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The political economy of the "illegal" immigrant

By Steve Martinot
Published in Berkeley Daily Planet, Oct. 1, 2009
October 2009


The recent outburst by Joe Wilson in Congress concerning Obama's veracity
on his proposed health care reform once again invoked that ghost so often
enlisted to sidetrack real issues, the specter of the "illegal" person. It
refers to those immigrant workers who labor without proper papers under
substandard conditions, mostly in agricultural work that is very hard and
injurious to health, both physically and chemically. Politically, they
live precariously, subject to arrest by immigration authorities, the
callous breaking of family bonds, often held (unconstitutionally) in
indefinite detention, yet with taxes withheld from paychecks that they
then cannot reclaim. They do essential work in this economy, yet face
demands that they leave. They are excluded from social services, such as
health care and education, that they nevertheless pay for through their
labor and their taxes. From a value-added standpoint (the primary
standpoint of a capitalist economy), they constitute an ideal labor force.

Justice would demand that those who add value to this society be at least
honored for it, if not granted citizenship. Yet these people are
considered a threat, and are thought of as seizing that which properly
belongs to more worthy people. Let us deconstruct this briefly in the
context of the international political economy to which these immigrant
workers belong.

What drives the current wave of Latino immigration? Why do they come here?
After all, they come with an awareness of the hardships, the dangers of
dealing with violent paramilitary anti-Latino vigilantes, the
anti-immigrant legislations and the impunity and brutality of immigration
police with which they are greeted when found. The mainstream response is:
"they want what we have." And the hidden truth in that response is the
question, where did we get it? That is a question of political economy.

The central economic fact of the western hemisphere in the 20th century
has been US corporate investment throughout Latin America. As Juan José
Arévalo (former president of Guatemala) revealed in his book, "The Shark
and the Sardines", this investment historically gave the US financial
control of Latin American trade and production, and through that, control
of their political structure. Traditionally, before the 1970s, such
investment (typically in agricultural products and mining, both labor
intensive). enjoyed a profit rate of around 20%, owing to low wage scales
and non-union labor conditions enforced by military rule. That is, its
capital outlay was recuperated in a mere 5 years.

The result was impoverishment. The profit from resource extraction
(including labor) was brought to the US. The resources brought to US were
used to manufacture products, some of which were sold in Latin America at
a profit, which was then brought to the US. The concomitant control of
hemispheric finances by US banks obstructed any autonomous local
industrial development. Thus, US corporate investment constituted an
impoverishment machine, sucking up value from poor societies and
transferring it to the pockets of the rich.

In short, the people and nations of Latin America weren't poor; they were
actively impoverished by a relational process that enriched the US.

Yet people found ways of surviving. In the vast rural areas of Latin
America, local autonomous economies existed or were formed (cooperatives,
communal agriculture, ejidos, communes, and barter economies, etc.), some
derived from ancient indigenous modes of living. Thus, people attempted to
withstand the onslaught of corporate investment. Ultimately, these
"alternate" economies formed a significant popular base for the national
liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

But then, around 1975, with the beginning of the "neo-liberal" era, things
got worse. And the vast floods of immigration faced by the US and Europe
has been one of the results.

The term "neo-liberalism" refers to global economic policies adopted in
the wake of anti-colonial movements that swept the world after World War
II. Those movements, seizing control of their own lands and attempting to
found autonomous and independent societies, tended to socialize public or
social assets and resources, to make them available to all. The
neo-liberal project sought first of all to privatize those social assets,
to undo their anti-colonial socialization, so they could be used for
investment profitability. Privatization means corporate control of social
resources such as utilities, water, hospitals, public transportation, and
nationalized industries. The privatization process was imposed through
debt. The IMF would propose loans for development, accompanied by
"structural adjustment programs" (SAPs) that required the elimination of
price controls, food subsidies, welfare safety nets, the removal of
prohibitions against sale of communal (ejido) lands, the removal of tariff
barriers, protective ecological rules, labor rights, etc. as conditions
for the loans. Insofar as the World Bank had centralized control of
international financing, countries that refused these SAPs would find
themselves blacklisted from most sources of credit needed for independent
development and trade. The two primary results of neo-liberalism have been
the shunting of local economic activity over to debt service, requiring
new loans and austerity programs to meet debt obligations, and the
destruction of the alternative economies by which rural people had
survived.

A classic example of the devastation imposed by an SAP is Rwanda. The
local economy in the 1980s was centered on truck farming, including
livestock, with some economic surplus for international trade produced by
fishing in Lake Kiva and Lake Tanganyika. The fisherman were small
entrepreneurs, whose labor intensive activity supported much of Ruanda's
employment profile. Gasoline was subsidized to support the truck farms and
markets. The nation was poor, but the economy sustainable. The SAP opened
the lakes to corporate fishing, removed subsidies for gasoline, and
permitted imports that undermined the markets for food crops on which
local farmers depended. Farmers could no longer afford to take their
produce to market, and were unable to undersell the imported food.
Corporate fishing pushed local fisherman aside, fished out the lakes, and
left. The result was mass starvation, a generalized unemployment
situation, and the desparation that led to the catastrophes of the early
1990s.

Similar conditions have been imposed on Latin America through IMF loans,
and "free trade" agreements (NAFTA, CAFTA, and the FTAA).

With their economies eroded from beneath their feet, the people of Mexico,
Central America, and parts of South America have nowhere else to turn but
to go where their own wealth has gone. In coming to the US, Latino
immigrants are simply following their money as it is taken north. They
come to find work, in order to send their earnings back as remittances.
Their efforts are significant. For El Salvador, for instance, some 30% of
their economy depends on those remittances. For Mexico, it is 15%.

For most immigrants, the average length of stay in the US is three years,
after which they return. to follow their own money back to their home
communities. Not all return. Some stay and seek social assimilation. They
form an important core of the Latino immigrant communities, helping newly
arrived laborers with employment information, and assistence in
out-maneuvering the legal obstacles that the US government places in their
way. They facilitate border crossings without coyotes, and help people to
obtain documents (false or otherwise). Altogether, these communities form
the base of an organized political movement, one of whose central purposes
is returning their wealth to their home economies. And they do it not by
taking that wealth, but by working for it.

One could say that they form a vast "reparations" operation seeking to
compensate for the damage done to their home economies by US investment –
in other words, repatriating what had been taken from them. It is therein
that the justice of the immigrant situation lies.

Though many immigrants may not comprehend their labor and remittances in
terms of a reparations project, it is an objective aspect that explains
why the tremendous dangers they face in coming here appear worthwhile to
them. In these terms, what the anti-immigrant movement seeks to preserve
is the injustice of having taken the wealth from Latin America through
economic imposition in the first place, leaving devastated economies in
its wake. For them, the pillage of Latin America has been "legal." But on
a human level, to consider these documented workers "illegal" is itself
illegitimate, unjust, and even criminal.

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