Primarily Indian metalworkers paid brokers up to $20,000 USD, which is literally a king’s ransom in rupees, to undertake the work.  They expected and put up with the terrible living conditions common in a labor camp in the shipyard, especially in the post-Katrina.  What they also expected was that promises of a green card which would allow them to continue working in the USA would also be delivered, since that was so clearly the line that recruited them to the shipyards.   Unfortunately, as any reader would know, that line was a total line.

            As the 500 workers agitated about their conditions, circumstances, and the injustice of it all, supported by assistance from the Workers’ Center and national advocacy by NDLON, the National Day Labor Organizing Network, and its leaders, Pablo Alvarado and Chris Newman, the boss according to the court papers and an article by Julia Preston in The New York Times, saw the Indians as “whiners” and wanted to target and remove the ringleaders.  Where did the boss go for advice in this area?  Well, right to agents of ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement outfit so notorious throughout the land.  

The advice was a classic labor busting technique more reminiscent of the old organizer tales of the Wobblies tarred and feathered and ridden out on the rails than anything else.  The agent according to the boss said, “Don’t give them any advance notice.  Take them all out of the line on the way to work; get their personal belongings; get them in a van, and get their tickets, and get them to the airport, and send them back to India.”

It didn’t work out so well in this one situation since folks like the Workers’ Center were all over this bad boy, but I have to wonder how many thousands of times this advice would have yielded exactly the expected result?  This situation may see some justice through the courts, but this is rare. 

The notion that we can build a “guest worker” program on the backs of desperate immigrant workers, almost classically exploitative labor contractors and recruiters, and still make a big deal out of the Statue of Liberty and any core values of the United States as a nation of immigrants, is the cruelest irony underlying all of this.

Silver Spring

The front page article on the Times was based on the virtually below the radar actions, which they labeled “small” butsignificant by immigrant reform advocates in Los Angeles and New York City targeting Homeland Security andtherefore immigration chief copy, Janet Napolitano, as the problem.  She danced around the issue of Arpaio in the Times, by pretending that the 287g subcontracted immigration enforcement to cities and counties might be too onerous for the Sheriff, who has publicly just scoffed at them thus far.

More devastating as a time bomb for the President and Napolitano might be the eruption of hunger strikes in a private prison in Louisiana that holds detainees who have been swept up in the immigrant bashing.  Reports from the Saket Soni, director of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice as covered by Chris Kromm at the Institute for Southern Studies, hit the wire services and elsewhere this week about the sub-human conditions being allowed detainees in these private Homeland Security compounds.

I was shocked to read about Guantanamo conditions existing in Louisiana.

The lack of progress on reform and the steady tightening of the screws on immigrants that is now being allowed and encouraged by the Administration is no longer a well kept secret, and will not long be something that the Secretary can keep from bringing the President down unless there is action on all fronts now.

These kinds of reports will guarantee that the response will not be “small” for long!

SN is a beautiful movie that dramatically portrays the immigrant trail from Honduras in Central America riding the rails through Mexico to the Texas border crossing at Reynosa.  A deported father is making his way back to his new family in New Jersey and takes the young woman who is now his daughter on the trip.  A gang originally Salvadoran is the other piece of this story since they prey on the traveling immigrants adding an additional level of fear and violence to the constant battle for survival of these economic refugees heading for estades unidos.

Gomorrah leeches out every last bit of romanticism that any may have had about the work of the “mafia” in Italy.  This movie is brutish and almost stark and colorless in the drab and defeating way it portrays life in the huge apartment blocks dominated by poverty, unemployment, crime, and drugs and therefore ruled in its own way by these criminal clans with only the slightest sense of any code.

In both movies it seems almost inescapable to conclude that life for the poor and powerless in these very different countries in Europe and Central America has virtually no value to anyone.  The movies though very different in outlook (there’s actually a “happy” ending of sorts in SN?) also make it hard to conclude that there is much hope that anything anytime or anyway soon is going to be any different.  Both movies are like a staggering punch in the face.

I felt I had to go see Gomorrah since we had agreed to help Professor Ken Reardon and organizers in Sicily with their organizing problem there in any even larger housing development that the mafia has squatted in order to see if there’s an organizational “answer” to the dilemma for the poor and working families caught in this crossfire between government, mob, and the desperate need for housing.  The whole movie was an ice cold shower of reality that forces the plans our plans for anything in Sicily to have to toughen up so that they are more than platitudes and bromides without meaning.

SN is lighter in some ways though the dread of death and violence lies under every scene.  For every light moment in which Mexicans in the countryside toss oranges up to the top of the train to the immigrants, there is the continual danger of the train and toll it takes, as well as the fact that all of these travelers are easily victimized, robbed, raped, and killed without names or numbers as they seek a better, more hopeful life.  One movie may be saying that this is no way to deal with criminals and that no one is really dealing with criminals, while the other says that but also says that the lack of immigration policy is a scourge on all of the countries of the Americas, including the United States.

It is amazing how clueless many still are.  The well meaning New Orleans audience at Canal Place applauded Sin Nombre and its young director with polite enthusiasm.

One well meaning question struck me more than others as staking out the inestimable distance of the gap between these well intentioned viewers and the reality of migrants and the poor around the world.  A woman respectfully asked Fukunaga whether his crew had “planted” all of the garbage strewn everywhere along the train tracks at every place the immigrants huddled to hobo along the route.  He laughed as he answered, that “no,” all of the garbage was part of what was normal in this experience and never part of the task list.

Indeed!  Had the director been making another movie the camera would have easily fallen on the cartoneros or reciclidades who would have been staying in Mexico City or any of these train stops along the way and making a living from this ever growing trash heap.

The question revealed how far the world of even New Orleans, hardly on anyone’s list of the worlds’ cleanest cities from the everyday reality of poverty and peril in the rest of the world.  With Fukunaga we can agree that trash is the least of the problems here, almost past notice and beyond comment.