The patterns in the New York City apparel
industry provide a partial basis on which to
explain the paradoxes of employment in New
York City as a whole, where new immigrants
easily find jobs (at minimum wages) in spite of
high official unemplyment and crippling job
loss.
Once again, in a time of national recession
and local fiscal crisis, the cry went up in New
York to “round up the usual suspects.” The
traits of workers were blamed for problems
that the capitalist economy generated but
couldn’t solve.
In our study of New York apparel, the no-
tion that the undocumented were displacing
“American” workers proved to be dangerously
misleading. In New York apparel, competing
forces of capital take advantage of a growing
reserve of labor to impose deteriorating
conditions on workers throughout the in-
dustry. Historically, the industry has
repeatedly replaced one immigrant genera-
tion with another, and maintained a high rate
of turnover in low-wage jobs. The allegation
of “unfair competition” between workers
obscures this continuous historical pattern.
Even the Employment Standards Adminis-
tration and the unions, while springing to the
defense of undocumented immigrants for the
benefit of the media, took up the same in-
sistence that the characteristics of workers
determine the state of industry. Both were
convinced that the sweatshops and the un-
documented go hand in glove. Thus, both
avoided the more intractable cause of the
degeneration of manufacturing and working
class unemployment in New York City: the
migration of capital to more lucrative sites.
Politically disenfranchised and never really
free from sudden deportation, undocumented
workers are saddled with an objective
vulnerability. First, the lack of a green card is
one factor that serves to hold them in the
lowest wage sectors of industry. Second,
bosses can manipulate their illegal staus to ex-
act favorable conditions over the terms of
employment. If a boss threatens dismissal or
disclosure to the INS, it is very difficult for
these workers to resort to any legal recourse.
Moreover, these workers suffer painful per-
sonal anonymity and can be isolated socially
and politically from other workers, adding
one more potential division for a boss to make
use of. Differences between workers can also
be exacerbated by negative images of undocu-
mented immigrants perpetrated by govern-
ment policy.
Legislative proposals, linked together
under the 1977 Carter Plan (but which have
surfaced whenever immigration reform is
urged) were presented as an attempt to relieve
the injustices suffered by the undocumented.
In fact, these proposals fail to confront the
44
NACLA ReportNovlDec 1979 45
Detainees at INS detention center in Brooklyn.
basic issues concerning undocumented im-
migrant workers.
The plan to greatly increase border en-
forcement fails entirely to even consider that
immigration has structural economic causes
that go beyond individual desires and deci-
sions. The government’s lack of concern
about these causes is reflected in its obsession
to determine only the numbers of immigrants
entering the United States illegally. Today,
nothing less than a full-scale militarization of
the border would be required to turn back
immigrants who have found that the process
of development in their own countries is con-
demning them to economic death at an early
age.
From our interviews it was clear that the ef-
fect of sanctions on employers hiring illegal
immigrants would only be to drive this large
labor force further underground, and to in-
crease the costs of false documentation
through black markets.
Other proposals suggest the institution of
temporary work permits, which would bring
immigrants under the close control of the
U.S. government. With these proposals the
government would make a reality of the “il-
legal alien” of the Labor Department’s
ominous descriptions: a segregated, second-
class worker with limited civil and union
rights and possibly even with fixed wages.
Such workers could legally be engaged by
employers to lower wage rates and undercut
local workers, by the very terms of the govern-
ment program.
Only a full, unconditional amnesty for the
undocumented, together with an immigra-
tion policy which does not discriminate
against labor migration or set workers against
one another, will put an end to current in-
justices. The full human and civil rights of
immigrant workers should be recognized
within the United States.
But even amnesty for the undocumented
will not put an end to the sweatshop in the
South Bronx any more than it will eliminate
the sweatshop in Hong Kong. The difficult
reality of the movement of industrial capital is
that it can be confronted with nothing less
than the conscious organization of working
people into powerful class organizations.
Amnesty is only one step.
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