Ironically, “illegal” immigrant workers and their supporters are increasingly using the legal system as a tool of their struggle. About 100 organizations, including the Texas Farmworkers’ Union, met in September 1978 in San Antonio, Texas to discuss legal strategies to resist unjust immigration law enforcement practices. In related developments, three potentially significant cases for undocumented workers are now pending in state and federal courts in California. They are a few of many such cases brought to courts in other states.
ILGWU v. SURECK DEFENDS THE RIGHT TO ORGANIZE
“…They [undocumented workers] are becoming more courageous, and they are starting to come forward…” This was how Phil Russo, western states organizing director for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) described rank-and-file workers’ militant response to Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) raids and harrassment in southern California’s prosperous garment factories.
Throughout its history, the ILGWU has drawn heavily on immigrant workers for its base. With undocumented Mexican women making up the vast majority of garment workers in southern California, it is in the Union’s interest to organize
these workers to buttress its sagging membership rolls. (ILGWU
membership reportedly dropped by 50,000 between 1968 and 1974 and another 63,000 between 1974 and 1977.) Over the past four years, ILGWU organizers have tried to unionize several factories, only to have agents under INS Los Angeles Director Joseph Sureck raid the factories in search of undocumented workers just prior to union elections. The resulting harrassments and deportations have significantly weakened
organizing drives.
Pending since August 1978 in federal District Court, Central
District of California, ILGWU v. Sureck seeks to prevent these
raids on the grounds that the INS uses unconstitutional methods of apprehension, detention, and interrogation in the raids. Particularly challenged is the practice of obtaining vague and often contradictory affidavits from workers who are arrested and interrogated by the INS. These affidavits, obtained under duress, have been used as the basis for issuing general warrants to search factories-for allegedly stolen property, not for people-warrants which the ILGWU charges are illegal. But during organizing drives, factory managers had allowed agents to enter work places and, according to the ILGWU, “selectively interrogate, intimidate and mistreat our Latin-looking [union] members in the most racist and scurrilous manner … ” without even the flimsy pretense of an illegal warrant.
On October 10, 1978, the INS announced that its Los Angeles
office had stopped raiding factories as a means of immigration
law enforcement. It cited unsettled legal actions against raids and developing pressure to reform immigration laws as the reasons for this major policy change. But perhaps more significant is the fact that a major trade union, faced with the need to survive, has defined its interests in common with
workers regardless of race or national origin.
SBICCA WORKERS RESIST DEPORTATIONS
Unionization efforts at the Sbicca shoe factory in the
southern California town of El Monte continue there because
workers have insisted upon their full legal rights in the face of deportation. They are part of a group of largely undocumented Spanish-speaking workers who were arrested in an INS raid just prior to an election which was likely to unionize the factory.
The actions of these 70 workers are set against the background of a long-term rank-and-file-based organizing drive which
culminated in an invitation to the Retail Clerks International Union to represent the workers. When the INS deprived the workers of union representation by arresting 120 of them, 70 refused to sign away their full due process rights in return for a “voluntary departure”.
“Voluntary departure” agreements obtained at the time of arrest are commonly used by the INS to expedite deportations.
They are statements that an immigrant worker admits undocumented status and agrees to return to the country of his or her origin. They effectively prevent immigrants from obtaining the fullest protection of the law if they are signed by a worker prior to a deportation hearing.
Because workers are often harrassed and abused when they are arrested and detained by the INS, and because voluntary
departures do not become part of a criminal record, it is often prudent for undocumented immigrants to sign the departure agreements at the time of arrest. This is particularly true when workers know that resistance means further detention without adequate legal counsel. The unprecedented action of the 70 Sbicca workers to insist upon the fullest possible exercise of their rights is a very significant, organized form of resistance. It not only strengthens the organizing struggle in the Sbicca factory, but stands as an important precedent for all undocumented workers who are fighting for their rights.
CORPORATION TAKEN TO COURT BY UNDOCUMENTED WORKERS
The pines east of scenic Highway 1 in San Mateo County, just
south of San Francisco, have for more than a decade concealed
cardboard and plastic leantos-$45- per month “housing” for undocumented workers. California politics has likewise concealed the business practice common among many corporate
farmers of extorting $10 per month from each of their hired
workers as “protection” against INS raids and deportations. For more than a decade (since the end of the “bracero” program), undocumented workers have been paid wages far less than the minimums set by state and federal laws, and have worked 60 – 70 hours per week under threat of deportation.
But in the fall of 1977, after four undocumented workers were fired by the Donald Garibaldi-owned Aio Nuevo Flower Growers because they complained about their situation, they took their grievances to the County Legal Aid Society. Joined by 18 other workers, they filed suit for unpaid wages, rent abatement and damages and further charged that their employer was violating fair business practices by paying such low wages.
The 22 Ano Nuevo workers are not subject to deportation while their case is pending. When the case is decided-probably in their favor-they will be forced to leave the U.S. Nonetheless, their actions represent the strength of organized resistance under extremely difficult circumstances. Other undocumented people with similar grievances are looking to the Ano Nuevo resistance as an example of what they, too, can do if they struggle together. Furthermore, the long legal battle has
formulated legal tools for use in other times and other struggles.
IMMIGRANTS DEMAND FULL EDUCATIONAL RIGHTS
Outside their work places, undocumented immigrants are also
using the legal system as a tool for struggle. Five immigrants
who have lived legally in California while awaiting the processing of their residency applications, are challenging the right of the state colleges and universities to deny them admission because they do not have Form 1-151 “green cards,” or work permits. Their case was filed in Santa Barbara California Superior Court in September 1978.
The five plaintiffs emigrated legally, four of them with their
families,as young children. In 1966, as their immigration
papers were being processed, Congress changed the law under
which Cuban (and only Cuban) refugees were included in the
annual quota of Western Hemisphere persons allowed to become legal U.S. residents. Refugees are normally given a special legal status which excludes them from the quota system. By
including Cuban refugees in the quota, immigrants from other
countries in the hemisphere were excluded from legal residency even though many of them were actually living in the U.S.
legally. This abrupt change in the law left the plaintiffs-and thousands of other immigrants from Latin America-with a residency status neither legal nor illegal, and without the standard Form I-151 work permits or “green cards.”
The Santa Barbara students are using the legal system to affirm the educational rights of immigrant workers. By their actions they join their brothers and sisters in the Ano Nuevo fields and the southern California factories in using the legal system as one tool of defense against the mounting attacks on undocumented workers.
As the current international economic crisis deepens, the
bourgeoisie will attempt to maintain its hegemony by escalating and re-forming its attacks on the working class. As the attacks take different forms, so must working class resistance. These four cases particularly affect Mexican and Latin American immigrant sectors of the working class-sectors which the bourgeoisie attempts to isolate from the rest of the class through the use of racism and national chauvinism. The legal tools of resistance being forged in these cases particularly move these sectors forward, but also strengthen the entire class because they move toward breaking down the isolation of different races and nationalities from one another, and move toward consolidating a working class struggle in the U.S.
