Alllieblog

We always speak of immigration as if one day a person in a foreign country woke up and decided to come to America, inspired only by a love for our freedom and democracy. Usually, it isn’t/wasn’t like that. In the early days of America most immigrants were compelled or coerced into coming here. By the rich. The rich do no labor. They produce no wealth. They never have. They can maintain and increase their wealth only by exploiting the labor of others. When some English parasite was given a land grant in the colonies it was pretty useless without people to work the land, to turn the land into money. First the wealthy had slaves and indentured servants brought here to use and exploit. Then there was convict labor. Starting in 1718 when the British Parliament passed the Transportation Act, England sent up to 60,000 convicts to the American colonies to be sold as indentured servants. For decades they provided a ready and cheap source of coerced labor for planters and merchants.

But not all immigrants were coerced. Some were persuaded.

…. in England… peasants had enjoyed secure land tenure for centuries. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, landlords and improving farmers (agrarian capitalists) threw peasants off the land, leaving them and their descendants with a great yearning for land. The same men who evicted peasants financed colonial ventures that promised land to former peasants. Persuaded by labor recruiters, family, or friends, hundreds of thousands of English, Scot, Irish, and German immigrants came to America. http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/kulikoff_from.html

Thus it began. In the early colonial period the rich did their own recruiting but as time passed a new breed, now called labor agents, developed. But there was never enough cheap labor to satisfy the rich since those brought to this broad land could easily escape their exploitation. They could walk away and make their own living, find their own land. This necessitated the importation of a continual supply of new immigrant labor. This supply was often provided by labor agents, who painted a picture of America as having “streets paved with gold” to the poor and oppressed of Europe. Now they paint that same story in the slums of Central and South America, convincing the poor that Americans live like the people on Dynasty or BayWatch.

Immigrant recruiters included several types. Some were paid by the shipping companies to stir up trade, very much like those ads by the cruise companies or airlines today, trying to convince people that paradise lies at the end of their trip. If they could convince people to spend what little money they had to book passage on their ships, they would make money. Some recruiters were paid by speculators who owned land in America, land that they wanted to sell. Very much like the railroad companies of the 19th Century recruited people to come and buy western land owned by the railroads and to settle on it. The railroads made money from selling land the federal government had granted them for building the railroads and made money from the fares settlers paid to travel west then made money from delivering goods to the the towns that they founded along the way. If the Indians were robbed in the process or the settlers ended up with land that would not support them, that was not a concern of the railroad companies. Then there were the pure labor recruiters. They recruited cheap labor for the factories and fields.

As Upton Sinclair wrote in The Jungle:

“The first family had been Germans. The families had all been of different nationalities–there had been a representative of several races that had displaced each other in the stockyards. Grandmother Majauszkiene had come to America with her son at a time when so far as she knew there was only one other Lithuanian family in the district; the workers had all been Germans then–skilled cattle butchers that the packers had brought from abroad to start the business. Afterward, as cheaper labor had come, these Germans had moved away. The next were the Irish–there had been six or eight years when Packingtown had been a regular Irish city. There were a few colonies of them still here, enough to run all the unions and the police force and get all the graft; but most of those who were working in the packing houses had gone away at the next drop in wages–after the big strike. The Bohemians had come then, and after them the Poles. People said that old man Durham himself was responsible for these immigrations; he had sworn that he would fix the people of Packingtown so that they would never again call a strike on him, and so he had sent his agents into every city and village in Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work and high wages at the stockyards. The people had come in hordes; and old Durham had squeezed them tighter and tighter, speeding them up and grinding them to pieces and sending for new ones.

Labor recruiters roamed Europe and, upon occasion, Asia. Whole counties in Slovakia were emptied to supply workers for the steel plants and coal mines of Pennsylvania; Poles and Lithuanians supplied the labor force for Buffalo, Cleveland, and Chicago; Jews came from Eastern Europe to the garment and fur industries of New York. All the while American blacks were kept on the margin. http://128.103.142.209/issues/ma00/02138.html

More diversity was added as Albion Malleable Iron Company, maker of steel parts for boilers, engines, motors, trucks and tractors, sent labor agents/recruiters to different parts of the country to find factory workers. In 1907, 40 Russians, unable to speak English, arrived from the slums of Manhattan and the Bronx… http://www.indiana.edu/~arch/saa/matrix/aea/aea_14.html

Labor recruiters didn’t always recruit from the poor of other countries. Sometimes they recruited within our borders. Much of the black exodus from the south was due to labor recruiters enlisting southern blacks to come to the factories of the north and to undercut the union labor force that had been developing there, thus sowing seeds of enmity between the poor of each race.

In Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath “the Joads plan to go to California based on flyers they found advertising work in the fields there. These flyers, as Steinbeck will soon reveal, are fraudulent advertisements meant to draw more workers than necessary and drive down wages.”

Driving down wages is always a primary goal of those who hire labor recruiters and sometimes all it took was a few thousand flyers full of lies.

One of the saddest things about the present wave of labor recruiters is how it was started by the same industry that was the focus of Sinclair’s The Jungle: The meatpacking business. Not too many years ago the meatpackers were union shops full of good paying jobs but through aggressive labor recruiting the unions were broken sending the meatpacking industry back to the horror days before the muckrackers of a hundred years ago.

To sustain the flow of new workers into IBP slaughterhouses, the company has for years dispatched recruiting teams to poor communities throughout the United States. It has recruited refugees and asylum-seekers from Laos and Bosnia. It has recruited homeless people living at shelters in New York, New Jersey, California, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. It has hired buses to import these workers from thousands of miles away. IBP now maintains a labor office in Mexico City, runs ads on Mexican radio stations offering jobs in the United States, and operates a bus service from rural Mexico to the heartland of America.

So this industry aggressively recruited illegal aliens, luring them to the US to break unions and lower wages. The minimum wage in Mexico is $4.65 a day so it was easy for IBP to lure the poor of Mexico here to hurt American labor.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates that about one-quarter of all meatpacking workers in Iowa and Nebraska are illegal immigrants. The proportion at some slaughterhouses can be much higher…Nevertheless, the recruiting efforts of the American meatpacking industry now target some of the most impoverished and most vulnerable groups in the Western Hemisphere. “If they’ve got a pulse,” one meatpacking executive joked to the Omaha World-Herald in 1998, “we’ll take an application.”
Fast Food Nation

As the meatpacking industry started it, so other industries have followed, recruiting illegal aliens in the millions. There are not people who woke up one day and decided they wanted to come to the United States. They were poor and desperate people recruited so they could be exploited and be used as a weapon against American citizens who wanted jobs with decent wages.

Schlosser writes. “If the meatpacking industry is allowed to continue its recruitment of poor, illiterate, often illegal immigrants, many other industries will soon follow its example. The rise of a migrant industrial workforce poses a grave threat to democracy.” http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/12/banerji-c.html

From 2001 to 2004 for those under 35 income fell 8 percent, adjusted for inflation, and for those 35 to 44 it fell 9%. http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0227/p01s04-usec.html Younger workers are earning well below what they did in 1970 but in 1970 unions were strong and that kept everyone’s wages high. Falling wages are generally blamed on globalization, the rising cost of education and health care and more single parent families but what they never mention or consider is the effect of competition with 11 million illegal immigrants. American workers must now compete with some of the poorest people in the hemisphere and compete with them in America. The capitalists rejoice. But the working man must morn as more and more illegal immigrants are lured to a country to, first, be exploited and then to be used as a weapon against their fellow workers.

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© Alllie 2006

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