In the wake of Trump’s first election to the presidency in January 2017, activist David Bacon wrote about the economic context of immigration policy and what Trump could and could not do to shape immigration for Dollars and Sense. The piece was republished after Trump’s reelection.
DAVID BACON; dbaconphotography@gmail.com
Bacon is a photojournalist, author and political activist. He covers labor and immigration.
Bacon told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “What strikes me is how similar the situation is today from what we were looking at when Trump first got elected [in 2016]. The threats that Trump is making, and made during his campaign, are a repeat of what he campaigned on and threatened in 2016. The focus is the threat of mass deportations, because that’s the most terrorizing element of his rhetoric.
“In the last 16 years, we’ve had hundreds of thousands of deportations per year. That’s been the norm. Trump is saying that he is going to ramp up that number. But there are some limitations on his ability to do that. The biggest limitation is that the labor of immigrant workers in the U.S. economy is fundamental. We have approximately 11 to 12 million people without papers in the U.S., and about 8 to 9 million are employed as wage workers. We all know the industries that are dependent on that labor––agriculture, meatpacking, construction––would collapse without those workers. The labor is essential, but it’s also very profitable labor.
“Trump says he’s going to remove that workforce and expand the system of contract labor by bringing workers into the U.S. on visas tied to their work. Just in agriculture, there are around 350,000 workers brought into the U.S. each year on temporary H-2A visas. That represents a sixth of all the workforce in agriculture in the U.S. Trump will give companies workers under that program while enforcing immigration laws. Those workers are overwhelmingly recruited from Mexico, from the same cities and towns that are the sources of migration for undocumented people. It’s really the same group of people. The difference is the vulnerability of those workers. If you’re an H-2A worker, your boss can force you to work fast; if you don’t keep up, you can lose your visa and get deported. Same thing if you organize a union. It creates a very vulnerable workforce. Trump and the employers see eye to eye on this.
“The Trump administration is also going to try to enforce employer sanctions more fiercely than in the past. There is going to be pressure from the Trump administration through workplace immigration raids or mass firings of workers. Selective enforcement is likely, because if they did it across the board at the meatpacking plants, the plants wouldn’t be able to function. They will use examples to terrorize people… Trump isn’t interested in sending corporate executives to jail. Workers pay the price of enforcement––not executives.
“We are also going to see more people picked up at the border. As he did last time, Trump will likely force Mexico to bear the burden of people arriving at the border who want to claim asylum. Trump forced Mexico to set up detention camps, rather than allowing people to cross the border and be processed by the U.S. asylum system. We will see that again. Trump has also said that he’s going to bring back 287G, the provision that allows local law enforcement agencies to arrest and hold people for not having papers.
“Let’s remember how we fought him before. We stopped family separation before. We cooperated with the Mexican government to try to change the detention situation at the border. Government in Mexico is more oriented toward human rights now than in the past. And because the renegotiation of NAFTA that took place during the first Trump administration allowed workers in Mexico to organize independent unions in U.S. companies, we’ve seen [the creation of] independent unions in auto plants in Mexico. There are new possibilities of responding to Trump through cooperation across the border between U.S. and Mexican unions.” Bacon argues that solidarity will be especially important as employer sanctions begin to happen: “The union as a whole has to defend people. Workers with status and who are citizens have to join arms with the people who don’t and who are under attack.”