Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants

by David Bacon

Overview

For two decades David Bacon has documented the connections between labor, migration, and the global economy. In Illegal People he explains why our national policy produces even more displacement, migration, immigration raids, and an increasingly divided and polarized society. Arguing for a sea change in how we think, debate, and legislate about and around immigration, Bacon promotes a human rights perspective in a globalized world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807042304
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	06/01/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

David Bacon is a writer and photojournalist based in Oakland and Berkeley, California. He is an associate editor at Pacific News Service, and writes for TruthOut, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Progressive, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. He has been a reporter and documentary photographer for 18 years, shooting for many national publications. He has exhibited his work nationally, and in Mexico, the UK and Germany. Bacon covers issues of labor, immigration and international politics. He travels frequently to Mexico, the Philippines, Europe and Iraq. He hosts a half-hour weekly radio show on labor, immigration and the global economy on KPFA-FM, and is a frequent guest on KQED-TV's This Week in Northern California. For twenty years, Bacon was a labor organizer for unions in which immigrant workers made up a large percentage of the membership. Those include the United Farm Workers, the United Electrical Workers, the International Ladies' Garment Workers, the Molders Union and others. Those experiences gave him a unique insight into changing conditions in the workforce, the impact of the global economy and migration, and how these factors influence the struggle for workers rights. Bacon was chair of the board of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, and helped organize the Labor Immigrant Organizers Network and the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health. He served on the board of the Media Alliance and belongs to the Northern California Media Workers Guild. His book, The Children of NAFTA, was published by the University of California Press in March, 2004, and a photodocumentary project sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, Communities Without Borders, was published by the ILR/Cornell University Press in October 2006. In his latest project, Living Under the Trees, sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities and California Rural Legal Assistance, Bacon is photographing and interviewing indigenous Mexican migrants working in California's fields. He is currently also documenting popular resistance to war and attacks on immigrant labor and civil rights. He has received numerous awards for both his writing and photography.

Table of Contents

Preface v

1 Making Work a Crime 1

Merry Christmas. You're fired. 1

How the Housekeepers Saw It 8

The Smithfield Raids: Overt Union-Busting 12

2 Why Did We Come? 23

Flight from Oaxaca 23

Battles in the Mines 33

3 Displacement and Migration 51

Forcing People into the Migrant Stream 51

The Sensenbrenner Family Business 64

Migrant Labor: An Indispensable Part of a Global System 70

The Profitability of Undocumented Labor 77

4 Fast Track to the Past 83

Not Enough Workers! 83

Modern-day Braceros 92

How Corporations Won the Debate on Immigration Reform 105

5 Which Side Are You On? 119

Paolo Freire on LA's Mean Streets 119

Los Angeles: Class War's Ground Zero 129

The Story of Ana Martinez 136

Immigration Enforcement Becomes a Weapon to Stop Unions 142

Operation Vanguard 147

Immigrant Workers Ask Labor: "Which Side Are You On?" 153

6 Blacks Plus Immigrants Plus Unions Equals Power 167

Mississippi Battleground 167

Katrina: Window on a Nightmare 179

The Common Ground of Jobs and Rights 183

Remedy the Past's Injustice 189

People in the Streets Want More 193

7 Illegal People or Illegal Work? 199

Illegal Means Not European and Not White 200

Fighting Second-Class Status 209

Silicon Valley's High-Tech Sweatshops 214

"What Future for Our Children?" 222

8 Whose New World Order? 233

High Skills and Low Salaries 233

From Guest Worker to German Citizen 238

Suppressing Asylum Seekers While Promoting "Managed Migration" 243

Mode 4 and the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrants 246

Transnational Communities: A New Definition of Citizenship 250

Editorial Reviews

Bacon's timely analysis is as cool and competent as his labor advocacy is unapologetic. In mapping the political economy of migration, with an unwavering eye on the rights and dignity of working people, Bacon offers an invaluable corrective to America's hobbled discourse on immigration and a spur to genuine, creative action.—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A fascinating look at trade and immigration policies and the people directly affected by them."-—Booklist

"David Bacon is the conscience of American journalism and an extraordinary social documentarist."—Mike Davis

"Illegal People documents how undocumented workers have become the world's most exploited workforce-subject to raids and arrests, forced to work at low pay and under miserable conditions, and prevented from organizing on their own behalf. In this richly reported book, David Bacon makes a powerful case for the centrality of 'illegals'-of all nationalities-in the global struggle for economic justice."—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

"From the Hawaiian sugar plant organizing drives of the 1930s to the 2007 miners' strike in the Sonoran Desert, Bacon chronicles the struggles and lives of Mexican, Guatemalan, Filipino, Indian and Salvadoran workers . . . [and] unabashedly writes as an advocate. The result is refreshing."—Gary Delgado, ColorLines

"David Bacon's book . . . demonstrates that there is hope, and we can win something better, today, not just for immigrants, but for all working people!"—Dolores Huerta, cofounder of United Farm Workers

From the Publisher