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By Dr. Kendall Stewart |
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, (Jan 20, 2004): When President George Bush floated a proposal to grant undocumented immigrants a three year legal status so that they can work in areas that ordinary Americans do not want to engage in, he set the tone for a new kind of under-class in the United States. The president's proposal would make an entire community of millions of people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds one huge mass of third rate non-citizens. This is certainly not immigration reform but simply a stop-gap mechanism that offers these immigrants no citizenship relief at the end of a three year period of near slave labor conditions.
Worse yet, there would be no automatic guarantee that these immigrants would have their "temporary citizenship" renewed since the buck will stop with the Congress. Mr. Bush or other any other president would have been afforded the right to play Pontius Pilate by simply saying "it's not my job, its Congress's responsibility to renew the program."
But the president's real underlying intention and his use for this army of cheap and available labor was spelled out in his State of the Union address last January. In it he spoke of the need to reform U.S. immigration laws "to reflect our values and benefit our economy." But what he calls a new guest worker program, presumably one that will "benefit our economy," and which matches "willing foreign workers with willing employers when no Americans can be found to fill the job," is a barely concealed con-game that would do little or nothing to further the dreams of undocumented immigrants to become United States citizens.
Last year the feds accused the mega-retail giant Wal-Mart of illegally employing hundreds of undocumented workers as low-paying janitors and day laborers. If the president's proposal gets implemented corporations like Wal-Mart won't have to resort to clandestine exploitation or fear that they will run foul of federal immigration laws that prohibit the hiring of the undocumented. They'll hire all the immigrants they want at super-low wages-and it will be legal. Should a guest worker dare demand better treatment the corporations can simply revoke his certification, triggering immediate deportation proceedings.
While the president's plan is packaged and presented as immigration relief for all undocumented immigrants it is quite clear that he's looking at the Hispanic undocumented. It's no secret that Hispanics comprise a huge share of the 8 million undocumented workers in this country. Likewise it is no secret that President Bush needs a bigger share of the Latino/Hispanic vote to assure his reelection. As the presidential election year politicking gets underway in real earnest he will go to great lengths to persuade Latino voters how hard he worked to solve the immigration problem.
It is my view that this program is designed to create a permanent and fluid underclass that can be easily manipulated and exploited by unscrupulous businesses. The proposal has no safeguards or rights for these immigrants who will be at the mercy quite literally of big business bosses. If ever there was any doubt as to where the president is going with this proposal then the almost immediate endorsement by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce dispels it. That is because both President Bush and the Chamber know from past experience that the best way to get an American worker to refuse a job is to offer a wage so miserable only a desperate immigrant would take it. To ensure that these vulnerable and desperate immigrants would take the job the President dangles the lure of "legal temporary immigration status" and throws in the added sweetener of these immigrants being able to go in and out of America during the duration of the three-year program.
I call on all progressive citizens and immigrant rights advocates to write the president and put on record the fact that his plan is not meaningful immigration reform but a way to help big corporations exploit cheap labor. I resoundingly condemn this shameless exploitation of America's most vulnerable community and urge all decent people to reject this proposal that clearly only aims at making a permanent underclass in American society and creating an entire generation of third rate non-citizens.