against bosses hit immigrant workers Employer sanctions, immigration controls One struggle: Turkish workers in Hackney on hunger strike in solidarity with Turkish struggle
"Equally important would be a check on the employment of overstayers. A Department of Employment witness told us that The TUC has expressed concern about illegal working by immigrants, especially in the hotel and catering industry, and the government has made it clear it shares that concern' and is keen to take some action to control illegal working.
"The Home Secretary has undertaken that there will be consultations with both sides of industry about what steps to take. The Department appears to have been dilatory, and accordingly we recommend that, as a matter of urgency, the government, after consultation with both sides of in dustry, should introduce measures, if necessary by legislation, to provide effective sanctions against employers who knowingly employ overstayers and illegal immigrants.
"But, as a Department of Employment witness explained, 'a difficulty is that there is at present no comprehensive system of documentation in this country recording identity and immigrant employment status, so there is no way in which employers can distinguish applicants for employment who should not be legally employed"... We therefore ... recommend ithat the government should institute an independent inquiry to consider the system of interal control of immigration."
The above are paragraphs 88 and 89 of the First report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration, which was published in 1978 - under a Labour govemment. It supported and legitimised much of the tightening of immigration restrictions that has been implemented by the Tories over the last decade.
For example, the Committee made the recommendation that 'the police, the Immigration Service Intelligence Unit and other authorities should be afforded substantially more resources to trace overstayers and tackle all aspects of illegal immigration; that the department of Health and Social Security introduce without delay new procedures to tighten identity checks'; and that "the governPage 28
FEATURES and 1992 By Steve Cohen HUNGE 170IVC ment give priority to their consideration of British Nationality Law*: the Thatcher government has since obliged on all counts.
Employer sanctions
Paragraphs 88 and 89 relate to employer sanctions: under the 1971 Immigration Act it is a criminal offence for a person with leave to enter Britain to work in breach of any conditions restricting their employment. It is not a criminal offence as such for an illegal immigrant to take employment - though the entry itself can attract criminal liability.
In a little-publicised section of the 1988 Immigration Act, people refused entry but given "temporary admission", and also those subject to notice of deportation, may have conditions against employment imposed upon them - and breach of these conditions can be a criminal offence. In practice, police and immigration officers frequently conduct raids on factories and business premises in search of illegal entrants, overstayers and those working without authorisation. In 1980 in London in just one month there were raids on the Bestaway Cash and Carry, the Hilton Hotel and the Main Gas Company. Two national union leaders, Moss Evans of the Transport Workers (TGWU) and David Basnett of the General and Municipal Workers (GMB) issued a joint stalement saying that black workers would now have to carry at all times their papers
Pother HANG STR proving their right to live and work here. This is a situation more reminiscent of the apartheid system in South Africa than of Great Britain'.
The raids have intensified throughout the decade. On March 2 1989 police raided several sweat shops in Hackney and arrested 37 Turkish workers. However it is still not a criminal offence to hire 'undocumented" labour. Such criminalisation would be extremely reactionary. It would have the effect of making employers the agents to enforce immigration controls - in just the same way as the 1987 Carriers" Liability Act, by imposing fines on airlines carrying "undocumented" passengers, has tumed carrying companies into a private arm of the immigration service.
Inasmuch as the use of unlawful labour in certain sectors of the economy, notably catering and garment manufacture, depresses the wage of all workers, then the answer is not the criminalisation of employment but the unionisation of all workers and a struggle for better conditions for all.
Now with the attempt to hannonise EC immigration laws by 1992 there is a serious danger that these employer sanctions may be legislated in Britain. In fact in 1978 the European Commission produced Draft Directives on immigration, of which Article 3 declared that: SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 20, Dec-Jan 1989-90
*For the purposes of preventing and detect- ing illegal migration and illegal employment, member states should organise adequate con- trol, especially of employers and persons and undertakings supplying manpower to third parties. In its Explanatory Memorandum to the Draft Directives, the Commission * In particular, as regards the or- ganisation of controls, the Commis- sion is of the opinion that effective control at the internal frontiers of the Community is becoming more and more impracticable. This will become increasingly the case when the Com- munity establishes a Passport Union and abolishes all internal control on Community territory. It consequently underlines the necessity for providing checks on non-Community labour at In its own expalantory statement on the Draft Directive the British Home Office declared that for the UK "Legislation would be required to make it an offence for an employer to employ a person who may not take the employment in question. To make such an offence effective it would probably be necessary to place upon the employer a duty to take reasonable steps to see that his employees had permission to work, and to provide machinery by which he could do so The US Immigration Reform and Control Act 1986 This is the most extensive harden- ing of US immigration laws since the Mc- Carren-Walter Act of 1952. It is aimed against migrants and refugees from Central America, and contains many repressive measures. It ex- tends the criminal law in relation to illegal entry, particularly in respect of the transport of alleged illegal entrants once inside the United States itself. It vastly increased the budget and personnel of the Immigration and Nationality Service (INS) - including a 50 per cent in- crease in the personnel of Border Control. However the most significant feature of the new Act was the introduction of employer sanctions - alongside a bogus "amnesty' scheme. As such it is a likely blueprint for im- minent changes in UK Employer sanctions in the US in fact consist of a complex cluster of provisions, of which the main ones are the following: • Graduated civil penalties (up to $10,000 per violation) ad criminal penalties (higher fines and up to six months imprisonment per violation) for those who knowingly hire an *unauthorised alien' after November 6 1986 (when the Act was passed); • Employers are required to verify the SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 21, February 1990
FEATURES LOST TINE CAN BE LOS FOREVER Whole Industries depend upon cheap migrant labour whichever is the later. reasonably appears believed 'in good faith". rant. immigration work authorisation. immigration law. plications.
documentation of identity and immigration Mexico. work authorisation for cach newly-hired employee and to keep a record of verification - the Employment Eligibility Certificate, or so-called 1-9 form. The Act imposes penalties on employers who fail to fill out the 1-9 form and save it for possible inspection for a minimum of three years after date of hire or one year after date of termination of employment,
An employer would comply with the employment verification system and avoid all sanctions if the employee documentation
Wto be genuine and is
• The Act gives the power to the INS to inspect 1-9 forms at any time, without a war-
• it also provides for fines and imprisonment (up to two years) for employces who use fraudulent documents in respect of indentity or
Racism and economics
US employer sanctions have sweeping im-
Since November 1986 every worker applying for a job has had to have, as a
office, matter of law, his/her immigration status checked by management. Central Americans regard the new Act as a particular threat. A Houston school teacher described how One of my students came in and said My dad says we have to leave because of the war'. I said 'What war?" He said The war against
The most frequent justification given for employer sanctions was that they would save jobs for Americans". Likewise in this country. a common racist justification for immigration controls has always been that black people "take our jobs. In fact the campaign for the US Immigration reform and Control Act was thoroughly racist. Restric- tionist groups such as 'Americans for Border Control worked closely with key members of Congress. Central Americans - and Asians - were linked in the media with drug smuggling and other crimes. They were characterised as people with high fertility rates and cultures strong- ly incompatible with US ways. Head- lines in the popular press in support of immigration control absolutely paral- lel those found in the UK - for in- "legal Aliens Swam stance Mongrelises Our Strain', and *Flood of Aliens Coming Our Way'. INS Western Regional Organiser Harold Ezell issued dire warnings that "those who are invading this country by feet are going to overthrow what we un- derstand and enjoy as a culture. Senator Alan K Simpson, the main sponsor of the new Act, himself used the language of war when he intro- duced the slogan "To regain control of our borders. In reality employer sanctions could never - even if this were their true in- tent - "save jobs for Americans". This is because the demand for immigrant labour in the USA is structural: cer- tain sectors of the US economy, notably the so-called secondary labour market, are dependent on cheap undocumented labour. These sectors include food processing and packing, catering, light manufacturing, house and office cleaning, parking and garage ser- vices, building maintenance and sub-contract garment manufacture - even baby-sitting. If employer sanctions were consistently enfored then these sectors would be decimated. Enforcement of employer sanctions Sanctions are enforced - but in a selective way. The main aim and effect of this is to un- dermine labour organisation through rendering undocumented work even more vulnerable for the employee. Certainly there have been many cases of firms being fined for employing un- authories workers: the Western Regional INS which covers Califomia, Arizona, Nevada, Hawii and Guam, imposed S1 million in fines in a 2-year period. However a more frequent practice is for the INS to use its powers to inspect 1-9 forms and then arrest workers for false documentation, whilst ex- cusing employers on the grounds that they had acted in 'good faith'. Page 29
This is what happened in Chicago in 1988
when a factory with 126 employees was
raided, with 122 being arrested. Moreover
management often uses the threat of employer
sanctions either to discipline or actually to
sack workers. Soon after the Act was passed
an official of the Interational Ladies Garment Workers Union said "We've had several cases of threatened firings'. Employers have engaged in mass dismissals of workers and replaced them with others brought in from abroad on short-term government contracts. In California, following a mass firing of Latino garment workers, thousands of Filipino women were imported, who would work for even lower wages than the undocumented.
This reveals the flip side of employer sanctions, namely the creation of a "guestworker" layer of imported labour that is totally under the control of the employer by being immediately returnable on termination of employment. This is the same as the notorious "gastarbeiter" system prevalent today in West Germany, and which will be extended throughout Europe by 1992 with the harmonisation of controls.
In the USA such a guestworker class between 1942 and 1964 undermined the farm workers' unions, with Mexican agicultural labourers imported under what became known as the "Bracero" programme. Indeed the 1986 Act allowed for the reintroduction of short-term contracts under the so-called H-2A agricultural workers' programme. Dolores Huerta, vice president of the United Farm Workers Union said of H-2A: "The INS has been working hand-in-glove with the growers since day one'.
The Amnesty
Integrally linked to the employer sanctions provisions of the 1986 Act was the granting of an amnesty to illegal entrants. This purported to give legal status to those who could es tablish that they had entered the US prior to January 1 1982, and had lived there continuously since; or to those agricultural workers who could prove that they had worked for at least 90 days between November 1986 and November 1987.
This "amnesty" was spurious. It gave protection to relatively few and created dangers for many more. The cut-offdate of January 1 1982 was itself quite cynical, since the majority of refugees from El Salvador arrived after that date; death squad activity in El Salvador only came to a peak in late 1982, and "counterinsurgency" bombings terrorising the region only began in 1984.
Also the US amnesty had all the legal and practical limitations of the temporary amnesty which applied in Britain in 1974. The US amnesty did not apply to anyone who had entered the country lawfully but had then overstayed their leave. More important was the question of how to prove that an illegal entry had taken place prior to 1982. Entire undocumented Page 30
FEATURES Expelled as economic migrants: Boat people in Hong Kong communities found themselves caught: as most undocumented people are paid in cash, never fill in income tax returs and never make purchases on credit, they had to rely on employers and past employers for the papers they needed to legalise their status. The employers, fearing reprisals from the Internal revenue Service demanding back taxes, often refused to give the necessary documentation.
The amnesty split families, some of whose members arrived before 1982 and others after. This happened to the Herrera family from El Salvador: Carlos fled in 1981, but his wife, Celfa and children, only managed to get out in February 1982. The INS made a deportation order against Celfa and the children.
As with immigration laws generally the amnesty has generated a parasitic group of "immigration advisors' charging large fees for bad advice. Latinos in the USA call such people 'abogangsters" - coined from the Spanish word for lawyer (abogado) and the English gangster".
In two respects the US amnesty was even worse than the one in this country. Firstly, the government demanded a fee, $180 for adults, $50 for each child, and an additional $75 mandatory doctor's bill. Secondly, the INS regulations defining the terms of the amnesty excluded anyone "likely to become a public charge" - and those who did receive amnsety were rendered incligible for most forms of government welfare for five years, This provision affected women in particular, especially single mothers and those who wished to leave violent marriages. Even in the UK. where the "no rcourse to public funds' requirement runs through most immigration law, such a criterion was not applied to the 1974 amnesty.
Most organisations in the USA which oppose employer sanctions also opposed the amnesty on the grounds that it as bogus, divided documented from undocumented workers, and
led to further govemment and employer control of migrants. This control became obvious after May 4 1988 - the final date for amnesty
Throughout May 1988 INS agents boarded Chicago Transit Authority buses and detained suspected undocumented passengers. Heraldo, a Spanish newspaper in Chicago, called these raids "gestapo-like". The INS had claimed that information obtained on legalisation applications would not be used to deport anyone if the application failed: in practice ap plicants for amnesty, even successful ones, were at risk. In March 1988 the INS raided the Swift meat packing plant in Des Moines, apparently after first checking the 1-9 forms with the management. 17 workers were arrested for working with false documents -though the firm was not charged with anything, It was later revealed that many of the 17 had amnesty applications pending. Nonetheless they were charged with having previously used false Social Security cards. One INS agent is reported as saying "Just because you are an applicant or have been given amnesty, it doesn't mean we aren going to
At the moment several other EC countries - most notably France - operate employer sanctions. With the projected dismantling of internal EC borders, such sanctions are anyhow the most obvious method for the capitalist class to control immigration and immigrant labour.
The US experience shows what this will mean in practice, and how even a 'sweetener' such as an apparent amnesty scheme can also tighten the screw on immigrant workers. One measure which would make employer sanctions even more viable would be the introduction of a system of national identity cards. Several organisations, not least the Police Federation, are already campaigning for this. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 20, Dec-Jan 1989-90