Civil Rights Movement and Immigration Part II

"Why do immigrants come here?" is the question uttered by many Americans and others in the Global North.

It's the same reason we buy peaches from Chile in the winter, IPhones made in China, and a bottles of wine from South Africa: capitalism. Companies are in a never-ending pattern of cutting costs and increasing profit. This means it is always in their best interest to pay workers less and less. One of the ways it is able to do, especially in a country with low levels of collective bargaining, is to hire foreign-born workers.

The 1965 Immigration Law eliminated nations quotas from select European countries. It created tracks for high-skilled immigrants to come to the United States as well as family reunification. By creating quotas for nations in the Americas, which did not have them before 1965, this new law created the "illegal immigrant." Before 1965, there was more circular migration in the Americas; for example, Mexicans would work in the United States and return home once they had met their financial goals or if the United States deported them en masse, like with Operation Wetback. The new 1965 quotas made immigration from Mexico more restrictive, encouraging more people, including women and families to migrate more permanently. When it comes to countries in the Americas, the 1965 made it harder, not easier, to migrate to the United States.

Whether they are H-1b visa holders or undocumented/illegal workers, companies recruit people from all the developing world to work for them in the United States or any other place in the developed world. Companies want immigrant labor since they can pay them less. It's why we do not see many immigrants from Norway or Sweden-- their high taxes yield a society where you do not need to work low wages to feed your family. Europeans strong history of labor movements and reactions to less-fettered capitalism is very different from the US where the Supreme Court said corporations are people. Wealthy capitalists get richer from paying us less for our work. Immigrants help them make it happen.

I saw this firsthand. Years ago, I worked for an immigration law firm in Chicago. Our clients were many of the big companies we are familiar with today as well as others that had merged with others or bought out to form new companies. After they had recruited these immigrants, I helped these companies convert their J-1 student visas into an H-1B worker's visas, renew H-1Bs, or apply for permanent residency. I also processed the paperwork for any spouses or children attached.

I noticed that the "prevailing wage" the government had set was a far cry from the salaries of the software engineers, computer scientists, and biologists that I saw advertised in the Chicago Tribune. (I'm surprised those workers did not sue the Department of Labor for setting  "prevailing wages" that were not prevalent in their line of work, given their expertise and education.) Before I was fired, I had to tell the Immigration and Naturalization Service that the company had publicly advertised their position (in a newpaper nobody read), but Mr. Mehta or Ms. Shah with their respective Master's and PhD in electrical were somehow the only people to fit their needs (for the low pay of $54,000 in 2001 dollars).

How many tech companies worked with the Department of Labor to make that low dollar figure realistic?

Although sometimes the cost of the visa clearly offset the salary of the worker, many times it did not. Often the salary+visa cost was still far less than what native workers were paid for the same labor. It was painful for me to hear a grown man from South Asia cry on the phone because of how poorly his employer was treating him, but he had to stay because the H-1B is tied to the employer. I had another man yell at me on the phone because he knew that if he was paid what his labor was worth on the non-immigrant visa market, he would be able to afford the cost of permanent residency for himself and his family, and still have extra money left over. Yet, our law firm was employed by AT&T, Microsoft, Gemini and many others.

I was working for the capitalists.

As I learned more and more about the job, I googled flights to Brazil more often. That's a good reason to get fired. But I did tell them I was leaving in a month to do a Fulbright in Barcelona, Spain. I worked a different job that month that did not make me feel like I was screwing over highly skilled immigrants to turn then millionnaires into our current billionnaires.

As Americans, we are more upset by people moving to our country than goods and commerce coming from the same places. It's not fair that inanimate objects have more rights to migration than human beings. But these borders serve a purpose: they create the uncertainty necessary to keep immigrants tied to low-paying jobs that refuse to pay you closer to what your labor is worth. Many employers welcome deportation raids if it means they can get a new batch of workers who will do even more work for less. When "illegal" immigrants attempt to mobilize for higher pay or better working conditions, they face the risk of their employers calling ICE on them.

In addition, deportations are a ploy to obtain less expensive prison labor from immigrants. This increases profits for contractors who build prisons and keep them running. The mass deportations, like many things immigration-related, is just one big money grab.