Monday, November 4, 2013

McDonaldization, militarization and criminalization of immigration: What is really going on on the border?

Tic marks in my notebook as I counted each one. “Illegals” who steal American jobs. Burdens on the health and welfare system. Research subjects for academics and high theorizing. Criminals. Unruly invaders who are threatening our culture.

These representations conveniently dehumanize the sisters, the brothers, the mothers, the fathers, the daughters, the sons, the cousins, the aunts, the uncles, the grandmas, the grandpas, the hard working, hopeful, desperate and determined people that cross the U.S. border searching for a better life.

Image copyright Lawrence Gipe 2013 

This weekend at the Alliance for Global Justice “Tear down the walls” conference, I learned about “Operation Streamline,” a program that targets migrant workers on the U.S.-Mexico border. Since the program started in 2008, the criminal prosecutions have increased every year. Part of the new immigration bill mandate in Arizona is to triple the number of prosecutions from the current 70 per day. In order to keep the system running, Tucson spends $11-17 million per month.

As the money pours into the criminal justice system, other vital services suffer (like the postal station, which was closed to save $14 million) and private companies such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) receive $3,450 per month for each detainee. That’s $1,000 more than public prisons make for their detainees. The felony crime of re-entry under Arizona’s law 1326 is the “easiest crime to prove” according to Isabel Garcia, an Arizona attorney and human rights activist with Coalicion de Derechos Humanos (Human Rights Coalition).

The opportunity for profit is an undeniable factor in the push to increase the prosecutions from 70 to 210 per day in Tucson, to double the maximum sentence from 6 months to a year, and to compromise the justice process making it easier to get convictions. Aggressive plans to increase prison beds and government corruption (e.g. politicians being major stock holders in CCA), along with statistics that clearly demonstrate the ineffectiveness of criminalizing immigration provide ample evidence of the driving force behind programs such as Operation Streamline: lining the pockets of the rich.

Federally, out of the 82,250 criminal prosecutions, half are for immigration. The U.S. spends $17.9 billion on immigration enforcement. Anti-terrorism rhetoric justifies the spending and criminalization of immigration while the programs remain ineffective; zero terrorists have been apprehended as a result of these laws, yet they persist. Furthermore, the recidivism rate has increased seven percent, from 17% to 24%. So, why then, aren’t we doing something different? All we need to do is look at where the money is going and we have the answer.

If we really wanted to address the immigration ‘problem’ we should first start by seeing migrants as sentient beings who have hopes and dreams and who are people affected by U.S. imperialism, unfair trade policy, militarization and racism.

I sat in the federal courtroom last Friday listening to the sounds of the shackles while 70 anxious migrants awaited their sentencing. The rattles of the chains were occasionally drowned out by the repetition of the “grand explanation of rights.” The accused passed through the courtroom like products on a conveyor belt to get their three-minute hearing from the McJudge. Each of them enters into a guilty plea bargain, supposedly without being rushed, intimidated or forced. But what other option do they have?

That is the key question. It is not just the question we should answer when we ask about the criminal justice process and whether it delivers real justice. We should also think about it when we ask ourselves why these men and women would leave their homes to travel through treacherous conditions, ride precariously on the tops of trains, expose themselves to freezing temperatures, put themselves at great risk for sexual assault, cross miles of desert where if the heat and lack of water doesn’t kill them, either a drug cartel or the border patrol might. Is it because they are criminals and they can’t be bothered with the expensive and arduous process to enter the U.S. legally?

Or, perhaps it’s because they were pushed off their land by large-scale agro-industry growing mutated versions of what was once a subsistence crop for small farmers, perhaps the Maquiladora set up in the free trade zone by Nike found cheaper labor in Indonesia and the mothers that supported their children on minimum wage jobs now have nothing, perhaps the heightened military and drug cartel violence from which people flee their homes out of fear, or maybe it is because being a third generation of a Mexican American family who came to the United States under the Bracero program during WWII when the demand for labor in the U.S. encouraged migrants to cross the border freely you have relatives here and you just want to be with your family.

So, next time we hear about “Illegals” who steal American jobs, burden the health and welfare system and threaten the American culture, I urge us to take a step back and really think about whether we believe that in our heart of hearts. If we can’t find the moral ground and compassion, we could engage the facts and try to find the logic in the militarization and criminalization of immigration. I hope that Operation Streamline won’t be there long enough for you to see, but if it is, you too could witness the inhumane and McDonaldized judicial process that has been normalized through increasing anti-immigrant sentiment that dehumanizes people and criminalizes a response to law that favors private corporations and fuels the military-industrial complex over people.


Photo: Ted Robbins/NPR

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Thursday, August 29, 2013

Reflections from the field - Women and Colombia's Cut Flower Industry



Maria lives in a small house made of cinder blocks on a hillside just outside of Facatativá, one of Colombia’s flower producing towns in the Bogota Savannah. For many, the stunning views are the stuff of envy – but enjoying the vista is the last thing on Maria´s mind. She lives alone with her 12 year-old son, who suffers from a heart condition that requires frequent visits with doctors in the capital, a four hour round trip for which she has to miss work and scrounge to cover the cost. Maria tells us about her work in the flower sector for 6 years. She says repeatedly throughout the interview “el trabajo en las flores es pesado, muy pesado” (work in flowers is tough work, very tough).

In 2010, after 6 years working for the same company, she was fired. They told her that the reason for her dismissal was that her contact was over. The truth is, as Maria puts it, that like many other flower workers who become sick or suffer debilitating injuries from the grueling work, she was fired because of her health problem. “We are like machines,” said one of the flower workers I interviewed. Like machines is how the employers treat them; employers simply recycle the workers for newer ones when they are no longer useful to the company (because of health problems, age, association with unions, etc.).

In the Bogota Savannah, there aren’t many job opportunities for women, especially for those who only have an elementary school education. The flower industry provides thousands of jobs to women in the Savannah (70% of the 100,000 workers are women). That’s great, right? Well, it turns out it’s more complicated than that.

Increasing the number of women in the workforce is part of the plan for the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals for 2015. It falls under the rubric of promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment (Goal #3).  Indeed, there has been an increase of women in the global workforce over the past few decades as free market ideology and neo-liberal trade policy spread and drive export-oriented industries. Women dominate the workforce in many export-oriented sectors. Unfortunately, these industries are where horrifying stories like hundreds trapped in sweatshop fires and child labor come from.

Many of the women I have interviewed told me that their job in the cut flower industry allows them to buy food for their children, and if they are lucky, they can buy school supplies and save some for their children’s’ future (so that hopefully they don’t have to work in the cut flower sector). Some argue that the comradery with other women workers provides a space for social change and dialogue outside of the home and that women who aren’t dependent on their spouses or parents for financial support are more autonomous in decisions about marriage and having children. Therefore, in spite of the exploitation in the workplace, wage labor jobs do contribute to social change and gender equality.

Sure, it can be concluded, as many women have concluded, that life is better than it was before having a job, or that life is better than what their moms had to endure. Perhaps that is a step toward women’s empowerment and gender equality, but I am not entirely convinced.

Maria is the poster child for what happens to women in Colombia’s cut-flower industry. She worked for six hard years waking up at 4 a.m. so that she could make lunch for her children and be at work by 6 a.m., then go home, make dinner and do chores (the "double shift" or "double burden" of women in the workforce who cannot afford a nanny or maid). Her work philosophy was to cut as many flowers per hour as she physically could, so that she might be rewarded.

Maria’s reward for working so hard: a letter of renunciation from her employer and chronic problems with her hands. She won’t be able to find work because no employer will hire her with disabled hands. She never saw a penny more than minimum wage (which is barely enough to live on even by rural Colombian standards). During the high season - gringo holidays such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day - she worked upwards of 20 hours per day. “We may as well sleep there,” said one worker when I asked about working during the high season.

Maria’s story doesn’t end tragically like many do. She found an organization in Facatativa called La Casa de Los Trabajadores y Las Trabajadoras de Las Flores (The house of workers of flowers) where she got help from a lawyer fighting for her right to be reintegrated back to work and for financial coverage of her work-related health problems. But her reintegration comes with persecution from other workers and her employer. In the flower industry unionizing or standing up for labor rights is a risky proposition. It results in getting “black-listed.“ Being a woman, head-of-household is especially risky when their children’s survival hinges solely on them.





Tuesday, August 27, 2013

almost getting mugged finally inspired me to write a blog post

More than two months ago I arrived in Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia, to do field research for my master´s thesis (more on that in later posts). I didn’t really have an excuse for not writing blog posts but after my first year of grad school, I felt like a turnip; and as the saying goes, “you can’t get blood out of a turnip.” Recently, I have been more inclined to write but two reasons for not doing so are: I fell and hurt my right arm which makes it hard for me to type and the ever-so-paralyzing question that plagues me “Will people be interested in reading what I write?”

Despite the fact that I decided writing about my experiences is for myself (or at least it should be), I still hesitated. However, something happened today that I thought for certain people would be interested in reading. We all love a story that makes us gasp – most of us know that feeling that compels us to stare at a car accident or that undesirable desire to hear the latest gossip, right?

Ok then, I’ll get to the juicy part of this post. Today, after spending a significant amount of time in a country known most for being dangerous, most of which has been in the capital with a population of over 8 million and relatively high street crime rates, I was almost mugged. Despite robberies being a common occurrence here in the capital city of Colombia, I’ve managed to not get mugged -- until today when a young man approached me with sheets of stickers that he was supposedly selling.  

People sell stuff, lots of random stuff, on the streets, in buses, everywhere. Usually a simple “todo bien” (English translation: “it’s all good”) is sufficient to dissuade a persistent street vendor from pestering you. After three “todo bien”s, the man kept getting closer with his sheets of stickers. Jorge, in his firm (don’t f*&% with me, I’m because I’m dead serious voice), said to the man “TODO BIEN Compadre!” 

Meanwhile, my subconscious mind was working fast – thinking to myself, this is unusual, he should have gone away by now and he is awfully close. His stickers were hovering over my purse so that could not see what he doing, a simple but clever tactic.  Then, when I felt something rustling around in my purse, which was against my body, I grabbed the man’s hand. He jerked it away from me but I wasn’t going to let him go without seeing if he had successfully ripped my off. So I grabbed his hand again (I know maybe not the smartest thing since he could have had a weapon) to see if he had managed to steal anything. He was shocked (I am sure he had me pegged as an easy target) and my heart was pounding out of my chest but the coast was clear. 


I was lucky. My reaction was fast. All the scenarios I had heard and stored away in the back of mind obviously served me well. It could have easily gone bad but it didn’t. I am thankful for what happened because it reminded me to be more conscientious (I have become more lax as I feel less like an obvious target) and it inspired me to put some words on paper which I haven’t done much of since I arrived.