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A WORKING-CLASS HISTORY OF FIGHTING DEPORTATIONS  
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David Bacon
December 15, 2024
Jacobin
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_ The US working class has a long tradition of standing up against
immigrant repression. This history is a reservoir of inspiration and
strategic thinking — and it can help immigrant workers and
communities confront Donald Trump’s promised wave of repr _

Migrant farmworkers, domestic workers, and their supporters marched
through San Francisco’s Mission District to call for passage of the
Registry Bill in June 2024., Courtesy of David Bacon

 

The history of working-class organizing in the United States is full
of examples of immigrant resistance to mass deportation, sweeps, and
other tactics. Time and again, immigrant worker activity has changed
the course of society. It has produced unions of workers ranging from
copper miners to janitors. It turned the politics of Los Angeles head.
And it is this tradition of worker resistance that is the real target
of immigration enforcement waves, both current and threatened by the
incoming administration.

 

Organizers of the past fought deportation threats just as we do today,
and their experiences offer valuable insights for our present
situation. Not only did they show tremendous perseverance in the face
of direct threats to migrants, but these organizers also envisioned a
future of greater equality, working-class rights, and social
solidarity — and proposed ways to get there. Increased immigration
repression has a way of making the bones of the system easier to see
and the reasons for changing it abundantly clear. These organizations
and coalitions defending immigrant workers, their families, and their
communities have often been building blocks for movements for deeper
social change.

The rich tradition of worker organizing against immigrant repression
is a story of courageous struggle and a reservoir of strategic
thinking that can help immigrant workers and communities confront the
promised MAGA wave of repression. It involves far too many
organizations and fights to list here. This article aims to show what
people faced, how they fought, and what kind of future they fought
for.

The Old Threat of Mass Deportation

In the outpouring of fear and outrage over Donald Trump’s threat to
deport millions of undocumented immigrants, many have drawn parallels
to the mass deportations of 1932–33. At the height of the Great
Depression, with hunger haunting the homes of millions of
working-class people, relief authorities denied food to Mexican and
Mexican American families. Racist bureaucrats appealed to the
government to deport them, claiming that forcing them to leave would
save money and open up jobs for citizens. These age-old lies have been
recycled over the last century, repeated most recently by the MAGA
campaign.

Hunger was the most powerful weapon used to force people to leave.
Thousands were swept up in street raids, and many more fled because of
the terror these raids produced. Voluntarily or not, people were
loaded into boxcars and dumped at the border gates. The euphemism of
the ’30s was “repatriation.” Today’s immigration enforcers
call it “self-deportation.” The idea remains the same, and Trump
and J. D. Vance are only the latest proponents of this inhumane
policy.

People resisted deportation through the radical organizations of the
era, from the Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española to the unions
formed in bloody strikes in mines and fields. The largest farm labor
strike in US history, the Pixley cotton strike, erupted in 1933 across
the barrios of California’s San Joaquin Valley during that peak
deportation year. Radical activists were singled out for deportation
and defended by communist and socialist defense organizations,
including later the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born.
The Mexican government of the time, only a decade after the
revolution, also protested and tried to help deportees.

This history of resistance is as important to remember as the history
of the deportations themselves. The organizations created by
resistance, and the larger working-class movement of which they were a
part, survived the deportation wave. While many groups were put on the
attorney general’s list of subversive organizations during the Cold
War, others emerged during the civil rights era. When the immigrant
rights movement peaked again in recent decades, it inherited this
legacy.

Workers Win Over Their Unions

One crucial battle was fought by a small group of workers in wealthy
Palm Springs, California. Twenty-three years ago, Maria Sanchez,
working at the luxurious Palm Canyon resort for $4.75 an hour, marched
into the office of Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local
309. There she and her coworkers joined the union. The hotel hired
security guards — dressed in uniforms mimicking those of the Border
Patrol — and began firing workers. The immigrant housekeepers
organized a silent march in the street outside, prayed in the parking
lot, and refused to go back to work.

With the support of Local 309, Sanchez and her coworkers stayed out on
strike for four months. She lost her house and car, selling personal
belongings to survive. The manager swore they’d never work there
again.

When the hotel said only workers with legal immigration status could
go back, everyone stayed on strike another month, documented and
undocumented together.

Despite his threat, the Palm Canyon was finally forced to agree to
reinstate the workers with back pay. But when the hotel said only
workers with legal immigration status could go back, everyone stayed
on strike another month, documented and undocumented together. ”I
didn‘t care who had papers and who didn’t,“ Sanchez told me
then. ”We decided that no one would go back until we all went back.
The union didn‘t back down, and we won.“

What makes the Palm Canyon experience important today is not just the
inspiring courage of the workers but the strategic ideas that guided
them. They organized over the concrete conditions of their lives.
Faced with legal repression and firings, they defied efforts to make
them suffer. Knowing they couldn’t fight alone, they looked for
help, and the union supported them. Most importantly, they stuck
together. “This is exactly what’s leading unions to change their
attitude towards immigration,” explained John Wilhelm, then the
national union’s president.

It was no accident that as the strike unfolded, the AFL-CIO
highlighted the organizing of immigrant workers at its Los Angeles
convention. Rejecting its history of support for anti-immigrant
legislation, the union federation adopted a resolution calling for
immigration amnesty for the country’s then six million undocumented
people and the repeal of employer sanctions — the 1986 law that made
it illegal for them to work. Palm Canyon strikers were among the many
witnesses at the subsequent union hearings organized around the
country to expose the violation of immigrant workers’ rights.

SEIU janitors from San Francisco and Los Angeles demonstrated in
support of AB 450, a bill to protect workers during immigration raids
and enforcement actions, in March 2024. (Courtesy of David Bacon)

Defending Against Raids in the Workplace

The decades following the Cold War saw workers and unions developing
increasingly sophisticated strategies to resist immigration
enforcement. From factory floors to union halls, these battles helped
shape today’s immigrant rights movement.

One of the first post–Cold War battles over immigration enforcement
against workers took place at the Kraco car radio factory in Los
Angeles in the early 1980s. Workers joining the United Electrical
Workers stopped the production lines to force the owner to deny entry
to immigration agents and saved one another from deportation. Later
that decade, the Molders Union Local 164 in Oakland joined the Mexican
American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in suing the Immigration
and Naturalization Service over its practice of having agents bar the
doors of factories, holding workers prisoner, and then interrogating
them and detaining those without papers. The case went to the US
Supreme Court, which found the practice unconstitutional.

In one of the last raids of the Bush administration, in 2008,
immigration agents took 481 workers at Howard Industries, a
Mississippi electrical equipment factory, to a privately run detention
center in Jena, Louisiana. They were not charged, had no access to
attorneys, and could not get released on bail. Jim Evans, a national
AFL-CIO organizer in Mississippi and a leading member of the state
legislature’s black caucus, said, “This raid is an effort to drive
immigrants out of Mississippi and a wedge between immigrants, African
Americans, white people, and unions — all those who want political
change here.” Evans, other members of the black caucus, many of the
state’s unions, and immigrant communities all saw shifting
demographics as the basis for changing the state’s politics. They
organized the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA) as a
vehicle for protecting the immigrant part of that constituency.

By the 2000s, these workplace battles had evolved into complex
struggles over race, labor rights, and political power in the South.
Howard Industries, a rare union factory in the state, paid $2 per hour
less than the industry norm. “The people who profit from
Mississippi’s low wage system want to keep it the way it is,”
Evans said, charging that the immigration raid was used to keep the
union weak. International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local
1317’s African American business manager, Clarence Larkin, told me
that the company “pits workers against each other by design and
breeds division among them that affects everyone. By favoring one
worker over another, workers sometimes can’t see who their real
enemy is. That’s what keeps wages low.”

 

MIRA activists met the raid with organizing, sitting outside on the
grass with the families of those in detention. “When the shift
changed, African American workers started coming out and went up to
these Latina women and began hugging them,” MIRA organizer Victoria
Cintra remembered. “They said things like, ‘We’re with you. Do
you need any food for your kids? How can we help? You need to assert
your rights. We’re glad you’re here. We’ll support you.’”

The company ‘pits workers against each other by design and breeds
division among them that affects everyone.’

In Mississippi fish plants, Jaribu Hill, the director of the
Mississippi Workers Center, collaborated with unions to help workers
understand the dynamics of race. “We have to talk about racism,”
Hill said. “Organizing a multi-racial workforce means recognizing
the divisions between African Americans and immigrants, and then
working across our divides.”

The Obama era brought a new tactic: mass firings. In 2011 Chipotle,
the chain that made its fortune selling Mexican food made by Mexican
workers, fired hundreds of them throughout Minnesota. Their crime was
that they worked but had no immigration papers. They joined thousands
of other workers fired in the Obama administration’s key immigration
enforcement program, which undertook to identify workers without
papers and then force companies to fire them. With no job or money for
rent and food, immigrants would presumably “self-deport.” In
Minneapolis, Seattle, and San Francisco, over 1,800 janitors lost
their jobs. In 2009, over 2000 young women at the sewing machines of
American Apparel were fired in Los Angeles. Barack Obama’s
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director John Morton said
that ICE had audited over 2,900 companies in just one year, and the
number of firings ran into the tens of thousands.

In Minneapolis, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 26
helped Chipotle workers organize marches and demonstrations,
cooperating with the Center for Workers United in Struggle, a local
workers’ center, and the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action
Committee. Supporters were even arrested in civil disobedience at a
Chipotle restaurant and mounted a boycott of the chain.

As Trump’s presidency approached, unions moved from reactive
resistance to proactive protection. In the period before Trump took
office in 2017, many unions expected that workplace raids and firings
would be a large part of his immigration enforcement program as well.
The hotel union in Oakland, California, developed a proactive strategy
to keep ICE away from workplaces and asked the Oakland City Council to
protect immigrants on the job. The council passed a resolution, noting
it has been a “City of Refuge” since the anti-apartheid movement
of the mid-1980s: “The City Council … calls upon all employers to
establish safe/sanctuary workplaces where workers are respected and
not threatened or discriminated against based on their immigration
status.”

Trump again threatens, as he did in 2016, to end federal funding to
more than three hundred sanctuary cities. Moreover, many cities, and
even some states, withdrew from the infamous 287(g) program, requiring
police to arrest and detain people because of their immigration
status. Trump promises to reinstate it and cancel federal funding to
cities that won’t cooperate.

Like many unions looking for alternatives, HERE Local 2850 (now part
of UNITE HERE Local 2) began negotiating protections into union
contracts, requiring managers to notify it if immigration agents tried
to enter, interrogate workers, or demand papers. The contract says the
hotel has to keep agents out unless they have a warrant. The union
then helped workers resist at one hotel where new owners demanded they
show their immigration papers to keep their jobs. All the hotel’s
workers refused, documented and undocumented alike, and the company
backed down.

California’s janitors’ union, SEIU United Service Workers West
drafted the Immigrant Worker Protection Act, a state law requiring
employers to ask for a judicial warrant before granting ICE agents
access to a workplace. It prohibits employers from sharing
confidential information, like Social Security numbers, without a
court order. The act came after years of fighting workplace raids and
immigration-related firings. In 2011, Los Angeles janitors sat down in
city intersections to protest terminations by Able Building
Maintenance and fought similar firings in Stanford University
cafeterias and among custodians in the Silicon Valley buildings of
Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

As Trump took office in 2017, the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union (ILWU), Filipino Advocates for Justice, and several
other groups organized trainings to prepare workers for raids. Union
members acted out scenarios that used job action to protect one
another. Some were veterans of an earlier organizing campaign among
recycling workers, in which they stopped work to keep the company from
firing employees for not having papers.

Resisting in Working-Class Communities

For decades, immigration enforcement has paired workplace enforcement
with community raids and sweeps. Workers have expected labor
organizations to oppose immigration enforcement in their communities
with the same vigor that unions oppose workplace raids. Unions have
often delivered, as have community organizations.

The working-class neighborhoods of Chicago have a long history of huge
marches to protest immigration raids. As Obama entered his second term
in 2013, activist groups including Occupy Chicago blocked buses going
to the immigration courts. Emma Lozano from Centro Sin Fronteras and
other labor activists were arrested. Similar direct-action tactics
were used in Tucson, Arizona, by young people who chained themselves
to busses carrying detainees to the notorious special immigration
court.

Trump’s 2016 campaign promised to make Chicago a focus for
enforcement. As anti-immigrant hysteria promoted by his campaign
spread, ICE began detaining people
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traffic stops, knocking on apartment doors, and pulling people off the
street for interrogation and detention. The enforcement wave
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which continued through 2019, included sweeps of the corners and
sidewalks near Home Depot and other gathering sites for day laborers
looking for work. The public presence of day laborers has historically
made them a particular target for immigration street sweeps.

Activists met the Trump threat with actions. In July of 2019,
thousands of people marched through the Loop in Chicago chanting
“Immigrants are welcome here!” A day earlier, they’d shown up at
the Federal Plaza after hearing that ICE agents were about to be
deployed.

‘Many of the fundamental rights that immigrants struggle to attain
are the same rights the labor movement fights to secure for all
workers every day.’

Unions helped organize the resistance. Don Villar, a Filipino
immigrant who headed the Chicago Federation of Labor, told protesters,
“Throughout the labor movement’s history, immigrants have enriched
the fabric of our city, our neighborhoods, our workforce, and our
labor movement. Many of the fundamental rights that immigrants
struggle to attain are the same rights the labor movement fights to
secure for all workers every day.” Labor activist Jorge Mujica
demanded
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end to the increase in deportations that began with the economic
downturn. Instead of spending money on war, we want money spent on
schools and mental health clinics that the City of Chicago is shutting
down.”

Chicago also saw one of the most effective direct actions in the
campaign against deportations. As President Obama mounted his 2012
reelection drive, young undocumented migrants, brought to the United
States as children, occupied his campaign office. The occupation
capped two years of organizing marches, ferociously fighting the
detention of activists as they pushed for legislation to grant them
amnesty from deportation. After reelection, Obama issued an executive
order, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), deferring their
deportation.

DACA has withstood a legal assault for a decade, but right-wing courts
and the MAGA administration will undoubtedly attempt again to kill it.
Its minimal protections be lost for hundreds of thousands of people,
but that’s not all: DACA recipients have to provide personal
information on their applications, which immigration authorities could
use to find and detain them in a new deportation program.

 

The same problem confronts recipients of Temporary Protected Status,
which allows people fleeing from environmental or political danger to
stay and work in the United States. If Trump tries to withdraw the
protection, even under legal challenge, the information necessary for
detaining people is already in the government’s hands. Haitian
refugees in Springfield, Ohio, the target of J. D. Vance’s racist
lies about eating pets, undoubtedly feel a similar vulnerability.

Winning Back May Day

The most effective wave of immigration resistance in recent history
hinged on the huge immigration marches of 2006. That year, provoked by
the House of Representatives’ passage of HR 4425, the Sensenbrenner
Bill, people poured into the streets by the millions on May Day. The
bill would have made it a federal felony to be in the United States
without immigration papers, a danger so extreme that every
undocumented family was threatened with severe punishment. The
outpouring relied on Spanish-language radio to spread the word. It
also depended on the networks of immigrant rights activists and
organizations, which brought together people from the same hometowns
in their countries of origin.

Unions were prominent among the mobilizers, organizing one of the two
marches that took place on the same day in Los Angeles, each of which
drew over a million participants. Unions and immigrant networks built
marches of hundreds of thousands in cities across the country. The
message was made even stronger by a grassroots movement, “A Day
Without a Mexican,” which urged immigrant workers to stay off the
job to show the essential nature of their labor. When some
participants were fired on their return, some unions became involved
in defending their right to protest.

The movement achieved its short-term goal: HR 4425 died. But the
cultural impact was just as important. May Day had been attacked as
the “communist holiday” in the Cold War, and celebrations became
tiny or disappeared altogether. After 2006, the United States joined
the rest of the world in celebrating it, and marches are now held
widely every year. While not as large as in 2006, annual May Day
marches bring out progressive community and labor activists in large
numbers — and could provide a readymade vehicle for challenging a
renewed Trump deportation threat.

A similar bill, California’s Proposition 187, which would have
denied schools and medical care to undocumented children and families,
also had unintended consequences. Proposition 187 convinced many Los
Angeles immigrants and their citizen children to become voters, and
the leftward movement of the city and state’s politics owes a lot to
that decision. As a result, labor now has a powerful political bloc in
LA — in a city that was the “Citadel of the Open Shop” just a
few decades ago.

Both May Day and the Day Without Immigrants became a vehicle for
protesting Trump’s first inauguration. For example, in San
Francisco, members of several chapters of the Democratic Socialists of
America marked the first May Day after Trump’s election with a
direct action blocking ICE’s garage doors with a human chain
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brandishing signs reading “Sanctuary for All” and “We Protect
Our Community.”

In the mobilizations around May Day and the Day Without Immigrants,
labor support grew for immigrant workers facing raids. Four unions
(Communications Workers of America, Amalgamated Transit Union,
National Nurses United, and the United Electrical Workers) urged
workers and labor activists to participate in both. “As leaders of
the unions who supported Bernie Sanders for president, we refuse to go
down that road of hatred, resentment and divisiveness,” they
declared in a letter. “We will march and stand with our sister and
brother immigrant workers against the terror tactics of the Trump
administration.”

In 2012, immigrant workers, members of the United Food and Commercial
Workers, and community activists demonstrated in front of the Mi
Pueblo market in Oakland against the firing of undocumented workers
because of their immigration status. (Courtesy of David Bacon)

Replacing Immigrant Workers

Enforcement, however, doesn’t exist for its own sake. It plays a
role in a larger system that serves capitalist interests by supplying
a labor force that employers require. Immigrant labor is more vital to
many industries than ever. Over 50 percent of the country’s entire
agricultural workforce is undocumented, and the list of other
dependent industries is long: meatpacking, some construction trades,
building services, health care, restaurant and retail service, and
more.

Trump would face enormous resistance from business owners if he tried
to eliminate this workforce — an advantage and even a source of
potential power for workers. In 2006, growers in California bused
workers to the big marches, hoping the Sensenbrenner Bill wouldn’t
deprive them of labor. Within months of Trump’s 2017 inauguration,
agribusiness executives were meeting with him to ensure threats of a
tightened border and raids would not be used when they needed workers.
Just last month, construction companies in Texas were warning Trump
that mass deportations would threaten their profits.

But workers, communities, and unions can’t depend on employers to
battle Trump for them. What companies need is labor at a cost they
want to pay. The existing system has worked well for them — but not
for workers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that about eight
million of the eleven to twelve million undocumented people in the
United States are wageworkers, and most are laboring for the minimum
wage or close to it. The abysmal federal minimum of $7.25 per hour
produces an annual income of $14,500. Even the higher minimums in
states like California render an income of barely twice that.

Social Security estimates that the average US wage is $66,000, but the
average farmworker family’s income is below $25,000. That enormous
difference is a source of enormous profit. If the industries dependent
on immigrant labor paid the national average, they would have to pay
undocumented workers an additional $250 billion. The pressure is on
Trump not only to guarantee workers but to guarantee them at a cost
acceptable to corporate employers. Looking at his picks for his
cabinet, it is clear that employers’ needs come first.

If the industries dependent on immigrant labor paid the national
average, they would have to pay undocumented workers an additional
$250 billion.

In his 2017 meetings with growers, Trump promised to expand the
contract labor system, under which as many as 900,000 people recruited
by employers work in the United States each year. These workers can
come only to work, not to stay. Visa categories include the notorious
H-2A program for farm labor, modeled after the old bracero program of
the 1950s. Last year growers were given 370,000 H-2A visa
certifications — a sixth of the entire US farm labor workforce. The
program is known for abusing workers, and the recent reforms by
Secretary of Labor Julie Su are already being targeted by growers and
their MAGA allies for repeal. The H-2A program is already huge, but
similar ones are growing in hospitality, meatpacking, and even for
teachers in schools.

There is no way this many workers can be recruited and deployed
without displacing the existing workforce, itself consisting mostly of
immigrants already living here. For farmworker unions and advocates,
this poses a dilemma, and H-2A’s expansion will deepen it. How can
they organize and defend the existing workers, including their
members, and at the same time defend, and even help recruit, those
brought to replace them? H-2A farmworkers themselves, however, are not
simply passive victims and have a history of protesting exploitation.
Going on strike means getting fired, losing the visa and having to
leave, and then being blacklisting from future recruitment.
Nevertheless, despite the risks, these workers sometimes act when
conditions become extreme.

DAVID BACON [[link removed]] is a California writer and
documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents
labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for
human rights.

Unions like Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ) in Washington state
have assisted contract workers when strikes break out. Growers keep
workers isolated, threatening them to make organizing as difficult as
possible. In the meantime, FUJ and other unions protest the
displacement, since the loss of jobs in farmworker communities means
hunger and evictions. In many farmworker towns, the existing workers
increasingly fear replacement, which makes strikes to raise wages
risky and less frequent. Nevertheless, at the Ostrom mushroom plant in
Washington state, the local workers, members of the United Farm
Workers, have been on strike for two years against replacement by H-2A
recruits.

According to author Frank Bardacke, in the early 1960s, a growing
willingness of braceros to leave their camps and join strikes by local
workers cost the program its popularity among growers. That helped
lead to its eventual abolition. The Trump program for supplying labor
needs will pose these same challenges — but also opportunities for
organizing.

Beyond the Deportation Threat

In the civil rights era, fighting the mass deportations of the Cold
War and the bracero program that gave growers the workers they wanted
created two parallel demands. The leaders of the Chicano civil rights
movement in particular — among them Bert Corona, Cesar Chavez, Larry
Itliong, and Dolores Huerta — fought to end the program, a demand
they won in 1964. But the movement did more than fight the abuse. It
proposed and fought for more fundamental change.

Much of this fight this took place on the ground. In 1965, the year
after the program ended, Larry Itliong and veteran Filipino farmworker
unionists started the great grape strike. That same year, the civil
rights movement among Chicanos, Mexicans, and Asian Americans won
fundamental change in US immigration law. The family preference
system, favoring the reunification of families over the labor needs of
employers, became the basis of US immigration policy, at least for a
time.

In the stream of people crossing the border, “we see our families
and coworkers, while the growers just see money,” says farmworker
and domestic worker organizer Rene Saucedo. “So we have to fight for
what we really need, and not just what we don’t want.” In other
words, the struggle to stop enforcement and deportations requires
fighting for an alternative. There have been many such alternative
proposals in the past two decades, from the Dignity Campaign to the
New Path of the American Friends Service Committee. Today the movement
for an alternative is concentrated on the Registry Bill, a proposal
that would give legal status to an estimated eight million
undocumented people. The bill would update the cutoff date that
determines which undocumented immigrants are eligible to apply for
legal permanent residence. Right now, only people who arrived before
January 1, 1973 can apply for it — a tiny and vanishing number. The
proposal would bring the date to the present.

Another, longer-range demand is the extension of voting rights. It is
no accident that many of the counties and states where the
undocumented workforce is concentrated, and where it produces the most
profit for employers, are MAGA strongholds. If the whole working
population of Phoenix and Tucson could actually vote, it would likely
elect representatives who would pass social protections for all
workers. Extending the franchise could add enough people to the
political coalition in Mississippi to enable it to finally expel the
Dixie establishment. So instead of thinking of the vote as a
restricted privilege, as we are taught, we need to think of it as a
working-class weapon — and understand how powerful class unity could
make us across the lines of immigration status.

By the same token, the political education of the US working class has
to include an understanding of migration’s roots and how US actions
abroad — from military intervention to economic sanctions to
neoliberal reforms — make migration a question of survival. When
Mexican people fight for the right to stay home rather than coming
north and elect a government that promises to move in that direction,
they deserve and need the support of working-class people on the
northern side of the border. Cross-border solidarity has a long
history, but powerful media, cultural, and educational institutions
deny us this knowledge. Without an independent effort to educate
working people — whether by unions, communities, religious
organizations, media workers, or progressive social movements — the
door opens for MAGA and closes on our ability to organize in our own
interest.

Joining the rest of the world, as we did when we joined the
international tradition of celebrating May Day in 2006, means
recognizing the direction other countries are moving. With 281 million
people living outside their birth countries and children perishing in
the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande, the international community
sometimes tries to step up. One such step was the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their
Families. It supports the right to family reunification, establishes
the principle of “equality of treatment” with citizens of the host
country in relation to employment and education, protects migrants
against collective deportation, and makes both origin and destination
countries responsible for protecting these rights. All countries
retain the right to determine who is admitted to their territories and
under what conditions people gain the right to work. So far, however,
only forty-nine migrant-sending countries, like Mexico and the
Philippines, have ratified it.

No US administration, Democratic or Republican, has ever submitted it
to Congress for ratification.

_DAVID BACON [[link removed]] is a California writer and
documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents
labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for
human rights._

_If you like this article, please subscribe
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* Donald Trump
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* deportations
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* Farmworkers
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* immigrant rights (4148)
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