2. READ: Lost Children Archive. A novel by by Valeria Luiselli.
4. READ: There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration. A book by Ali Noorani.
5. READ: What the first 24 hours on U.S. soil looks like for detained immigrants.
6.LOOK: Our 2018 photo essay in the midst of a rally outside the gates of Tornillo, Texas.
This interview with Dan Hopkins, Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
What were the original assumptions in the Constitution about state-level loyalty versus national government loyalty?
It's a good question. The Constitution is now far enough back in our collective memories that I think it's really valuable to start by having some sense of what the U.S. was like at the time. There were some scholars who argued that the Constitution is well understood as a peace treaty between sovereign states about how they were going to govern their affairs.
In 1776 and even in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, the U.S. was a collection of 13 quite different colonies. It took the Georgia delegation six weeks to travel to Philadelphia in order to participate in the Constitutional Convention. Different colonies had very different economies and different religious heritages. This was a quite diverse country and, thus, the Constitution was designed to protect substantial levels of state-level autonomy. I think it is really important to recognize that at the time, many of the people thought of themselves as Americans, but also to a certain extent, as New Yorkers or Virginians or Pennsylvanians.
When do you start to see a shift towards politics in the U.S. becoming more nationalized?
To some degree, it's an ongoing process that has unfolded in fits and starts over our 200-plus year history. I do think that the Civil War is a critical turning point. In the run-up to the Civil War, you see many more implications of state-level identities. I'm a Georgian, I'm a Virginian. And obviously, the Civil War pitted state against state.
It's generally been the case that the Republican party has been more likely to invoke federalism. Of course, the exemplary issue is the issue of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Even in more recent times, the Republican party has advocated for there being less of a role in the federal government asserting itself to protect the rights of African-Americans, especially, but not only in the South. I think it's fair to say that if you've heard a state rights argument in the last 50 years, it's more likely to be coming from the Republican party.
There's also an element in which as power shifts, we see changes. When the Republicans control the federal office, sometimes it's Democrats who say, "Hey, it's important to let California write its own laws with respect to clean energy or car emissions standards." At the same time, the extent to which we see Republican states moving to block sanctuary cities, for instance, is surprising.
If you're a principled federalist, then presumably cities shouldn't be punished for diverging.
In general, I see very few principled federalists in American politics. I think that all too often in contemporary American politics, federalism is just the clothing we use to dress up certain arguments instead of being a principled approach to a range of policy problems.
What factors contribute to a nationalized political landscape?
I actually think there's a relationship between the transformation of campaign finance, the transformation of voting, and the transformation of what's getting covered in our newspapers. There's a unifying element to all of this.
Let's look at campaign finance first. In many of the most competitive 2020 Senate races, large majorities of money came from out-of-state donations. What does that do to the candidates, and how does that affect the way constituents perceive elections?
I think that the nationalization of the campaign finance structure is an example of our nationalized set of divisions. What we're trying to do is refract these highly nationalized divisions through our federalist system. And the result often distorts representation in critical ways. One of the key facts about campaign finance has been that as late as 1992, two-thirds of all donations to federal candidates, to members of Congress, were coming from within the state that they represent. 20 years later in 2012, only one-third of all dollars were coming from the states that people represented.
The danger is that the representatives and senators increasingly have one constituency where they get their votes, but a separate constituency from where they get their money.
That is not how our system was designed to work. It was not designed for members of Congress to spend four hours a day raising money from people who are not their constituents.
And simultaneously, there has been a collapse of local media. I wonder how the decline of local news plays into this landscape?
When the internet first became a sizable presence, there was a hope that it might actually lead to a proliferation of local news. With the internet there are very, very low production costs, so, theoretically, I could put up a newsletter about my neighborhood. But in fact, as you said, the rise of the internet and the rise of cable television led to this dramatic concentration of our attention on a very, very small number of nationalized news sources. Partly that's because the news media would target us based on where we lived. The Philadelphia Inquirer targeted a set of people who wanted to know about life in and around Philadelphia.
But more recently we instead see that the business model for many media companies is to compete based on who voters are and who readers are and who consumers are, rather than where they live.
Rather than providing me with information specific to Philadelphia, they will identify me as someone who likes the National Football League or cares about politics.
That has led to the fragmentation of our media environment. One of the real losers in this has been people's attention to state and local politics. State and local politics have never been on the top of people's priority lists. It used to be that if I were reading the Philadelphia Inquirer, as a by-product of learning what the Eagle's score was, I also learn a little bit about who my mayor was or who my governor was. And nowadays, since I can go right to ESPN or I can go right to Fox News, I can skip over all that state and local information.
In a world where state and local politicians want to be well-known, they're much more likely to attach themselves to a lightning rod federal issue than they are to actually dive into the challenging, complex issues that face their local community.
Which really allows issues to be manipulated. When we focused on immigration, something I found interesting was how much immigration was used as a campaign tool in Ohio or Maine. It’s easy to make a border terrifying when you don’t live near one. Do you feel like campaigning has changed based on the ability to take issues that don't have anything to do with your constituents, but are made to look like they have everything to do with constituents?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the real challenges with a nationalized political environment is that it encourages attention to issues that are evocative and emotionally charged and often have to do with specific groups of people, but ultimately do not have clear policy effects. I think one prominent example of this is not long after President Trump was elected he attacked football players who refused to stand for the National Anthem. I think it's a very instructive case because he wasn't proposing any policy. This was purely about symbols.
I worry that in the nationalized political environment, it's very hard to put together a political coalition that speaks to auto workers and nurses in the suburbs of Detroit, and retirees in Maricopa County. This is a very diverse country. One of the easier ways to knit together a political coalition is to reach for these divisive, identity-oriented issues, even if that's not actually what's going to motivate the policies that you're proposing.
I do think that there's been a real connection between the way in which our politics has nationalized and the way in which our politics has become more identity oriented.
It's these kinds of identity charged issues that can have an intuitive meaning to people in places from Montana to North Carolina.
Has your work clarified your opinion about how national politics should work? What do you advocate for moving forward in terms of policy and campaigning?
I certainly think that voters do better when they have the information that they need, and I think that we are missing an opportunity to really use our federalist system, because there are so many different kinds of issues that face the different communities in our country.
If we are trying to force all of those issues onto a single divide between Democrats and Republicans, we're going to miss a lot of critical issues.
I think some of the disaffection with contemporary politics stems from the fact that many of us deal with problems in our day-to-day lives that are not represented by the Republican-Democrat divide.
I do want to be wary of nostalgia — or suggesting that some earlier period of history was markedly better. Yes. I worry a lot that today's voters just don't know much about state and local politics, but state and local politics wasn't always vibrant and democratic in previous generations, right? As a social scientist, I think part of my job is to lay out trends. I do think that nationalization is something that we should forecast as being a major part of our politics moving forward.
I also think that there are some policy changes on the edges that I would advocate for that I think would help reinforce the connections between places and voters, and to make better use of our current federalist system. For instance, I think campaign finance matching, so that every dollar you get locally is amplified, is a great idea. I think that could encourage politicians to lay down roots in the specific communities they represent and to spend less time trying to raise money from Manhattan or Dallas.
I think we should also do everything in our regulatory capacity to help promote, protect, and foster high-quality, non-partisan coverage of states and localities.
As a country that is hemorrhaging reporters who cover states and localities I do think that given how many important decisions are made at the state and local level, as a society, we have a real stake in the quality of local news media. There are fewer statehouse reporters, there are fewer city hall reporters, and there are fewer people who are tracking state and local politics to hold our politicians accountable. I think that has been underappreciated, and one of the real dangers in contemporary American democracy.
interviews
The Right to Remain
by David Bacon
June 29, 2020
This interview with David Bacon, journalist and author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you start by talking about your background a bit?
David Bacon | I grew up in Oakland. The racial politics of my youth was centered around Black people and white people. Learning about how the imperial and racist history of this country affects African American people, Asian American people, and Latino people and their migration has been a lifelong learning experience for me. I say that because, I want to make sure that it's understood that I'm a learner, a lifelong learner.
In the 1970s, I was involved in the Delano grape strike - an effort by the workers in Central Valley. I would stand in front of Safeway and try to convince people not to buy grapes. After a while, I wanted to know more about what was going on behind the scenes. I convinced a friend of mine, a lawyer for the United Farm Workers Union, to let me volunteer in one of their offices. I began working at the union, on a ridiculous salary of $5 a week, taking statements from workers who were being fired or beaten up because of their union sympathies. I worked as a union organizer for about 20 years. As time went by, I became more and more drawn into documenting what I was seeing. So I made the transition to the work that I do now, and have done for the last 30 years, as a writer and a photographer.
I look at the process of migration from the perspective of those who are migrating. I ask: What uproots people and sets the process of migration into motion? What is the experience of traveling as a migrant? What happens to migrants once they reach the place they are going to?
How does your work with the unions inform your perspective of immigration?
The union was a school for me - it taught me Spanish, it taught me about organizing, it taught me about immigration. I’ll never forget how one evening, I was meeting with a group of date orchard workers at the union office. The next day, when I went out to talk to them again, they were being handcuffed and loaded into a green border patrol van. I was just floored by it. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't stop it. I chased the van down to the Imperial Valley, trying to figure out how to help them. It was a very brutal learning experience, certainly more brutal for them than for me, but it also taught me something very important.
I've written a lot about the US immigration process over the years, and I have tried to put an analytical framework around the process. The framework I use is this: The penetration of capital from large wealthy industrial countries into developing countries, displaces people. Those who are uprooted then become the workforce of the countries that displaced them in the first place. It's a singular system. And it is a system that is motivated by producing economic results.
What is an example?
Well, there was an economic incentive in the process that made Walmart the largest employer in Mexico.
Mexico used to buy corn from small producers in states like Oaxaca to help those communities survive. They would then turn that corn into tortillas and sell them at state-run markets in the cities to help poor people.
That system became illegal under the rules of NAFTA. Walmart comes in as being the big retailer of tortillas in Mexico, and the tortillas are no longer made from Oaxacan corn, but corn imported from Iowa. What happens to the farmers who were previously supported by Mexico’s system? They become migrants. About a third of the agricultural workforce in California is made up of people coming from Oaxaca. The irony is that Oaxaca is the birthplace of domesticated corn -those farmers are coming from towns that gave corn to the world, but they can no longer grow it themselves, so they became migrants.
You have worked with migrants for many years. What has been the starkest example of change in the migration system?
The border has become much more militarized. Largely that is due to The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
Before ‘86, if a hot band was playing in Mexicali, workers from the Imperial Valley would cross the border, see the show, and go back across the border to sleep at the labor camps that they were living in. In many places, even now, the border consists of nothing. For all of Trump's talk about the border, the reality is that it is still hardly marked at all in some places, but the process of crossing has become much more difficult and much more expensive.
At the time that you were organizing within the Unions what was the perspective of the migrant on US immigration?
People generally looked at the United States as a place that they have to come to work.
The Bracero Program from 1942 to 1964 was crucial in shaping this dynamic. Hundreds of thousands of people were recruited in Mexico, contracted a short period to work in the US, and then sent back to Mexico.
We still have programs that are very much like the Bracero program today, such as the H-2A. People have very conflicting feelings about those programs. On the one hand, people want to come here to work. They know the wages they can get here, and they see the programs as a possible way to get US jobs. On the other hand, people know that those programs do not offer you the ability to stay in the US permanently or the ability to bring your family to the US. We literally have thousands of migrants in California who live under trees, and I've talked to many of these folks. They often say, “Well, it's just for a while. I can put up with it for now while I send money home. In a way, it's better for me - if I don't have to pay rent, I can send more money home.”
How does that affect worker organizing?
That sentiment is very important to acknowledge in worker organizing. It means that migrants don’t have much to lose, but they don't have much to gain either. If somebody comes to them and says, let's go on strike here because the wages are too low, they may not be willing to risk their job if they know they are only in the US temporarily. The more someone lives here, as they start to pay rent, as they start a family, the more they come to think of themselves as part of the community. They have a greater stake in trying to change things.
What is interesting is that very often people come to the US with a lot of organizing skills. I remember one man spoke to me about how his father had participated in land reform struggles in Baja, California. He burned down the mansion of the Hacienda owner and redistributed the land in this worker's upsurge. Migrants come with organizing skills. If you can combine those skills with a stake in labor conditions, change can be explosive. We are seeing the results of that in California and in Washington right now.
And how does the opposite work? How do anti-union and anti-immigration sentiments work in tandem?
There are many mechanisms by which this happens.
The most obvious is that people come here without papers. Out of a workforce of about 2.5 million farmworkers, 1.25 million of those folks have no papers. They don't have permission to work, and the employers or labor contractors who hire them, generally speaking, know this. They exploit this vulnerability and to keep wages low. They tell workers, explicitly or implicitly, if you stir up trouble, you can be deported.
Under the Employer Sanctions in our immigration law, it is illegal for an employer to hire undocumented workers. Employers who are facing an organizing effort by their workers can say, “We've discovered that you don't have any papers. We're not legally able to keep you. You're fired.” Sometimes immigration authorities will initiate that vetting, but sometimes not. In theory, employers should be punished and fined because of who they are hiring, but that seldom happens. It is the workers themselves who pay the price and lose their jobs.
The guest worker programs also have adverse effects on migrant workers' rights. Through these programs, employers can hire foreign workers on temporary visas. The migrant’s visa, and their right to be in the US, is dependent on the job. Through the H-2A program, which is specifically for temporary agricultural work, about 250,000 people, mostly from Mexico, are recruited. A report recently came out about this program. Every single worker interviewed spoke about the abuse of their labor rights, and sometimes these violations were egregious. The precarious nature of workers on these programs results in workers who can’t afford to complain.
The mechanisms differ, but the results remain the same.
A lot of people think about immigration through this lens of sort of opportunity. How would you encourage a reframing of our current view on immigration?
Well, we need a reality check.
There are 40 million people in the United States who were born somewhere else. Why do people come here to begin with? The decision to migrate, often, is not a voluntary one, it is a survival tactic.
We have to look at our own responsibility for that. What kind of policy does the US government pursue in other countries that lead to the displacement of people? We have to look at trade policy. We have to look at NAFTA.
I think that a lot of people do get that that NAFTA hurt people. They often think of it in terms of how NAFTA hurt us, because jobs went south. But people here also, in many cases, are able to think about its impact in other countries and the way in which policies have displaced people too.
This movement of people and this process of displacement between the US and Mexico is not going to stop. You can build as many walls as you like, but it's not going to stop people from coming here. The things that are pushing people are to migrate much stronger than a wall. The need to survive is stronger than a wall. The desire to reunite the family is stronger than a wall.
Given that this movement of people is not going to stop, what do we want our immigration policies to do? Do we want them to make people more or less vulnerable? For working people, it is advantageous to fight to make migrants less vulnerable. If migrants do not have rights, it affects the entire workforce. If you want to organize a union in your workplace, and people are working in your workplace are terrified, and unwilling to be part of that process, that's going to hurt the worker. It makes it harder for the worker.
What sort of policy prescription or framework would you suggest?
We have to find where we have common ground: Where does an unemployed Black person in the US find common ground with a Mexican immigrant?
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee tried to find it in, what I think, was a really effective policy proposal. About a decade ago, she proposed an immigration bill that simultaneously considered both of those groups.
She proposed a legalization program for people who were currently undocumented here, and, at the same time, new jobs creation programs for people living in communities of high unemployment. Who pays for it? Employers who benefit from the immigration system. All of a sudden, you have both interest groups advocating for the same immigration bill, because both people stand to benefit from it. Instead of pitting people against each other in a competition for scarce jobs, we need to unite to garner political power.
How do we look across the obvious dividing lines here and recognize people as people on each side? And not just from a moral point of view, but so we can mutually advance our material interests.
We also have to address voter disenfranchisement. A huge percentage of the working population cannot vote or elect people. If they were not disenfranchised due to their immigration status, maybe we would have more worker-friendly policies. We should look past what's often presented as a moral question “Why should those people be able to vote?”, and ask, “How will we benefit as working people?” If everybody who worked had the right to vote, then we would be able to change politics much, much more easily.
I think the conversation has found some new urgency amid the Coronavirus pandemic because we have had to look clearly at who our essential workers are, and how they’ve been treated or mistreated.
Yes. We're in the process of unpacking that. Essential means yes, your labor is necessary, but essential also means that you can't say no.
So on one hand, we are acknowledging that picking fruits and vegetables, working in meatpacking plants, or working in hospitals is socially necessary work. We are recognizing that we need to value that work and the people who are doing it.
On the other hand, essential is also being used by the administration and by employers as a way of saying your work is essential, and therefore you may not withhold it. You must go to work regardless of what the risks are. We are getting a good education about what actually happens to these essential workers as a result of their immigration status, their poverty, and their lack of rights as workers. We can look at the meatpacking plants. People are being forced into working, with the knowledge that a percentage of them are going to get sick and die. That gets underlined when they passed the relief bills. Not only did people who were undocumented not get relief money, but anyone who was married to somebody who was undocumented or did not get the $1,200 in relief payments. That removed any kind of support that might enable people to decide whether or not they want to work tomorrow.
That this is not lost on people. I've interviewed a lot of farmworkers who say, "This is really a slap in the face. First, you call us essential. You tell us how important this work is. You come outside and eight o'clock in the evening and you clap your hands for us. And yet what does that do for us? We're working the same job, with the same low wage as before, and now we have no choice but to go to work.”
Are you hopeful for meaningful change past this sort of rhetoric?
In the end, I think I am an optimistic person. There have been a series of strikes where immigrants are demanding better protective equipment, demanding social distancing to be put into place, and demanding hazard pay.
One result of the pandemic is that people are being forced to look at their situation and determine how far they are willing to go. Previously, it was a question of whether you were willing to risk your job for a wage raise. Now it is a matter of survival. When the threat is death, the question has become - How can we afford to not take action?
A heavy realization.
A heavy realization, but it produces activity. Crisis teaches people something. I think change is coming. How? I'm not sure. I can't predict the future, but I can see it coming. You feel the rumbling under your feet, right?