Has anyone picked up the latest issue of
Ms. Magazine? If not, get it; in case you haven't noticed,
Ms. has become a fabulous news source for international feminism: this issue's got stories on Israel, the Juárez murders, and the U.S. Mariana Islands, as well as a good overview of Coretta Scott King's career, actual scholarship about the history of Mary Magdalene (as opposed to that appalling DaVinci thing), and a really thought-provoking interview with Deborah Tannen about her latest book, which apparently studies mother-daughter communication.
(Their server appears to be down, or I'd link directly to the Ms. website. Anyway, it's not like you don't know what the magazine looks like.)But the big draw is the cover story,
excerpted here. The situation in the Mariana islands has been
on the radar since 1998, but it's gotten only spotty coverage at best--and
Ms.' article is the latest. The outline, to refresh your memory, is this:
The Marianas are a U.S. commonwealth. Its citizens are Americans, and subject to American laws--mostly. They're not, however subject to U.S. minimum wage or immigration legislation.
What this means, in practice, is that there are garment factories in the Marianas whose products get labelled "Made in the U.S.A.," although the factories that make them might be owned by anyone--often by Chinese companies. More importantly, their workers are largely Asian women who pay "recruiters" thousands of dollars to be brought in without the protection of U.S. immigration law as "guest workers." They have to pay back their "debt," and they also have to pay for housing and food (often supplied by the company they work for)--all out of their sub-minimum wages.
Ms. points out that "a worker who owes, say, $5000 to her recruiter has to work"
58 weeks/year, at 40 hours/week, to pay back her debt. Of course, in actual practice, "workers [often] labor six days a week, sometimes up to 20 hours a day," and the incidence of "formal complaints that they have not received their wages, with some women going without paychecks for over five months" is on the rise. Because the Marianas is not subject to U.S. immigration law, however, workers who complain can just be shipped back home; there's no labor protection for these "guest workers."
Nice, huh? The political hook here, so far, has been twofold. First, despite repeated Congressional votes to raise the minimum wage and/or force the Marianas to abide by U.S. immigration law,
Jack Abramoff (who was hired as a lobbyist for the Marianas) and his buddy
Tom DeLay (scroll down to the bottom of the article for the relevant info) managed to block the legislation. Second, one of the many fucked-up realities of the women workers in the Marianas is that it appears that, if they become pregnant, they're forced, explicitly or implicitly, to have abortions:
According to a 1998 investigation by the Department of Interior Office of insular Affairs, a number of Chinese garment workers reported that if they became pregnant, they were "forced to return to China to have an abortion or forced to have an illegal abortion" in the Marianas.
So the "hook" for this story so far has been
Tom Delay supports forced abortions on U.S. territory, more or less. Which is a pretty good hook, and a pretty vile thing to do. But it seems to me that in light of the current immigration debate, there's something else about this story that we really need to be paying attention to: that "guest worker" thing. As
Ms. puts it,
The guest worker designation means that these foreign laborers can remian on the islands for an indefinite period but are not eligible for U.S. citizenship. If workers complain about conditions, not only can they be terminated at the whim of their employer, but because they're exempt from U.S. immigration law, they can be summarily deported (36).
In other words, this "guest worker" bullshit is totally not about helping immigrants who want to come to this country and make a decent wage to support families back home. It's about protecting employers from being prosecuted for hiring undocumented workers, while
also protecting them from giving up the exploitative power they have over undocumented workers. In fact, what struck me most forcibly about this article was the similarity between the women profiled in it and the family profiled in
Enrique's Journey
, a book I just finished reading (which, coolness, is also available
in Spanish).
Ms.Of the nearly 30 workers interviewed by Ms., almost all had left children back home with relatives, hoping they'll earn enough in Saipan to finance their offspring's education.
Enrique's Journey. . . she tells me about four other children. . . . in Guatemala. She left them there, when she ventured north as a single mother to work in the United States.
She has been separated from them for twelve years.
Twelve years? I react with disbelief. How can a mother leave her children and travel more than two thousand miles away, not knowing when or if she will ever see them again? What drove her to do this?
Carmen dries her tears and explains. . . . "They would ask me for food, and I didn't have it."
Immigration, legal or not, is going to happen. Because if you are faced with a choice between feeding your child, teaching it to read, or breaking the law, you're going to break the law. Any decent parent would. The Abramoffs and the DeLays and the Bushes know this perfectly well. They bank on it to put money in their own pockets. That's what this "guest worker" program is all about, what the Marianas sweatshops are all about: figuring out ways to make desperately poor people into profitable commodities--which means keeping them desperately poor. The Abramaoff lobbying scandals, the bribery and corruption scandals that connect Abramoff to DeLay, the Texas redistricting bullshit, the forced abortions in the Marianas, and the National Guard being sent to guard the Texas/Mexico border aren't actually particularly complicated. You don't need to be an expert on fairness to immigrants, or global free trade, or protecting life, or protecting U.S. borders, or any of that high political rhetoric and its popular jingoistic simplification.
All you need to do is pay attention to what women and kids all over the world actually need, and to who, or what, is keeping them from getting it.
Cross-posted at The American Street
