Trans-border worker citizens: Hemispheric labor and the many faces of citizenship

Original Article

Trans-border worker citizens:

Hemispheric labor and the many faces of citizenship Rodolfo Rosales

The University of Texas at San Antonio

Abstract The essay discusses the world of immigrants and their rights as workers as they cross the border to work. It focuses on a concept of citizenshipthat is expanded to include the rights of immigrant workers to decent wages and security for their families. By focusing on production, the category of citizenship is broadened to include the constitutional extension of rights to all persons in our jurisdiction. The argument is not for open borders nor for automatic citizenship; rather, it is for an inclusive concept that addresses a global economy that does not recognize borders.

Latino Studies (2013) 0, 1–18. doi:10.1057/lst.2013.29Keywords: borders; citizenship; community; market; production; worker

Introduction

Today we are engulfed by a market economy that has splattered across con- tinents, to almost every corner of the world, shaping and reshapingeverything in its path. In the United States, to keep up with the globalcompetition for markets, the government is ceding sovereign power to corporations, allowing them to go above the law more and more, so to speak, through court decisions, treaties and through our national policies of deregulation (Sassen, 2008). At the same time, the concept of citizenship that we as a nation apply to order our society is at bestinadequate to meet the needs of a bustling global economy that recognizes no borders, and at worse, the manner in which it is applied leads to a violation of the basic rights of workers as they come to our nation to meet the needs of industry.

© 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies Vol. 00, 0, 1–18 www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/

Rosales

A Different Kind of Citizenship

In this essay I propose a brief theoretical outline for a broader, more inclusive, model of citizenship that transcends the various problems that have arisen from a nineteenth-century citizenship. The model I present is a paradigm that expands the social and political boundaries of what citizenship implies beyond the rights of exclusive membership. It moves away from a singular focus on borders in defining the rights ofworkers.

The model is not outside the constitutional framework that has been usedto establish the individualistic rational membership that is operationalin the usual application of citizenship. While going beyond the rights of the individual, it does not negate these rights but is expanded to workers as a community (Rosales, 2010). That is to say, the citizenship that we have come to enjoy in this nation is not negated in this discussion, instead overlaying this individualistic “membership” model is one that is more dynamic and that allows the economy to operate without turning the country into a police state where papers are constantly sought.

Unlike the citizenship that is assumed in the constitutional codification of citizenship, this expanded model does not begin with membership. Rather this model starts at the point of production. The focus is on the broader economic context of production that has in essence created the flow of workers to workplaces that is then politically defined through the use of borders. More importantly it focuses on the agency of workers in their appropriation of the fruits oftheir labor. Production as the starting point simply points to the rightof workers to that which they produce; in modern terms that means the

right to a decent wage and to the security of a person and her/his

family.

1

More to the point, I focus on the dynamic relationship that is created by the border between the United States and Mexico. Moving away from a narrow legalistic citizenship, the focus is on the rights of immigrants,in particular Mexican and other Latino immigrants, as they cross the border in their path to work in the United States (Sassen, 2000). The objective is to develop a citizenship model that can inform us theoretically and lead us on the various political and/or constitutionaland social paths that can be taken from an agency perspective on the part of workers as they struggle to legitimize their work. More importantly, in a more universal sense, a broader citizenship that incorporates the participation side of citizenship, especially of workers, can lead to the empowerment of not only the individual worker but also of the excluded communities, both immigrant and non-immigrant, that have shouldered a large part of the burden of our economic system.

In the following pages, I describe what a citizenship that focuses on the world of the worker means in the context of the global economy that has engulfed the Americas. The implication of citizenship rights for immigrant workers then is the guide for the rest of this narrative. The starting point of this essay is the

2

© 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies Vol. 00, 0, 1–18

commodification of immigrant workers by an immigration policy paradigm that has focused on the border and not on the workers that have to crossthat border to go to work. Do immigrant workers have a right to their productive capacity regardless of citizenship status? Has our concept ofcitizenship, one that narrowly focuses on an individualistic approach tosocial and political rights that is based on membership, become irrelevant in today’s global economy? A focus on the Fourteenth Amendment and its relevance to the rights of immigrants as workers and as residents brings out the legal basis for this approach. In the penultimate section I address what I refer to as “the three faces of citizenship,” a practical concept that goes beyond the nineteenth-century concept that is contained by needs that we have since outgrown. To conclude, I provide an historical and political argument for the concept that I present in this essay.

The Changing Nature of the Americas

Given the emerging global economy and the quickening pace of corporate penetration and exploitation of markets throughout the Americas, the United States has intensified its efforts to expand its economic and social power on a hemispheric basis. In the midst of this global economy, a new and reorganized capitalist accumulation process described

by Harvey (1987) as “flexible accumulation” has developed, bringing about rapid changes in inter- and intra-national economic and social relations. The modernist conditions of capital still exist, it has simply reorganized itself physically with the help of advanced communica- tion and transportation technology in a dispersed decentralized manner but nevertheless still relentlessly pursuing the bottom-line in a most organized and centralized manner. Indeed, at timesit is difficult to make distinctions between inter- and intra-national economic processes because this new global economy is simply a process by which capitalists in this hemisphere are consolidating control over production as well as expanding consumption across this hemisphere. Thisconsolidation is an effort on the part of multi-national corporations – with the critically important support and guidance provided by the United States and the various international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank – to address the needs of capitalist production and consumption from a materialist base. Obviously, an international capitalism has extended across the globe, take for example oil. But even oil capitalist interests seek to establish their own sources locally (that is, Bush and his intense efforts to further exploit wild preserves in Alaska) as they seek to control their own production and therefore consumption. However, despitethe supposed e-net capabilities expanding across the globe, productionand consumption are still mired in a material world. The old North–Southbinary of exploitation and domination still holds.

The irony is that from the North to the South, this global economy has put US capitalist interests in a collective global interdependent position with all of the

Trans-border worker citizens

© 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies Vol. 00, 0, 1–18 3

Rosales

2 Even though their particular politics

American nations in a potential competitive position with other regions of the world. The economic stranglehold by the United States over most of the hemisphere is moving toward interdependence as the structure of the global economy shifts the once centralized political and economic power in the hands of the United States and its international institutions to a post-modern complex process of political negotiations.Stated from a Gramscian theoretical framework, it is more a “war of maneuver” between nations as opposed to a more fixed hierarchical pattern of relationships or “war of position” characterized by the past imperialistic domination of Latin America by US interests (Gramsci, 1996). While the United States still exerts tremendous influence through

the IMF, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), nations, such asVenezuela, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and so on, are finding greater leeway in their ability to define their own national interests.

This has created the heretofore-unlikely situation that nations in this hemispheric community have to approach each other as members of the same community. As American nations become more and more familiar with each other economically, social and culturally, they no longer can afford to deal with each other as “exotic” foreign others. This logic oftrans-national partnership can be seen as well from the zealous corporate perspective as they race to extend their market share throughout the Americas.

Just as true, however, political instability and political insurgency have pockmarked most nations below and including Mexico. The temptation is, of course, to argue that political instability and political insurgency are character- istic of most of twentieth-century Latin America (Mexico, Central America and South America). I will not take on that debate because it offers no new insights to this discussion, although it does offer a manner by which to dissect the political and economic domination imposed by the United States and its various international institutions, such as the Organization of American States (OAS), IMF, World Bank, GATT and so on. I am proposing that regardless of such a debate over the twentieth century, the political instability and political insurgency referred to in this essay are of a different nature in that as the various nations attempt to impose neo-liberal policies so as to attract greater investment by foreign corporations they ultimately have to deal with the individual liberties and rights accented in this intensification of the market economy. While human welfare has taken a step backward, individual liberties have become the nemesis of the neo-liberal policies. They have become the twenty-first-century “parlia- mentary distractions” that must be confronted by any political strategy. Stated in a different manner, the individual liberties that are implied in the expansion of the market economy and its institutions are the starting point for both, a reformist as well asa revolutionary strategy. The Zapatistas in Chiapas are of course the

universal example of radical insurgency in the context of the global

economy and its trademark, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

2

Since then Chavez has taken over Venezuela. Morales, representing the first

4


UNCORRECTED PROOF indigenous electoral takeover in South America, was elected president inBolivia. Indeed, throughout Latin America governments have taken different electoral paths in establishing their independence. These electoral takeovers have their roots in the neo-liberal efforts to privatize water and other resources.

Confounding these political issues, the environmental problems continue to plague Latin American countries. The destruction of the rain forests in the context of the expanding needs of small farmers in key areas of Latin America is slowly coming to the consciousness of most environmentalists. Today, large corporations are intensifying their efforts to further exploit the labor and natural resources of the bountiful Americas. In their wake, greater environmental dangers are facing communities throughout the Americas. This is especially true along the 2000-mile border between Mexico and the United States, where maquiladoras have proliferated since the signing in 1994 of NAFTA, the “Magna Carta” of corporations today.

While the imposition of one set of values on others through the market economy is well documented, borders have never been able to stop the flow of humanity as people seek ways to survive. As Sassen (2000) observes in her timely analysis of immigration in Europe, immigrants arenot invaders; they are in actuality part of the larger capitalist economic system of production that knows no borders. This profound insight especially applies to the reality emerging in the global economyrepresented by NAFTA. Indeed, the border between Mexico and the United States is crisscrossed by the paths of multitudes of people, not just from Mexico but from throughout Latin America, who are simply respondingto the broader patterns of economic and social development in the twentieth- and now twenty-first-century Americas. In this historical context, the border has served to intensify a particularly ugly xenophobia in the United States that knows no bounds – not even the right to life. Following the example of Arizona’s SB 1070, which is clearly aimed at a Brown population and not a White population, this xenophobia has reached a high pitch level. At least 12 states have

followed suit and as Gordon and Raja (2012) report in the journal MotherJones, there have been 164 anti-immigration laws passed in state legislatures (Archibald, 2010).

As a consequence, social justice continues to be an illusive goal and polemical flashpoint in discussions about the presence of the United States in the rest of the Americas. In this new expansive context, social, economic and environmental problems can no longer be addressed by only one nation. Borders can no longer isolate any one nation from another. Much more to the point, borders can no longer be used to definerights and privileges in an economic system that approaches workers as commodities, as cost, and not as participants in that system. This then raises the question of rights within a market economy where the pursuit of private self-interest tends to trump the question of rights.

and strategies are historically tied to Mexico and its relationship to its many indigenousgroups, the applicability of their struggle is not only an inspiration but also a format, a template as our computer age youth would say, for the struggles of the many communities across the Americas, including those in the United States.



5

UNCORRECTED PROOF Rosales

The Dialectics of Rights Within a Market Economy

Marshall (1992), in his classic lecture on citizenship in Post-World WarII Great Britain, Social Class and Citizenship, meticulously outlines the historically slow, back-and-forth broadening of the foundation of a citizenship born in the days of aristocratic privilege. His lecture provides an excellent conceptual framework from which to understand the limits and the potential of a citizenship whose foundation rests on the rights of property and the right to pursue that right in the market. Thethree stages of development outlined by Marshall are civil/legal rights,political rights and social rights. Historically, the civil/legal rightswere established to protect the individual’s right to pursue his or her self-interest – to protect property – the beginning of the Capitalist Market Economy. It is the celebration in legal terms of the Lockean “isolated, aggressive, possessive, acquisitive, competitive, individual,” which was brought over and established in the Americas by

English colonists (McPherson, 2011). Political rights, which did not materialize universally in England until the beginning of the twentieth century in the form of voting and participatory rights, were partly established rather early in the United States and maintained in various forms, including unions and political parties. A major part of the storyof the United States in the last 225 years concerns political struggle in the streets and in communities, to establish these rights through political institutions and their processes. While still to this day manyin the broader Americas do not have access to these citizenship rights in their own nation – especially indigenous peoples – it can be safely argued that today these basic rights are not under debate and are accepted as the standard in any democratic society. Further, the struggle for democratic rights and sovereignty has been, from the days of Simon Bolivar to now, the story throughout the Americas.

However, social class, as in twentieth-century England, especially post World War II, has ultimately provided the boundary to the extension of this franchise of citizenship for the individual because of the inherentmaterial inequality to be found in a competitive market economy. The explicit equality in citizenship in the political and legal arenas is ultimately contained in the irresolvable unequal distribution of wealth in a competitive market economy. This unequal distribution is further complicated by the dialectics of race, class and gender. That is, unequal access to wealth has historically been maintained beyond class and includes the areas of race and gender. The dilemma then is expressedthrough the protection of the privileges of a propertied class in the very same citizenship grants of political and legal rights to all members of society. In a society where citizenship and all its privileges rest on the presumption of property as the driving force of its market economy, property becomes the basis of those rights. This dilemma of differential access to citizenship rights is further compounded in the context of a border politics that is used to protect economic, social and legal privilege from American nation to American nation, even as exchange across borders is liberalized and celebrated asin the NAFTA treaty.

6


UNCORRECTED PROOF In a classic dialectical fashion, the governing institutions, that is municipalities, unions, political parties, that extend to the local

level have provided the working class and the poor the means by which togovern themselves (Sassen, 2003).

The venue by which communities can re-negotiate the Lockean concept of individual rights in the context of our modern pervasive capitalist market resides in an expanded definition of citizenship on the ground. That is to say, in the face of a capitalist explosion across the globe, the most practical approach to this phenomenon is local and is addressing workers’ and communities’ rights and needs within capitalist political democracies.

As members of a social contract that has expanded to include all of the Americas in its protection of the economic individual, that is, investment and exploitation of markets, resources and workers, the venueby which communities can empower themselves is exactly through the parallel expansion of the concept of Citizenship to fit the expanding Lockean Social Contract already in place for capital.

I use the Lockean Social Contract to theoretically capture the implications of an economy that goes beyond the borders that nation-states originally established to develop their particular economies. Thereality is much more complex than imposing an Anglo-Saxon model of society on a hemisphere where the various nation-states reflect a vastlydifferent history with overlapping different cultures, and with deep indigenous roots that have refused to assimilate a worldview that is notin their human or societal interest. However, as the Americas interact intimately in social, economic and political terms, the basic premise for a universal basis for rights is not attained by imposing an Anglo-Saxon value but rather by establishing a standard for interaction that provides justice to both sides, the South and the North. This view becomes critical when we look at how immigration policy has been based on an abstract concept of immigrants and their communities as commodities.

The Commodity Basis of Immigration as a Policy

The common basis throughout the twentieth century in the various US policy approaches to borders and immigration has not been to stop immigration but to fit expendable workers into the needs of industry. Moreover, the focus of these policies has centered on the utility of theimmigrant. Those who bring a skill are more easily fitted into the needsof production. Those who provide the manual labor in the fields, the packing plants, the restaurants and construction generally do not fit into the skill categories that the US prizes, such as technology, medicine, science and so on. These immigrants are generally those who come seeking a way out of the dire straits they find themselves in theirsending countries, that is Mexico, Central America and South America.




The difference between these two types of immigrants is that the skilledimmigrants are invited and are prized, while those who come with their hands and their backs as tools are drawn by an industry that requires their manual labor on a day-by-day basis. That is to say, they require cheap labor. One can argue that all the immigrants, highly skilled workers and those that bring their hands and their backs to work, are ultimately treated as commodities, as things, as cogs in the big global economy. However, those with skills can negotiate their expendability away, while those not in the categories that are considered prized skills do not have any basis to negotiate except through a collective venue.

Further, the paradigm that has been and is used to address immigration has not worsened in itself, rather the problems on both sides of the issue, the immigrants and the resident communities, have escalated as our communities are inundated by a global market economy in the twenty-first century that has required uncategorized labor beyond the point of control. Compounding this problem of less control, the needs of those communities coming to work have intensified. No longer can immigration policy assume that the flow of workers can be controlled. No longer can the flood of immigration be contained, controlled and used through a policy that uses these communities as commodities without human rights consequences.

The consequences can be horrific, as in the November of 2012 incident where a Texas Department Safety helicopter chased a fleeing vehicle carrying immigrants, shot at the vehicle and killed two immigrants. The officers’ excuse was that they mistakenly thought the vehicle of immigrants was carrying drug contraband. The consequence then is that today we face a reality that is a conflicted terrain where immigrants are treated as commodities while those same immigrants and their communities defy this approach through their oppositional action.

A Crisis in Governance

In the United States, since 9/11/2001, the context has drastically changed. We have experienced an intensification of the xenophobic anti-

immigrant, anti- Mexican rhetoric not just along the border but also across the United States. The US Congress has increased its militarization of the border and authorized the construction of a wall along most of the 2000-mile border while Homeland Security through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement has intensified its raids on workplaces and even homes. Further, along with Arizona’s draconian SB 1070 law as well as its law against ethnic studies in its schools, the 10-year period from 2000 to 2010 can be characterized as one of the mostxenophobic periods in the United States competing with the especially intolerant 1930s and the 1950s.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis that the United States faces has created further complications. It has intensified the xenophobia not only along the border but

8


UNCORRECTED PROOF also in unlikely areas such as Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, indeed, across the states where one can findthe Latino diaspora. Further, the lack of action on the part of Congresshas also put pressure on states to act, in many cases, in ill-advised ways. Finally, the federal government’s 287G program of funding local governments to act on immigration in their areas, that is to say, to do the job of enforcement, has added to the high- pitch politics around immigration. Surprisingly, in the closing hours of the short but intenselegislative session of 2011, the Texas Legislature failed to pass a “Sanctuary” bill that aimed to force local enforcement agencies to ask for documentation of anyone that they stop. By December of 2012 the 287Gprogram was phased out (Gomez, 2012).

These high-pitched politics have led to a political context that has become chaotic and unpredictable. While the Conservatives at the state level have tried to follow the Arizona lead, some have thought twice about their actions. In California, most of the rabid anti-immigrant politicians began to temper their rhetoric against immigrants. As a result, even conservative leaders in California have distanced themselves from the radical xenophobic politics. However, in Texas, where the Tea Party representatives have gained a significant footing inthe legislature, the political debate has died but not because of any tempering influence but because the Republicans have an ultra

conservative governor and a super majority in both the houses, which have moved to pass some of the most conservative legislation that Texas has seen since the Cold War of the 1950s. Interestingly enough, the Republican Governor Rick Perry, who was elected to a fourth term and at one point actually went to Mexico to take a Spanish-language course and spoke out publicly on the idea of open borders, is now the leader in promoting some of the most restrictive and anti-immigrant legislation that Texas has ever seen.

It is during change, instability or chaos that institutions, public and private, begin to adjust in anticipation of protecting their own interest. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) is actively seeking to intervene on behalf of immigrants in the national policy arena, when traditionally the AFL-CIO had taken an anti-immigrant stance because of its historical characterization of immigrants as anti-union at worst and at best simplyscabs.

Civil rights organizations, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens, because of their grassroots membership have jumped into the marches and demonstrations on behalf of immigrant rights, this even at the risk of losing funding for some of their established programs. The National Council of La Raza, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and other organizations have joined the politics demanding comprehensive immigration reform that addresses the rights of immigrants. Further complicating the picture, the intensification of therhetoric and aggressive legal attacks on immigrants has pushed many overto the side of justice rather than enforcement, with at least




26 cities passing resolutions against the draconian Arizona Anti-Immigrant Law alongside the mobilization of entire communities in support of immigrants and their rights. At least 100,000 activists converged on Phoenix, AZ over the 2010 Memorial Weekend to protest SB 1070 in Arizona with a commitment from many of the activist organizations to mobilize a summer campaign for the rights of immigrants.

Further, Bacon (2011) documents the collaborative and collateral activities between US unions, including the AFL-CIO, and Mexican workers/unions. His analysis in the series of articles that he presentedon Americas Program focused on political strategies that have advanced aprogressive politics along the border. While his analysis is empirical and advances a call to create solidarity among workers from both sides of the border, we can see that the basic premise is that the organized politics on both sides ultimately trumps a citizenship that is based on an individualistic legalistic membership-only status.

One more significant outcome of these politics is that while most of thepoliticians mentioned here are neo-liberal in orientation, they are actually taking into account the inevitable historical path that the United States has had to take in its relationship to Mexico and the restof Latin America. This is a path that can no longer be approached in theunilateral manner that US political and corporate leaders have traditionally conducted business. A combination of factors, including a failing economy, a slide in prestige in Latin America, and a drug war along the border with Mexico, has thus created a crisis in governance. One very clear outcome of this chaos is the use of the border in a manner that is similar to how Jim Crow and its institutions maintained their effort to control the African- American community.

The Border as the New “Jim Crow”

The US-Mexico border is the longest border in the world between an industrial center and a “developing” country. Since the year 2000, thousands of immigrants from Mexico and other states in Latin America have lost their lives crossing the 2000-mile-long border between Mexico and the United States. Indeed, the number of deaths reached 5000 in 2010. Many of these deaths have occurred because of negligent means of illegal transportation across the border provided by smugglers. Some have died horrible deaths brought about by dehydration in the arid deserts of the Southwest United States. As pointed out earlier, last October the Texas Department of Safety in their effort to stop drug contraband shot at a fleeing vehicle from the air. It turns out that thevehicle was loaded with immigrants being smuggled across the border instead of contraband. Two immigrants were killed in that incident (Davies, 2012). Those who have managed to cross for jobs in constructionand the service industry are critical to these

10


UNCORRECTED PROOF Q2

industries from a labor perspective. And yet they are treated as criminals because they cross a border to work.

The collusion of business interests funneled through the lobbying corps in state legislatures provides a view of how this approach to immigration is in actuality more of a labor control mechanism even in the midst of all the hysterical xenophobic talk about security and the law. A politics aimed at this apparent problem has created draconian policies that are connected directly and indirectly to the need of business to decrease its overall cost of production. The point, however,that we cannot overlook is that race, not unlike was the case with Jim Crow, is very much a part of the various efforts to bring this labor under control. That this is occurring at the US-Mexico border and not atthe US-Canada border is significant. Indeed, the distinctive treatment at the two borders reflects the underlying racial concerns in immigration policy. In this context, that dividing line, the border, andits enforcement, now serves as a brutal ordering principle of labor along racial lines. If stripped of this racial covering, it could be argued that many working-class communities, including White working-class communities, would at the very least be suspicious of, if not politically against, these immigrant policies. A la Jim Crow this biasedimmigration policy defines who belongs and who does not. So close and yet so far away.

But it is not a matter of a border politics going berserk. Rather the issue is the historical struggle to subordinate entire Mexicano communities to the labor needs of industry as was done in Texas (Montejano, 1987). It has been a policy goal for the entire twentieth century. Zamora (2000) described the turn of the century, from 1900 to 1920, as a period where the anti-Mexican environment was at a hystericallevel. Montejano documents the 1920s and 1930s as an era when terror reigned on Mexicano communities across the Southwest. During and after World War II, the Bracero Program (established in 1942) and “Operation Wetback” (established in 1954) established the framework by which Congress would strive to deal with immigration into the twenty-first century. Operation Wetback proved to be the last major drive to cleanse the Southwest American economy of Mexican immigrants. The Bracero Program, on the other hand, was a policy aimed at the control of immigration while at the same time addressing the needs of major agribusiness interests. After 1964 the debate over immigration in terms

of enforcement began. The 1980s immigration policy became more confusingas it strived to control immigration, address the needs of industry, andaddress the question of legalization and citizenship. Thus, the twentieth-century efforts to deal with immigration policy focused on those immigrants produced by the crossing of the US-Mexican border. Further, in the broader context, the xenophobia of communities across the nation has been aimed mostly at immigrants of color; it impacts all immigrants from the Caribbean as well as Central and South America and indeed extends to African and Middle East immigrants. However, the focusof this essay is on the Latinos because of the proximity of job to community, but of course, with a border in between.




The labor control paradigm to immigration has been consistently followedfor most of the history of US-Mexico border relations in the twentieth century:

When the gap between the stated purpose of law and its outcomes persist across time and space, as it does in the case of immigration, we can reason- ably infer that something systemic, or structurally patterned, is going on. As we see from Inside The State, the structural contradictions circumscribing and buffeting immigration policies in capitalist democracies persist, even while the historical context may change and with it the specifics of the pattern. The consequence of suchcontradictions is not only frustration with the “immigration problem.” The human toll is enormous, with thousands of border-crossing deaths every year, appalling living and working conditions for immigrants, and retaliation and civil rights violations by law enforcement and localresidents.

(Calavita, 2010)

But even in these earlier periods of the twentieth century and throughout the rest of the century, labor control was evasive. Especially when entire families, sometimes communities, provided supportfor each other in the barrios of the Southwest and into the migrant steams stretching into the Midwest, as far as Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and so on. Tragically, what underscores the failure of

the efforts to control labor are the “repatriation movement” in the 1930s and the “Operation Wetback” in 1954 (Dillin, 2006; Koch, 2006). What is qualitatively and quantitatively different today is that in the midst of an incredible “diaspora” of immigrants and their families from “below” the border into all parts of the United States, immigrants have now moved beyond the control that the border represents. Moreover, the issue of “illegal aliens” has moved to the center of our public attention span. Nearly every state in the union has now experienced the “illegal alien” in significant enough numbers to bring about social, cultural and economic conflict in those receiving communities, causing astir in state legislatures across the nation. The labor control mechanism has exploded into a racially driven politics not only along border states but into the Midwestern states and even into the New England states. Albeit, according to Mendoza (2012a,b, from community tocommunity across the nation, the experience has been like a mosaic, fromxenophobia to embracing the new workers.

The US-Mexico border is the historical dividing line between an English-speaking world and a Spanish-speaking world. On the US side, race was efficiently separated, compartmentalized and maintained through Jim Crowuntil very recent times, and on the Spanish-speaking world that is stilllargely populated by indigenous communities race was not as efficiently compartmentalized. In Mexico alone there are a multitude of distinct indigenous languages that are still very much alive (Schmal, 2010). Batalla (1996) presents a picture of Mexico where the conflict is still boiling between the European colonizers and

12


UNCORRECTED PROOF their descendants and the indigenous peoples. Further complicating the picture, beginning in Mexico, where the African heritage is visibly intertwined with existing indigenous populations in many sectors of Mexico, a complex historical picture of Mexicanidad is visible. Hence, the labor crossing the border is of a racial grouping that is Indian, Mexican, African or all mixed. For the xenophobic fears of White US citizens the distinctions do not matter, rather the appearance of these immigrants depicts alien (Gates, 2011).

The Implications of the Equal Protection Clause of the FourteenthAmendment

The concern in this essay, then, is not simply policy, which indeed is very important. Rather, the argument is that policy cannot work nor can it change until we investigate the basis by which we address the policy measures that do not recognize these workers who are here to work as persons, deserving the guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution not to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” (US Constitution, Section 1, Fourteenth Amendment).

Thus, the social conflict brought about by the presence of immigrants, legal or not, who live in our communities, work in our economy, attend our schools, and today have the audacity to demand rights, raises very important questions about the nature and the definition of citizenship in the United States as implied in the US Constitution.

Moreover, the concern is not how we process immigrants, which is obviously critically important in human rights matters, but rather the rights and privileges that immigrants as resident-workers are due based on the most famous phrase of the Fourteenth Amendment quoted above. One can argue that without stating it, the equal protection clause implies acitizenship that is based on basic human rights that include protection as residents as provided by the Bill of Rights as well as those basic rights of workers to the wages and benefits that they are entitled to through the production coming from their own hands and backs.

Thus, can citizenship based on a legal code that comes from an age before the “global village,” as McLuhan (1967) coined our brave new world, continue to work? The argument in this essay then is that the exclusive nineteenth-century citizenship that is used to inform and shape our immigration policies has led and continues to lead to an irrational xenophobia against a whole class of people who are simply drawn to where the work is to be found.

In the end, the US-Mexican border represents the dividing line between an impoverished South that produces the resources and the labor for a wealthy North that requires both. As stated above, it serves as the ordering principle of labor. It defines who belongs and who does not. Asthe leading capitalist investor



UNCORRECTED PROOF

Rosales

in this hemisphere, the United States cannot but be at the center of anyeffort to address the expanding social contract that is represented by the emerging global economy.

The Three Faces of Citizenship

As discussed above, citizenship as a concept is very complex. On the onehand, it carries with it a notion of membership that implies certain rights and privileges within a nation-state. In the twentieth century ithas served the interests of the capitalist corporate world that is constantly seeking cheaper labor by defining who has these rights and who does not. This narrower definition, bolstered by the needs of countries like Mexico for investment, has created a virtual wall separating millions of workers from what should be, simply stated, theirright to the product of their labor.

Thus, in direct conflict with this notion of membership is the notion ofcitizenship as participation. Membership and its privileges are bound upin the right to property, that is, the right to work and the benefits ofthat work as property rights. Indeed, it is very Lockean in the universal right to property found in his theory of labor. Going beyond simply membership, participation is a broader notion of rights and how those rights are defined. While not going beyond the rules of the marketeconomy, it bends and expands those rules. Stated in a more poetic fashion, it brings the social contract to its “illogical” conclusion. Itis the basis for the formulation on the ground of universal rights for workers everywhere in the Americas. It takes citizenship from its individualistic pedestal to a citizenship that recognizes the community,whether that be workers or residents, and their rights.

As pointed out earlier, the Lockean social contract is not meant to be amodel to fit the reality of a hemisphere. Rather, it is the theoretical explanation of how the expansion of the market can go beyond imperialism. But, more importantly, the argument based on this theory isnot about policy, that is neo-liberalism, nor about cultural homogeneitynor about imposing a rigid definition of public and private spaces, and most especially it is not about defining the role of property from an Anglo-Saxon individualistic framework. The theory is simply used to provide the historical foundation for the democratization of a process that is becoming unmanageable under the conditions that have been created by an emerging global economy.

Hence, a third aspect that arises dialectically in the context of the emerging global economy is the notion of historical and social consciousness. Arising from each nation-state is an experience that is a

combination of immigrant status and indigenous roots, not to speak of the constant interaction of these experiences across borders. While not popularly addressed or even recognized, this notion can

14


UNCORRECTED PROOF be either regressive or progressive. Its regressive tendencies appear asxenophobia and racism, and in general as a tool by which to divide the working-class consciousness along borders as well as through the creation and maintenance of hierarchies of privilege within the working class and its various communities.

Its progressive tendencies, however, have not gotten much attention. Onecan see how the Chicana/o community, as citizens and as immigrants, has

sponta- neously rebelled, gone on strike and picketed throughout history

from the nineteenth century to the present.

3

As it relates to the

hemisphere, this aspect of citizenship, then, is brought about through a political process that melds participation and membership. It is thisaspect that can connect the particular needs and problems of workers and communities to the larger hemispheric picture. This is not simply an idealistic model of citizenship, but rather, a materialist paradigm where the workers and communities come face to face with other workers and their communities in their demands for basic citizenship rights. It is this last notion that goes beyond membership and still maintains the notion of citizenship. That is to say, it is no longer in the classical sense of citizenship as a legal individualistic concept of membership and entitlement. Nor is it defined from the Lockean model except to describe the implications of the expanding global economy. Rather, it expands those definitions to inco

Stated simply, then, citizenship is the most obvious political starting point by which communities can connect in a broader, more trans-nationalorganizational manner and still maintain their community focus. It is the most universal organizational point where US unions can begin a dialogue, one that obviously is internal in two manners. What is needed is an internal organizational dialogue on analysis and organizing strategies pertinent to increasing their own base as well as gaining leverage in their economic struggle against the various corporate strategies to increase their profits off the backs of workers. Unions would be the most logical organizational site to begin a national dialogue that would aim at lifting the national political language to one that aims to establish citizenship rights based on participation in production and community and not simply on membership.

Second, the AFL-CIO has a national committee addressing the question of immigration and its significance to labor organizing and consequently tothe policy positions that labor should take and lobby for in Congress. While limited to its own internal needs of organizing a labor force thatis changing in composition within a national strategy, it nevertheless is beginning to go beyond the more myopic zero-sum approach to workers’ rights that has been pushed by xenophobic nationalist and narrow economic interests that have existed within and influenced established union politics. Unions have an opportunity to create the bridge that is needed to bring together the various groups, especially in the Latino community in the United States, that have been addressing the immigrant question throughout the last century and currently.

3 Gramsci (1996) conceptualized subaltern groups as communities that have their own view of reality and society outside that of the dominant hegemonic group and thus can act on their own interest. See Zamora (2000) for a discussion of the mutualista societies that maintained their history, culture and language, enabling them to struggle for their own worldview and interest.



15


This dialogue would ideally merge the requirements of membership to participation. Thus, a worker would gain inclusion in the guarantee of rights based on her or his participation in the workforce and not on a pre-determined membership that is represented by the present exclusive and static notions of citizenship. Thus, workers are simply that, workers. They are not invading immigrants. They are not criminals. More importantly, workers would then be afforded all of their rights as workers. This approach would emphasize the rights of a person, persons and family in that instant, not in terms of some legal determination based on membership and all its legal intricacies. The paradigm of a trans-border worker citizenship is in this moment then the foundation ofa human rights regime that gives a person and a family claims, through their production, to their work and residency.

This dialogue would have to recognize and involve communities and grassroots efforts that are the life and soul of most poor and working-class people who are not part of the union politics today, or if they are involved, remain fragmented from the larger union picture. There areover 20 states in the United Sates that have “Right to Work” laws that inhibit at best, and stop at worst, union organizing. In most of these states, public employees, for example, have no collective bargaining rights at all. As a consequence, many “associations” have arisen to meetthat need. At best, the traditional unions ignore them and at worst theyare seen as renegades and are still not provided any support. Unions in the maquiladora system in Mexico are for the most part company unions orare “renegade” independents. In either case this is more than likely reproduced throughout Latin America, where corporate interest is dominant.

The Basis of an “Americas” Citizenship

As US unions act in their economic interest, they have been gradually pushed to a more trans-national position in their demand for worker rights. Their continuing efforts to address US national immigration policy coupled with the political position on the rights of immigrants are important aspects of the expanding notion of Locke’s social contractas it applies to the Americas. However, the re-definition of citizenship

must come from below. Wapner (1995), for example, in the context of his study of Transnational Environmental Activist Groups (TEAGs), argues that they represent “that slice of collective life which exists above the individual and below the state yet across national boundaries.” And also, as Sassen states, “Citizenship practices have to do with the production of presence.” It is where a citizenship takes place that ultimately cannot be ignored (Sassen, 2003).

To put it in a seemingly absurd manner, an immigrant worker outside of his/her community is, in terms of social or political power, an abstractquantitative

16


UNCORRECTED PROOF Q7

figure. Hence, communities and their various spontaneous responses to the various issues that face them have to be part of that formulation. This includes independent unions, community organizations, environmentalorganizations, as well as social justice organizations addressing immigrant and maquiladora issues. Whatever the future holds in the twenty-first century, citizenship as a slogan is not enough. Nor is citizenship as an economic category broad enough. And exclusive membership ultimately creates stateless people with no recourse to basicrights (Cotter, 2005). The human condition and its needs is still the starting point for a sustainable politics based on inclusion, an inclusion that goes beyond political borders in a market economy that knows no borders except those which brought about a society and its priorities.

Stated in more practical historical terms, what we have just discussed is happening along the border as well as across the United States. What we have addressed here is one side of praxis – theory. It is not a program but an understanding of where we as a community must direct ourselves. Perhaps, just perhaps, it is a peek at what we are constructing in our politics.

About the Author

Rodolfo Rosales received his PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in Political Science. He recently retired as Associate Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). He is the author of The Illusion of Inclusion: The Untold Political Story of San Antonio, 1951 to 1991 (University of Texas Press, 2000), an analysis of the Chicano community’s struggle for political inclusion in San Antonio’s governing institution. He is also co-editor with Sharon A. Navarro, UTSA, of The Roots of Latino Urban Agency, a volume on the politics of Latinos in five major US cities (The University of North Texas Press, forthcoming fall of 2013). Rosales is writing “The Politics of Albert Pena, Jr: A Man and His Community,” a biography of a Chicano politician/activist in Post-WWII San Antonio (E-mail: [email protected]).

References

Archibald, R.C. 2010. Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration. New York Times 23 April.

Bacon, D. 2011. Growing Ties between Mexican and U.S. Labor. Americas Program, http:// csis.org/program/americas-program, accessed 14 June.

Batalla, G.B. 1996. Mexico Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization, trans. P.A. Dennis Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Calavita, K. 2010. Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and I.N.S. New Orleans, LA: Quid Pro Books.




Cotter, B.L. 2005. Hannah Arendt and the ‘Right to Have Rights’. In Hannah Arendt and International Relations: Readings across the Lines. Palgrave Macmillan history of international thought, eds. A.F. Lang and J. Williams., 95–111. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Davies, D.M. 2012. Texas DPS Helicopter Shooting Under Investigation. KPBS News 2 November, kpbs.org/news/2012/nov/02/texas-dps-helicopter-shooting-under-investigation/, accessed 2 November.

Dillin, J. 2006. How Eisenhower Solved Illegal Border Crossings from Mexico. TheChristian Science Monitor 6 July.

Gates, H.L. 2011. Black in Latin America. New York: New York University Press.

Gomez, A. 2012. Immigration Enforcement Program to be Shut Down. US Today 17 April.

Gordon, I. and T. Raja. 2012. 164 Immigration Laws Passed since 2010? Mother Jones March/April.

Gramsci, A. 1996. Prison Notebooks: Volume II, ed. J. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press.

Harvey, D. 1987. The Condition of Post-Modernity. The London Free Press.Jones-Correa, M. 1998. Between Two Nations: The Political Predicament of Latinosin New

York City. New York: Cornell University Press.

Koch, W. 2006. U.S. Urged to Apologize for 1930s Deportations. USA Today April.

Locke, J. 1980. Second Treatise of Government, 26. Cambridge, MA: Hacket Publishing.

MacPherson, C.B. 2011. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. New York: Oxford University Press.

Marshall, T.H. and T. Bottomore. 1992. Social Class and Citizenship. London: Pluto Press.

McLuhan, M. and Q. Fiore. 1967. The Medium is the Massage. Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press.

Mendoza, L. 2012a. Voices across Our America: Conversations on the Front Lines and Fronteras of Latinoization in the U.S. Texas: University of Texas Press.

Mendoza, L. 2012b. A Journey around Our America: A Memoir on Cycling, Immigration, and the Latinoization of the U.S. Texas: University of Texas Press.

Montejano, D. 1987. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836 to 1986. Texas: University of Texas Press.

Rosales, R. 2010. Community as the Materialistic Basis of Citizenship: A Re-Conceptualiza- tion of Citizenship. Unpublished essay.

Sassen, S. 2000. Guests and Aliens. New York: The New Press.Sassen, S. 2003. Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship. In Handbook of

Citizenship Studies, eds. E.F. Iin and B.S. Turner.. New York: Sage.Sassen, S. 2008. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Schmal, J. 2010. Indigenous Languages in Mexico: Mexico Culture & Arts. Mexconnect, http://www.mexconnect.com/articles/3689-indigenous-languages-in-mexico, accessed 17 September.

U.S. Constitution. Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1.Wapner, P. 1995. Politics beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civic

Politics. World Politics 47(3): 311–340.Zamora, E. 2000. The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas. Texas: Texas A&M

University Press.

Q3 Q4

Q5

Q6

18


Trans-border worker citizens: Hemispheric labor and the many faces of citizenship

Documents