United States: Immigration, prison and wage labor

Figures in the press [1] give us an interesting picture of the relationship between immigration, prison and wage labor in the United States, and allow us to explore certain issues relating to the relationship between capital and the working class in the country.

Let us start from the figures (always to be taken with the due pinch of salt), bearing in mind that, whilst the “reform of immigration” (whose objective should be to give “regular” papers to 12 million clandestine immigrants at present working in U.S. territory) is stuck in the parliamentary tug of war, it is a lucky moment for the anti-immigrant legislation, elaborated in various ways in different states – legislation aiming, as always in these cases, at making the conditions of immigrants (especially those from Central and South America) precarious and open to blackmail, applying constant pressure that obliges them to accept any sort of job and living conditions. And, we might add, the universal condition of the proletarian migrant – persecuted, exploited (in the specific example, 12 or more hours of labour a day in the fields picking fruit and vegetables), alternately within or outside the law, struggling day after day in what invariably becomes a war amongst the poor and the desperate.

A new chapter in this war of the poor and the desperate has opened up over the years, under the impulse of the laws of capitalist economy and, in this situation of stalemate (due not to lack of sensitivity on the part of individual members of parliament but to the needs of the labour market), it manifests itself in all its crude reality:  particularly in the western States, most of the work in the fields – the historical destiny of immigrants, whether legal or clandestine – is now done by those serving prison sentences. The big agricultural enterprises “hire” groups of prisoners from one penitentiary institute or another, to work in the fields under due surveillance at an hourly rate of around $9.60 – only 60 cents of which go into the pocket of the prisoner-labourer, whilst the rest is hoarded by the institute, which will decide whether to use it in order to pay the damages caused by the crime the individual was involved in or whether to pay it into a fund to be managed by itself and made over to the individual at the time (s)he is … set free (a sort of severance fund, in view of the fact that, in any case, we are speaking of a capitalistic prison)

Let us look more closely at the individual issues.

The needs of capital and the fluxes of immigrants

The figures tell us that the incidence of immigrant labour as a percentage of total labour in the USA grew from 5% in 1970, to an approx. 6% in 1980, approx. 8% in 1990, approx.12% in 2000 and approx. 14% in 2004 (in California alone – the state that at present absorbs the highest number of immigrants – the figure has risen from 10% in 1970 to 32% today).

The history of US capitalism is in many ways the history of endless, successive waves of immigration. Without wanting to go into a history of US immigration here, and limiting ourselves to the 1800s (the century in which US economic power emerges as dominant, after completing the nation-making process through the 1861-64 Civil War, under the banner of the capitalist mode of production alone and thus having created a real domestic market), the first waves of immigration come in the ‘40s and ‘50s (German and Irish labour: the former mostly skilled or semi-skilled, the latter unskilled, literally starving and ready to take on any sort of job at any wages, the butt of undisguised racism by the ruling class and by the growing middle classes), which join “native” labour, consisting of the English, the Scots and the more established Americans, on the job market.  Already, within the US working class, the first divisions are skilfully created and exploited by the ruling class to weaken any potential opposition front.  In the same decades, on the US Pacific coast, large contingents of Chinese are arriving, as they flee from the upheavals caused by capitalist penetration of Asia:  they will be working in the gold and silver mines and on the building of the first intercontinental railroads and, once these two sources of work have been exhausted (and the Asian immigrants used to move public opinion against foreigners, culminating in an authentic pogrom), they will create the Chinatowns of the country’s main cities.

In the mid-1800s, first the war with Mexico for the control of the vast south-western territories and, subsequently, the Civil War  will complete the process of US nation-making: amongst the many consequences, this involves securing a huge reserve of cheap labour consisting of the populations descending from the Mayas and the Aztecs in the south-west and the former slaves, “free” to join the job market. In both cases, segregation laws and established customs, written and unwritten, will contribute to making both these groups into a hyper-exploited and hyper-oppressed caste. In the second half of the 1800s, the huge wave of migration arrives, mainly from southern and eastern Europe – Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, another enormous contingent of cut-price labour, ready to take on the hardest and worst-paid jobs in order to survive and not be forced to return. The thirty-year period bridging the two centuries sees a constant flow, which will be concentrated mainly in the big cities and constitute the origin of strong social tension, but also of the great workers’ battles.

If, therefore, around 7.5 million workers arrive in the United States between 1820 and 1870, in the following 50 years around 26 million arrive, with a peak of 8.8 million in the decade 1901-1919 – figures that alone would suffice to explain the rapid take-off of US imperialism, its intervention in the First World War and its final position as leading world power and creditor.

What we wish to emphasise is that ever since the 1840s but mostly in the four decades between the 1860s and the year 1900 the policy of US capitalism was guided by the motto divide et impera (divide and rule) – take advantage of the ethnic and national divisions in the emerging working class (and in most cases fuel them purposely) to weaken the class front, provoke antagonism or racial hatred and, at the same time, herd the immigrant proletarians towards assimilation and a strong sense of nationalism and patriotism [2]. From the very beginning, the practice has been that of “ethnic replacements”, as the sociologists term the practice of setting immigrant and native proletarians against one another. Some cases  are emblematic and help us to understand what is going on today as regards the “immigration law”.

In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, banning any further entry by Chinese immigrants, a law with open class prejudice (entry is granted to diplomatic staff and their families, traders and their families and a limited number of students only). The law remains until 1943, when it is abrogated to allow entry by “war brides” (women who married US soldiers of Asian origin in the Far East during the war). Let us leave aside for the moment all aspects relating to the material and psychological consequences of this law, responsible for the advent in US Chinatowns of the so-called “bachelor society” (=men who were unable to bring over the rest of their families).  What is interesting to note is that this restrictive anti-Chinese law was joined in those same years by a sort of unofficial but fully operational “open door” for other Asians, from the Philippines (the Philippine islands come under US imperial power in 1898, together with Hawaii, Guam and Puerto Rico and remain a sort of “clearing house” for Asian immigration in North America), whilst the door to immigration from Mexico always remains open. Indeed, whilst in 1924 the law known as the National Origins Act practically closes off immigration from Europe, access remains constantly open for the Pacific area (and in particular the Philippines, which are US territory up to 1934) and Mexico (whose border with the United States is so long as to make it virtually impossible to close it off completely – even today).  From then onwards, together with black people and Puertoricans, the Philippinos and Mexican-Americans (the so-called chicanos) [3] are to form one of the most exploited, oppressed and persecuted sectors of the US proletariat. The case of Puerto Rico shows just how hypocritical all bourgeois arguments on “immigration control” are.  Puerto Rico is conquered by the United States in 1898, becoming not one of the United States but a “member of the commonwealth” – a highly ambiguous relationship that allows US capital to exploit the island as a practical and close-by labour reserve, with the flexibility made necessary by the different phases of the economic cycle. A first flux begins in 1917 (the year Puertoricans are “granted” American citizenship, thus excluding them from the category of “foreigners” subject to possible restrictive laws), it culminates in the ‘30s, makes a strong comeback in the years before and after the Second World War (when it is necessary to “fill the gaps” left by soldiers at the front) and, above all in the ‘50s (the boom years), when “Operation Bootstrap” (in practice the forced industrialization of the island) brings into North America floods of impoverished peasant smallholders, ready to transform themselves into proletarians and sub-proletarians in the big cities, but also to return to the island when the laws of the economic cycle make this necessary.  Something similar was also happening to Mexican-Americans: between 1942 and 1964, the “Bracero [farm labourer] Program” brings over five millionchicanos, almost by force, into the south-western states, to be employed as seasonal farm workers in appalling living and working conditions (there were many cases in which the workers had to pay rent for the trees they slept under out in the fields!); but in 1954 “Operation Wetback” obliges a million of them, declared “clandestine”, to go back again (amongst them – it will be found later – there are quite a few fully-fledged US citizens). Lastly, in recent years, “Operation Gatekeeper” wants to “regulate” the flow of clandestine immigrants by building an iron wall and setting up “frontier patrols” – “to regulate”, but not too much… because, as has become clear, their role is, after all, still essential to the US economy.

In Book One of Capital (Chap. XXIII:  “The General Law of the Accumulation of Capital”), Marx writes that, if a surplus of working-class population is the product necessary for accumulating or developing wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population does, on the other hand, become the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed one of the conditions for the existence of the capitalist mode of production.It forms an industrial army of reserve which belongs absolutely to the capital as if it had been raised at its own expense; to serve its changing need to create value, it creates the human material to be exploited, always at the ready, independently of any real demographic increase.

Thus, the need for a surplus working-class population (to keep salaries down, to exert constant blackmail on the rest of the class, to provide immediate coverage for any gaps that may form in the labour market, to exploit to the absolute maximum a labour force that will accept anything in order to survive) and the control of it by means of “anti-immigrant laws” (laws that are presented as an integral part of a project for “social peace” but which really serve merely to exert further pressure on immigrants and above all in the most vulnerable area, that of the clandestine) are not a contradiction but a law of accumulation – part and parcel of the brutality through which the capitalist mode of production functions.

Prisons and capitalist business

Let us turn now to the other aspect – that of the transformation of the US prison population into another sector of underpaid labour. In fact this, too, is no novelty and there is no lack of examples, particularly in the United States.  From the second half of the 1800s onwards in particular, the long lines of chain gangs, prisoners at work on road and railroad building, digging ditches, strengthening banks or picking cotton and tobacco, guarded by armed police on horseback, were a familiar scene, which even put down roots in popular culture, for example in the “work songs” (“Take this hammer, take it to the captain, tell him I’m gone…”). During the Mississippi floods and those of other big rivers in the first few decades of the 1900s, the use of prison labour to deal with emergencies was quite common and it was common to use prisoners during the New Deal to build roads in the southern states. In any case, the relationship between prison and bourgeois society has always been very close: suffice it to remember what Marx, again in Book One of Capital (Chap. XXIV: “So-called primitive accumulation”), called “bloody legislation against the expropriated”, which developed in Europe from the 1500s onwards, culminating in the English “anti-vagrancy laws”: “The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this ‘free’ proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working-class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as ‘voluntary’ criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed.”

When, as time passed, the problem was no longer just that of adapting to totally new living conditions, i.e. when, from the start of the 1800s onwards, the capitalist mode of production had become generally established in western Europe, it should not be forgotten that the vagrant, the unemployed, the widow without support, the orphan child, had only one realistic prospect – that of being whisked off to the workhouse – the “penal colony of misery”, a true nightmare for the English proletariat and sub-proletariat, made familiar by the novels of Dickens.

Thus, from the very beginning, prison (in its various forms and interpretations) takes the form of a basic tool of capitalist exploitation: it serves to direct huge masses of  people uprooted by the rapid and violent processes of transformation towards capitalist exploitation during the shift from feudalism to capitalism and, at the same time, “licenses” even those who find themselves more or less temporarily on the margins of society to take part in the process. A society which, ever since its origins, has found prison (the “penal colony”) its most effective metaphor.

In modern times and with the consensus of all the right-thinking reformers, this characteristic of prisons has become even more explicit, particularly in the USA, which, being the most capitalistically “advanced” country, lays down the law to the entire world. So not only prisons as pure repression, as the attempted total elimination of behaviour defined (with the utmost hypocrisy) “anti-social”, but also the exact opposite, prisons as structures deeply integrated into capitalist society and the capitalist mode of production, to the point of offering it a further “gift” of ultra-exploited and ultra-blackmailable labour – that of the prisoners. At this point, one can almost hear the shocked protests of the right-thinking citizens: “What do you mean!  It’s a question of making the condition of the prisoner more dignified by means of work!” Oh yes, Arbeit Macht Frei, as we might read at the entrance to certain Nazi concentration camps: “Work makes us free.” Just what we wished to demonstrate: the creation of Lagers by capitalist society has taken giant steps forward.

But let us return to the United States and to the (productive!) work of prisoners.

According to the latest report by the Department of Justice [4], the prison population of the United States amounted to 2.245.189 at 30 June 2006, with a 2.8% increase over the past year: two thirds in federal jails and one third in local ones. If this prison population is then limited to the 18 to 39 age range and broken down by “ethnic group” and origin, the following picture emerges:

Black: 11.6% (born in the US), 2.5% (born abroad)

Hispanics or Latinos: 6.7% (born in the US), 1.0% (born abroad)

Asians: 1.9% (born in the US), 0.3% (born abroad)

Whites: 1.7% (born in the US), 0.6% (born abroad).

The figures [5] confirm what can easily be imagined: the situation in prisons is a mirror image of the condition of oppression and discrimination experienced by wide sectors of the “free” US population. This also means that a large part of that abundant 20% of Blacks and Hispanics (Central-Americans, Latin Americans etc.) belong to the US proletariat and sub-proletariat. This gives rise to an initial consideration that we should take good note of. We do not intend analysing here the recent US legislation with its increasingly repressive measures (“three strikes and you’re out” and other delicacies of this nature), nor shall we discuss more specifically the presence in US prisons of a large number of individuals imprisoned for political motives. It does, however, become immediately clear that repression and imprisonment are used not only for immediate “social pacification” but also to create divisions within the proletariat.

As to work in prisons, this is now widespread and has been for some time. For example, according to the report by the Department of Corrections of Florida, for the tax year 2003-2004, the so-called “Community Work Squads” produced something like 6.5 million working hours during the course of the year, for a total value of around 68 million dollars, which convert, net of expenses, into 38.5 million dollars of “added value” (the expression, used in the report, is the same as for any company balance sheet!). The “beneficiaries” of all this “surplus-labor from prisons” are the Department of Transport, the Public Works sector and other external “Contract Work” [6].

This is a situation common to a large proportion of the US penitentiary network (but, as we well know, not only). The list of the “beneficiaries” of all this “surplus-labor from prisons” extends well beyond government agencies, transport departments, public works, and includes the choicest of US and non-US companies, such as IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT & T, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, HP, TWA, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin and so on... In some cases, after de-localizing production from over-costly production centres and moving it to the horrible maquiladoras along the Mexican border, some companies have ended up outsourcing it on to certain prisons, such as the famous San Quentin in California. There is also the growing phenomenon of the “private prisons”, which, through certain corporations (the Corrections Corporation of America, the Geo Group Inc., the Cornell Companies) receive a subsidy for each individual prisoner and must then act like any other private company: i.e. they must have their accounts in order, with all the consequences deriving from this [7]. Let this suffice for the moment.

We feel no romantic fascination with the immigrant as such, neither do we play around with reactionary mystifications of the “politically correct” (for which ethnic or national origins, social and cultural traditions are supposed to be of value in themselves and should be safeguarded in the vortex of “globalisation”). Just as, for Marx, “either the proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing,” so the immigrant either feels (s)he is part of the struggling proletariat or (s)he is nothing – indeed, (s)he is subject to the worst chauvinistic infatuations: whether these come from his or her past or present matters very little. In the same way, as far as “prison labour” is concerned, there is, indeed, a positive aspect in it, but not in the same sense as the right-thinking citizens mean (rehabilitation, reintegration, self respect and all the other reformist idiocies that have accompanied the real situation of prisons since they became one of the key institutions in the capitalist mode of production). No, the positive aspect lies, once again, in the potential (and we stress potential) for showing the prisoner who is producing “surplus-labor” that (s)he belongs to the camp of the exploited, inside and outside of prison: demonstrating that (s)he is a proletarian, in that enormous jail represented by capitalism.

But for all this to decant and take concrete shape in a true proletarian front, two pre-conditions are needed:  the class war has to flare up anew, joining together different sectors of the world proletariat so that they overcome the divisions imposed by capital, going through phases that will certainly prove dramatic; and the revolutionary party must once more establish itself internationally.