On 1 April a truck carrying 19 Mexicans evaded an immigration checkpoint in California, about 600 miles north of the Mexican border. Most of the passengers came from the village of Cheran in Mexico, where wages average from $3 to $7 per day. They were in the US looking for jobs which might pay them eight or nine times more. Two sheriff's deputies chased the truck for more than an hour until the driver of the truck finally stopped. Most of the passengers managed to escape, but a man and a women, Enrique Funes Flores and Leticia Gonzalez Gonzalez, were left behind. The two cops caught them as they were trying to get out of the truck. First they lunged at Funes. One cop clubbed him repeatedly with a night stick, even though he offered no resistance. They continued to beat him even as he fell to the ground, face down. Then they began beating Gonzalez, dragging her by her hair. Gonzalez later told reporters, 'I thought I was going to die.'
It was all a typical day's work for the two Riverside California cops. Both have a record of brutality and one has a reputation for abusing Latinos. 'He's known for roughing up Mexican-Americans and harassing the hell out of them,' said immigrants' rights advocate Gilbert Chavez.
In fact, the only reason the media took any notice of the beating was because by chance a television news team filmed the entire incident from a helicopter overhead. But, like the videotape of the Rodney King beating five years ago, the footage showed not how rarely, but how frequently, such police beatings take place. As police brutality lawyer Stephen Yagman argued, 'If anyone other than a cop had gone out and beaten these people like that, they would be in custody now.' Instead, the two sheriff's deputies have been suspended with pay.
Immigrants are the ones who are treated like criminals in today's political climate. Many immigrants who enter the US illegally are literally thrown in prison for years while their immigration status gets tied up in endless red tape. Three years ago a boat crammed with 300 Chinese immigrants ran aground off the New York coast. Most of them had paid up to $30,000 to be smuggled to the US. Some were escaping persecution for having participated in pro-democracy demonstrations. Others were seeking higher wages. Instead, most of them have spent the last three years languishing in a prison cell, with no end in sight.
In another case, a young woman named Fauziya Kasinga fled Togo to escape genital mutilation after she was forced into an arranged marriage at the age of 17. She travelled halfway across the world to the US because she thought the US government 'believed in justice'. But when she turned herself in to the authorities in late 1994 she was shackled and thrown in prison. A judge turned down her claim for asylum with the cursory statement, 'This alien is not credible.' After 18 months she was released from prison, but if her appeal is denied she will still be deported back to Togo.
The US Border Patrol apprehended nearly 1.4 million immigrants in 1994, a 43 percent increase since 1993. And in this election year politicians are competing to appear the 'toughest' on immigration. Racist scapegoating has been the order of the day. As Marc Cooper wrote in the Nation, politicians have been pandering to the idea that 'all our problems...collapsing social services, probably even air pollution and earthquakes, could be solved by barring the children of "illegal aliens" from our schools and hospitals.' Early in the campaign far right presidential candidate Pat Buchanan vowed to build a 2,000 mile fence along the entire stretch of the US-Mexican border (he didn't mention the possibility of closing the US border with Canada). Since then the other candidates have been rushing to catch up.
Clinton, who launched his own attack on immigrants several years ago by claiming US borders are 'leaking like sieves', has spent more than $540 million on the government's 'Operation Gatekeeper' programme to crack down on immigrants. Not to be outdone, Republican candidate Bob Dole argued that the children of illegal immigrants should be thrown out of state funded schools. The Economist described the prospect 'of an election year bidding war in which Bill Clinton, eager to please middle America, called for tighter restrictions, and Republicans, eager not to be outdone, veered crazily towards Buchananism'.
Despite the fact that legal immigration to the US has dropped for four consecutive years, now standing at 775,000 annually (or 0.3 percent of the US population), both wings of Congress have been whipped up into an anti-immigrant frenzy. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate have passed bills over the last two months which attack the rights of both legal and undocumented immigrants. In March the House passed a bill which would bar undocumented immigrants from receiving non-emergency health care and would kick their children out of schools. The Senate bill, passed on 2 May, does not include the education restriction, but it is no less harsh. In the words of the bill's sponsor, Republican Senator Alan Simpson, 'We have stuff in there that has everything but the rack and thumbscrews for people who are violating the laws of the United States.'
The Senate bill reinforces the mistaken assumption that both legal and illegal immigrants are a huge drain on government funds. In reality, estimates are that illegal immigrants contribute far more in taxes than they receive in government assistance - and only about 5 percent of legal immigrants of working age receive public assistance, virtually the same percentage as US citizens. Nevertheless, the Senate bill would make most immigrants ineligible for any welfare support from the state. It also would consider immigrants 'deportable' if they received any government assistance for 12 or more months during any five year period. 'Government assistance' would include not just welfare, but also health care, legal aid or a college loan.
More and more workers see through the politicians who spew racist hate in order to shift blame away from their own policies. The unity of US born and immigrant workers, both legal and undocumented, holds the key to defeating the system which breeds such scapegoating.