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Article Excerpt
After Katrina hit, Armando Ojeda paid $1,200 to be smuggled across the desert border from Mexico, a walk that took several nights. Talk of $10 an hour--more in a day than he made each week at a computer factory back home--led him to pay another $1,200 to be crammed in a van with a dozen other immigrants and driven 1,600 miles, from a safe house in Arizona to Mississippi.... But six weeks later, Ojeda still hasn't been paid the $600-plus he said he is owed for eight days of dawn-to-dusk labor (Pritchard, 2005).
OJEDA'S ORDEAL IS ONLY ONE STORY AMONG MANY EXPERIENCED BY LATINO immigrant males facing severe conditions of labor exploitation in the Deep South. (1) In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita in the fall of 2005, (2) Latino immigrant workers, lured by the promise of plentiful and lucrative employment in the cleanup and construction industries, experienced a different reality.
The considerable reconstruction needs resulting from the devastation caused by the hurricanes requires a significant labor force to provide cleanup and rebuilding. Following an established historical pattern, the nation-state facilitates and encourages the use of immigrant labor as an exploitable and disposable workforce. This event has greatly influenced migration and demographic patterns in the Deep South, and called attention to the legal, civil, and human rights needs of a disenfranchised immigrant population.
Frequent reports of labor exploitation and abuse numbering in the hundreds surfaced after rebuilding began (Chandler and Susman, 2005). Labor contracts awarded by the U.S. government during the Bush administration and then subcontracted multiple times provided myriad opportunities for employers to take advantage of vulnerable workers. With only a few immigrant rights advocacy organizations in the region, the pervasive labor exploitation in the rebuilding process became a critical issue. New organizations, ranging from human rights groups, legal aide agencies, and religious-based organizations, emerged and proved to be crucial for the protection and well-being of immigrant laborers working in the hurricane-affected states. Nevertheless, abuses continued, causing harm to individual workers and creating hostility between native-born groups and immigrants.
I argue that the rebuilding of the Deep South amounted to state-sponsored exploitation of immigrant workers. The influx of a new immigrant labor force initiated a change in the racial and ethnic demographics of the Deep South, creating a heightened climate of racial tension between native-born African Americans and whites against newly arrived immigrant populations from Mexico, Central America, and other regions of the United States.
Using primary scholarly works and secondary sources, including newspaper articles, legal briefs, government reports, and briefing papers from human rights agencies, this article examines the shift in the poor and working-class demographic in the southern United States from a primarily African-American workforce to a substantial population of Latino/a immigrants. (3) I apply current theories that address issues of immigration and migration, labor markets, and race and citizenship to explain these trends and demographic shifts. The article concludes with a brief appraisal of the growth in advocacy and resistance activities spurred by several factors affecting Latino/a communities in this area, foremost that of the exploitive labor conditions experienced by Latino immigrants. This advocacy and resistance is examined within the context of human rights activism and the enactment of "cultural citizenship."
Pre-Katrina Immigrant Labor
Data from the 2000 U.S. census rank Mississippi and Louisiana as the poorest states in the nation, with Alabama ranking sixth (United States Census Bureau, 2002). Moreover, 20% of the hurricane survivors lived below the poverty line before the event (Congressional Research Services Report to Congress, 2005: 14). Many of the affected areas contained a disproportionate number of African Americans. (4) The areas most affected by the hurricanes comprise some of the most impoverished regions in the United States.
In the year 2000, the total population of Latino/as in the South was 95,928, with Latinos making up 49% of the population and Latinas 51% (United States Census Bureau, 2002). Latinos made up 2.4% of Louisiana's population, 1.4% in Mississippi, and 1.7% in Alabama. The primary draws for employment to southeastern states before the hurricane were agriculture, meatpacking, carpet, garment, and textile production, and work in the onshore oil industry (Mohl, 2003).
The recent history of worker demographic shifts in the South clearly demonstrates the transition of labor exploitation from primarily native-born white and African American poor and working class to foreign-born poor and working-class immigrant labor. Beginning in the 1950s, Mexican American farm workers from Texas began arriving in the southeast; the trend continued into Florida in the 1960s through the 1970s (Rothenberg, 1998: 181). In the 1980s, the need for agricultural labor began to increase the demand for Latino workers in the South. (5) Beyond those needs, the growth of industry in the South spurred demand for a large exploitable labor force. Gainesville, Georgia, which calls itself the "Poultry Capital of the World," employs a large Mexican immigrant workforce (Guthey, 2001:61-63). By the 1990s, the estimated growth rate of Latino migrants, mostly undocumented, in the East Coast was 70% (Rothenberg, 1998). The onshore oil industry in southern Louisiana became an additional site of labor exploitation in the 1990s (Donato, Bankston, and Robinson, 2001). More recently, Latino workers from the poultry industry have spilled over into the carpet mills of Dalton, Georgia (Engstrom, 2001). (6)
U.S. immigration policies facilitated the growth and movement of an exploitable immigrant workforce into the Southeast. The ostensive goal of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was to reduce illegal immigration and grant amnesty to undocumented immigrants who could prove residency in the U.S. before 1982. It also offered farm workers the opportunity to gain documented status through the Special Agricultural Workers (SAWs) and Replenishment Agricultural Workers (RAWs) programs. Penalties were imposed on employers who knowingly hired undocumented laborers. Because they employed farm workers through the SAW and RAW programs, farmers benefited most from IRCA. The availability of a large and replaceable agricultural workforce kept wages low and increased the movement of immigrant workers into the agriculturally related industries of the Southeast.
Raymond Mohl (2003: 33) has documented the impact of globalization on the migration of Latinos to the South. He notes that industries that previously drove the South's economy--agriculture, steel, textiles, and apparel--witnessed a sharp decline over the last few decades. "At the same time," Mohl asserts, "new economic investment poured into the region as American and foreign capital sought cheap labor, new markets, and government incentives." The Deep South's population growth increased the need for service-sector workers, thus hiking the demand for low-wage jobs. Changing federal immigration policy and globalization were thus the primary forces attracting Latino immigrants to the South. International trade policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) also intensified labor migration to the region. Its failure to improve economic conditions in Mexico increased the necessity of immigration into the United States (Ibid.: 35).
Sassen (1999: 15) suggests that forces of globalization are transforming the nation-state in multiple ways and are affecting its authority with regard to national sovereignty. "The particular combination of power and legitimacy we call sovereignty, which has over the last century become almost synonymous with the national state," she claims, "is today being partly unbundled [and] redistributed onto other entities." These entities include multinational corporations, international trade agreements, and human rights agreements. This framework helps us to understand the current demographic shifts of labor in the Deep South.
Post-Katrina Immigrant...
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