The following narratives illustrate the human experiences behind the North American Free Trade Agreement and a U.S. immigration system that mainly serves employers. They accompany an Investigative Fund/Nation magazine article, “How US Policies Fueled Mexico's Great Migration.”

All interviews and photographs by David Bacon. The original interviews have been edited into narrative form by Bacon.

The Story of David Ceja and Guadalupe Marroquin

David Ceja and Guadalupe Marroquin are two of the hundreds of migrants from Veracruz who came to North Carolina to work in the Smithfield Food slaughterhouse in Tar Heel. They tell the story of how and why they came, and why they and many other migrants were finally forced from their jobs.

David Ceja

My father and brother are ejidatarios [farmers on communal land] near Martinez de la Torre, in Veracruz. They have some land, but never enough money to cultivate it. That's why I left, in order to get some money so that we could farm. As a child, I was already working in the fields, just to buy shoes, or a book or pencil for school. It was hard to find enough for everyone, so I suffered all through my childhood.

The home of David Ceja's cousins on the family farm near Martinez de la Torre, Veracruz.

It was hard just to get bread, much less a piece of meat, because it was all so expensive. As they say, we ate tortillas with salt. But we could give milk to people who came asking for it. There were people even worse off than us. Now the boys I played with, are all here. I'd see them working in the plant.

At first we had some fruit trees — oranges and bananas — and about ten cows. We had some pigs and chickens we'd sell to get sugar or salt. Sometimes the price of a pig was enough to buy what we needed, but then it wasn't. Farm prices were always going down. After the crisis, we couldn't pay for electricity, so we'd just use candles. Everyone was hurting almost all the time.

The fruit we were growing was for the US, but then when they'd stop eating it, or they'd have some requirement we couldn't meet, we couldn't sell what we were growing. The free trade agreement was the cause of our problems. They were just paying as little to farmers as they could. When the prices went up, no one had any money to pay. After the crisis, we couldn't pay for electricity — we'd just use candles at home. But when you see that your parents don't have any money, that's when you decide to come, to help them.

David Ceja's father, also named David, on the family farm of 13 hectares in the village of Bernabe, on the Ejido Almanza, near Martinez de la Torre.

In the ranches where we lived, coyotes would come by offering to take us north. I was 18 years old when I left in 1999. When we started thinking about coming to the US, we couldn't see how to come up with the money we needed. We'd look at what we had and it did add up to much. My parents sold four cows and ten hectares for the money to get to the border. Then I walked across the river from Tamaulipas to Texas, and walked through the mountains for two days and three nights.

The coyote cost $1200. I couldn't find work for three months. I was desperate and afraid of what would happen if I couldn't pay. I had to stay and work in Texas until I paid him off, and then some friends told me to go to North Carolina to harvest tobacco. In Veracruz we'd heard there was a slaughterhouse there. While I was working in the tobacco friends gave me a hand and I was hired. They all come from the area near where I lived in Martinez de la Torre. Lots of people from Veracruz worked at Smithfield.

Guadalupe Marroquin

I grew up on a ranch in La Choapas, in Veracruz. Our family grew rice and corn, and sold pigs when the price was high. But prices were usually low, and my father complained that when the crops were harvested the prices always fell. Whenever we thought we could get ahead, the prices would fall.

Later I worked on a rubber plantation. I was never able to go to school, because we didn't have any money. I got married in 1981, and my husband and I worked in the fields. We had a small piece of land, and we'd raise corn, cows and pigs. Sometimes we could get a good price, but mostly we couldn't. My four kids were born in the 1980s. I didn't want them to be illiterate. I could read and write a little, but I wanted something better for them, so I began to put them through school.

Approaching the border wall near Tecate.

In 2000, my oldest girl started college. She took the exam to get a subsidy for low-income families, but that wasn't enough. Plus, I had the other kids getting older too. My goal was to get them all through school.

So I came to the US with a coyote. I took a bus, first to Mexico City, and then to Naco, Sonora. We spent three days in an empty house, sleeping on the floor, men and women together. I didn't know any of them, and I was worried by all the stories I'd heard about women getting raped and robbed. We were all waiting for the coyote to get enough people together for the trip.

Then one afternoon he took us down into a ravine. We climbed into a pipe, crawling on hands and knees, one person behind the next. The pipe was only about four feet around, with sewage running at the bottom.

We crossed in the sewers that run between Naco, Sonora and Naco, Arizona. I was very scared, but I needed to make it across. It was very dark, and the coyote warned us not to go off to the side or we'd get lost. I prayed to the saints. I dreamed before we left that I was stopped by themigra, but when I showed him my saint, he let me pass. It cost me $2000 to cross the line.

I arrived in Lumberton, North Carolina, on a Saturday, went to mass and gave thanks to God on Sunday, and went to work in the fields on Monday. With the first money I made in the States I bought a saint and gave him to the church there. A lot of people from my town live in Lumberton. They helped me get here, gave me a place to stay, and told me about the job at Smithfield. I bought identification from friends, and went down and applied for a job there.

On the line, I worked on cutting out the liver and heart. It was very hard, and I had to learn how to use the knife. The line went very fast, and when the knife was dull, the work was very difficult.

David Ceja

I worked at Smithfield for seven years. I went to work on the stomach line, and after eight months they put me on the loin line, making 8.25 an hour. They just put us on the line and we had to learn fast. The loin line had a lot of problems, and they pressured us to work fast.

Our supervisor began shouting at us, and using gross insults. Then he put another person into our work area, and there wasn't enough room for us all. It was dangerous because the line moves so fast, and we were going to cut him, or cut ourselves. When we protested to the supervisor, he began yelling at us for not doing a good job. When he called out to me, he used a bad word, instead of my name. We protested to the Human Relations department, but they never did anything.

The supervisor said, “If you don't want to do your job, the door is really big,” meaning, go look for another job. We said they were treating us like burros, like slaves. But this isn't a job for aburro. So we agreed that we'd stop the line. We'd done it before, but it hadn't changed anything. The line slowed for a week, but then they started speeding it up again. We didn't know anything about the law, but I told my friends that I knew people who could help us, from the union. People were scared to talk with them. But I said they knew what we could do. There were people working with the union who'd been workers inside the plant too.

Two aunts of David Ceja sell tortillas in their home on the Ejido Almanza in Veracruz.

We had meetings in a field near San Pablo. They suggested writing a letter first, so we put all our complaints into it. We asked for better safety because the way we were working was very dangerous, due to the speed of the line. The majority of people on our line signed, about 80 people.

We took the letter to HR at break time. Some were afraid, but I told them, if you're afraid all the time, nothing will happen. They'll just keep treating us like slaves. We were shaking when we got to the office, but we explained the purpose of the letter. The managers said they'd give us an answer in a week or two.

Two weeks later they chose ten people and took us to HR. They asked who had helped us with the letter. I said we'd written it. Finally they said they'd slow the line down. The next week we were really happy, but after two or three weeks, they speeded it up again. That's when I told my friends, we need a union. We needed an organization to support us.

I'm glad it came in. We worked hard to get it.

Guadalupe Marroquin

I worked on the line for nine years. Then I got a letter from Motor Vehicles that said that my license was no good. I got very scared because there had been raids, and people were being fired because they didn't have good IDs. So I quit my job before something worse happened to me.

Miguel and Zoila Huerta were among the first immigrants from Veracruz to North Carolina. Through years of hard work, they put their son through university in Mexico.

Lots of people from Mexico have lost their jobs here, and many have been deported. Others get arrested for drunk driving or domestic problems, and then are picked up and deported too. Sometimes the migra goes to the apartment houses where we live and rounds people up. There are not nearly as many Mexicans living here as there used to be. People have moved to other states, with their whole families. Some restaurants have even closed.

But I have faith in God, and I still need the money to send home for my children. I've been here for 11 years, and when it's their birthdays or Christmas, we just talk on the telephone. I feel very sad and alone on the holidays. But I've fulfilled my commitment. I came to help my children, and with faith I can do it.

Now I work in a restaurant, making tacos for workers. They call me Doña Lupe de los Tacos. Since I came here I've never been without money. When someone gets deported, their family often will ask me to help pay their bills. Unemployment went up because of the raids, so we have a lot of collections to help those families.

So far the authorities haven't bothered me. But many of my friends believe they act in a very unjust way towards us. Everyone has come here like me, sacrificing a lot.

David Ceja

I became a supervisor also, but they wanted me to put pressure on the workers. I asked to go back to being a regular worker, but they said there was no other job for me. They said, “There's the door, you can leave.” I came from the line. I know what it's like. I know what your body feels like when it's tired. If workers say they can't do it, then they can't, so I couldn't just force them to work faster.

A farmer waits to meet with a coyote in a park in Xalapa, Veracruz.

Then the company began to hire more white and black people. I don't have anything against them. We all need to work. But the company wanted them producing right away, and expected me to put pressure on them. The managers just wanted me to make them work.

During this time the migra arrived. I don't know if the company had an agreement with ICE, but they came before the union election, and they scared the people. When someone was called into the office, they were afraid and sometimes just went home instead.

The big raids happened while I was on vacation. When I came back, people just weren't there. Workers said supervisors had sent them up to the office where the migra was waiting, and they never came back. Then managers began to tell me to send such and such a person to the office. I'd tell the worker, go if you want, but if you don't want to, go home, because the migra might be there waiting for you.

Band members of the Mexican group, Flammaso Musical, practice after work in a shed outside of Red Springs. Almost all are immigrants from Veracruz.

They wanted me to send workers to the office where I was afraid the immigration agents would be waiting for them. I thought it was better for me to leave, so I wouldn't have to turn in mycompañeros. These big companies always want people to be scared, so that they can keep control. That's why there's so much intimidation. Once people unite, the company starts to tremble, so they say, the migra's coming, or they're going to check your papers. The company attitude is, you're here to work, so just go to work.

The company knew we didn't have papers. They need the workers, and we need the work. If the government would give us permission to work things would be much better. We'd have labor rights. But we had to buy papers in order to work. I bought my papers for $700, ten years ago.

It's really because of the economic crisis that we're here — all the Veracruzanos. It's the poverty and recruits us. We all had to leave Veracruz because of it. Otherwise, we wouldn't do something so hard. But I never let them humiliate me. I always fought for my rights.

David Ceja's sister-in-law rocks a baby to sleep on the family's farm in Veracruz.

The Story of Fausto Limon

Fausto Limon is a farmer in the Perote Valley in Veracruz, where Smithfield Foods and its subsidiary, Granjas Carroll de Mexico, have built a complex of hog farms. He, his family and neighbors have organized a movement to stop environmental contamination and the further expansion of the farms.

My family has been living in the municipio of Perote for generations. My ancestors were landowners, and they had a big hacienda in Alchichica, where they built a church that's unique, different from all the rest in Mexico.

My great-grandfathers went off to fight with Pancho Villa during the Revolution. Then, even before the land reform came, they divided up the hacienda into small parcels. My grandfather then bought his own ranch, where we live today, called Rancho Riego. My father built a stone house here during the 1950s. He was very taken with modern ideas about design and construction, and there's nothing like it. It's made of stone.

Today we grow corn, beans, wheat, carrots, tomatoes, and tomatillos, at least we would if we had the money. That's what we used to grow. Today I hardly have enough money to plant a crop of beans, which is what we have in front of the house. We farm 38 hectares, which is enough to support a family. There were six of us, but there's only five now since my mom died of a kidney infection.

Before the granjas (the pig farms) came, they said that they would bring jobs. But then we found out the reality, the way things really are. Yes, there were jobs, but they also brought a lot of contamination.

The mill for hog feed owned by Granjas Carroll de Mexico near Perote. Local farmers demonstrated here against the expansion of the farms.

The granjas came in '94 and '95. What we experienced at first was the stench. The air smells like rotten meat. The wind has a chemical smell. I can't really describe how bad it smells. At night we'd begin to vomit, and we'd get into my pickup truck and drive until we couldn't smell it any longer, and we'd all sleep in the truck.

Then the taste of the water from my well changed. We had very good water before, but everyone in my family began to suffer from kidney infections. Two and a half months ago we went to a doctor who told us we should stop drinking the well water. We began to drink bottled water. Since then we haven't had to take any more medicine for our kidneys. Before that we were taking it every fifteen or twenty days.

The Church of San Antonio Alchichica in Perote Valley.

There are a lot of flies now. Some time ago we also had a lot of savage dogs, who were attracted by the dead bodies of pigs from the farms. They'd just bury them right below the surface of the earth, and the dogs would dig them up. There were many of them. We were raising ostriches, and they killed five of the six we had on the ranch.

Once people began to understand the reality, we began to hold meetings and form a group, Pueblos Unidos, to defend what is ours. I was one of the first people, because I was living in the middle of it all. The reason for the protests was the stench, and the pollution in the air, the ground, and in the aquifers. In the area where I live, the water table is about 8 meters below the surface now. When they dig the holes for their oxidation ponds, they don't use a membrane or filter, so what's in the pond travels into the aquifer. The ponds are as deep as the level of our aquifers.

A farmer herds his goats near a GCM hog shed, where the smell and flies are omnipresent.

In 2003-4 they bought land near my own farm. The company bought land fromejidos [collectives formed during the land reform] mostly, and some from small farmers. When they announced they were expanding the unit there, the people got together, and we wouldn't let them build it. Earlier there'd been an expansion in Totalco, and people stopped it from expanding there also.

We sat in and blocked the highway, because they were beginning their expansion plans again for the farm next to my ranch. We actually let cars through, but we slowed them down. There were more than a thousand of us. We had an effect, because it stopped the construction of more farms.

A farmer in the Perote Valley.

We also collected signatures, and sent appeals to government authorities, but to this day we've never received any real answers. There was a meeting with the authorities from Puebla and Veracruz in Chichicuautla. At that meeting we signed an agreement, but the company went on functioning and treating us as they always had.

Now they're saying again they're going to expand. We'll see what the people decide to do. The municipal president in Guadalupe Victoria in Puebla wants to give the company permission to do it. At a meeting with the sub-secretary of administration for the state of Puebla, people told me that she said the company was going to expand no matter what.

The people are saying now that they're not going to let the company put in more farms. I don't know exactly what they will do, but if they say they won't let the company build more granjas, then for sure they won't let it happen.

Our back is to the wall. I'm glad to see the people waking up to the pollution here. You don't need to be a scientist or doctor to smell the stench or see how it's filtering into our water and earth. The authorities and the company say they're not polluting. But everyone here can see it. When they say the pollution is not getting into the water, no one believes it.

Fausto Limon looks through the petitions and legal documents used by local towns to try to stop expansion of the hog sheds.

There was a lot of pig growing here before the granjas. We used our pigs as kind of a savings account, and because we could feed them the corn we were already growing. They were something we could sell if we needed money. But now there's very little.

You have to vaccinate pigs so they don't get sick, three times for different illnesses. When the big farms came, they stopped selling the medicine, and lots of our pigs died. The medicine's not available here anymore. They don't sell it.

Fausto Limon worries about his home and his farm.

Once one of the people working at the granja told me I should get rid of my pigs, and they'd give me sheep to raise instead. But to this day I've never seen a sheep from them. I'm probably a sheep for believing him.

Many people have left for other countries. It's also because of the lack of jobs here. People leave in groups, and invite others to go with them — groups of three, four, even ten people. They risk crossing the border without documents, and many lose their lives. It's a big problem, and getting even bigger.

The home built by Fausto Limon's father, using local stone in a combination of traditional Mexican and bauhaus styles.

We all want the company to leave. We don't want it here and we don't see any other solution.

The Story of Keith Ludlum and Terry Slaughter

Keith Ludlum and Terry Slaughter are two slaughterhouse workers who helped organize the union at the Smithfield Foods plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. They tell the story of the way African American, white and Mexican immigrant workers were able to find common ground in that campaign, and how the company used immigration enforcement to try to defeat them.

Keith Ludlum

When I was 22, I heard about this new hog plant, and went and applied. They put me in the livestock department, right in the belly of the beast. It was a real shock — seeing how workers were treated. I saw hogs fall on people, and then the supervisors doing everything to get the hog back on the line. They were more concerned with the hogs then with the people. A dead animal was more valuable than a live human being.

Keith Ludlum is president of UFCW Local 1208.

Most people working there were African American. I never thought of myself as better than anyone. My dad came from poor rural North Carolina. He taught me, we're all the same. Treat people how you want to be treated. Work hard and you'll be rewarded for hard work. I had no idea what unions were. Like most people in the south, most of my ideas about unions came from the companies I worked for, which were very anti-union.

Then an older African American guy, a humble spirit, broke his leg. The next day when I came in he was in the break room with his leg in a cast on crutches. He said they told him that if he didn't come in to work he'd be fired. The supervisor wouldn't even let him park near the place where he worked in the plant — those places were just for management. That's when I knew I wouldn't keep working under those conditions. One of the ladies invited to a union meeting in Lumberton and I went.

Nilsa Morales was injured and then terminated at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel.

I knew what they were doing to people was wrong. And the only fix that I could see was the union. So I took union cards into the plant. I thought the law would protect me, and if I lost my job, it wasn't the end of the world. I was naive. Now that I'm older, I know corporations don't care about the law, but I was young. I thought, Americans believe in the law and everyone has to obey it.

After three weeks, I had most of livestock signed up. But other workers told me the supervisors were watching me. Then they started writing me up. Finally they called me in. They had the regional guy in charge of all the farms, the livestock manager, and the assistant plant superintendent all in there to fire me. The livestock manager knew what he was doing was wrong. He couldn't even look at me. I looked up at him and said, “You can't hold it against someone for trying to make things better.” They walked me out, and when we got to the lobby there were two deputies standing there to escort me to my car.

I said to myself, “You picked the wrong m__________r.” And that started a 12-year fight. That was 1994.

Terry Slaughter

I was born in Georgia, but we moved to New York City when I was 10. My wife's family was from North Carolina, and after we got married she decided to move down here. I didn't want to leave the city life, but finally I decided it was time to grow up.

Terry Slaughter is secretary-treasurer of UFCW Local 1208.

When I came down here, it was the first time I had a regular job, where I was paid by the hour. Before, I was never paid on the books. At first I worked at a Black & Decker factory on the line. In 2002, after three years, I came to Smithfield. It was a whole new world.

I started in the livestock department, taking animals off the truck. I was scared of the hogs the first week. I called them pigs. They told me, they're not pigs. That's a city name. The plant was killing 32,000 hogs a day. In eight years there was never a day they didn't have hogs.

If a hog gets crippled or falls, someone has to pick it up. They weigh 400 pounds. You have to push it into a barrel, and if you're a man, they say, you do it by yourself. With all the walking and carrying hogs, I lost 75 pounds the first year I was there.

Lorenzo Reed, a worker at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, in the parking lot in Dillon, South Carolina, where workers wait for vans to take them to their jobs. It takes hours to get there.

At first I liked it. Then, in 2005, reality set in. I started seeing the way management was treating the employees. Hogs would run over a worker and managers would move the person to the side so they could keep the animals moving. The hogs were more important than the people. But what could I do? One person alone couldn't do anything.

In July 2006, I heard people start talking about forming a union. That was what I was waiting for. I knew about unions in New York. Some were skeptics and some were scared. But I thought, if we don't stand for something, we won't count for anything.

One morning, it was almost 100 degrees outside. Keith and a couple of others went to get water from the cooler, but it was hot and had ants in it. We said, “We're not going to work if we don't have clean and cold water.” So 25 of us got some chairs and we sat in the middle of the barn. We crossed our arms and said, “We're not going to do anything until we get what we deserve.” For eight hours we did nothing.

Vanessa McCloud, a worker at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. On the wall behind her are portraits of Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X.

The supervisors started to go crazy. When livestock stops, the rest of the plant does too since it doesn't have any more hogs on the line. The hog trucks were lined up at the gate, and the animals were dying from heat in the trucks. When they started losing money and realized we weren't going back to work, supervisors tried to run the hogs themselves. But they couldn't do it. They'd never done that work before.

I thought for sure we were going to get fired. But they realized they weren't going to be able to produce if we weren't working. The very next day we got clean and cold water. That's when I knew we had a chance. From there it snowballed.

Keith Ludlum

I won at the labor board, and all the appeals later in court. Finally, they reinstated me in 2006. By then the whole community knew what was happening. By the time I came back there were only a few people in livestock who remembered me. I wore a Justice at Smithfield shirt when I went back in, and even had my company ID photo taken with the shirt on.

The first day I started asking people to sign cards. Some people thought I had the plague, but other people were really excited. I always let the company throw the first punch, but I always hit them harder, and workers saw that. You can't show any kind of weakness or make any mistakes. So we slowly built a core group in livestock. That department controls the whole plant. Terry and some of the others joined. They started believing, and we started doing actions in the plant.

Julio Vargas led a walkout among Smithfield's subcontracted cleaning workers for higher wages and safer working conditions. He was later fired.

By then there were a lot of immigrants in the plant. After Smithfield ran through the workforce around here, you started seeing a lot more immigrants working in the plant. The company thought the undocumented would work cheap, work hard, and they wouldn't complain. It happened very quickly, and there wasn't an established community here before Someone made a personal effort to get the workforce here. The company had to make that happen.

I went back in July of 2006, and the walkout over the firings happened in November 2006. At first African Americans and others viewed the firings as just a Latino problem, but during the walkout I tried to explain that it was a worker problem. People are just trying to earn a living and raise a family. The company took advantage of them, and then made them pay the price.

Rose Marie Rodriguez was injured on the job at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, and then fired.

They'd fired 50 or 70 people, and they said more were coming. People were panicked. They knew they were going to be next. Were they going to wait, or do something about it? That's when they said, “Let's shut them down.” It was really empowering to see all those workers stand up together. We just took over the parking lot. We had total control. When you've got enough people, nothing can stop you.

We were trying to buy some time for people, and the company agreed to extend the time by two months. It was the best we could do, but it did show people we can change the way the company makes a decision.

A Smithfield worker studies English in a class organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers.

The next February ICE hit this area again, and Eduardo and I followed them around with cameras. With cameras on them, ICE would handle going into people's houses differently. You could tell they were mad at us, and kept trying to push us back. They surrounded one trailer, and turned off the power to try to smoke the people out. It was a hundred and some degrees, and the air conditioning was cut off. There were children in there.

But you could see that staying just wasn't worth it to people, and they were going to move on. They didn't know if they were going to be arrested, or how their family might be split up.

Terry Slaughter

If you're a good worker, they should let you work. Granted, you're supposed to be documented. We know that. But this was a tactic by Smithfield at the time when we were trying to get the union in. That was a dirty low blow. If you were undocumented, the company knew. They knew who they were hiring.

They wanted people to believe that the union had called ICE on the people, so we'd lose the Latino vote. I would say a vast majority of the Latino workers were a yes vote for the union. But people were scared if they were undocumented. If I was undocumented, I wouldn't want to be out in front either.

There were more Native Americans and African Americans coming into the workforce at that time. I don't think the change in the workforce made a big difference by the time of the election. The union won because it was time.

A Smithfield worker signs a union card in the parking lot in Dillon, South Carolina, where workers wait for vans to take them to their jobs.

Keith Ludlum

I think there had to have been cooperation [between ICE and the company]. The company wants someone they can exploit - the dream employee. You were supposed to come to work, take whatever they paid you and however they treated you, and if you didn't keep your mouth shut you should go back home. It was a perfect employee for a corporation, other than a slave.

But I'm sure the company saw these people were getting organized. The workforce in the shadows was uniting, expecting rights, expecting to be part of the community. That's not what the company wanted. It wasn't going to be a workforce anymore that would be quiet and obedient.

Everildo Lopez, a worker who was injured at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, and then fired.

For a while relationships between Latinos and African Americans were strained. Some African Americans thought Latinos were taking jobs they could do, and keeping the wages down. But there was also a sense of envy after Latino workers walked out over the firings, and showed their power. Many started saying, we need to do something, and started demanding the MLK holiday. The following year Smithfield named MLK an official holiday for the whole company. People started building bridges, standing together.

Everyone saw the power of that unity in the walkout. But it was something people did out of necessity. Afterwards, they had to start getting ready to leave. It would have been different if we'd been able to stop the terminations permanently. That would have made a difference. Once people started leaving, it broke up those core groups that made things happen. The damage had been done to the immigrant population, and the undocumented started leaving, getting away from the hotspot. You can't blame them. Who wants to get arrested, with your kids waiting to be picked up? Immigrants have that extra fear. We all have to worry about being fired. They have to worry also about being arrested, separated from their families and deported.

Carolina and her sister stay at the house of Everildo Lopez, an injured Smithfield worker.

The company terminated me again in 2007. They wanted me out of there. So I worked for the union on the campaign here. After we won the election in 2008, we always wanted the union here to be run by workers from the plant. It's got to be people who live here, not just someone for whom it's a job. I've been a member of the local since it was chartered in 2009, so I ran for President after the first contract had been negotiated.

The union has been able to improve the wages, even though we've been in the worst recession since the depression. Thirty people who were fired unjustly are back on the job with back pay. To me that's enough — firing is like a death. People in this country are two paychecks away from being homeless. The company can't fire people for getting hurt the way they did before, and we can time the lines and slow them down.

When the union made the agreement with the company for the election, they had to agree that I couldn't go anywhere near the plant. I couldn't even be on the grass on the roadway outside. Now I'm the local president.

Ronnie Simmons, a worker and leader of the union organizing effort at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel. Today, she's a member of the executive board of UFCW Local 1208.

Terry Slaughter

Relations between Latinos and African Americans today are great. When you look at the culture in the plant today, everyone's together. Supervisors can't yell at you — no more. They can't downgrade you — no more. It used to be that if you said anything you got fired — no more.

Between all the shop stewards and elected officers, there's over a hundred of us. When we speak, plus the five thousand people who work there, you hear a roar. When it's a few of us together, we're a force. But when it's all of us together, we're a union.

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, now known as Type Investigations, with support from The Puffin Foundation.

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Roberto Ortega tried to make a living slaughtering pigs in Veracruz, Mexico. “In my town, Las Choapas, after I killed a pig, I would cut it up to sell the meat,” he recalls. But in the late 1990s, after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) opened up Mexican markets to massive pork imports from US companies like Smithfield Foods, Ortega and other small-scale butchers in Mexico were devastated by the drop in prices. “Whatever I could do to make money, I did,” Ortega explains. “But I could never make enough for us to survive.” In 1999 he came to the United States, where he again slaughtered pigs for a living. This time, though, he did it as a worker in the world's largest pork slaughterhouse, in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

His new employer? Smithfield — the same company whose imports helped to drive small butchers like him out of business in Mexico.

David Ceja, another immigrant from Veracruz who wound up in Tar Heel, recalls, “Sometimes the price of a pig was enough to buy what we needed, but then it wasn't. Farm prices were always going down. We couldn't pay for electricity, so we'd just use candles. Everyone was hurting almost all the time.”

Ceja remembers that his family had ten cows, as well as pigs and chickens, when he was growing up. Even then, he still had to work, and they sometimes went hungry. “But we could give milk to people who came asking for it. There were people even worse off than us,” he recalls.

In 1999, when Ceja was 18, he left his family's farm in Martinez de la Torre, in northern Veracruz. His parents sold four cows and two hectares of land, and came up with enough money to get him to the border. There he found a coyote who took him across for $1,200. “I didn't really want to leave, but I felt I had to,” he remembers. “I was afraid, but our need was so great.”

He arrived in Texas, still owing for the passage. “I couldn't find work for three months. I was desperate,” he says. He feared the consequences if he couldn't pay, and took whatever work he could find until he finally reached North Carolina. There friends helped him get a real job at Smithfield's Tar Heel packinghouse. “The boys I played with as a kid are all in the US,” he says. “I'd see many of them working in the plant.”

North Carolina became the number-one US destination for Veracruz's displaced farmers. Many got jobs at Smithfield, and some, like Ortega and Ceja, helped lead the sixteen-year fight that finally brought in a union there. But they paid a high price. Asserting their rights also made them the targets of harsh immigration enforcement and a growing wave of hostility toward Mexicans in the American South.

The experience of Veracruz migrants reveals a close connection between US investment and trade deals in Mexico and the displacement and migration of its people. For nearly two decades, Smithfield has used NAFTA and the forces it unleashed to become the world's largest packer and processor of hogs and pork. But the conditions in Veracruz that helped Smithfield make high profits plunged thousands of rural residents into poverty. Tens of thousands left Mexico, many eventually helping Smithfield's bottom line once again by working for low wages on its US meatpacking lines. “The free trade agreement was the cause of our problems,” Ceja says.

Smithfield Goes to Mexico — and Migrants Come Here

In 1993 Carroll Foods, a giant hog-raising corporation, partnered with a Mexican agribusiness enterprise to set up a huge pig farm known as Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) in Veracruz's Perote Valley. Smithfield, which had a longtime partnership with Carroll Foods, bought the company out in 1999.

So many migrants from Veracruz have settled in North Carolina and the South that they name markets for their home state. Because of ferocious anti-immigrant laws, however, many businesses have lost customers as immigrants flee the state.

By 2008 the Perote operation was sending close to a million pigs to slaughter every year — 85 percent to Mexico City and the rest to surrounding Mexican states. Because of its location in the mountains above the city of Veracruz, Mexico's largest port, the operation could easily receive imported corn for feed, which makes up two-thirds of the cost of raising hogs. NAFTA lifted the barriers on Smithfield's ability to import feed. This gave it an enormous advantage over Mexican producers, as US corn, heavily subsidized by US farm bills, was much cheaper. “After NAFTA,” says Timothy Wise, of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, US corn “was priced 19 percent below the cost of production.”

But Smithfield didn't just import feed into Mexico. NAFTA allowed it to import pork as well.

According to Alejandro Ramírez, general director of the Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork in 1995, the year after NAFTA took effect. By 2010 pork imports, almost all from the United States, had grown more than twenty-five times, to 811,000 tons. As a result, pork prices received by Mexican producers dropped 56 percent. US pork exports are dominated by the largest companies. Wise estimates that Smithfield's share of this export market is significantly greater than its 27 percent share of US production.

Imported pork had a dramatic effect on Mexican jobs. “We lost 4,000 pig farms,” Ramírez estimates, based on reports received by the confederation from its members. “On Mexican farms, each 100 animals produce five jobs, so we lost 20,000 farm jobs directly from imports. Counting the five indirect jobs dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000 jobs in total.”

“That produces migration to the US or to Mexican cities,” Ramírez charges.

Corn imports also rose, from 2 million to 10.3 million tons from 1992 to 2008. “Small Mexican farmers got hit with a double whammy,” Wise explains. “On the one hand, competitors were importing pork. On the other, they were producing cheaper hogs.” Smithfield was both producer and importer. Wise estimates that this one company supplies 25 percent of all the pork sold in Mexico.

The increases in pork and corn imports were among many economic changes brought about by NAFTA and concurrent neoliberal reforms to the Mexican economy, such as ending land reform. Companies like Smithfield benefited from these changes, but poverty increased also, especially in the countryside.

In a 2005 study for the Mexican government, the World Bank found that the extreme rural poverty rate of 35 percent in 1992-94, before NAFTA, jumped to 55 percent in 1996-98, after NAFTA took effect — the years when Ortega and Ceja left Mexico. This could be explained, the report said, “mainly by the 1995 economic crisis, the sluggish performance of agriculture, stagnant rural wages, and falling real agricultural prices.”

By 2010, according to the Monterrey Institute of Technology, 53 million Mexicans were living in poverty-half the country's population. About 20 percent live in extreme poverty, almost all in rural areas.

The growth of poverty, in turn, fueled migration. In 1990, 4.5 million Mexican-born people lived in the United States. A decade later, that population had more than doubled to 9.75 million, and in 2008 it peaked at 12.67 million. About 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa; another 7 million couldn't but came nevertheless.

As an agricultural state, Veracruz suffered from Mexico's abandonment of two important policies, which also helped fuel migration. First, neoliberal reforms did away with Tabamex, a national marketing program for small tobacco farmers. A similar program for coffee growers ended just as world coffee prices plunged to record lows. Second, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the country's corrupt president, pushed through changes to Article 27 of the Constitution in 1992, dismantling land reform and allowing the sale of ejidos, or common lands, as private property.

Waves of tobacco and coffee farmers sold their land because they could no longer make a living on it. Many became migrants. But allowing the sale of ejidos to foreigners made it possible for Carroll Foods to buy land for its swine sheds. Displaced farmers then went to work in those sheds at low wages.

Simultaneous changes in the United States also accelerated migration. The Immigration Reform and Control Act, passed by Congress in 1986, expanded the existing H2-A visa program, creating the current H2-A program, which allows US agricultural employers to bring in workers from Mexico and other countries, giving them temporary visas tied to employment contracts. Growers in North Carolina became large users of the program, especially through the North Carolina Growers Association. Landless tobacco farmers from Veracruz became migrant tobacco workers in the Carolinas.

“Many Veracruzanos came because we were offered work in the tobacco fields, where we had experience,” remembers Miguel Huerta. “Then people who'd been contracted just stayed, because they didn't have anything in Mexico to go back to. After the tobacco harvest, workers spread out to other industries.”

From Huerta's perspective, “these companies are very powerful. They can go to Mexico and bring as many employees as they want and replace them when they want.” Poverty, though, was the real recruiter. It created, as Ceja says, the need. “We all had to leave Veracruz because of it,” he emphasizes. “Otherwise, we wouldn't do something so hard.”

Exporting the Hazards of Corporate Hog Raising

Hog raising is a dirty business — and the environmental damage it creates has provoked rising opposition to Smithfield's operations within US borders. In Virginia in 1997, federal judge Rebecca Smith imposed the largest federal pollution fine to that date — $12.6 million — on the company for dumping pig excrement into the Pagan River, which runs into Chesapeake Bay. That year the state of North Carolina went further, passing a moratorium on the creation of any new open-air hog waste lagoons and a cap on production at its Tar Heel plant. In 2000 then-State Attorney General Mike Easley forced Smithfield to fund research by North Carolina State University to develop treatment methods for hog waste that are more effective than open lagoons. Despite North Carolina's well-known hostility to regulating business, in 2007 Easley (by then governor) made the moratorium permanent. In the face of public outcry over stench and flies, even the anti-regulation industry association, the North Carolina Pork Council, supported it.

Fausto Limon looks at his bean plants, knowing they need more fertilizer, but lacking the money to buy it.

In Mexico's Perote Valley, however — a high, arid, volcano-rimmed basin straddling the states of Veracruz and Puebla — Smithfield could operate unburdened by the environmental restrictions that increasingly hampered its expansion in the United States. Mexico has environmental standards, and NAFTA supposedly has a procedure for requiring their enforcement, but no complaint was ever filed against GCM or Smithfield under NAFTA's environmental side agreement. Carolina Ramirez, who heads the women's department of the Veracruz Human Rights Commission, concluded bitterly that “the company can do here what it can't do at home.”

For local farmers like Fausto Limon, the hog operation was devastating. On some warm nights his children would wake up and vomit from the smell. He'd put his wife, two sons and daughter into his beat-up pickup, and they'd drive away from his farm until they could breathe without getting sick. Then he'd park, and they'd sleep in the truck for the rest of the night.

Limon and his family all had painful kidney ailments for three years. He says they kept taking medicine until finally a doctor told them to stop drinking water from the farm's well. Last May they began hauling in bottled water. Once they stopped drinking from the well, the infections stopped.

Less than half a mile from his house is one of the many pig farms built by Smithfield's Mexican hog-raising subsidiary, GCM. “Before the pig farms came, they said they would bring jobs,” Limon remembers. “But then we found out the reality. Yes, there were jobs, but they also brought a lot of contamination.”

David Torres, a Perote native who spent eight years in the operation's maternity section, estimates that GCM has eighty complexes, each with as many as 20,000 hogs. The sheds look clean and modern. “When I went to work there, I could see the company was completely mechanized,” he says. The Mexican News online business journal explains that “production cost is very low because of the high ratio of pigs to workers... The preparation of food and feeding of the pigs is completely automated, along with temperature control and the elimination of excrement.”

Workers aren't employed directly by Granjas Carroll, however, according to Torres. “Since we work for a contractor, we're not entitled to profit-sharing or company benefits,” he says. “Granjas Carroll made millions of dollars in profits, but never distributed a part of them to the workers,” as required under Mexico's federal labor law. Torres was paid 1,250 pesos ($90) every fifteen days; he says the company picked him up at 6 every morning and returned him home at 5:30 each evening, often six days a week.

In back of each complex is a large oxidation pond for the hogs' urine and excrement. A recent drive through the valley revealed that only one of several dozen was covered. “Granjas Carroll doesn't use concrete or membranes under their ponds,” Torres charges, “so the water table is getting contaminated. People here get their water from wells, which are surrounded by pig farms and oxidation ponds.” Ruben Lopez, a land commissioner in Chichicuautla, a valley town surrounded by hog farms, also says there is no membrane beneath the pools.

In response to an article published in August in Imagen de Veracruz, a Veracruz newspaper, GCM public relations director Tito Tablada Cortés declared, “Granjas Carroll does not pollute.” And Smithfield spokeswoman Amy Richards says, “Our environmental treatment systems in Mexico strictly comply with local and federal regulations…. Mexico encourages, and requires, anaerobic digesters and evaporation ponds.”

Yet despite the 1,200 jobs the pig farms created in a valley where employment is scarce, Limon estimates that a third of the young people have left. “They don't see a future, and every year it's harder to live here,” he says.

In 2004 a coalition of local farmers called Pueblos Unidos (United Towns) started collecting signatures for a petition to protest the expansion of the swine sheds. According to teacher Veronica Hernandez, students told her that going to school on the bus was like riding in a toilet. “Some of them fainted or got headaches,” she charges.

When expansion plans moved forward nonetheless, on April 26, 2005, hundreds of people blocked the main highway. That November a construction crew about to build another shed and oxidation pond was met by 1,000 angry farmers. Police had to rescue the crew. Finally, in 2007 GCM's Tablada Cortés signed an agreement with local towns blocking any new expansion. That year, however, the company filed criminal complaints against Hernandez and thirteen other leaders, charging them with “defaming” the company. Although the charges were eventually dropped, the farmers were intimidated and the protest movement diminished.

A local farmer declares that the people of the Perote Valley want the hog farms removed to protect the environment and health of the communities there.

Then, in early 2009, the first confirmed case of swine flu, the AH1N1 virus, was found in a 5-year-old boy, Édgar Hernández from La Gloria. Pickup trucks from the local health department began spraying pesticide in the streets to kill the omnipresent flies. Nevertheless, the virus spread to Mexico City. By May, forty-five people in Mexico had died. Schools closed, and public events were canceled.

Smithfield denied that the virus came from its Veracruz hogs, and Mexican officials were quick to agree. Tablada's note to Imagen de Veracruz asserted, “Our company has been totally cleared of any links with the AH1N1 virus,” and “the official position of the Secretary of Health and the World Health Organization leaves no room for doubt.” By one estimate, fear of the virus had led to losses of $8.4 million per day for the US pork industry for the first two weeks of the global scare. So meatpacking companies breathed a sigh of relief at Smithfield's exoneration. In the valley, though, “no one believed it,” Limon recalls.

This past August, GCM representatives received a permit from the municipal president of Guadalupe Victoria, the county next to Perote, for building new hog farms. Representatives of eighteen town councils have denounced the expansion plans and accuse state authorities of “threatening to use public force (the granaderos) so that the company can continue to expand, against our will.”

“It doesn't do any good to threaten to kill us,” responds one farmer. “We're not going to let them build any more sheds. We want GCM to leave the valley.”

Veracruzanos Fight for the Union in Tar Heel

As unrest grew in Veracruz, it was also growing among the company's workers in North Carolina. When the Tar Heel slaughterhouse opened in 1992, its labor force was made up mostly of African-Americans and local Lumbee Native Americans. Many objected to the high line speed and the injuries that proliferated as a result. The plant kills and dismembers 32,000 hogs every day. People stand very close together as animal carcasses speed by. They wield extremely sharp knives, slicing through sinews and bone in the same motion, hundreds of times each hour. Repetitive stress and other injuries are endemic to meatpacking, and the faster the line runs, the more injuries there are.

The workers' frustration with the low wages and brutal working conditions produced one of the longest and bitterest fights to organize a union in modern US labor history. In 1994 and 1997 the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) lost two union representation elections. The 1997 election was thrown out by the labor board, but an administrative law judge ruled that in both, Smithfield “engaged in egregious and pervasive unfair labor practices and objectionable conduct.” In 1997 police in riot gear lined the walkway into the plant, and workers had to file past them to cast their ballots. At the end of the vote count, union organizer Ray Shawn was beaten up. Security chief Danny Priest and the other guards were later deputized, and Smithfield maintained a holding cell in a trailer on the property, which workers called the company jail.

Even by standards in North Carolina, where union membership and wages are low, Smithfield's pay scale and reputation for injuries made it hard for the company to attract local workers. In the mid-'90s, Mexicans pushed by the effects of NAFTA to leave the Veracruz countryside began arriving in North Carolina and going to work at the Tar Heel slaughterhouse. All over Veracruz, meatpacking companies were recruiting them, according to Carolina Ramirez. “There were recruiters in many Veracruz towns,” she remembers. “There were even vans stationed in different places, and a whole system in which people were promised jobs in the packing plants. It was an open secret.” Richards, the Smithfield spokeswoman, denied that the company recruited workers in Mexico. “With one exception [a management trainee program], Smithfield Foods does not travel to, nor advertise in, other countries or outside of our local communities to actively recruit employees for our various facilities around the country,” she said.

Roberto Ortega remembers that there were hundreds of people from Veracruz in the Tar Heel plant when he worked there in the late '90s and early 2000s. They'd have community get-togethers, eat seafood and play their state's famous jarocho music on wooden harps and guitars. “Almost the whole town [of Las Choapas] is here,” he says. “Some are supervisors and mayordomos, and they bring people from the town.”

Keith Ludlum is president of UFCW Local 1208.

As new migrants, the Veracruzanos were desperate and hungry. Most were undocumented. According to Keith Ludlum, one of the plant's few white workers, “After Smithfield ran through the workforce around here, you started seeing a lot more immigrants working in the plant. The company thought the undocumented would work cheap, work hard, and they wouldn't complain.”

Ramirez describes the Veracruz immigrants as “docile at first, because they didn't have the experience.” For employers, she explains, “these people were a safe workforce. They didn't understand their rights, but they got the message — don't organize. They would work fast for fear of losing their jobs, because there was no alternative.”

“They pressured you so you'd work faster and produce more,” Ortega recalls. “You felt like knifing the foreman. Many wanted to throw their knives at his feet and just leave. But if you are the support of your family, you put up with it. I am not going to leave my work, you'd say to yourself — who will pay me then?”

Eventually, however, like the locals, the immigrants didn't put up with it either.

In the early 2000s the UFCW sent in a new group of organizers, who began helping workers find tactics to slow down the lines. They set up a workers' center in Red Springs, offering English classes after work. In 2003 the night cleaning crew refused to work, keeping the lines from starting the following morning. David Ceja helped organize another work stoppage a year later.

Ortega was fired in 2005. “Perhaps they saw us talking about this [the union] on our meal breaks, and they started to notice there is something going on with these people,” he says. “They never told me and I never knew why I was fired. They just said, As of today there is no more work for you.” He then began making visits to other workers.

By 2006 Mexicans made up about 60 percent of the plant's 5,000 employees. In April of that year, protests and demonstrations for immigrants' rights were spreading across the country, culminating in massive May Day rallies in dozens of cities. Hundreds left the Tar Heel plant and marched through the streets of Wilmington. On May Day only a skeleton crew showed up for work.

Abel Cervantes, a worker at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, was cut by a knife at work. At 20 years old, he can no longer use his hand or work.

That spring, Smithfield enrolled in the Department of Homeland Security's IMAGE program, in which the government identifies undocumented workers and employers agree to fire them. The program enforces a provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act called employer sanctions, which prohibits employers from hiring undocumented workers. Smithfield spokeswoman Richards says, “We do all that the law requires, and more, in assuring that our workforce is authorized to work in the US.”

In October 2006 the company announced that it intended to fire hundreds of workers suspected of being undocumented because they had bad Social Security numbers. When terminations started, 300 workers walked out and stopped production, temporarily forcing the company to rescind the firings.

Ludlum, who had just been rehired after a twelve-year legal battle, says, “It was really empowering to see all those workers stand up together — probably one of the best experiences of my life.” It had an effect on African-American workers too. They collected 4,000 signatures, asking the company for the day off on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. When managers refused, 400 black workers on the kill line didn't come in. With no hogs on the hooks at the beginning of the lines, no one else could work either. The plant shut down again.

Nine days later, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained twenty-one Smithfield workers for deportation, questioning hundreds more in the lunchroom. Fear was so intense that most immigrants didn't show up for work the following day. A few months later, another raid took place. Some of the detained workers were later charged with federal felonies for using bad Social Security numbers.

Meanwhile, ICE agents swept through Mexican communities, detaining people at home and in the street. Ludlum and union organizer Eduardo Peña followed the ICE agents with video cameras but couldn't stop the raids. Ludlum, Peña and other union activists believed the company had cooperated in the immigration enforcement because the Veracruzanos were no longer useful. “The workforce that was in the shadows was expecting rights, expecting to be part of the community,” Ludlum says. “That's not what the company wanted.”

Eventually, the crackdown took its toll, and the immigrant workforce shrank by half, as people left. Union organizing stalled. But then, in 2006, led by activist Terry Slaughter, African-American workers stopped the plant again by sitting all day in the middle of the kill floor. They put union stickers on their hard hats and began collecting signatures demanding union recognition. Spurred by widespread community support and the threat of lawsuits, the company agreed to an election without its old bare-knuckle tactics. When the ballots were finally counted on December 11 that year, the union had won. Today Ludlum is president of UFCW Local 1208, and Slaughter is secretary-treasurer.

Terry Slaughter is secretary-treasurer of UFCW Local 1208.

A Veracruzana, Carmen Izquierdo, sits on the union executive board. “In the union it doesn't matter if you're undocumented, if you have papers or not,” she says. “All the workers here, whether or not we have papers, have rights.” Ludlum and Slaughter say line speed is slower now, and workers can rotate from one job to another, reducing injuries. Ceja feels that the union gave workers a tool to change conditions. “I'm glad it came in. We worked hard to get it,” he says. But he was not there to enjoy the union's victory; he left after he was made a supervisor at the time of the raids. “They wanted me to send workers to the office, where I was afraid the immigration agents would be waiting for them,” he explains. “I thought it was better for me to leave, so I wouldn't have to turn in my compañeros.”

Others left because of fear, especially in the intensifying anti-immigrant climate in North Carolina. Roberto Ortega and his wife, Maria, left the state when the hostility got worse and they couldn't find work. Juvencio Rocha, head of the Network of Veracruzanos in North Carolina, says bitterly that “after we contributed to the economy, they didn't want us here anymore. They even took our driver's licenses away.”

Resisting the System on Both Sides of the Border

Smithfield didn't invent the system of displacement and migration. It took advantage of US trade and immigration policies, and of economic reforms in Mexico. In both countries, however, the company was forced to bend at least slightly in the face of popular resistance. Farmers in Perote Valley have been able to stop swine shed expansion, at least for a while. Migrant Veracruzanos helped organize a union in Tar Heel. Yet these were defensive battles against a system that needs the land and labor of workers but does its best to keep them powerless.

“From the beginning NAFTA was an instrument of displacement,” says Juan Manuel Sandoval, co-founder of the Mexican Action Network Against Free Trade. “The penetration of capital led to the destruction of the traditional economy, especially in agriculture. People had no alternative but to migrate.” Sandoval notes that many US industries are dependent on this army of available labor. “Meatpacking especially depends on a constant flow of workers,” he says. “Mexico has become its labor reserve.”

Raul Delgado Wise, a professor at the University of Zacatecas, charges that “rather than a free-trade agreement, NAFTA can be described as…a mechanism for the provision of cheap labor. Since NAFTA came into force, the migrant factory has exported [millions of] Mexicans to the United States.”

About 11 percent of Mexico's population lives in the United States, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Their remittances, which were less than $4 billion in 1994 when NAFTA took effect, rose to $10 billion in 2002, and then 
$20 billion three years later, according to the Bank of Mexico. Even in the recession, Mexicans sent home $21.13 billion in 2010. Remittances total 3 percent of Mexico's gross domestic product, according to Frank Holmes, investment analyst and CEO of US Global Investors. They are now Mexico's second-largest source of national income, behind oil.

However, Mexico's debt payments, mostly to US banks, consume the same percentage of the GDP as remittances. Those remittances, therefore, support families and provide services that were formerly the obligation of the Mexican government. This alone gives the government a vested interest in the continuing labor flow.

For Fausto Limon, the situation is stark: his family's right to stay in Mexico, on his ranch in the Perote Valley, depends on ending the problems caused by the operation of Granjas Carroll. But he has no money for planting, and he shares the poverty created by meat and corn dumping with farmers throughout Mexico. The trade system that allows this situation to continue will inevitably produce more migrants — if not Limon, then probably his children. The fabric of sustainable rural life at his Rancho del Riego is being pulled apart.

The border wall in the mountains west of Mexicali.

In both the United States and Mexico, many migrant rights networks believe that rational immigration reform must address issues far beyond immigration law enforcement in the United States: real reform must change the US trade policies that contribute to displacing people. Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, a professor at UCLA and former head of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, a group of indigenous Oaxacans living in Mexico and the United States, believes that in the United States “migrants need the right to work, but with labor rights and benefits.” In Mexico, “we need development that makes migration a choice rather than a necessity — the right to not migrate. Both rights are part of the same solution.”

There are some constructive proposals on the table. The TRADE Act, proposed in the 110th Congress by Maine Democratic Representative Mike Michaud, received support from many migrant rights groups because it would hold hearings to re-examine the impact of NAFTA, including provisions like the environmental side agreement that did nothing to restrict the impact of Granjas Carroll on Perote Valley. Another immigration reform proposal, called the Dignity Campaign, goes one step further. It would ban agreements that lead to displacement, like that caused by pork imports or the cross-border investments that created the Perote pig farms. It would also repeal employer sanctions, the immigration law that led to the firing of so many Veracruz migrants at the Tar Heel plant.

“Employer sanctions have little effect on migration,” says Bill Ong Hing, a law professor at the University of San Francisco, “but they have made workers more vulnerable to employer pressure. The rationale has always been that this kind of enforcement will dry up jobs for the undocumented and discourage them from coming. However, they actually become more desperate and take jobs at lower wages — in effect, a subsidy to employers.”

“When you make someone's status even more illegal,” Carolina Ramirez adds, “you just make their living and working conditions worse. Jobs become like slavery. And if there are no remittances, kids in Veracruz can't go to school or to the doctor. All the social problems we already have get worse. And all this just provokes more migration.”

The Dignity Campaign and similar proposals are not viable in a Congress dominated by Tea Party nativists and corporations seeking guest-worker programs. But as it took a civil rights movement to pass the Voting Rights Act, any basic change to establish the rights of immigrants will also require a social upheaval and a fundamental realignment of power.

The walkouts in Smithfield and the marches in the streets in 2006 show a deep desire among migrants for basic changes in their conditions and rights. In Perote Valley, farmers are equally determined to prevent the expansion of pig farms and the destruction of their environment. These organizing efforts are linked not just because they're carried on by people from the same state, facing the same transnational corporation. They're trying to change the same system.

“We are fighting because we are being destroyed,” says Roberto Ortega. “That is the reason for the daily fight, to try to change this.”

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, now known as Type Investigations and the Puffin Foundation. Some names of the people profiled in this article have been changed.

All photographs by David Bacon.

The post How US Policies Fueled Mexico’s Migration appeared first on Type Investigations.

If there's one experience that Mexicans have in common more than any other, more even than hatred and repudiation of the mutual violence of the narcos and the government, it's migration. In Oaxaca, 18 percent of its 3.7 million people have left for other parts of Mexico, and especially for the United States. Almost half its towns have shrunk, and migration has become part of the daily experience for almost every family.

I just spent three days listening to indigenous people here talk about it, in a unique organization that brings together people from both sides of the border, the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB).

Two things make this organization different from the average hometown association organized in the United States by people from the same Mexican village or state. It's not just an organization of the people who've left, but of those who still live in those hometowns as well. And while FIOB members spend a lot of time talking about their indigenous culture (languages like Mixteco, Zapoteco, and Triqui, and the dances, music, food, and history shared by people for hundreds of years before Columbus arrived in this hemisphere), their organization has very political goals.

The debates at the FIOB meeting, which lasted for two days in Oaxaca, revolved around two general rights. One is the right to migrate, and in particular the rights of Oaxacan indigenous migrants in the United States. The other is the right to not migrate — to stay home.

Naturally, the members of FIOB in California, where it was first organized and today has several offices, feel the attack on migrant rights strongly. They came to the meeting after debating and adopting probably the most advanced and progressive proposal for immigration reform made by any migrant organization in the United States.

Mexican members, who live mostly in Oaxaca (some of whom are also migrants within Mexico itself, principally in Baja California), came to talk about the right to not migrate. To implement this right, people need economic development that can make migration a voluntary choice, rather than one forced by poverty and desperation.

In Oaxaca, that discussion has moved from agitation and critique of failed government economic policies to expectations of concrete change. In state elections this year, the old ruling party, the PRI, lost the state's governorship for the first time in 75 years, to an unwieldy coalition of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the right-wing National Action Party (PAN). Gabino Cue became governor. He then appointed Rufino Dominguez, former binational coordinator of the FIOB, to head an office charged with defending the interests of migrants.

Obviously this changed the relationship between FIOB and the government dramatically. Instead of governors who arrested and attacked FIOB leaders, Cue's secretary for social development was on the stage as the assembly opened, reminding delegates of his long relationship with them.

But the real change wasn't ceremonial. Delegates from Oaxaca have high expectations that the new state government, and especially its migrant affairs office, will be able to move the right to not migrate from slogan to reality.

That's a tall order in one of the poorest states in Mexico. The Mexican federal government and its neoliberal, free-market, anti-labor policies set the parameters for economic development in this country, regardless of what states do. Nevertheless, farmers want some way to stay on their land, and to sell their crops for a price that can keep them going from one year to the next.

Many delegates I spoke with also want to raise organic crops, protect Oaxaca's corn (according to legend, the state is the historic home of corn cultivation) from genetic contamination, and undo the damage of deforestation. Oaxacan women are famous weavers, and indigenous artists and crafts people also see their production as a potential road out of the trap of forced migration.

Listening to the hundred-plus delegates trying to combine these related elements into a political program, and then into action capable of realizing even a part of it, was a moving experience. I don't think there is any other place in our two countries where a debate and discussion like this takes place — not among academics discussing migration, but among the people who live it as a daily reality.

FIOB is run by its members, supported by their dues and participation. I used to be an organizer for the United Electrical Workers, so the culture of rule by the rank-and-file and fighting for social change, feels very familiar. In fact, it's enough to make you believe that these aren't ideas or practices tied to any particular nationality or culture, but part of the best of human experience.

This year Gaspar Rivera Salgado, the first Mixtec professor in the United States (at UCLA), and one of the few delegates who was around when FIOB was organized 20 years ago, stepped down as its binational coordinator. While other positions were filled by Oaxacan migrants living in California, the new coordinator, Bernardo Ramirez, lives in the heart of the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. Ramirez worked five seasons in the fields of the United States, an experience he shares not only with almost every FIOB delegate, but with hundreds of thousands of others throughout this one state alone.

His election promises another big change. The center of gravity in FIOB is moving south into Mexico. That's not hard to understand. The change in Oaxaca's state government opens up new political possibilities, and it won't be a surprise if FIOB members are elected to state, and even national, office in the next few years.

Nevertheless, “the fact that one of its best recognized leaders [Rufino Dominguez] is now a government official doesn't mean that the organizations will simply obey the state government,” observed Arturo Cano, longtime journalist for the Mexican left-wing daily, La Jornada.

This change gives us a better chance to hear the voices of Mexicans as they debate what should be done about the principal phenomenon that draws our people together — their movement back and forth across the border. We need a Mexican voice from the left. For years FIOB has opposed guest worker programs and the exploitation of undocumented migrant labor. It has fought for the right of migrants to full political and labor rights in both countries.

But now people in the United States will also have the chance to hear Mexicans talk about their right to stay home. That means they will expect us to do more to oppose the measures designed on Wall Street (listen up, you Occupiers) that have enforced poverty on the indigenous people of Oaxaca's countryside. With three trade agreements approved in Congress just last week, that’s something we should be doing anyway, and not just for Mexicans or Colombians, but for Americans too.

For me, though, two days of political discourse have some added benefits. The pleasure of listening and interacting with FIOB is that along with the talk you get to eat mole, watch thedances of the Guelaguetza (and dance a little yourself) hear explanations of the pre-Hispanic codices, and share the sophisticated culture of these warm and engaging people.

The post Letter from Oaxaca appeared first on Type Investigations.

A special Federal District court convenes every day at 1 p.m. in Tucson. All the benches, even the jury box, are filled with young people whose brown skin, black hair and indigenous features are common in a hundred tiny towns in Oaxaca or Guatemala. Their jeans, T-shirts and cheap tennis shoes show the dirt and wear from the long trek through northern Mexico, three days walking across the desert, and nights sleeping at the immigration detention center on the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

Presiding over one court session in June, Judge Jennifer Guerin called these defendants before her in groups of eight. They walked up in tiny waddling steps, heavy chains binding their ankles and wrists to their waists, and sat. Judge Guerin recited a litany of questions, translated into Spanish through headphones. “You've been charged with illegal entry, a criminal offense...at trial you would have the subpoena power of the court...you have certain rights,” she intones. At the end she asks anyone who doesn't understand to stand up. No one does. She asks if they plead guilty. After a moment in which her question is translated, seventy voices mumble “Sí.”

Leaving the courtroom a young woman stumbles, eyes streaked with tears. A public defender tells the judge her feet are covered with blisters from walking through the wilderness. A boy no older than 13 or 14 searches the room with his eyes as he's led away, perhaps seeking a friend or relative. No one seems older than 30, and most are much younger. They are today's border crossers — the mostly indigenous youth of southern Mexico and Central America.

They all plead guilty to a federal criminal charge. Sentences run from time served to six months in a federal lockup run by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

According to the Spanish news agency EFE, this new court process, dubbed Operation Streamline, convicted 5,187 migrants between January 14 and June 10. Isabel Garcia, who heads Derechos Humanos, a leading immigrants' rights organization in southern Arizona, says the current daily quota of seventy chained defendants will soon be raised to 100 — fifty tried on one shift, fifty on another. Twenty-one new federal prosecutors will handle the surge, with CCA detention facilities to house it.

A new bureaucracy is growing rapidly, thanks to drastic changes in immigration law enforcement. In past decades, migrants were treated very differently when caught without papers. They were allowed to leave voluntarily or were deported after being found guilty of an administrative infraction, the equivalent of a parking ticket.

Today's migrants are being treated as criminals. The features pioneered in Tucson's courtroom — serious federal criminal charges, mass trials of defendants in chains and incarceration — are becoming standard features of immigration raids from Postville, Iowa, to Los Angeles. State laws supplement federal statutes, and federal, state and local authorities cooperate closely to bring a large variety of criminal charges against migrants.

The vast increase in workplace raids has gone hand in hand with a pressure campaign designed to win passage of an immigration reform package centered on guest-worker programs. In December 2006, 1,282 workers were detained by hundreds of heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in military garb at six Swift packinghouses. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters that raids would show Congress the need for “stronger border security, effective interior enforcement and a temporary-worker program.'' President Bush wants, Chertoff said, ”a program that would allow businesses that need foreign workers, because they can't otherwise satisfy their labor needs, to be able to get those workers in a regulated program.“ In July Chertoff explained to the New York Times, ”We are not going to be able to satisfy the American people on a legal temporary-worker program until they are convinced that we will have a stick as well as a carrot.“ His carrot is the prospect of massive contract labor programs for business. The sticks are the chains in the Tucson courtroom.

According to Garcia, each day's defendants are less than 10 percent of those picked up on the Arizona border. ”They're making an example of them to create a climate of fear,“ she charges. ”We are a laboratory. The model they're developing in Arizona is coming everywhere.“

Garcia's statements have made her a target of right-wing talk-radio hosts, who routinely urge listeners to call the county executive to get her fired from her job as a public defender. But her warnings proved prescient in Postville, where Tucson's assembly-line justice was transplanted virtually intact.

On May 12 ICE agents swooped down on workers at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant. Twenty minutes after the shift started, Maria Rosala Mejia Marroquin saw people running past the line where she stood cutting chicken breasts, shouting that la migra was in the plant. She ran too and tried to squeeze between huge boxes in a dark warehouse. ”Men came in with flashlights. One pointed a gun in my face, shouting, 'No one will escape!'“ she remembered. When she was interrogated, she told agents she had a daughter in childcare but lied to keep them from knowing where the baby sitter lived, fearing she'd be picked up as well. Agents finally strapped an electronic monitoring device onto her ankle, telling her she had to wait for a hearing.

Her brother Luz Eduardo was taken with 388 others to the National Cattle Congress, a livestock showground in Waterloo, two hours away. In a makeshift courtroom they went before a judge who'd helped prosecutors design Tucson-style plea agreements five months before the raid took place. In order to get a job at Agriprocessors, workers had given the company Social Security numbers that were either invented or belonged to someone else. The judge and prosecutor told workers they'd be charged with aggravated identity theft, which carries a two-year prison jolt, and held without bail. If they pleaded guilty to misusing a Social Security number, however, they would serve just five months and be deported immediately afterward.

”They told [my brother] if he signed the papers they'd deport him, but it was a lie,“ Mejia says. ”He didn't know he was agreeing to criminal charges, and now he's been in prison in Kansas for months.“ Translation into Spanish was provided, but according to Elida Tuchan, who was also arrested, about half the detainees speak only Cachiquel, an indigenous language from San Miguel Dueñas, their Guatemalan hometown. ”They felt terrorized, that everything was against them. They didn't understand anything about the process or their rights.“

Workplace raids have been sweeping the country. According to Secretary Chertoff, ”arrests in worksite cases have jumped from a total of 850 in 2004 to 4,940 last year, including 863 arrests based on criminal charges.“ From January 1 to May 31 alone, ICE arrested 3,000 people for immigration violations and 875 more on criminal charges.

On August 25 ICE agents raided a Howard Industries plant in Laurel, Mississippi, sending 481 workers to a privately run detention center in Jena, Louisiana, and releasing 106 women for ”humanitarian reasons,“ most in ankle bracelets. While workers taken to Jena weren't hustled before a judge, as they had been in Postville, a week after the raid they were still incarcerated, many with no idea where they were being held. ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez declined to say how much longer detention would last. Federal prosecutors charged eight with felony identity theft, and Gonzalez said criminal charges might be brought against the others.

Patricia Ice of the Mississippi Immigrants' Rights Alliance (MIRA) called the raid political. ”They want a mass exodus of immigrants out of the state, the kind we've seen in Arizona and Oklahoma,“ she declared. ”The political establishment here is threatened by Mississippi's changing demographics and what the electorate might look like in twenty years.“ In the past two decades, the percentage of African-Americans in the state's population has stabilized at more than 35 percent. Immigrants, who were statistically insignificant until recently, are expected to reach 10 percent in the next decade. Jim Evans, state AFL-CIO staffer, leader of the legislature's Black Caucus and MIRA board chair, says the state sanctions law (which makes it a felony for someone without papers to hold a job) and the raid serve the same objective. ”They are both efforts to drive a wedge between immigrants, African-Americans, white people and unions — all those who want political change here.“ At the same time, he says, ”they make it easier to exploit workers. The people who profit from Mississippi's low-wage system want to keep it the way it is.“ He points to the fact that while workers without papers now risk fines, prison time and deportation, Mississippi employers have hired thousands of guest workers.

Two weeks before the Mississippi raid, Chertoff made the same connection. ”There's obviously a straightforward solution to the problem of illegal work,“ he said, ”which is, you open the front door and you shut the back door.... Congress wasn't willing to open the front door.... In the interim, to be honest, we're closing the back door.... I think it's a necessary condition to satisfy the American people that when the front door is opened, we will really bring people only through the front door.“ Closing the back door is a euphemism for immigration raids. Opening the front door means guest-worker programs.

This agenda for immigration reform has emerged out of a policy framework forged by some of the country's largest corporations. In 1999 a group of corporate trade associations, in industries employing large numbers of immigrant workers, formed the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition because US industry, it said, faced a huge labor shortage. ”Part of the solution,“ EWIC announced, ”involves allowing companies to hire foreign workers to fill the essential worker shortages.“

The group, headed by the US Chamber of Commerce, includes the American Meat Institute, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores (Wal-Mart is a member), the National Council of Chain Restaurants and other industry associations — which are major campaign contributors (in the 2000 election cycle, the meat-processing industry gave $145,500 to Democrats and $1.14 million to Republicans; so far this year, the restaurant industry has given $2.9 million to Democrats and $4.4 million to Republicans).

In an August 2001 letter to Bush, EWIC argued for ”a temporary worker framework that provides a role for such workers whose labor is needed in the US.“ When a 2002 Cato Institute report said a huge temporary visa program ”should be created that would allow Mexican nationals to remain in the United States to work for a limited period,“ EWIC immediately embraced it. The Bush administration issued proposals a year and a half later that were identical to those in the report. Cato's ties to the media helped guest-worker proposals achieve greater legitimacy. When Cato asserted that the problem facing US companies was a shortage of workers rather than their unwillingness to pay higher wages to attract workers, much of the media treated this as fact. Cato and EWIC members shared an aversion to minimum wages. Rob Rosado, director of legislative affairs for the American Meat Institute, said, ”We don't want the government setting wages [in guest-worker programs]. The market determines wages.“

EWIC's ideas were embraced by most Democrats as well as Republicans, who dismissed as ”politically unrealistic“ an immigration bill sponsored by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee and members of the Congressional Black Caucus that did not contain a guest-worker program. Meanwhile, John Gay, representing the National Restaurant Association at EWIC, became board chair of the National Immigration Forum, a powerful immigrant-advocacy group in Washington. EWIC anchored a coalition with immigration lawyers, establishment civil rights organizations and several unions pushing for a reform package. And Tamar Jacoby, former staffer at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, organized a new corporate lobbying group, ImmigrationWorks USA, that includes EWIC, the National Council of La Raza, the National Restaurant Association and the US Chamber of Commerce.

The immigration reform bills introduced into Congress from 2005 onward, with crucial input from EWIC, linked guest-worker programs to heavy enforcement. Labor contractors would be allowed to recruit hundreds of thousands of workers a year outside the country, on temporary visas that would force them to leave if they became unemployed. The bills then mandated a tighter border to make crossing without papers more difficult, while beefed-up employer sanctions would make it impossible to work without a guest-worker visa.

”Enforcement is not an issue you can separate from guest-worker programs,“ says Mary Bauer, director of the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. An SPLC report,Close to Slavery, documents extensive abuse of workers in current programs and the benefit to employers of a workforce with few rights, whose vulnerable status makes organizing to raise wages difficult. ”Immigration enforcement is structurally necessary for these programs,“ she explains. Most comprehensive bills contained legalization provisions for undocumented people but would have imposed fines and waiting periods from eleven to eighteen years, during which applicants would have a status similar to guest workers.

With Chertoff citing Congress's failure to pass Bush's reform package, the administration began to implement its enforcement proposals through increased raids. ”We would have had raids with those bills too, because of their enforcement and funding provisions,“ says Marielena Hincapié, director of programs at the National Immigration Law Center (NILC).

The administration also used the bills' failure as a pretext for relaxing restrictions on current guest-worker programs, such as the requirement that employers demonstrate that they have tried to hire US workers first. ICE director Julie Myers told the Detroit Economic Club in April that ”these changes will make it easier for agricultural employers to hire foreign temporary or seasonal labor to harvest crops.“

The Southern Poverty Law Center, the AFL-CIO and immigrants' rights groups have bitterly opposed these changes. Employers have generally supported them. ”We see employers on the Hill all the time, saying they have to have guest workers. At one hearing they had to open extra rooms to accommodate all the lobbyists,“ Bauer fumes. ”And support is coming, not just from Republicans but from Democrats like Barbara Mikulski, Zoe Lofgren, Ted Kennedy and even John Conyers.“

Many supporters of tougher immigration enforcement claim that they have the interests of workers — both foreign-born and American — at heart. ICE asserts that raids and sanctions are intended to prevent employers from exploiting vulnerable undocumented workers. A week after the Postville raid, Myers said the ICE raids targeted ”unscrupulous criminals who use illegal workers to cut costs and gain a competitive advantage.“ But in reality, very little is being done to enforce labor standards. On July 15 the Government Accountability Office charged that Labor Department inspectors routinely fail to investigate complaints and close half of them after short calls to employers. Between 1997 and 2007, the number of inspectors dropped from 942 to 732, and the number of cases went from 47,000 to 30,000, the lowest since World War II. Meanwhile, the budget for the Border Patrol has climbed to $3.5 billion, and its 15,000 employees make ICE the second-largest investigative government agency.

The current enforcement campaign is geared toward punishing workers, not employers. The affidavit supporting ICE's search warrant for the Postville plant stated that a source saw a supervisor ”duct-tape the eyes of an undocumented Guatemalan worker shut and hit the Guatemalan with a meat hook,“ but the worker did not want to report the incident because ”it would not do any good and could jeopardize his job.“ Although ICE would not identify the beaten worker or confirm his detention, it is probable that after the raid he was in federal prison, while the supervisor continued working, since none were taken to Waterloo. The Iowa Labor Commissioner documented fifty-seven cases of child labor at Agriprocessors and filed charges of numerous violations against the company. Although some workers may get temporary visas as witnesses, all will eventually be deported.

Not only do these tactics fail to protect labor standards; they often aid employers in resisting efforts by undocumented workers to improve their conditions. During a union-organizing drive at Smithfield's Tar Heel, North Carolina, packinghouse, two raids created a climate of fear, according to organizers. And when housekeepers at the Woodfin Suites in Emeryville, California, tried to enforce a new municipal living-wage law, ICE investigated them at the request of Republican Congressman Brian Bilbray and company president Samuel Hardage. A year before the raid in Postville, supervisors often used immigration status to threaten workers involved in a union drive at Agriprocessors, according to Mejia.

Scott Frotman, spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers, says that ”raids let companies drive down wages and working conditions.“ To NILC's Marielena Hincapié, raids show the employers' power: ”Enforcement intimidates even citizens and legal residents. The employer brings in another batch of workers and continues business as usual. People who protest get targeted and deported.“

ICE has enlisted state and local authorities in its campaign to criminalize work. Last year Arizona passed bills requiring state employers to use the E-Verify system to ensure they were not hiring the undocumented. Employers must verify an applicant's immigration status with a database, which DHS said in 2007 ”is still not sufficiently up-to-date to meet the...requirements for accurate verification.“ The original bill would have punished any employer with an undocumented employee, but after employers protested, the law was changed so that they would be fined only for future hiring.

E-Verify makes undocumented workers more vulnerable to exploitation. One woman employed in a Tucson bakery, who withheld her name, explained that she was getting $10 per hour for tending the oven, while legal residents were getting $16 for the same job. ”If I leave or get fired, how will I find another job, with a bad Social Security number?“ she wondered. A Tucson union organizer, also afraid to be identified, added that construction workers told her that contractors lowered wages from $18 to $10 per hour after the law passed, and told them to bring their own tools to the job. She described rising unemployment, with workers leaving for other states. ”It's not going to stop us from organizing the union,“ she said, ”but it will certainly make it harder.“

In March, Arizona state police arrested eleven employees at a Tucson Panda Express restaurant for mismatched Social Security numbers. After the state prosecutor threatened felony identity theft charges, carrying long prison sentences, workers pleaded guilty to lesser charges and were sentenced to time served. Nevertheless, in August, two were still in jail, five months after the raid. As in Postville, deportation became a desirable outcome. Francisco Mondaca, who pleaded guilty to ”impersonating a Panda worker,“ says, ”I didn't hurt anyone. I filed W-2s and paid taxes. All I did was go to work.“ After the raid, Panda Express fired all its Arizona workers, according to one terminated employee, and brought in a new workforce. ”The company knew we didn't have papers,“ he said. ”Managers would talk about it.“ No action was taken against management.

On March 17 Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour signed SB 2988, which requires employers to use E-Verify and gives them immunity for hiring undocumented workers if they do. An undocumented worker, by contrast, faces felony charges carrying one to five years in prison and fines up to $10,000 for holding a job. Workers are ineligible for bail. At roadblocks near local chicken plants in Laurel, Mississippi, ”They take us away in handcuffs and we have to pay over $1,000 to get out of jail and get our cars back,“ according to one worker, who asked that her name be withheld.

Immigrants' rights organizations and unions have challenged this enforcement program with demonstrations and lawsuits. In Phoenix, county sheriff Joe Arpaio became a hero to nativist groups for invading immigrant communities with deputies, buses and helicopters, picking up people on the street and holding them for ICE. But when Arpaio brought in the Minutemen to support off-duty sheriff's deputies hired by M.D. Pruitt's furniture store to arrest day laborers, picket lines of workers, churches and immigrants' rights groups grew to more than a thousand people. ”Even the Phoenix Police Department came out to protect us from him,“ says Pablo Alvarado, director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. ”The mayor called for an FBI investigation, and the governor took $1.8 million from Arpaio's budget.“

The United Food and Commercial Workers organized five hearings in response to the raids and filed a lawsuit to stop ICE from using warrants naming some individuals as a pretext for detaining many more, as it did at Swift. ”Showing up for work should not subject workers to being detained,“ says UFCW president Joe Hansen. ”Work is not a crime. Workers are not criminals. We do not leave our constitutional rights at the plant gate.“

In California, the AFL-CIO, two central labor councils and one building trades council, the NILC and the ACLU filed suit in 2007 to stop ICE from issuing a new regulation, under which Social Security would have sent letters to more than 140,000 employers, listing the names of at least 8 million workers with mismatched numbers. Employers would have had to fire all who could not produce verifiable Social Security numbers. The order was blocked by US District Judge Maxine Chesney and remains on hold.

Just three days after the Mississippi raid, while many immigrants hid in their homes in fear, MIRA organizer Vicky Cintra and more than a hundred raid victims and family members marched down to the Howard Industries plant to demand withheld paychecks. When company managers called the police, who tried to arrest Cintra, immigrants began shouting, ”Let her go!“ As news reporters arrived on the scene, the police backed off. Seventy families got paychecks to keep them eating while their men were in immigration jail and their women were braceleted and unable to work.

Implementing its program by executive action, the administration has created a large bureaucracy, with rich contracts and high-paying jobs, to carry out the raids. Any new administration will thus inherit an entrenched program that enjoys considerable political momentum. Should John McCain be elected president, he is likely to embrace that program and continue the quest in Congress to weld the system developed under Bush into place. McCain co-sponsored the Kennedy-McCain bill, helping to set the terms for Washington's immigration debate. As Arizona senator he belongs to the establishment that made the state an enforcement testing ground.

Barack Obama has the chance to stop this juggernaut. At the AFL-CIO, Ana Avendaño, director of immigration programs, is drafting ideas for an Obama administration's first 100 days. ”At the very least, it could change the regulations and terms of enforcement,“ she says, ending, for instance, the practice of charging undocumented immigrants with federal crimes like identity theft.

The larger question, however, is whether Obama would challenge the mushrooming enforcement bureaucracy and the raids it feeds on, and advocate a more humane system. Organizations like the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights urge that instead of the enforcement/guest worker/legalization triad, Congress should legalize people without papers and make more visas available for legal migration, without setting up guest-worker programs. The AFL-CIO, the network and many others want much greater enforcement of labor standards and union rights, and call for repealing employer sanctions. Instead of reinforcing the unequal status of millions of immigrants, or treating them as a cheap labor supply for corporate employers, immigration policy can and should protect the rights and living standards of immigrants — and workers generally.

Research support for this article was provided by the Puffin Foundation Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

The post In Arizona, Undocumented Immigrants Face Federal Criminal Charges appeared first on Type Investigations.