August 8, 2000

During the last several months there has been a shocking increase in repression and violence against Mexican and Central American immigrants entering the United States. There has been a steady rise in the number of deaths and murders, as well as an increase in the incidents of torture and physical abuse of immigrants. The United States government is largely responsible for these violations of human rights, though more recently vigilantes and terrorists have joined in the attack on immigrants. The Mexican government must also share some responsibility because of its economic and social policies that have contributed to desperate migration.

Policies of Militarization and Criminalization

The U.S. government has tended to deal with the migration issue--largely an economic issue--through police and military methods that are both inappropriate and ineffective. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the U.S. Border Patrol continue the policy of militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border through programs such as Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, Operation Hold the Line in El Paso, Operation Rio Grande in McAllen, and Operation Safeguard in Tucson. The Border Patrol has not only literally built an "Iron Curtain" in the form of a steel wall between Mexico and the U.S., but it also deploys a fleet of automobiles, boats and helicopters, infra-red night vision equipment and sophisticated electronic sensors in an attempt to control migrants at certain points along the border. Political opportunism appealing to fear and racism has driven these laws, regulations and practices. The main purpose of this policy is to drive Mexican migrants out of middle class urban and suburban areas. Migrants--men and women, the elderly and infants--crossing the border in search of jobs are driven like rats in some sadistic laboratory into the most dangerous territory. In the scorching sun or the freezing mountains they have literally died by the hundreds since 1994 (approximately 1,500 as of this writing).

INS and Border Patrol agents have adopted policies and procedures that threaten the lives, the well-being, the civil rights and human rights of immigrants both legal and undocumented and also of citizens and legal residents. Ironically, these inhumane policies and often-violent procedures have had virtually no impact on the number of immigrants crossing into the United States each year. Amnesty International has investigated Operation Gatekeeper and the other related INS programs and condemned the United States for violating international human rights standards for migrants. In February, 1999 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed an international human rights complaint in Washington with the Organization of American States (OAS) over the continuing deaths. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the social action arm of the Friends (Quakers), has repeatedly reported violations of civil rights and human rights by Border Patrol agents and INS officials. The AFSC informal reports show an alarming increase in police abuse of migrants in the U.S.-Mexico border area (the reports will appear in the forthcoming annual report).

In addition, in the last few months U.S. vigilante groups have shot at and beaten immigrants, as well as detaining and holding them on their property. Several immigrants have been murdered in suspicious circumstances, leading to the conjecture that vigilante groups and hate groups may have been involved in their torture and assassination. Ranchers in Arizona and young hoodlums in California have attacked and beaten immigrants in violation of their civil rights. The rise in these incidents is directly attributable to the INS and Border Patrol policy that has contributed to anti-immigrant sentiment and has driven the migrants into isolated areas where they are subject to attack.

Cultural institutions in the United States--schools and religious groups, magazines and newspapers, radio and television--often contribute to racial stereotypes and antagonisms. So too do politicians and elected government officials. In particular they often portray Mexico as the dangerous netherworld and Mexicans as enemies of the United States. Mexico is characterized as the source of drugs, radical guerilla groups, and unwanted interlopers, not as the source of a good part of thelabor force that produces our country's food, construction, and industrial wealth, and not as a sister country that makes a unique contribution to our common but complex North American culture. Too often the people of the United States adopt belligerent attitudes towards Mexican and other Latin American immigrants, as well as toward Asians and Africans that contribute to the general atmosphere of hostility and aggression. These cultural attitudes lead directly to the violent attacks on immigrants. Just as we call upon the U.S. government to end its militarization of the border and criminalization of migration, so too we call upon educational institutions, religious groups, and the media to stop stigmatizing immigrants. The culture of hostility leads directly to the acts of aggression. We need not only a new political policy, but also a new political and social culture that embraces cultural diversity, appreciates immigrant contributions to our society, and manifests a humane attitude toward immigrants.

An Historic Movement of Peoples Driven by Economic Necessity

Mexican and Central American immigration to the United States is a secular movement of peoples, a great tide of humanity washing back and forth across the border driven by wars and revolutions, by economic opportunity and sometimes by economic, political and military catastrophe. War, revolution, and depression have been among the main motors of migration. In modern times economic motives have been the dominant factor in most Mexican and Central American migration. American economic developments have been the principal motor driving Mexican migration. The American economy functions as a kind of economic pump, pulling in and pushing out workers according to the economic rhythm of the United States. While individuals make decisions to migrate, they do so within an international economic context that provides both the push out of their homeland and the pull into a foreign country. Migration thus represents an economic, social and political problem--not primarily a police issue and certainly not a military matter.

The U.S. first acquired a Mexican population through the U.S. aggression against Mexico between 1836 and 1854. The U.S. supported the secession of Texas in 1836, fought the war against Mexico in 1847, and finally took a final piece of territory through the Gadsden Purchase of 1854. Through this process hundreds of thousands of Native American and Mexicans became U.S. citizens, and as some have said, "We didn't cross the line, the line crossed us." War brought the first Mexicans into our country, involuntary captives of a more powerful state.

The first significant Mexican immigration to the United States began during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz when liberal economic policies drove peasants from their traditional lands. The new Mexican railroads and the new western lines of U.S. railroads made it possible for migrants to move from the population centers in Central Mexico to work on the mines and railroads in the American Far West.

The immigration increased during the violent years Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) when hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, some scholars estimate one million, crossed the border into the United States. That migration coincided with the U.S. entry into World War I (1916-1918), when there was a tremendous expansion of the economy and a lack of manpower because of the draft. Mexicans found work in mining, railroad track maintenance, construction, and agriculture and played a key role in the development of the industrial and agricultural economy of the Far West. With the end of the Mexican Revolution and of World War I, many Mexicans returned home, though some stayed on and they or their children became U.S. citizens. Mexican immigrant laborers again came to work in the 1920s in those same industries and contributed to the boom of the 1920s.

With the stock market crash of 1929 and the beginning of the decade of the Great Depression (1929-1939) many businesses failed and others laid off workers or cut hours. Some companies laid-off Mexican workers first as a matter of seniority or racial policy. Without jobs many Mexicans returned to their homeland. In various states and cities government officials rounded up Mexicans--undocumented migrants, legal residents and sometimes citizens--and put them on trucks or railroad cars and shipped them back to the border. These round-ups of migrants often had the character of mass deportations and resulted in the separation of families.

Beginning around 1940 the U.S. economy began to expand as it provided lend lease arms to the Allies in Europe, and in December 1941 the U.S. entered World War II on two fronts. With millions of men going off to the military services, Mexican workers were once again welcomed across the border and into the United States where they worked not only in mining, railroads, construction and agriculture as before, but now too in manufacturing and services industries. The U.S. and Mexican government signed a bilateral agreement between the two governments which promised workers housing, good salaries, and other things that were not fulfilled.

Following the end of World War II, the U.S. agriculture industry found that it had become dependent upon the reliable, skilled, hardworking and low-wage Mexican workers to plant, tend and harvest. Beginning in 1942 the federal executive created the Bracero Program that insured the United States a steady supply of agricultural labor without the right to organize labor unions or negotiate contracts. In 1951 Congress passed a law creating a permanent Bracero program. The Bracero Programs continued until 1964, at which point the program ended and U.S. agriculture became dependent upon mostly undocumented migrant workers. Throughout the 1960s and 70s hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from Mexico crossed the border to work in the United States in agriculture and tens of thousands more worked in construction, manufacturing and services throughout the Far West, the Southwest, and the Mid West of the United States.

During the 1980s political and economic crises led to greater Mexican and Central American immigration. In Mexico, the fall in oil prices that led to the economic crisis of 1980 and the devaluation of 1982 created pressures that brought hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Mexican countryside to the United States. At the same time, overt and covert U.S. wars in Central America against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and against guerrilla groups in El Salvador and Guatemala created hundreds of thousands of political and economic refugees who also became part of the wave of Latin migrants workers seeking employment and asylum in the United States.

Finally, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a common market negotiated by Canada, Mexico and the United States, took effect in 1994. NAFTA also contributed to the Mexican migration to the United States. In preparation for NAFTA the Mexican government amended Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917 to permit indigenous and peasant communities to sell communal and ejidal lands, thus promoting the privatization of formerly state-leased collective property. As a result, hundreds of thousands of peasants have left the countryside, but without hope of finding work in their own country. NAFTA led directly to the December 1994 peso devaluation, stock market crash and economic crisis that pushed hundreds of thousands more Mexicans out of their country. NAFTA has permitted U.S. transnational corporations to sell their industrial and agricultural products in Mexico, leading to the collapse of many Mexican businesses and farms, and to yet more migration.

Today, thanks to NAFTA, transnational corporations can move capital and goods and services around the North American continent with almost complete freedom. Yet while capital is mobile, labor is restricted. The U.S.-Mexico border now acts not only to divide two nations and two societies, but also to make them ever more unequal. Contrary to the propaganda and to popular belief, U.S. and Mexican wages and standards of living are diverging, not converging. Twenty years ago, U.S. workers' wages were four times those of Mexican workers, at the time NAFTA was adopted they were 10 to one, and today they are 12 to one. The border acts as a barrier to proportional development and to economic equity.

What this history suggests is that Mexican migration has been driven largely by polices of the United States and by American economic developments. American wars, economic boom times and depressions have been the driving force behind Mexican migration. Such economic and social problems require economic and social responses, not police and military measures.

Why these policies then?

The U.S. has a long history of racist immigration policies and practices back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s, through the immigration laws of the mid-1920s that excluded undesirable Eastern and Southern Europeans and Jews. The immigrations laws of the 1950s established racial quotas that promoted Northern and Western European immigration over that of people of color. While the 1965 immigration law changed those racial policies, and opened the door wide for the first time to Asians and other people of color, racism remains a factor in U.S. immigration policy. In particular the racial animus driving recent immigration laws has become quite clear. And, if there was any doubt, California's propositions have spelled out opposition to immigrants, to their race, and to their language.

Recent U.S. immigration policy has been driven by politics in the worst sense of the word. The Republican and Democratic parties and politicians competed during the 1980s and early 1990s to promulgate ever more racist and repressive immigration laws. Governor Pete Wilson's support for Proposition 187 in 1994 may have begun the most recent sequence, but it was followed by President Clinton and the Democratic Party's support for the repressive Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. The IIRIRA dramatically changed U.S. immigration policy by criminalizing economic migrants. Democrats and Republicans have supported these state propositions and Federal laws in an attempt to win votes by appealing to the most racist and reactionary sentiments in the American public. New laws and regulations also introduce greater discrimination on the basis of social class, requiring that immigrants have larger amounts of money either to migrate or to bring their families to join them.

The alternative to these racist, classist, and violent policies is an appeal to the common humanity, to the common history of all of nearly all of us as immigrants and children of immigrants, to the common birthright of our planet. Together the people of North American, and the people of the world can work together to lower the barriers and eliminate walls that separate us. Together we can work to share the economic resources of our countries so that all may find work and fulfillment in their own countries, and a warm welcome in ours should they chose to come.

We express then our shock and dismay at the U.S. government's appalling policy of driving immigrants to their death, criminalizing migration, and creating an atmosphere which has led to a rise in vigilante attacks on migrants. We join with immigrant rights organizations, labor unions, churches, human rights organizations, and many other concerned groups in the United States, Mexico, and Canada in calling for an end to the INS and Border Patrol militarization of the border, and end to the criinalization of migration, and the beginning of respect for the human, civil and labor rights of immigrants. Above all, we demand that the U.S. government tear down the wall. To this end then we propose the following policies.

1) End the Militarization of the U.S. Border

Operation Gatekeeper in California and similar programs in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas have driven migrants into the mountains and deserts where many die of exposure. We call for an end to these INS and Border Patrol policies, and for the destruction of the concrete and steel walls built along sections of the along the border. The INS and the Border Patrol should end the military-style enforcement of U.S. immigration policy.

2) End the Criminalization of illegal immigration

Most Mexican immigrants are driven by economic need and they come North to the United States in search of employment, an income to support themselves and their families. These people are not criminals, and do not pose a threat to the safety or security of the people or government of the United States. Yet Congress has passed laws that criminalize the mere act of crossing the border in search of work. We call for the repeal of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.

At the same time immigrant youth have become the targets of these unjust laws by being persecuted largely because of their status as "illegal" persons. Their criminalization has affected them to the point that immigrant youth are in danger of being deported for petty crimes or even for crimes they did not commit. This has the effect of separating and destroying families and uprooting youth from their home communities. Immigrants constitute one of the fastest growing populations inside prison walls. We call for the repeal of these laws and for an end to criminal sanctions and penalties against undocumented immigrants. We also call for the end to a deportation process that arbitrarily decides the fate of immigrants status according to their country of origin.

3) Pass a new General Amnesty

Millions of Mexicans and other immigrants live and work in the United States without documents and therefore under the constant threat of deportation or criminal prosecution. The undocumented or "illegal" status of these immigrants not only leaves them in legal limbo, but also subjects them to extortion by employers, landlords, and others who know that they fear to demand their rights as legal immigrants or citizens would. We call upon the U.S. Congress to adopt a new general amnesty for all undocumented immigrants living in this country. We also call upon Congress to adopt legislation to legalize the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants, some of them living in this country for decades, who were not included in the last general amnesty.

4) Facilitate Citizenship for Those Who Wish It

Many immigrants wish to become U.S. citizens but have been deterred by the INS citizenship process. Immigrants complain of bureaucracy, discrimination and racism in the policy and practice of the INS. While not all immigrants wish to become citizens, for those who do the INS should simplify the process and end racist and discriminatory practices. The INS, rather than military and police controls of the border, should devote its resources to making migration, residency and citizenship easier. Similarly, the U.S. State Department should simplify the process by which migrants get visas for travel to the United States. All international migration should be transparent, simple, and non-discriminatory.

Immigrants who become citizens and wish to vote should not have their path strewn with obstacles. The states should simplify process for voter registration to encourage new immigrants to exercise their right to vote. Voter registration should be a quick and easy process.

5) Respect the Civil Rights of Immigrants

Federal, state and local authorities, employers and landlords frequently violate the civil rights of immigrants both legal and undocumented. Police and other authorities frequently treat immigrants (or those whom they believe to be immigrants) in arbitrary and abusive ways they would not treat citizens. We demand that these government authorities and private parties stop their illegal and immoral abuse of the immigrants' civil rights. We call upon the U.S. Congress to adopt a new federal civil rights law to protect legal and undocumented immigrants from abuse by those authorities. We call upon the U.S. Senate to ratify the United Nations International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families and to pass legislation and regulations to implement the convention.

6) Federal, State and Local Prosecution of Vigilantes

We call upon Federal, state and local authorities to investigate, indict, bring to trial and convict the vigilantes and terrorists who have engaged in the illegal detention, beating, torture and murder of immigrants on the U.S.-Mexico border. Ranchers and other private parties have no right to detain immigrants. Neo-nazi groups (sometimes called "skinheads") and individual members of those groups who have terrorized and murder Mexican immigrants should be indicted for their attacks. We also call upon the U.S. government to end the criminalization, militarization, and general repression that has created the climate in which vigilante and terrorist activity has grown.

7) No more Bracero Programs, No indentured servitude

Bracero or guestworker programs should in general be rejected because they tend to become forms of indentured servitude. The moving force behind most such programs has been the agribusiness lobby, which wishes to increase the labor supply in order to keep down wages, and moreover prefers a group of workers locked in legal chains and marching social shackles. Many recent bracero or guest-worker programs have discriminatory features we would not countenance in our own society such as only permitting the contracting of male workers. Some proposals have suggested a wage below the national minimum wage. Others suggest exempting such workers from other standard labor rights and benefits. All immigrants to our country both legal and undocumented now enjoy, at least formally, the same labor rights as other workers, the right to organize, bargain collectively, and strike. We should not have a group of contract laborers imported into this country in conditions where they could never exercise these rights. Such a program of indentured labor importation violates our own history of the struggle against slavery and indentured servitude, and the right to organize, and makes a mockery of our ideals of being a nation of free labor.

8) End INS workplace raids. Respect labor rights of Immigrants

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) should end all community and workplace raids. Immigrants have a right to live and work in their communities without fear of constant harassment from the INS. Today, thanks to a series of creative court cases brought by immigration lawyers and court decisions resulting from those cases, immigrant workers whether legal or undocumented enjoy all the labor protections of other workers. They have the right to join or form a union of their own choosing, to participate in National Labor Relations Board representation elections, to bargain collectively and to strike. However the INS has in some instances violated those labor rights or has penalized workers after the fact. In addition the INS in some locations has partnered with local police in order to harass immigrants workers at work or in their communities. We call upon local governments to follow the example of San Francisco and refuse to cooperate with INS officials, and to forbid police from doing so. Immigrants who contribute so much to our society deserve the protection of their neighbors, their communities and their local governments against the depredations of the federal government and its inhumane policy.

9) Renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement

Since it went into effect on January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico and the United States has had a negative effect on the lives of Canadian and U.S. workers, and a disastrous effect on Mexico. Mexican workers have seen unemployment rise, the growth of insecure employment in the informal sector, a fall of real wages, the deterioration of the standard of living in the country. Today approximately 60 percent of all Mexicans live in poverty and 20 percent live in dire poverty. NAFTA has been largely responsible for the deterioration of Mexico's economic situation. NAFTA has therefore contributed to the rising immigration of undocumented Mexican workers to the United States. NAFTA has also led transnational corporations to close plants in Canada and the United States and move them to Mexico where workers usually have no independent labor union, receive low wages, and have no health and safety or environmental protections. We call upon the U.S. Congress to renegotiate NAFTA and to come up with a new treaty to protect the rights or workers and the environment in all three countries.

10) End Globalization from Above, Promote Equitable International Development

Migration to the U.S. from Mexico and Latin America, as well as from Asia, Africa and Europe has been conditioned over the last twenty years by the rise of the economic model known as neoliberal globalization. Driven by multinational corporations and the most powerful economic and military states, this elite globalization has advocated free markets and free trade. The World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank , undemocratic organizations dominated by the corporate and political elites, have pressured developing countries to privatize their industries, dergulate their economies, cut their budget for social welfare, and flexiblize labor. In reality these policies have opened these countries to investment by U.S. banks and transnational corporations which have taken advantage of their natural resources, cheap labor, and consumer markets. Neoliberal globalization has also drawn these countries deeply into debt, so that many of them spend a huge part of their GNP on debt service. The result has been increasing inequality, poverty, and around the world millions of economic migrants who can no longer earn a living in their own countries. We need a new world economic development program that would promote equitable international development. With fair economic policies we can create justice on the border and a more fair and fluid migration policy. We need to create a democratic movement for economic social justice around the world. First there must be an international agreement to cancel the debts of poor countries that can never hope to escape from their poverty while they must pay as much as a third of their GNP to service the foreign debt. International organizations and national governments should contribute to the development of less developed countries. Corporate profits should be taxed to create an international development fund to help lift underdeveloped countries out of poverty. Only with a more equitable international development can we create a world where economic poverty, political repression and war would no longer drive migration. In such a world of peace and social justice we could live with open borders.