International Migration Rules

Re “Why No Country Can Stand on Its Own,” editorial, Nov. 26:

A North American Free Labor Agreement (NAFLA), like that called for by The Times, will find many friends among corporate America, but vigilant citizens will properly see this as a potential vehicle for revival of the much despised bracero program, which gave exploitation a bad name before it was killed by Congress decades ago. Under such a program, workers from Mexico and elsewhere will be given visas to work temporarily in the U.S., at permanently low (and poorly enforced) wages, and with no real right to organize a union on the job. Thousands of residents (both citizen and undocumented) already living here will find these bracero-assigned jobs forever closed to them and the wage and benefit standards in the remaining jobs severely depressed.

Imported temporary workers, like Filipino and Chinese workers decades ago, will be denied the basic right to bring their families with them, and discontented workers will be deported. They will never have the right to vote. We will have the hands to tend our crops, sew our clothing, raise our children and wash our dishes, without the painful accountability imposed by extending to these new “untouchables” the American dream of family life, economic justice and citizenship.

A revived bracero program is favored by California’s multimillion-dollar corporate agricultural industry, which wants a cheap, pliant work force to labor in what the Sacramento Bee called the “fields of pain” because of rampant wage and hour abuses. Garment manufacturers, anxious to keep their notorious urban sweatshops filled with powerless workers, also want to import temporary workers as well under a new bracero program.

While our community remains divided over Proposition 187, and about one-eighth of California’s population voted to approve it, most Californians share a common belief in the value of family life and in the right of working people to eventually become citizens. We do not want disposable workers to go with our disposable lifestyles.

With politicians increasingly answerable only to the political fund-raising power of corporate of America, citizens can no longer accept uncritically the international treaties negotiated by Washington bureaucrats. Let us openly debate the substance of the immigration issue and reach a consensus before we go to the bargaining table and negotiate a NAFLA.

STEVE NUTTER

Vice President and Regional Director

International Ladies Garment Workers

Union, AFL-CIO, Los Angeles