11/20/2023 0 Comments Aviva chomsky"The complexity of the H-2 program and the gap between the overwhelming demand on both sides and the small number of visas actually available make the program ripe for fraud and exploitation. The notarios would file a fraudulent asylum application, which would nonetheless entite the migrant to a temporary, legal work permit, until their asylum hearing, which would generally result in deportation" (68-69). These notarios often had no legal credentials, but played on a semantic confusion, since in Latin American the term often refers to a lawyer. Some of her informants had paid hundreds of dollars to a notario for a temporary work permit. ![]() "Foxen also notes a 'total confusion surrounding understandings about the legality and illegality of different types of documentation' that stems from the population's long history of the law being used against them. ![]() ![]() 'As did their forefathers centuries ago,' Lutz and Lovell write, 'Guatemalan Mayas continue to migrate in order to survive" (68). The coyotes that offer to take them across the border may be considered smugglers under US law, but to the Mayans Foxen studied, they were no different from the labor contrators who had been forcibly recruiting them-legally-for generations. Rather than imagining themselves as autonomous individuals making a decision to break the law, they, like Rigoberta Menchu, understand their migration as a requirement imposed on them by outsiders, which they have no right or opportunity to question. "Among the undocumented Mayans of Providence, Rhode Island, Patricia Foxen found a very different conception than what most citizens understand about illegality. Moreover, the law left employers virtually immune to prosecution, and with even greater ability to exploit their now more legally vulnerable workers" (62). Employer sanctions created an enormous and costly illegal infrastructure that migrants had to navigate to obtain false documents in order to work, but did little to reduce the numbers of undocumented workers. "The 1986 law also for the first time made it illegal to employ a worker without proper documents. Like the deportations of the 1930s, Operation Wetback snared many individuals, including US citizens, simply for being ethnically Mexican" (58). "he Eisenhower administration initiated Operation Wetback, a massive, military-style sweep of Mexican and Mexican American neighborhoods aimed at deporting en masse those deemed to be in the country 'illegally.' Over a million were deported. A 'frenzy of anti-Mexican hysteria' justified roundups of entire Mexican neighborhoods and hundreds of thousands were deported with little attention to legal niceties" (55). On the pretext that they were like to 'become a public charge' as employment opportunities evaporated, both Mexicans and Mexican Americans were rounded up for deportation. "Mexican workers' theoretical deportability became real in 1929, as the country entered the Great Depression. Local officials served farmers' interests by carrying out deportation raids in cases of union organizing or, sometimes, just before payday" (54). 'Agribusiness kicked, winked, screamed, lobbied, and cajoled for border patrol practices that allowed unrestricted access to Mexican workers while promoting effective discipline over the region's Mexican workforce.' Deportability was part of that discipline. Mexican workers could still cross the border easily, but because they became more deportable, the new laws also made them more exploitable. ![]() "Was it a paradox that the Border Patrol was created in the 1920s, just when agribusiness, with its need for migrant labor, was rapidly expanding in the Southwest? Several scholars argue that in fact the system worked well for farmers who needed migrant workers. I checked this book out from the library but it had a lot of important things I want to remember for future reference so I'm going to diligently re-type a lot of the facts and tidbits I found particularly important/insightful:
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