Richard Vogel's Transient Servitude: The U.S. Guest Worker Program

Excerpts from lenghty 14 page analysis:

 Introduction

Defining moments in the history of a nation are time and again
overshadowed by the drama of war. These critical events are often
domestic policy decisions that affect the immediate state of a
country and have serious consequences for the future. Significant
examples in U.S. history include: the initial decision of the
revolutionary government to found a republic dedicated to the lofty
principles of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" but
embracing slavery, a contradiction that ultimately led to civil war;
the decision to prematurely end reconstruction efforts in the South
after the Civil War, a policy reversal which allowed the long-term
oppression and exploitation of the emancipated slaves and their
descendents; and the decision during the Second World War to
encourage the mass migration of poor African Americans from the rural
South to the industrial centers of the Midwest and Northeast to
support the war economy, a haphazard resettlement program that
resulted in the ghettoization and continued oppression of a
significant national minority.

The United States is currently at war and, simultaneously, at another
historical crossroad of domestic policy that will not only undermine
the economic life of working people, but will tax the social and
political institutions of the nation at large. The stakes of the
unfolding U.S. strategy to exploit millions of Mexican and Central
American laborers as transient servants through a national guest
worker program are staggering. 

The following article by Richard vogel documents
[]  the trend of unauthorized migrants living in the United States
from 1980 through 2005
[]  A History of Exploitation  -The United States has subjected the
Mexican people to relentless exploitation since the inequitable war
of 1846-48
* The history of the Bracero Program, an indentured servitude program
which allowed for the temporary migration of Mexican agricultural
workers to the United States from 1942 to 1964
* Maquiliadora Prgam
In 1965, Mexican president Diaz Ortiz signed into law the Border
Industrialization Program (BIP) that established the maquiladora
system in Mexico. Developed by U.S. business interests and secured
through "dollar diplomacy," the BIP granted U.S. industry access to
Mexican labor, initially along the U.S.-Mexico border and later
expanded under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into
the interior of Mexico, with virtually no liability for the social or
environmental costs of production.
* Open Border Policy
While unauthorized migration accounted for less than 25 percent of
all Mexicans relocating to the United States during the 1980s, it has
risen to a staggering 84 percent of the most recent Mexican migrants.
These findings indicate that, because of the rising demand for cheap
Mexican and Central American labor during the last fifteen years, a
gatekeeper border policy has kept the southern U.S. border virtually
wide open so as not to impede the migration.

[] International Preparation
Two key prerequisites for the realization of the plan are, first, a
plentiful supply of workers who will toil for substandard wages under
adverse working and social conditions, and, second, the establishment
of international law that sanctions free trade in human labor across
national boundaries. The pauperization of the Mexican and Central
American working classes and initiatives in the World Trade
Organization (WTO) to create global guest worker guidelines have set
the stage for initiating a strategy of transient servitude in the
United States.
[] The Strategy Unfolds:
... extensive domestic preparations are currently underway to
facilitate the influx of millions of migrants from Mexico and Central
America into the United States. These measures include:
  the building of transportation and enforcement infrastructures to
facilitate the movement and management of millions of migrants; the
promotion of immigration legislation to legitimize transient
servitude in the United States; and initial steps to implement the
program in full as soon as it becomes the law of the land.

[] Building the Transportation Infrastructure
Map 1 depicts the transportation infrastructure that is being
developed to accommodate the increasing traffic in goods and labor
between the United States and Latin America. The NAFTA corridors
designated on the map, which currently consist of existing Mexican
Federal Highways and specific sections of the U.S. Interstate Highway
System, are being expanded through what is being touted as the
biggest surface transportation project in history. When construction
is completed, the largest sections of the I-35 corridor, located in
Texas where the traffic is heaviest, will be up to 1,200 feet wide
and include four truck lanes, six auto lanes, six passenger and
freight rail lines, necessary safety medians, and wide service and
utility zones (for a complete discussion of the scope and impact of
the NAFTA corridor system see: Richard D. Vogel, "The NAFTA
Corridors: Offshoring U.S. Transportation Jobs to Mexico," Monthly
Review, February 2006).

[] Expanding the Enforcement Infrastructure
The expansion of Detention and Removal Operation (DRO) facilities
operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the other major area of
infrastructure development to facilitate the mass influx of migrant
workers from the South. Monitoring and enforcing a national guest
worker program in the United States that will ultimately involve tens
of millions of migrant workers from Mexico and Central America is the
biggest human management program that has ever been undertaken.
Expansion of the facilities that will be needed to detain and remove
unauthorized migrant workers from the United States is already
underway.

[]  Immigration Reform: Legitimizing Transient Servitude
While the WTO can supply international guidelines and sanctions for
guest worker programs, a national program of transient servitude must
be drafted and sanctioned by U.S. law before it can be implemented.
Table 1 presents a summary of the major immigration legislation that
was introduced in Congress in 2006.

[] Implementing the Program

The U.S. strategy to capture and exploit Mexican and Central American
labor through a national guest worker program, while awaiting a
rubber stamp from Congress, is already well underway. In addition to
the transportation and infrastructure projects reported above,
comprehensive government policies to implement the program have
already been formulated and initiated. These specific policies
include: sealing the U.S. southern border as tightly as possible in
order to stop unauthorized migration; provisions for the mass
detention and removal of unauthorized migrant workers presently
residing and working in the United States; and the reorganization and
mobilization of government agencies to enforce the provisions of the
guest worker program as soon as it becomes law.

ICE, the DHS agency that has been tasked with the mass detention and
removal of undocumented migrants already living and working across
the United States, is the largest special weapons and tactics (SWAT)
unit that has ever been mobilized, and Endgame is the agency´s
strategic plan that will initiate the program of transient servitude
across the nation. Endgame will be the biggest police action in
history.

[] The final campaign of Endgame, a nationwide assault on the
established communities of undocumented migrants living and working
in the United States and the deportation of millions of men, women,
and children to Mexico and Central America, is the "immigration
emergency" anticipated by the DHS. It will be the biggest mass
deportation in world history. To "remove all removable aliens" means
to locate, arrest, detain, and deport in excess of twelve million
people. The logistical problems alone are staggering and, if ICE
meets organized resistance, the operation could indeed produce an
"immigration emergency." People with their lives invested in the
United States and with nothing to return to in their home countries
might not go without a fight. The organization and training of ICE
for military operations indicates that DHS is anticipating just such
a contingency.

[] DHS: Enforcing Transient Servitude

The pending U.S. guest worker program to exploit Mexican and Central
American labor will be administered and enforced by the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, the most powerful and pervasive
agency of state control that has ever been mobilized. To monitor and
control the movement of migrants, DHS can employ unprecedented police
power: U.S. Customs and Border Protection; U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement; the U.S. Coast Guard; U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services; the Transportation Security Administration; and
the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center to train and enlist
state, local, and international police agencies for immigration law
enforcement.

[]  Transient Servitude: A Close-Up
A condition of servitude is all but guaranteed during the term of
employment because GATS has officially disavowed any responsibility
for enforcing international labor law advocated by the International
Labor Organization (ILO), which itself has no enforcement provisions.
Ironically, workers under the pending U.S. guest worker programs will
have less protection than the workers who labored under the Bracero
Agreement because of the power of GATS to supercede all national
(including labor) law thus nullifying worker rights guaranteed in the
Mexican Constitution.

[] Servitude-Past and Future
The history of the United States holds powerful lessons about the
economic, social, and political costs of human servitude. The
practice of slavery backed by the power of the state during the first
eighty years of the republic devalued the labor of all working people
and finally resulted in a civil war that almost destroyed the nation.
And while the pending program of transient servitude will not be as
oppressive as chattel slavery, it will produce the same erosive
economic effect-the presence of millions of workers toiling at
substandard wages in all sectors of the U.S. economy will undercut
the value of the labor of all working people in the nation, and,
considering the scope and size of the pending guest worker program,
the aggregate effect will be far greater than the cost of slavery in
the past. With the expensive infrastructure in place and the program
sanctioned by the WTO, legitimized by U.S. immigration law, and
enforced by the DHS, state, and local police, transient servitude
will become so entrenched in the U.S. economy that it might well
prove to be nearly as difficult to abolish as the practice of chattel slavery was.

fyi-janet