Beyond Braceros

It's time to say no.

Every new Republican proposal for immigration reform in Congress makes the prospect of winning legal status for the nation's 12 million undocumented residents more remote. At the same time, Congress appears ready to pass measures that will increase border deaths, lead to wholesale violations of workers' rights and give the country's largest corporations a huge new bracero program. Supporters of immigrant and workers' rights face a moment of truth. Can they defeat the right-wing "reform" offensive? Even more important, can they build a movement for a real alternative?

In September George W. Bush reintroduced his predictably corporate-friendly proposal for immigration reform, calling for contract labor programs that would allow corporations to recruit hundreds of thousands of workers abroad. The workers could stay in the country only while they work, for a maximum of six years. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has now proposed four separate reform bills. The first bill would beef up border enforcement, although the increasingly militarized border forces migrants to cross in the most dangerous areas of the desert. Hundreds already die every year as a result. The second bill would strengthen employer sanctions, turning the Labor Department and the Social Security Administration into immigration police, hunting and deporting those without papers. Sanctions enforcement destroys unions and lowers wages. The third bill would create a new guest-worker program. Historically, bracero programs have exploited immigrants mercilessly--while undermining the wages and rights of citizens and legal residents. Finally, in the only deviation from Bush, the senator promised a fourth bill to offer the undocumented some form of legal status tied to their employment.

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