an expansionist, inclusive economic policy" in the form of NAFTA while at the same time stepping up its efforts to turn back the tide of Mexican workers seeking to cross its borders. Smith sees the inconsistency in U.S. policy reflected in NAFTA's conspicuous failure to include any provisions related to labor migration. Still, he argues that it is not too late for this country to reconcile its immigration and trade policies toward Mexico.
It seems neither appropriate nor necessary to treat Mexico the same as Colombia, Honduras, India, Nigeria, or Bangladesh with regard to migration. Mexico is a neighboring country with deep historic ties to the United States and, even more to the point, a member of NAFTA. These facts provide ample justification for uniquely tailored policies. (p. 278).
In another insightful chapter in this volume, Gary P. Freeman and Frank D. Bean discuss the political difficulties the United States may face if it should attempt to develop such "uniquely tailored policies" for Mexico. They recognize that to do so would "be inconsistent with the thrust of nondiscrimination and universalism inherent in the decision in 1965 to eliminate national origins quotas" (p. 38). They also note that special treatment for Mexico "would raise the specter of a political struggle in Congress by partisans of other countries seeking similar treatment" (p. 39). They point out nevertheless that there are precedents among other Western industrialized nations for granting country-specific preferences, although the specific examples they cite as most relevant (Great Britain-Ireland and Australia-New Zealand) involve countries that are more culturally and economically similar than the United States and Mexico.
They find, moreover, in their historical review of U.S. immigration policy, that two special provisions for Mexico have been proposed frequently in Congress: special annual quotas for legal immigration from Mexico and a formal guest worker program for agricultural workers. Although they admit that currently it would be politically impossible to work toward a European Union-style free or even liberalized movement of labor migrants within NAFTA, they suggest that "specific bilateral concessions to Mexico" along the lines of special quotas or guest worker visas may actually be workable.
The findings of other contributors to the book demonstrate that the migratory pressures building up in Mexico warrant new policy approaches by the United States. Philip Martin, for example, warns that "Mexico today is on the verge of its 'Great Migration, analogous to the net one million Americans who moved from U.S. farms to cities each year in the 1950s and 1960s." The destination of many of these displaced Mexican farmers in the new century will also be large U.S. cities. This great migration is fueled by a number of market liberalization policies undertaken by the Mexican government in the 1990s, including NAFTA, and was exacerbated by the mid-decade recession, drought, and credit crunch in Mexico. In addition, Agustin Escobar and Bryan R. Roberts note in another chapter that Mexican cities have become much less attractive to rural migrants, as urban labor markets have lost the capacity to absorb new entrants in formal jobs, income inequality has worsened, and living conditions have deteriorated. Therefore, they argue, the dramatic increase, in absolute terms, of Mexican migration to the United States in the past two decades is not surprising.
The demographic results of this process are amply documented in another useful chapter, by Alene H. Gelbard and Marion Carter, which details the growth of the Mexican population in the United States through the mid-1990s. Reading between the lines of their analysis, it becomes clear that the vast majority of Mexican immigrants residing in the United States started out as illegal entrants. Between 1970 and 1994, the Mexican-born U.S. population grew by more than 5.5 million, from 760,000 to 6.3 million. During the same period, only about 1.7 million Mexicans were legally admitted to the United States. (Another 2 million legalized their status following implementation of the amnesty provisions of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.) Returning to Staudt's terminology, it is clear that unauthorized border crossing has become one of Mexican workers' most important and successful counterhegemonic practices.
NEEDED: A BINATIONAL LABOR POLICYAll the books discussed in this essay address, in varying degrees, the matter of Mexican labor's role and status in the North American economy. None of them, however, explicitly and systematically places Mexican labor at the center of an analysis of U.S.-Mexican relations over the last century. The present moment is an especially crucial juncture for developing just such an analysis, as U.S. dependence on Mexican maquiladora and migrant labor is higher than ever, and still growing. Indeed, it is the guarantee of U.S. capital's access to Mexican labor under a new, neoliberal factory regime that forms the underpinning of NAFTA. Similarly, much of U.S. immigration and border control policy in recent years has been driven implicitly by the desire to regulate the conditions under which Mexican laborers may enter and remain in the country as employees and their dependents. In neither case, however, is the centrality of Mexican labor explicitly recognized in the process of policy formation. Instead, the debate centers on trade and immigration policies. North American labor policy is not even on the table for consideration. Several recent developments may make this a propitious moment to consider developing a binational labor policy.
Economists, among them U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (see Solis and Corchado 2000), have come to recognize that the large supply of immigrant labor has helped to sustain the current record-breaking economic expansion in the United States. Without this low-cost labor supply, tight labor markets and resulting inflation might have already placed a serious brake on growth. The development of productive capacity in overseas manufacturing that feeds the demand for consumer goods in this country has a similar effect of allowing the economy to continue to expand without overheating. Mexican labor is heavily implicated in both these processes, for Mexicans are the largest immigrant group in the United States, and trade with Mexico--meaning mainly the U.S. contracting of labor services in Mexico--has expanded remarkably since the current boom began in the early 1990s. In the process, Mexico has become the United States' number 2 trading partner.
A binational policy also seems worthwhile in light of the growing realization that the substantial U.S. efforts to seal its southern border to unauthorized entry by Mexicans have been largely futile (Andreas 1998; General Accounting Office 1999; Spener forthcoming). Although the number of Border Patrol agents has more than doubled and millions of dollars of high-tech surveillance equipment has been introduced, undocumented Mexican migrants continue to arrive in very large numbers, feeding a seemingly insatiable demand for their labor in the U.S. interior. This situation has given rise to new legislation in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives for an expanded legal guest worker program similar to the old bracero system. The governors of U.S. and Mexican border states have endorsed such a program (Baldauf 1999). In addition, the Immigration and Naturalization Service reportedly has largely stopped its raids of workplaces in major centers of undocumented immigrant employment, such as Chicago; some observers contend that it has done so in order not to exacerbate labor shortages in key industries (Uchitelle 2000).
The AFL-CIO recently announced a stunning reversal in its position on immigrant labor in the United States, calling for an amnesty for undocumented workers residing in this country, the extension of the full protection of labor laws to all workers regardless of their legal status, and an end to the workplace immigration enforcement program that it once supported. In the resolution its executive council passed in February 2000, the union federation noted that workplace immigration enforcement not only had failed to deter the employment of undocumented workers but also had aided "unscrupulous employers" who "have systematically used the provisions of the enforcement program to retaliate against workers who seek to join unions, improve their working conditions, and otherwise assert their rights" (AFL-CIO 2000).
This resolution follows a number of union organizing drives in various parts of the country that have been undermined by employer retaliation against undocumented workers. With immigrant workers, especially Mexican immigrant workers, playing a disproportionately large role in the manual occupations in a variety of industries around the country, the AFL-CIO may have realized that the future of the labor movement in this country once again depends on the ability to organize immigrants, regardless of their legal status. With this realization, the U.S. labor movement has begun to move away from the "zero-sum jobs" position it has held toward foreign workers for some 30 years. Instead of concern that immigrant workers are taking "American" jobs or bidding down wages and working conditions, the union movement now hails the "millions of hard-working people who make enormous contributions to their communities and workplace who are denied basic human rights because of their undocumented status" (AFL-CIO 2000). Just how hard the union movement can push for official recognition and protection of immigrant workers' rights remains to be seen. This is, nevertheless, a significant development.
Mexican workers have played a vital role in wealth generation for U.S. capitalists since the late nineteenth century. They have served as a highly productive, low-cost labor force in agriculture and industry both north and south of the border. In a colonial fashion, they have been superexploited on the basis of their nationality, whether as miners in Arizona and Sonora, meatpackers in Chicago, pecan shellers in San Antonio, garment workers in Los Angeles and Puebla, harvesters in Salinas and Sinaloa, or electronics assemblers in Silicon Valley and Ciudad Juárez. When systematically denied the right to decent wages and working conditions, they have responded in multiple ways, from mutual aid in the form of networks of compradazgo and cooperative societies to episodic strikes and other forms of labor militance. As a consequence of their political disenfranchisement--in Mexico by an authoritarian state and in the United States by their status as noncitizens--their resistance to exploitation has mainly been covert, taking the form of illegal international migration and participation in unsanctioned subsistence activities in the informal sector.
These types of activity, however, ultimately cannot transform their conditions of exploitation. Enfranchising these workers would entail a more thoroughgoing democratization of the Mexican system as well as the recognition by both the U.S. and Mexican governments of the rights of Mexican nationals living and working in the United States. This means new forms of citizenship that would correspond more appropriately to the rights and responsibilities of the millions of Mexicans whose participation in economic, social, and cultural activities already transcends the international boundary separating Mexico and the United States. It remains to be seen whether such new forms will emerge and whose interests they will serve.
Added material.
David Spener is assistant professor of sociology at Trinity University. He is coauthor (with Frank D. Bean and others) of Illegal Mexican Migration and the United States-Mexico Border: The Effects of Operation Hold-the-Line on El Paso-Juárez (1994). He is coeditor (with Kathleen Staudt) of The U.S.-Mexico Border: Transcending Divisions, Contesting Identities (1998). His current research concerns the smuggling of Mexican migrants into Texas.
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