Paulo A. Suarez Rojas
Unemployed Undocumented Workers are Essential Workers: Overcoming the Liberal Discourse of Immigrant Disposability and Organizing for Organizing’s Sake
Abstract
This essay examines how recent news articles, policy reports, and essays about the disposability of essential immigrant workers during COVID-19 respond or not to the question: “Are unemployed undocumented workers ‘essential’?” I specifically pay attention to the cases of FWD.us and Movimiento Cosecha (Cosecha Movement), two organizations demanding protection for all undocumented immigrants. I find FWD’s and Cosecha’s proposals for protection of all undocumented immigrants could not be more oppositional. However, this opposition is not explained away solely by an external contradiction: that FWD’s lobbying focus must naturally clash with Cosecha’s grassroots focus; in other words, that it’s their relation to the state that defines their opposition. In fact, both FWD and Cosecha contend the state’s duty to be protection for all undocumented workers, particularly during this COVID pandemic. The essay instead argues their opposition stems from an internal contradiction: FWD’s demand for citizenship for all contrasts with their complete disavowal of unemployed undocumented immigrants, whom are not recognized as profitable and thus undeserving of citizenship. Due to the absence of a sustained anti-capitalist critique that considers unemployed undocumented workers, FWD as well as other articles and reports contribute to the formation of a liberal discourse of immigrant disposability. Building on previous work that analyzes the political economy of immigration, unemployment and global capitalism, I propose the most immediate dangers of the liberal disposability discourse are the prolonged institutionalization of exclusionary citizenship and the disorganization of the undocumented working class. I conclude with an examination of Cosecha’s demands, efforts, and goal during the pandemic crisis to sketch an anti-capitalist critique that prioritizes political organizing.
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Cosecha members gather. Photo from Movimiento Cosecha’s Medium website.[i]
“Our goal is to gain permanent protection for all undocumented immigrants… our goal is [not] to be a charity, or to raise funds or distribute funds, but it is something we had to do because nobody else was going to do it for us.”[i]Gema Lowe, an undocumented organizer with Cosecha in Michigan, explains how the COVID19 crisis forced Cosecha to drastically re-focus their efforts to help all undocumented workers. Cosecha found itself having to develop mutual-aid efforts like food distribution and emergency relief funds in addition to their already existent efforts to build an undocumented immigrant movement. Organizations like Cosecha have stretched their capacities to include mutual aid practices precisely because their goal is “permanent protection for all undocumented immigrants”.
While citizenship may or may not be the form this permanent protection takes, it is clear that Cosecha does not recoil from the necessity to organize for universal protection of and support for undocumented immigrants in the U.S., for those here and those to come. This is even more evident during the pandemic crisis, which has required them to step up to the role of protecting all undocumented immigrants, a role which they rightly argue should be exercised by the state. For the years that followed the limited solution of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Cosecha’s national network of organizations has mainly organized campaigns against the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., as well as against raids conducted by the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). When the pandemic hit and the country entered a steep economic crisis, Cosecha organizations adapted their infrastructure to serve the immediate needs of all undocumented immigrants across the country.
Cosecha is not the only organization advocating for permanent protection for all undocumented immigrants. Since 2013, FWD.us has argued for immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants. FWD.us is a pro-immigration lobbying group funded by Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley tech companies. FWD has primarily focused its efforts on creating a path to citizenship for DACA recipients and has come under much criticism for their support for only a small segment of the undocumented population. However, FWD’s Vice-President of Advocacy Alida Garcia seems to be changing this narrative: in light of the COVID19 crisis, she released an essay where she states FWD’s full support for a pathway to citizenship that includes all undocumented essential workers. At first hand, it appears Cosecha’s and FWD’s paths are beginning to converge into a single alliance in support of all undocumented immigrant workers.
This essay argues, via an anti-capitalist critique of the discourse of disposability that emerged during the COVID crisis, Cosecha’s and FWD’s proposals for protection of all undocumented immigrants could not be more oppositional. I suggest that this opposition stems from FWD’s complete disavowal of unemployed undocumented immigrants, whom are not recognized as profitable and thus undeserving of citizenship. During the pandemic, FWD has co-opted notions of the disposability of immigrant bodies to seemingly demand for citizenship for all; yet, truly these notions serve only to reinforce their long-standing demands for exclusionary citizenship. On the other hand, Cosecha recognizes the multiple ways in which all undocumented workers, including the unemployed, are profited from and they use this recognition to advocate for organizing in multiple struggles.
Why does the notion of disposability need to be sustained by an anti-capitalist critique?
August Carbonella and Sharryn Kasmir warn us the concept of disposability often leads to framing extremely precarious people as subjects constituted by conditions external to capitalism.[ii] The concept of disposability, they argue, has broadened its analytical niche due to the acceleration of processes of dispossession due to rapid wealth accumulation in times of neoliberal restructuring. Despite the concept’s intimate connection with historical material conditions of labor, some scholars understand disposability to be determined primarily by processes outside of capital.[iii] The primary danger of this latter form of disposability lies in its misunderstanding that precarious and non-waged labor does not contribute to the global circulation of value. Disposability holds this potential danger particularly when diverted away from a critique of capitalism and when deployed in discussions of citizenship and exclusion.
One of the ways in which an anti-capitalist approach avoids the conceptual danger of disposability is by considering the social relation between a given worker and the unemployed workforce. It is well known that Marx’s classic distinction between the “reserve army” and the “active labor army” is fundamental for any analyses of dispossession and accumulation.[iv] Fredric Jameson explains this fundamentality,
Marx does not there [Capital] call for the correction of this terrible situation [unemployment] by a policy of full employment; rather, he shows that unemployment is structurally inseparable from the dynamic of accumulation and expansion which constitutes the very nature of capitalism as such. (…) It suggests that those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, “dropped out of history,” (…) surely the vessels of a new kind of global and historical misery, will look rather different when considered in terms of the category of unemployment.[v]
If observed under a Marxist anti-capitalist lens, the disposability of precarious workers is in fact not external but structurally necessary for the global circulation of capital. Unemployment, then, must be thoroughly imbricated in any discussion of disposability and formulations of solutions to such conditions.
How do we inject this anti-capitalist critique to current notions of “disposability” and “essential work”? In the U.S., popular discourse around essential work defines the “essentiality” of this labor as contingent upon two broad conditions: 1) essential work is labor crucial to maintain the infrastructure necessary to keep the American economy afloat and 2) it is labor that requires workers to break with preventative isolation practices mandated of the general public.[vi] In other words, essential work continues the creation of surplus value by exposing the lives of the workers under the supervision of the state. An anti-capitalist critique would, at the least, also argue unemployment manifests as essential work. By being “structurally inseparable from the dynamic of accumulation,” unemployment too allows for continuous creation of surplus value by exposing the lives of unemployed workers to the dangers of the coronavirus. This becomes clear when we consider the imprisoned and the unhoused: corporations and the state extract a profit from the flow of prisoners into and out of the prison system; similarly, real estate companies among other corporations earn a profit from maintaining a degree of homelessness. During COVID, profiting from the imprisoned and the unhoused also means profiting from their potential deaths at the hands of high exposure to the virus. Yet, few rush to call the unemployed “essential”.
Why is the recent liberal discourse of immigrant disposability not sustained by an anti-capitalist critique?
While many recent articles and reports have rushed to explain why undocumented workers are essential on the basis of their disposability (a reality I do not dispute by any means), none to my knowledge have offered a concise analysis of why unemployed workers are disposable and unemployment is essential. The disposability of immigrant bodies during COVID19 has surfaced as the common denominator to many public demands for immigrant justice. A wide range of news articles, as well as some academic reports, denounce the lack of state support to undocumented immigrants during the pandemic. An article in Time magazine expounds the “essential” nature of undocumented labor, arguing that undocumented immigrants expose their bodies and risk their lives as frontline meat-packagers.[vii] A New York Times article sheds light on how undocumented farmworkers are recognized as essential in letters sent by the government yet their expendability during COVID has reached unimaginable heights.[viii] “Essential but exposed” or “essential but expendable” are the words that echo across these and more articles, yet the exposure and expendability of unemployed undocumented immigrants remain absent from the “essentiality” of undocumented labor.
Academic reports have utilized notions of disposability as a descriptive framework but also as platforms to propose just solutions for undocumented immigrants; however, these solutions do not consider an end to the conditions of unemployment. Penelope Alegria’s article in the Harvard Political Review invites the U.S. government to consider long-term policies that guarantee safe working conditions for undocumented workers.[ix] Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda and Sherman Robinson’s UCLA policy report encourages federal and local governments to economically support undocumented workers during this crisis. The report –titled “Essential but Disposable”– finds that “extending state and local economic support programs to undocumented immigrants and their mixed status families will induce positive multiplier effects on the Los Angeles county” and “including undocumented workers in federal government pandemic relief programs will boost their economic impact and ultimately the economy”.[x] Although the high rates of unemployment among undocumented workers are mentioned in conjunction with essential work by these reports, they leave unclear how unemployment and essential work are related. They are described alongside each other but not analyzed together.
Alida Garcia, FWD Vice President of Advocacy, goes further than other news pieces and policy reports by demanding what appears to be a “pathway to citizenship for all”. She writes,
By now, you’ve seen the viral photos of farmworkers hunched over, working in the fields under an orange sky, inhaling ash from wildfires, doing the skilled and tough labor that has allowed millions of us to keep food on our tables in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. These striking images make it clearer than ever: Our economic recovery from the pandemic is entirely reliant on providing a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people currently living in the US. There’s no way forward without doing right by the undocumented individuals who are keeping all Americans alive as our country continues to combat the coronavirus crisis.[xi]
The essay argues the risk taken by undocumented essential workers has kept the American economy afloat. This risk to their bodies and their lives must be rewarded with a comprehensive immigration reform that includes all undocumented immigrants –who work in the frontlines.
However, FWD also goes further than other pieces in a different regard: the essay does not mention unemployed undocumented immigrants at all. The essential undocumented worker described in the essay, in fact, thrives from this gap. Alida Garcia and FWD can only make their argument for “citizenship for all” by completely eradicating the unemployed undocumented workers suffering during this crisis. It is fair here to once again recall the now classic mythos of the “good immigrant”. In her discussion of migration to the European Union, Bridget Anderson elaborates on this myth arguing that full citizenship can only be afforded to the employed taxpayer.[xii] Similarly, in the U.S., FWD continues to contribute to a narrative of exclusionary citizenship dependent on paying taxes and, more specifically, being employed.
FWD’s new bid for “citizenship for all”, a supposed improvement from their older campaigns in support only of undocumented students, is not new at all but simply a refashioning of their long-standing advocacy for exclusionary citizenship. For David Feldman, these seemingly new narratives by tech companies and the organizations they fund (e.g. FWD) in favor of universal immigration reform originate from the growing political cost of undocumented immigrants.[xiii] Where undocumented workers were once cheap and expendable, Feldman argues their political mobilizations during the last few decades have caused their employers to lose a lot of money from fines by ICE as well as from labor shortages. The growing unreliable political cost of undocumented workers has caused a general shift by businesses and politicians to support institutionalized forms of what Cecilia Menjivar terms “liminal legality”.[xiv]Feldman argues that pro-immigrant liberal elite are critical for the project of institutionalizing liminal legality. One way they do so is through discourses[xv] that push for a pathway to citizenship that appears to abolish the legal limbo of our current immigration system while, Feldman explains, actually institutionalizing deportability[xvi] and surveillance. To cohesively sustain the projects of institutionalized liminal legality, liberal discourses of immigrant disposability must omit from their analyses and proposals the relation between essential workers and unemployed undocumented workers. This omission effectively manufactures them as external to the circulation of value and the accumulation of wealth. FWD’s proposal for universal citizenship is reserved for those who are willing to risk their lives in exchange for a few dollars an hour and to live them surveilled under the constant threat of deportation. The basis of this understanding of citizenship relies on a complete and detrimental indifference towards the unemployed, the detained, and the unhoused.
Although the news articles and reports mentioned above do not explicitly side with FWD, Alida Garcia draws from the general liberal discourse of disposability developed and reinforced by the articles and reports themselves. The absence of a concrete analysis of unemployed undocumented workers renders those pieces open for incorporation into FWD’s narrative of exclusionary citizenship. For this incorporation to be avoided, moral denunciations of the disposability of immigrant bodies during COVID19 must engage in sustained anti-capitalist critique that includes unemployed undocumented immigrants in their analysis. However, this critique will not be able to completely avoid co-optation without, in the first and last instance, prioritizing political organizing in multiple fronts.
Why must political organizing be a priority of anti-capitalist critique?
The reports and FWD essay propose various solutions to the disposability of essential immigrant workers; however, I have shown their underdeveloped analysis of unemployment leads to exclusionary solutions. I find myself having to broaden this last argument: these exclusionary measures also contribute to a politics of dispossession by disorganization. Kasmir and Carbonella contend that any effort to disorganize and defeat the organized working class functions as a form of political dispossession.[xvii] While it may be far too much a stretch to claim the U.S. has an organized working class, the existence of political organizations scattered across the country and united by flexible alliances is undeniable (e.g. Movement for Black Lives, Democratic Socialists of America, local tenant unions). Cosecha and other organizations supporting unemployed undocumented workers belong to this set of political collectives. Their efforts have been undermined by the liberal discourse of immigrant disposability, which –thinking with Feldman– contributes to the increased surveillance and repression of political mobilization by undocumented immigrants.[xviii] The institutionalization of immigrant disposability vis-à-vis liminal legality allows for the formation of a highly surveilled and deportable workforce, far more politically restrained and disorganized than undocumented immigrants. Any critique of immigrant disposability requires an anti-capitalist approach that centers political organizing, for it has only been community-based political organizations who have structurally incorporated all undocumented workers in their demands, efforts, and goals.
“While the Government Excludes Us, We Depend on Our Community: In half an hour we received 5000 applications for emergency relief funds. This is one of the few forms of relief that our community has. Regrettably we cannot accept more applications for now.” Update on the progress of Cosecha’s Undocumented Worker Fund.
Photo from Movimiento Cosecha’s Medium website.
Members of the Cosecha movement understand that, while their demands and efforts may be contextualized by moments such as our current crisis, their means and goal remain organizing. Cosecha’s advocacy for “permanent protection, dignity, and respect for the 11 million undocumented workers in this country”[1] demonstrates a demand for universal protection of all, including unemployed undocumented workers. Cosecha’s flexible strategies and re-imagination of their existent structures during the COVID crisis are living proof of their demand for universal protection. Their distribution of food and creation of two economic relief campaigns, the Undocumented Worker Fund[2], aim to help not only essential undocumented workers but all undocumented workers in need, including the unemployed and unhoused. Additionally, their continuous efforts to abolish ICE and the police[3] throughout the pandemic show their standing support for the unemployed, detained, and imprisoned. However, two points are clear from Cosecha’s own report[4] regarding their tactics during COVID: 1) while their demand is permanent protection for all, they are painfully aware 2) their mutual aid efforts only reach a few -as much as they would want to reach all. Thus, Cosecha’s ultimate goal is to foster organizing and the creation and interconnection of more organizations tackling the multiple struggles afflicting all undocumented workers.
The only way to counter dispossession by disorganization is through active advocacy for collective organizing. Cosecha’s pathway to protection for all is a great example of how to counter the potential disorganization enacted by the liberal disposability discourse: Cosecha seeks a form of “immediate, unconditional, and total amnesty for all”[5], but it does so only as a means for the promotion of organizing for organizing’s sake. In the words of Rosalba Alvarez, leader in the Cosecha Movement,
These mutual aid efforts are strengthening our long-term organizing infrastructure. We are absorbing volunteers who help run the mutual aid programs as well as families receiving support into DIA [Dignidad Immigrante in Athens], strengthening a base of immigrant workers who will soon be brought into local campaigns to demand protection, dignity, and respect. A movement with the capacity to provide emergency relief during an economic crisis can also develop the capacity to manage a strike fund.[6]
At the core of Cosecha’s agenda for protection for all is an anti-capitalist critique of the disposability of immigrant bodies and, most importantly, a promotion of community-based organizing across multiple struggles.
To conclude, I reiterate: for Cosecha, to demand protection or citizenship for all from the American state is only the means towards more organizing and the formation of more organizations and alliances. If you find yourself asking, “organizing towards what?”, the answer is towards more organizing. If you find yourself asking, “not towards citizenship for all?”, the answer is yes… but also no, because the answer is always more organizing. If we are to end the conditions determining the unemployed undocumented worker, I will repeat my previous answer –now in the words of Alain Badiou– “our duty is to organize ourselves with him or her, with everyone like him or her, if possible at an international level, to prepare the end of the oligarchic world order whose result is his or her being a nomadic proletarian.”[7]
Movimiento Cosecha. 16 May 2020. “How Movimiento Cosecha operates a COVID-19 fund by and for undocumented immigrants.” https://movimientocosecha.medium.com/how-movimiento-cosecha-operates-a-covid-19-fund-by-and-for-undocumented-immigrants-4199c6678afd
Movimiento Cosecha. 13 August 2020. “Nos Cuida la Comunindad: Cosecha’s COVID-19 Fund for Undocumented Workers has redistributed $1 Million.” https://movimientocosecha.medium.com/cosechas-covid-19-fund-for-undocumented-workers-has-redistributed-1-million-c8d49ded4aee
[i] Lizzie Tribone. 1 July 2020. “Mutual Aid for and By Undocumented Immigrants,” The American Prospect. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/mutual-aid-for-and-by-undocumented-immigrants/
[ii] August Carbonella and Sharryn Kasmir. 2014. “Introduction: Towards a Global Anthropology of Labor,” in Blood and Fire: Towards a Global Anthropology of Labor. eds. A. Carbonella and S. Kasmir. New York: Berghahn Press
[iii] August Carbonella and Sharryn Kasmir. 2014.
[iv] Karl Marx. 1867. Capital, volume I
[v] Fredric Jameson. 2011. Representing Capital: A commentary on Volume One. London: Verso
[vi] National Conference of State Legislatures. 2020. “COVID19: Essential Workers in the States,” National Conference of State Legislatures. https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/covid-19-essential-workers-in-the-states.aspx#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20U..S,energy%20to%20defense%20to%20agriculture.
[vii] Lisandra Villa. 17 April 2020. “’We’re ignored completely’: Amid the Pandemic Undocumented Immigrants are Essential but Exposed,” Time Magazine. https://time.com/5823491/undocumented-immigrants-essential-coronavirus/
[viii] Miriam Jordan. 2 April 2020. “Farmworkers, Mostly Undocumented, Become ‘Essential’ During Pandemic,” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-undocumented-immigrant-farmworkers-agriculture.html
[ix] Penelope Alegria. 1 August 2020. “Undocumented Workers: The Essential, Exposed, and Expendable,” Harvard Political Review. https://harvardpolitics.com/undocumented-workers-the-essential-exposed-and-expendable/
[x] Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda, et al. 10 August 2020. Essential but Disposable: Undocumented Workers and their Mixed-Status Families. Los Angeles: UCLA North American Integration and Development Center and Mexican Institution Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia. https://irle.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Essential-Undocumented-Workers-Final-w-Cover.pdf
[xi] Alida Garcia. 2020. “Economic Recovery from COVID Depends on a Citizenship Pathway for 11 Million Undocumented Immigrants,” Milken Institute. https://milkeninstitute.org/power-of-ideas/economic-recovery-covid-depends-citizenship-undocumented-immigrants
[xii] Bridget Anderson. 2015. “Immigration and the Worker Citizen,” in Citizenship and Its Others. eds. B. Anderson and V. Hughes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
[xiii] David B Feldman. 2019. “Beyond the Border Spectacle: Global Capital, Migrant Labor, and the Specter of Liminal Legality.” Critical Sociology 46(4-5): 729-743.
[xiv] Cecilia Menjivar. 2006. “Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants’ lives in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 111(4): 999-1037.
[xv] David B Feldman. 18 February 2018. “Pro-immigrant liberalism and Capitalist Exploitation: Why Corporate Democrats Do Not Support Immigrant Justice.” Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/pro-immigrant-liberalism-and-capitalist-exploitation-why-corporate-democrats-do-not-support-immigrant-justice/
[xvi] Nicholas De Genova. 2010. “The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement,” in The Deportation Regime. eds. Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
[xvii] August Carbonella and Sharryn Kasmir. 2014.
[xviii] David B Feldman. 2019.
[1] Rosalba Alvarez. 23 June 2020. “Now is the Time to Organize Undocumented Workers,” Jacobin. https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/undocumented-workers-daca-supreme-court-covid
[2] Movimiento Cosecha. 16 May 2020.
[3] Movimiento Cosecha. 5 June 2020. “Los trabajadores inmigrantes tenemos que apoyar al movimiento por las vidas negras.” https://movimientocosecha.medium.com/los-trabajadores-inmigrantes-tenemos-que-apoyar-al-movimiento-por-las-vidas-negras-d51152961ab2
[4] Movimiento Cosecha. 13 August 2020.
[5] David Feldman. 2019.
[6] Rosalba Alvarez. 23 June 2020.
[7] I include here Badiou’s quote from Migrants and Militants at length: “Let us give this name [the nomadic proletarian] to the person we are talking about, and let us then understand that out duty is not to welcome this person in the name of an ethics of hospitality. Our duty is to organize ourselves with him or her, with everyone like him or her, if possible at an international level, to prepare the end of the oligarchic world order whose result is his or her being as nomadic proletarian. Which means: our duty is to think and prepare, with this person, the new communist politics.” (2020).
