From Workers to Illegals


It's May 1 and today is a day of immigrant protest in the US. I am in full support of protests against the nativism that characterizes official debate on immigration in the US. "Official debate" means discussing what to do with the "problem" of "illegal immigrants." Leaving alone the basic mistake of conceiving of the "illegal" as a migrant group of young men who steal jobs from native-born Americans (a thoroughly false conception), the problem with this phrasing is that it inverts the logic. The problem does not lie with "illegal immigrants" but with "illegal employers"; it lies not with those who are exploited but with those who are exploiting them, that is, opportunistic employers.

These employers do not work in a vacuum; they are enabled by a legal, financial, and social matrix that has succeeded in replacing the term "worker" with "immigrant" in public discourse, a point initially noted by Alain Badiou in L'abrége du métapolitique, 136- 7 (1998), and elaborated upon by Slavoj Žižek in 2000, who in a footnote wrote, "the term 'worker' has disappeared from the vocabulary, substituted and/or obliterated by 'immigrants....' In this way, the class problematic of workers' exploitation is transformed into the multicultural problematic of racism, intolerance, etc." In, Butler, et al., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality . As Walter Benn Michaels has further noted, in his recent The Shape of the Signifier,
◆ The difference between these problematics is, as we used to say, essential, since insofar as exploitation is at the core of class difference, class difference is ineluctably linked to inequality, where cultural difference, of course, is not. Cultures, in theory if not always in practice, are equal; classes, in theory and in practice, are not. (17)

If before we understood things in terms of inequalities, and could defend the worker (the employee) against the greater power of the employer, today we have only "cultural" difference, and see the worker, especially the undocumented (illegal immigrant) worker, as but another cultural group, and thus not ipso facto meriting defence from the possible exploitation of the employer. (Why, one might ask? She or he could return to Mexico or wherever; she or he could never have come.... And the role of the employer in this calculus is wholly erased, the responsibility lies entirely with the worker.) As an "illegal" the worker is no longer describable by the terms of work and class but by those of law, and the solutions are no longer to restore justice to a system of employment that can take advantage of people, but to penalize the immigrant. The employer, who may often be a small house owner or contractor trying to cut costs (or needing to, given the competition) is largely spared the accusing gaze, the opprobrium of the public, which focuses instead on the migrant Mexican. (For statistics on the jobs held by immigrants, especially those coming from Mexico, see the Pew Hispanic Center website .)

Do I blame the individual home owner or the contractor who hires the willing bracero because he is not only good but cheap? Yes; I blame him because he is a) exploiting the worker, for though the bracero may be hired at market wages (already somewhat depressed by the entry into the workplace of undocumented workers), the contractor does not need to pay social security, workers' compensation, or any other legally requisite cost. By hiring the bracero "under the table," the contractor, for example, is not only depriving the bracero from his dues as a worker, he stealing from the social commons. It almost goes without saying that the current Bush administration tacitly allows this. They allow it by placing the locating the burden of "illegality" primarily on the shoulders of the bracero and not the employer.

Policing the employer is an obvious part of a just resolution if not solution. By "policing," I mean that the bracero can be left alone and the employer instead penalized. Will this create a large pool of migrant undocumented workers? Probably, at least in the short run; in the long run, the US would be less appealing to such migrant workers.

But it's just part of the solution. The greater, the more important solution is to ensure that workers everywhere are given justice and are not exploited. Fixing things here doesn't fix things for the worker overall, and that, I should think, is or should be the point of globalism: not to make it easier to exploit workers, which is to say, employees, but to make it more difficult. And it goes without saying that granting citizenship to those who are working here and very often already paying taxes is essential.

Posted: Sun - April 30, 2006 at 12:58 AM          

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