“If I ever met the Immigration Service, even if I knew they were go-
ing to send me back to Haiti, I would have to speak with them. I
would make them tell me why they are sending away Haitians, other
people of the Caribbean, Latins. Because this country has always had
immigrants, and they weren’t deported. The Germans, theJews, the
Italians came in the last hundred years. Why now are they sending
away Haitians? We are closer, we come from the same continent, and
we are doing the work here. Is it because of the color of the skin, or
for some other reason? Even if they sent me back, they would have to
answer my question.”
Colette (Haiti)
Late in 1974 the Commissioner of the Im-
migration and Naturalization Service (INS),
General Leonard Chapman, exercising his
duty to preserve the nation’s sovereign border,
issued a dire revelation. “The United States is
being overrun by illegal aliens,” he asserted,
adding that the invasion had only just begun.’
Chapman toured the states, arousing the
press, to propagate the alarm.
This was bad news to a country which, hav-
ing barely recovered from an economic slump
in 1970, was slipping again into recession,
with no convincing explanations forthcoming
from the Federal Government. In January
1975, unemployment hit 7%. That same year
New York City lost its credit rating on the
municipal bond market. A flagship American
city was stumbling toward bankruptcy.
The news was also disturbing because vir-
tually no one except General Chapman
seemed to have a clear idea of who an “illegal
alien” could be, or how one might act. The
chilling term denoted a category of people
both strange and lawless, stopping at nothing
to enter the country to steal American jobs.
In the five years after Chapman initiated
the “illegal alien” scare, the politics around
the issue hardened. President Jimmy Carter
established his position in August 1977 when
he proposed a plan to restrict illegal immigra-
tion which synthesized all the major ap-
parently liberal proposals which had emerged
in Congress. The Carter Plan called for sanc-
tions on employers hiring workers without
papers, and stepped up enforcement of labor
standards; greatly strengthened patrol of the
border, particularly to the south; and in-
creased aid to immigrants’ home countries,
primarily Mexico. In addition, the plan
called for a limited amnesty, which would
have provided permanent resident status to
immigrants who could prove they had lived in
the United States continuously for seven
years, and a five-year work permit to those
who had been here more than seven months.
The rest (a group which could include hun-
dreds of thousands) would be deported.
This essentially protectionist plan was
designed to mend what the Carter Ad-
ministration put forth as the worst conse-
quence wrought by “illegal aliens”: the
threatened livelihood of American workers.
The one major sector vigorously backing the
White House on the plan was organized labor
through the AFL-CIO. A resolution passed at
the 1977 convention of the Confederation
read, “Illegal alien workers take jobs from
Americans and undermine U.S. wages and
working conditions. Their status places them
at the mercy of unscrupulous employers who
rely on the threat of deportation to keep them
from protesting low wages and intolerable
working conditions.”‘
Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall was large-
2 NACLA ReportNov/Dec 1979
ly responsible for the proposal. Researchers at
the Department of Labor and the University
of Texas, where Marshall had been tenured,
had developed a scenario for the impact of
“illegal aliens” on U.S. labor markets which
justified the Carter Plan. Recently, Ray Mar-
shall told the Los Angeles Times that the
unemployment rate in the United States could
be reduced to less than 4% if it were not for
the presence of illegal aliens. 3 The broader
views behind this assertion proclaimed that il-
legal status determines, above all, the role
these workers play in the U.S. economy.
Burderned by the consequencs of illegality,
the argument goes, they grow docile, anxious
to please, willing to tolerate any exploitation
to avoid deportation. They must take what-
ever job they can find, no matter how menial
and poorly paid.
Knowing this, competing employers prefer
to hire these workers over American citizens
who, it is assumed, have full recourse to the
Labor Department and to labor unions to
fight abuse. Deterioration of wages and con-
ditions results. Says Vernon Briggs, of the
University of Texas at Austin, “It is a self-
fulfilling prophecy for employers to hire il-
legals and then to claim simultaneously that
no citizen workers can be found to do the
same work. Hence, it is clear that illegal im-
migration hurts all low income workers. Poor
blacks, poor Anglos, poor Chicanos, poor
Puerto Ricans, and all others are adversely
affected.”‘
David North, a researcher for the Labor
Department, concludes the argument when
he says, “At bottom, a decision to permit the
entry of large numbers of illegals into the
work force sanctions the creation of an
economically, socially and politically
disparate two-class society of legal, advan-
taged citizens and illegal disadvantaged
workers.” This social impact, in his view,
makes illegal immigration “a threat to
America as an egalitarian society.”s
Armed with this analysis, the Carter Ad-
ministration rushed to intervene in a sup-
posed battle between American workers and
an almost invisible enemy from within their
own class: undocumented immigrants engag-
ing in unfair competition. While defending
the Americans, Carter’s statements also ex-
pressed a pious concern for the exploitation of
the immigrants. For the latter, however, the
solution would be harsh: eliminate the ex-
ploitation by sooner or later eliminating most
of the workers.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
The assertions behind the Carter Plan were
made amidst a widely acknowledged dearth
of information about the dimension and
character of illegal immigration on a national
scale. Nevertheless, the plan publicly
legitimized the dark image of the “illegal
alien.” Obscured are the historical con-
tinuities of immigration to the United States.
Immigrants traditionally supply low-wage
labor in times of economic growth and take
the blame for the nation’s most painful
economic ills in a recession. As unemploy-
ment rises, the same foreign workers once
considered indispensible suddenly are seen as
highly expendable. This is a divisive, national
chauvinism which time after time has pitted
workers in the same industries and localities
against one another on the basis of country of
origin.
Giving “illegal aliens” the more accurate
name of undocumented immigrant worker,
helps bring into focus that what the United
States is now experiencing is nothing more or
less than a new wave of labor immigration,
primarily from Latin America, the Caribbean
and Asia, which escalated around 1965.
Legal immigration has shown regular in-
creases (from 296,697 in 1964 to 388,613 in
1976), while illegal immigration has soared,
according to the only available indicator, INS
apprehensions of “deportable aliens.” Most of
these are made at the border with Mexico and
by 1978, with no substantial increase in INS
enforcement capability, these detentions had
risen to over one million, from only 212,057
in 1968.s The INS currently estimates that
there are four million undocumented im-
migrants in the United States. But these
general figures confuse as much as they
clarify, since it isn’t known how many escape
detention for every one caught, how many
come and go after short stays, or how many
stay long-term. No longer limited to the
Southwest and California, undocumented im-
migrants can now be found in large numbers
in the factories of Chicago, the restaurants of
Denver, the fields of Ohio, as well as the
streets of New York.
Whatever the background causes of the
new immigration to the United States, the
year 1965 marked the beginning of a series of
congressional actions which forced working
class immigration into illegality. It was the
year after the termination of the Bracero Pro-
gram, which engineered the importation of
Mexican farm laborers into the American
Southwest, involving nearly 178,000 workers
in its final year. Under this program wages
were agreed upon between the Government
and the growers, with no effective input from
labor. It ended amid union and community
outrage that local farmworkers were being
forced out of work. This closed a major (but
highly oppressive) channel for legal immigra-
tion of low-wage laborers, without opening
virtually any other expedient access. (A
modified version of this scheme was resur-
rected through the use of Section H-2 of the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952,
under which limited numbers of agricultural
workers are brought into the United States,
theoretically in situations of proven labor
shortage.)’
In 1965, Congress also imposed a strict ceil-
ing on permanent resident visas at 290,000
annually for the entire globe, with a limit of
120,000 from the Western hemisphere. These
visas authorize immigrants to work and are
otherwise known as “green cards.” Again by
1977, the law was revised, setting limits per
country in the Western hemisphere. This
came as a particular blow to Mexico which, in
1976, had sent close to three times as many
legal immigrants as the new ceiling allowed,
as well as hundreds of thousands of un-
documented workers. 8
Legal channels were progressively denied to
working class immigrants in spite of ample
evidence that immigration from the under-
developed countries was rising rapidly.
Within three years after the end of the
Bracero Program, INS apprehensions of un-
documented workers had nearly doubled.’
Cigar-toting crew bosses coordinate enganches-work gangs-going by train from San Antonio to Pennsylvania’s
Bethlehem Steel mills in 1920s.
Southwest growers, as well as more and more
urban industrial and service employers, still
had an abundant supply of low-wage laborers
— without the inconvenience of Federal
mediation or scrutiny. Held to a paltry
budget compared to its mandated task, the
INS Border Patrol harrassed immigrants as
they ran the border, but never definitively
prevented many from entering; while in the
cities INS agents terrorized undocumented
workers without really cutting into the overall
illegal workforce.’ 0 The hypocrisy of this
policy became so egregious that even Leonel
Castillo, successor to General Chapman as
INS Commissioner, attacked it as a “half-
open door” when he resigned from his post in
August 1979. Illegal workers, he said, “are
not even second class citizens. .. they may be
more closely compared with indentured
workers.” ”
The 1977 Carter Plan only succeeded in
bringing the political usefulness of the im-
migrant as worker into conflict.
As a result, by 1979, the plan had suc-
cumbed quietly in Congress, with no friends
to resuscitate it. Employers, both big and
small, articulated their interests through the
press, objecting to possible sanctions for hir-
ing the undocumented, and revealing their
“dirty little secret,” that a work force deprived
of legal benefits and protection was exactly
what they had ordered.”
Some relatively new voices were raised in
opposition. The Mexican-American com-
munity achieved broad unity in rejecting any
partial amnesty or employer sanctions that
might unleash discrimination against them.
The Mexican government, suddenly influen-
tial because of newly publicized oil finds, was
cold to any attempt to forcibly return Mex-
icans to their home economy, with its
endemic, large-scale unemployment.
NovlDec 1979 5.NACLA Report
DOCUMENTING IMMIGRATION
Given this political background, this
NACLA Report has a two-fold purpose. First,
it will challenge the conceptions supporting
the “illegal alien” bugaboo, as both false and
tendentious. This stigma, pinned by present
U.S. policy on a segment of the immigrant
population, makes undocumented workers
appear to the public as being in a class by
themselves. In effect, it both punishes im-
migrants for being exploited, and makes
them the perpetrators of their own exploita-
tion. It puts them into a falsely portrayed
competition with others laboring alongside
them in factories, restaurants, and other
workplaces. The idea of the “illegal alien” will
be shown to be more of a political manipula-
tion than a reflection of economic and social
reality.
The second purpose of the Report is to
document the systematic exploitation of these
workers in New York. As immigrants, they in-
crease a reserve of labor in the city, which
gives employers greater flexibility in imposing
their terms oni wages and working conditions.
As the undocumented, their vulnerability is
accentuated because they are barred from
government aid and from exercising their due
legal recourse against abuse. Nevertheless,
NACLA’s research will verify that undocu-
mented workers are by no means docile or
passive, but rather sharply aware of their
situation and often ready to resist it.
BAD APPLE
The presence of undocumented workers in
New York City only emerged as a political
issue in the past two years. For one thing,
debates on this topic long dwelt on Mexican
migration into the Southwest, to the virtual
exclusion of other migrant streams. Today,
however, the Department of City Planning of
the “Big Apple” estimates there are at least
850,000 undocumented immigrants in the
New York Metropolitan area (a figure based,
by official admission, on “intuition”), or one
for every ten counted residents.’ These im-
migrants hail from a wide range of countries
in Europe and Asia, as well as the Americas.
From the latter, since 1965, the City has seen
an important influx of Dominicans, Colom-
bians, Jamaicans, Haitians and Ecuadoreans,
to name only the largest groups. Dominicans
and Colombians, for example, are estimated
to number 250,000 each, with perhaps half
undocumented.
In New York City, the stage is fully set for
resentment and irate accusations over un-
documented labor. The 1975 brush with
bankruptcy was a fiscal emergency rooted in a
larger crisis of blue-collar employment. Be-
tween 1950 and 1974, New York manufactur-
ing jobs declined by a full 41%, or a total of
430,400. In 1974, one out of every four city
jobs was in factory production; only five years
later it’s down to one in six. The city has been
losing its blood: $3.5 billion in manufacturing
wages between 1958 and 1976.” Its tax base
shrank while demand for services by the
unemployed expanded. Today, New York
unemployment is at 8.2%, with the rate for
minorities over 12% .1
New Yorkers are restive from the massive
lay-offs from government jobs and the gutting
of many key services that followed the fiscal
crisis. In one city subway station, in the sum-
mer of 1979, an anonymous writer scrawled,
“Save taxes, deport illegal aliens,” on eleven
different columns. In March, the New York
Times had called for federal help “to cope
with the aliens who have already penetrated
our defenses,”saying “Forgiveness may be
more human than deportation, but it offers
little consolation to Americans who need
jobs.” 6
However, the recent large influx of working
class immigrants poses a paradox for New
York. In spite of the dizzying job loss, the
signs of unemployment among new im-
migrants are lacking. How do they find jobs
at all? Why do they continue to come?
To begin to answer these questions,
NACLA interviewed 50 undocumented
workers in New York City (18 Dominicans, 12
Ecuadoreans, 7 Colombians, 6 Haitians, 3
Salvadoreans, 2 Nicaraguans, 1 Panama-
nian and 1 Mexican). All of them worked
primarily in manufacturing jobs. The 26
women had been in New York for a median of
five years, the 24 men a median of four. The
interviews cast light on the experience of the
growing number of undocumented im-
migrants who are finding their way into in-
dustrial jobs in U.S. cities.
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