On Immigration

 

ON THE IMMIGRATION “PROBLEM” April 22, 2924, 9 pm Eastern, 6 pm Pacific Presenty by: The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism The Socialist Education Project 4 th Monday Webinar Woody Guthrie wrote his famous song “Deportees” in 1948 decrying that “All they will call you will be ‘deportees.’” And “they chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.” He wrote at a time when the US political economy depended upon temporary immigrant labor. Since the 1940s particularly, the globalization of the economy, increased violence and repression within countries (largely involving United States interference), growing income and wealth inequality and poverty, climate catastrophes and the rise of repressive regimes everywhere, emigration has increased. The United Nations has estimated that “the number of international migrants has been robust over the last two decades, reaching 281 million people living outside their country of origin in 2020, up from 173 million in 2000 and 221 million in 2010. Currently, international migrants represent about 3.6 per cent of the world’s population.” And today, they represent a large and growing percentage of the agricultural and manufacturing work force. Now, “the immigration problem” is the issue dominating campaign and election debate. Both parties conceive of immigration as a problem. Is it? What are its causes? What role have immigrants played in America’s economy? How should the left respond to the vicious attack on immigrants and the draconian proposals made by political candidates to address “the problem.” Register in advance for this meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIocO6gpjooHtEaQQpxL9YDVdaS6IOmEjRA

To address this issue the webinar will hear from:

David Bacon writer, photographer, labor organizer. http://dbacon.igc.org/ ""David Bacon is the conscience of American journalism: an extraordinary social documentarist in the rugged humanist tradition of Dorothea Lange, Carey McWilliams,

Anne Lewis Anne comes out of a movement to make media that helps create opportunity for social change. She has made documentary films (always with limited resources) since the 1970¹s and was associate director and assistant camerawoman for HARLAN COUNTY, USA.

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Labor, Life, and Organizing on Both Sides of the Wall

 More Than a Wall.

Más Que un Muro 

        By David Bacon 

- a book of photographs by David Bacon and oral histories created during 30 years of covering the people and social movements of the Mexico/U.S. border
- a complex, richly textured documentation of a world in newspaper headlines daily, but whose reality, as it's lived by border residents, is virtually invisible.
- 440 pages
- 354 duotone black-and-white photographs
- a dozen oral histories
-  incisive journalism and analysis by David Bacon, Don Bartletti, Luis Escala, Guillermo Alonso and Alberto del Castillo.
- completely bilingual in English and Spanish
- published by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte with support from the UCLA Institute for Labor Research and Education and the Center for Mexican Studies, the Werner Kohlstamm Family Fund, and the Green Library at Stanford University

Publication date - May 1, 2022 (May Day, of course)

Price:  $35 plus postage and handling


To order, click here:  

https://david-bacon-photography.square.site/product/more-than-a-wall-mas-que-un-muro/1?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false

Signing events coming in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Joaquin Valley and elsewhere.

"The "border" is just a line. It's the people who matter - their relationships with or without or across that line. The book helps us feel the impact of the border on people living there, and helps us figure out how we talk to each other about it. The germ of the discussion are these wonderful and eye-opening pictures, and the voices that help us understand what these pictures mean." - JoAnn Intili, director, The Werner-Kohnstamm Family Fund 
 

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MORE THAN A WALL/MAS QUE UN MURO

Border Communities and their Social Justice Movements
Photographs by David Bacon

Sit down and read. Prepare yourself for the coming battle.  Mother Jones.  1837- 1930,.

More Than A Wall/ Mas Que un Muro

 

IT'S COMING!

MORE THAN A WALL / MAS QUE UN MURO



- a book of photographs by David Bacon and oral histories created during 30 years of covering the people and social movements of the Mexico/U.S. border
- a complex, richly textured documentation of a world in newspaper headlines daily, but whose reality, as it's lived by border residents, is virtually invisible.
- 440 pages
- 354 duotone black-and-white photographs
- a dozen oral histories
-  incisive journalism and analysis by David Bacon, Don Bartletti, Luis Escala, Guillermo Alonso and Alberto del Castillo.
- completely bilingual in English and Spanish
- published by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte with support from the UCLA Institute for Labor Research and Education and the Center for Mexican Studies, the Werner Kohlstamm Family Fund, and the Green Library at Stanford University

Publication date - May 1, 2022 (May Day, of course)

Price:  $35 plus postage and handling
Pre-publication discount for orders before May 1, use coupon "prepublication"
To order, click here:  

https://david-bacon-photography.square.site/product/more-than-a-wall-mas-que-un-muro/1?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false

Signing events coming in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Joaquin Valley and elsewhere.

"The "border" is just a line. It's the people who matter - their relationships with or without or across that line. The book helps us feel the impact of the border on people living there, and helps us figure out how we talk to each other about it. The germ of the discussion are these wonderful and eye-opening pictures, and the voices that help us understand what these pictures mean." - JoAnn Intili, director, The Werner-Kohnstamm Family Fund 
 

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MORE THAN A WALL/MAS QUE UN MURO

Border Communities and their Social Justice Movements
Photographs by David Bacon

Sit down and read. Prepare yourself for the coming battle.  Mother Jones.  1837- 1930,.

In the Fields of the North

LIVING IN THE SHADOWS
Book Review By Paul Von Blum
Truthdig, Posted on Jun 30, 2017
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/en_los_campos_del_norte_20170630
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2017/07/living-in-shadows-los-fotografos_9.html




"In the Fields of the North/ En los Campos del Norte"
A book by David Bacon


"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. . . They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

-Donald Trump, June 16, 2015

We live in a despicable era of racism and xenophobia, fueled by the anti-immigrant fervor of the Trump regime and abetted by right-wing media forces. Mexican immigrants have borne the brunt of much of this public animus, including countless verbal assaults and some egregious examples of physical violence. Few perpetrators of this hostility recognize the long historical origins of their nativist outpourings. Even fewer realize the deep humanity and the powerful suffering of the Latino farmworkers who have come north to the United States to escape grinding poverty and hunger and try to eke out marginal livings for themselves and their families.

A new bilingual book by David Bacon offers both a dramatic antidote to the deplorable reality of racism and a majestic life-affirming view of these hidden women, men and children. "In the Fields of the North" is a landmark fusion of journalism and documentary photography. Bacon is an accomplished writer and photographer, with a long record of union organizing for the United Farm Workers, the United Electrical Workers, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and others. He has effectively documented the impact of globalization, the degrading conditions of workplaces for many immigrants, the human consequences of migration, the political struggles for workers' and human rights, and many related topics in his books and commentary.

But above all, Bacon is a documentary photographer of extraordinary power, insight and skill. In his introductory comments to the book, he is modest-too modest-about contributing to the long history of socially conscious photography: "I hope my work contributes to this tradition today." I have had the privilege and pleasure of teaching and writing for many years about some of the giant American figures of this tradition, including Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks.

In the Fields of the North - Davis

Davis, Thursday, June 1, 2017
7-9 PM, Art Annex Room 107 (Technological Studies Building)
UC Davis Main Campus

The Reality Check: IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES BRACE FOR TRUMP

The Reality Check: IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES BRACE FOR TRUMP: IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES BRACE FOR TRUMP By David Bacon The American Prospect, November 22, 2016 http://prospect.org/article/immigrant-commu...

Invisible No More

INVISIBLE NO MORE Images by David Bacon Union Hall Gallery September 12 2015 SECOND SATURDAY 2126 K Street Sacramento Carol Davydova - (916) 217-7500. Call (916) 448-2452 for weekday group tours. These photographs show migrants at work, at home and in action, defending their rights -- not in isolation from the communities around them, but with their support.  The combination of images and words has the power to move us in a way that neither can alone.  Its purpose is to win support for migrants in a world that, at best, treats them as invisible, and at worst demonizes them.   The Right to Stay Home - justice for migrants and sending communities - a presentation by David Bacon in Berkeley CA on May 5, 2015 http://uslaboragainstwar.org/Article/37224/the-right-to-stay-home-justice-for-migrants-and-sending-communities THE REALITY CHECK - David Bacon blog http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com

Immigration Move : a first step

Immigration Move a "Stopgap Measure"

David Bacon
November 20, 2014
Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA)

[President Obama] said today: "The administration's decision to step away, at least partially, from the policy of mass deportations that have hurt millions of people over the last six years is a good step, but it is only a step. It leaves millions more people subject to deportation and vastly increased enforcement.The administration is imposing increasing enforcement and labor programs as a price for deportation relief. The U.S. already spends more money on immigration enforcement than all other federal law enforcement programs combined. Giving Silicon Valley more work visas and tying labor programs to deportation relief is a step towards lower wages, undermining the rights of all workers. At the same time, the administration has announced support for more free trade deals, like the Trans Pacific Partnership, which will lead to more displacement and migration, while eliminating jobs here at home. Instead of a stopgap measure, we must change U.S. immigration law and trade policy to deal with the basic causes of migration, and to guarantee the human, civil and labor rights of migrants and all working people."

[David Bacon is author of several books on immigration, including The Right to Stay Home and Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. He is a labor and immigrant rights activist, and part of the Dignity Campaign.]

Resources

The Dignity Campaign - Real Immigration Reform

United We Dream
United We Dream is the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the nation. Our powerful nonpartisan network is made up of over 100,000 immigrant youth and allies and 55 affiliate organizations in 26 states. We organize and advocate for the dignity and fair treatment of immigrant youth and families, regardless of immigration status.

Bacon: NAFTA Hurt Workers on Both Sides of the Border

They Call Us Illegal, But What They're Doing is Even More Illegal

"THEY CALL US ILLEGAL, BUT WHAT THEY'RE DOING IS EVEN MORE ILLEGAL"  
Fast Food Workers Face the Silent Raids
By David Bacon

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20289-they-call-us-illegal-fast-food-workers-face-silent-raids


OAKLAND, CA  (11/23/13) -- Since the Golden Arches rose above the first southern California drive-ins, workers have labored in their shadows for the lowest legal wage a boss can pay.  Other fast food chains have mushroomed since, copying the same ideas.  Pay workers the least possible.  Keep them guessing from week to week how many hours they'll get.  If anyone gets upset, there are always many more people on the street, ready to step behind the counter, clean up the dirty tables, or stand at the grill in the heat and smoke.

Is it a surprise that many people in those jobs came to this country to feed their hungry children, or give a future to those they left behind?  People will put up with a lot when they're hungry enough.  They'll take ibuprofen to get through the shift, or line up for food at the local food pantry at the end of the month, because their paychecks won't stretch that far.  All to keep that job.

The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration

 A review. by Duane Campbell

The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration by David Bacon  is a well written, well informed book that explains political and economic currents shaping the US immigration experience.

The U.S. public is  engaged  in a sustained and divisive debate over immigration. Unfortunately, at the same  time ,  most U.S. do not recognize that U.S. economic policy,  particularly NAFTA created many of  the conditions that produce the very immigration of some 8 million people  that many on the Right and the Tea Party   so oppose.

The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 accelerated a neo-liberal form of economic growth in Mexico that drove poor farmers, particularly in the indigenous south to lose their farms and their livelihood.  In  response  young men, and increasingly the young women,  made the dangerous trek to the U.S. in search of work and an income to feed their families and keep their families from losing their  farms.  

The Right to Stay Home

Socialism and Immigrants' rights in the Age of Obama

Join Tom Hayden, Catherine Tactaquin, David Bacon  and John Nichols at the DSA National Convention~ Come Out Swinging: Socialism in the Age of Obama October 25-27 in Oakland, California Register now! Our mission is to build a democratic socialist movement because as Frederick Douglass observed “power concedes nothing without a demand.” We are a political, educational, and activist organization, not a party. Through campus and community-based chapters, we use a variety of tactics from legislative to direct action to fight for reforms that empower working people. Our vision is of an economy and society run democratically to allow us all a dignified, healthy, and creative life – not to make profits for the 1%.

What Real Immigration Reform Would Look Like

WHAT REAL IMMIGRATION REFORM WOULD LOOK LIKE
Clue:  It's Not a New Guest Worker Program
By David Bacon
The Progressive web edition, 7/27/13
http://www.progressive.org/real-immigration-reform



Oralia Maceda asks her question at the Fresno meeting.

Oralia Maceda, an immigrant mother from Oaxaca, asked the obvious last weekend in Fresno.  At a meeting, talking about the Senate immigration reform bill, she wanted to know why Senators would spend almost $50 billion on more border walls, yet show no interest in why people leave home to cross them.

This Congressional blindness will get worse as immigration reform moves to the House.  It condemns U.S. immigration policy to a kind of punitive venality, making rational political decisions virtually impossible.  Yet alternatives are often proposed by migrant communities themselves, and reflect a better understanding of global economics and human rights. 

Rufino Dominguez, who now works for the Oaxacan state government, describes what Maceda knows from experience: "NAFTA forced the price of corn so low it's not economically possible to plant a crop anymore.  We come to the U.S. to work because there's no alternative."  The reason for the fall in prices, according to Timothy Wise of the Global Development and Environment Institute, is that corn imports to Mexico from the U.S. rose from 2,014,000 to 10,330,000 tons from 1992 to 2008. 

Oaxacan Teachers challenge the neo liberal tests

OAXACAN TEACHERS CHALLENGE THE TEST
By David Bacon
California Federation of Teachers website
http://cft.org/key-issues/quality-education/mexican-educators-face-reform.html

Demands on Congress to protect immigrant rights

DEMANDS RISE ON CONGRESS TO GUARANTEE IMMIGRANT RIGHTS

By David Bacon

TruthOut  (4/15/13)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/15788-demands-rise-on-congress-to-guarantee-immigrant-rights

        
        In San Diego, California, nine activists completed six days of a hunger strike outside the Mission Valley Hilton Hotel on April 10 -- the day demonstrations took place across the U.S. demanding immigration reform.  Hunger strikers were protesting the firing of 14 of the hotel's workers, after Evolution Hospitality, the company operating the Hilton franchise, told them that it had used the government's E-Verify database to determine that they didn't have legal immigration status.
     "The company says that E-Verify is making them do this, even though many of the workers have been working here for years," said Sara Garcia, a supporter and hunger striker from House of Organized Neighbors, a local community organization.  "But they started firing them when the workers were organizing a union."
        "I clean 16 to 18 rooms a day, and they pay me $8.65 an hour.  No one can live on that," explained Leticia Nava, a fired worker.  " I'm a widow with three children who depend on me.  What is happening is not just.  We are immigrant workers, and the only thing we're asking is to work.  That's not hurting anyone."
       Garcia and Nava accuse the company of using the government system for immigration enforcement in the workplace, a database called E-Verify, in order to retaliate against 14 women for their union support.  But they also say that the E-Verify system is used much more extensively, to fire workers even where no union organizing is taking place.

Photo journalist speaking at Sac State

David Bacon.  Journalist, photo journalist, labor journalist, immigrant rights activist. Speaking Feb. 20, 2013.  2013.  Hinde auditorium.  Sacramento State. 1:30 PM.

Sponsored by the Serna Center. See post below. 

Lets stop making migration a crime

David Bacon

We need an immigration policy based on human, civil and labor rights, which looks at the reasons why people come to the U.S., and how we can end the criminalization of their status and work.  While proposals from Congress and the administration have started the debate over the need for change in our immigration policy, they are not only too limited and ignore the global nature of migration, but they will actually make the problem of criminalization much worse.  We need a better alternative.

Coming in 2013 from Beacon Press:

THE RIGHT TO STAY HOME:  Ending Forced Migration and the Criminalization of Immigrants

 

From School to the Fields

"WHENEVER I GOT OUT OF SCHOOL, IT WAS STRAIGHT TO THE FIELDS"
The Story of Javier Mondar-Flores Lopez
By David Bacon
New America Media  8/27/12
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/08/the-story-of-javier-mondar-flores-lopez.php

Every Worker an Organizer

Every Worker is an Organizer

Photographs by David Bacon

This exhibit in the California State Capitol is organized by Assembly Member Luis Alejo and his staff, and is part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the United Farm Workers of America.

California State Capitol

Hallway next to the Governor's Office
May 20-26, 2012
Sacramento, California

Open to the public


      Farm labor is a key element historically in the photographic documentation of social reality in the US, and in particular the documentation of social protest.  Dorothea Lange, Hansel Meith, Otto Hegel, and the generation of the 1930s and 1940s left a body of work showing the extreme exploitation of farm workers, and documenting the early farm labor organizing efforts, part of the great labor upsurge of those decades.
    The iconography of social documentary photography was shaped by images like Lange's mother and children in Nipomo, or those of the Pixley cotton strikers packed onto the back of a truck under their banner "Disarm the rich farmer or arm the workers for self-defense!" or the growers with their rifles waiting in ambush.
  The first two decades of the growth of the United Farm Workers was undoubtedly one of the most-photographed social protests of the civil rights era.  It too had its icons -- the line of marchers on their way from Delano to Sacramento, silhoutted against the sky, or Cesar Chavez weakened by his fast, at the side of Robert Kennedy.

Immigrants and Labor

MARCHING AWAY FROM THE COLD WAR
By David Bacon
Chapter 11 in "Wisconsin Uprising - Labor Fights Back"
Monthly Review Press, 2012

http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb2808/


One sign carried in almost every May Day march of the last few years in the United States says it all: "We are Workers, not Criminals!" Often it was held in the calloused hands of men and women who looked as though they'd just come from work in a factory, cleaning an office building, or picking grapes.

The sign stated an obvious truth. Millions of people have come to the United States to work, not to break its laws. Some have come with visas, and others without them. But they are all contributors to the society they've found here.

In the largest U.S. May Day event this year, marchers were joined by the public workers who protested in the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, who have become symbols of the fight for labor rights in the U.S.  Their message was the same: we all work, we all contribute to our communities and we all have the right to a job, a union and a decent life.