Critique of Anthropology

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State Effects on Labor Exploitation : The INS and undocumented immigrants at the Mexico-United States border Josiah McC. Heyman Critique of Anthropology 1998 18: 157 DOI: 10.1177/0308275X9801800203 The online version of this article can be found at: http://coa.sagepub.com/content/18/2/157

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State Effects

on

Labor

Exploitation The INS and undocumented

immigrants at the

Mexico-United States border

Josiah McC. Heyman Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI Abstract The power of enforcing labor control and exploitation is often attrib▪ uted to states. However, such claims need careful empirical and analytical verification. In order to do this, we should view states ’from below’, involving state agencies, state workers, and the policed population, elements that are ignored in most state theories. In the case of undocumented immigrants who cross the United States-Mexico border to work, US state actions do add to exploitation. The smuggling, transportation and job arrangements required to overcome border and interior enforcement lead undocumented immigrants to enter conspiracies to avoid the law that are, in turn, used against them in workplaces. US undocumented immigration policy seen from below is not a deliberate system for labor control, but it follows a consistent pattern of stigmatizing immigrant labor, forcing it into an exploitative underworld. This analysis unites the current anti-immigration theme in US politics and the actual persistence of illegal, exploited labor in that nation. Keywords ▪ border ▪ immigration ▪ labor ▪ Mexico ▪ policing ▪ states ▪ United States

Introduction The United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) makes about 1.6 million arrests of undocumented aliens a year. At the same time, undocumented immigrants fill competitive and poorly paid sectors of the US economy. A very convincing study (Thomas, 1985: 105, 115-17) demonstrates that undocumented immigrants from Mexico are more exploited than legal immigrants and citizens working side by side with them in California agriculture. The employment of Mexican undocumented immigrants in the most competitive industries and services suggests that this holds true for metropolitan labor markets as well (Cornelius, 1989b). I denominate this ’superexploitation’, indicating that compared to normally exploited, Vol

157-180; 004246] 18(2) 157-180 [0308-275X(199806)18:2, 157-

Copyright 1998 © SAGE Pubhcations (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)


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resourceless proletarians (day laborers, farmworkers, domestics, etc.) undocumented immigrants work faster and harder for the same pay (and less frequently, for lower pay), and struggle to avoid or limit workplace authority less often. Given this scenario, it is easy to attribute to the US government the role of direct labor control (e.g. Pedraza-Bailey, 1985: 139-142), which we might term ’capitalist functionalism’. The INS, for example, might overtly police workers, expelling them when they become too restive. Immigration enforcement might loosen and tighten like a valve to match labor supply to the rising and falling economy (Samora, 1969: 49; Nikolinakos, 1975: 12). The state might deliberately create a category of vulnerable and fearful workers (Castells, 1975: 53; Nikolinakos, 1975: 12). Undocumented status, involving denial of rights to settle in the US, might function to relegate the costs of labor reproduction to Mexico and other nations (Burawoy, 1976). Illegal border crossing might discursively discipline undocumented immigrants to be subordinate outsiders in a citizenship-based nation-state (Kearney, 1991). Why is the US currently cracking down on immigrant labor? Is it a system for fine-tuning labor supply and exploitability?l The position that immigration law deliberately manipulates migrant workers is a specific claim about a state regime over labor. To examine adequately a posited state-labor regime, we require a sustained empirical examination that delineates the major patterns of governmental policy, asks exactly how they affect labor, and gives an active role to the working people. This article finds that undocumented immigrants are superexploited, partly, but not completely, because of current immigration law enforcement. However, it locates state effects not in direct repression or manipulation of supply, but in double-edged, successful but entrapping, conspiracies to violate the law. It puts less emphasis on direct employer interests in labor control than in consistent stigmatizing of foreign workers. Current US border control and undocumented immigration policy has labor effects that favor capitalists, but it is not a labor policy in the strict sense. Of course, historical instances will differ, and this case does not preclude instances of direct state creation of labor exploitation. But it does show the need for analytically informed empirical work on state-labor regimes. Filling that void, however, challenges the biases of state theory. Looking at principle state theories, whether instrumentalist (Miliband, 1969; Domhoff, 1990), structuralist (O’Connor, 1973; Poulantzas, 1973; Bach, 1978), or state-centered (Evans et al., 1985), we find that they put most emphasis on political forces acting above the state, and directing explicit, successful policies. Recent, subtle syntheses emphasize the interaction of politics with bureaucratic actors, including one very important work on the INS before 1965, considered below (Block, 1987; Calavita, 1992). Still, it is fair to say that all the approaches involve only one direction of political struggle: how powerful and/or organized actors determine governmental decisions. The progress in state theory has been ’from above’. We also need to view the state ’from below’ - the relationships between


159

agencies and the people on whom they try to act. The best studies from below, the ones read widely for theory and example, come either from colonial contexts or from Britain just as it emerges into capitalism - that is, from situations peripheral to the highly organized modern capitalist state (Hay et al., 1975; Guha, 1983; Corrigan and Sayer, 1985). Anthropologists have begun to examine state workers and regional populaces from this perspective (Smart, 1989; Nugent, 1993; Nugent, 1994; Gupta, 1995). The neglect of the state from below is problematic. State theories from above, at least at the level of models, neglect the reality that state agents struggle to implement policies; that is, they ignore the ’everyday politics’ (Scott, 1985; Abrams, 1988) of state power. This entails struggles with wealthy and powerful classes just as much as with laboring classes. However, I worry particularly about neglecting the latter. Without delineating the actions of the laboring folk, we slip into a perfectionist vision of power, in which one delineates goals and means of the wealthy and privileged, blithely assuming their unproblematic execution. The view from above, seen as a strategy for studying state-labor regimes, has the following characteristics. It focuses on who sets major laws and state agency priorities, and how. Some variants emphasize the external, instrumental control; others add the state agencies as bureaucratic actors themselves. However, once this question is explored, the view from above regards fulfillment as secondary and mechanical. State agencies do things to society, but they do not look very social themselves - do not much act in problematic social relations with laborers or employers. The perspective from below state

will differ. First, the state agency and its workers are central, rather than mechanical and secondary. I begin by sketching how major political processes impel the INS to conduct specific types of policies, but I do not regard the results sought in these politics as automatic. Thus, I put emphasis on studying the precise patterns of INS work. I ask how these patterns are likely to affect undocumented immigrants, given my field observations and the work of ethnographers of undocumented immigrants. Looking at the entire INS production process, then, I ask if this is empirically consistent with direct labor control or other models of state intervention. Second, I study (to a limited extent) the populace in relation to the state. The targeted Mexican and Central American immigrants are a distinctive ’policed population’. The view from below does not begin with the assumption that labor policies can be imposed on policed populations, though it may end with agreement or disagreement to that proposition. The state agency might intend a certain effect, or even unconsciously strive toward an effect of another type. But whatever the state strives toward, it does not necessarily achieve; the full view requires documenting the actual labor effects among the populace in a richly reported context. Immigration itself, for example, adds to superexploitability, as well as the external presence of the law. Thus, to establish the specific character of a state-labor regime requires both populace and state agency inquiries.


160

Undocumented

Immigration in the US Polity

I will argue that anxieties about long-term changes in US society and world position shape current US immigration politics, especially law enforcement against undocumented entry. However, before we reach the present, we need to review the older politics and labor regimes. In the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, the INS was a complaisant tool of agribusiness, which had entrenched power in the US Congress (Calavita, 1992). The Border Patrol, the most influential unit in the Service, controlled the movements of contracted and undocumented Mexican farm laborers throughout western states; this set in place the tacit assumption that endures even in the present Patrol, that the INS has license to police Mexican folk in the borderlands (Heyman, 1995). Agribusiness continues to write immigration policy to its particular interests, but its influence on the state is much smaller today than it was 40 years ago. Undocumented immigrants largely work in metropolitan occupations, such as gardening services, restaurants, domestic service and light industry, rather than in agriculture (Cornelius, 1989a: 4-5). The congeries of employers do not have the striking unity of purpose and political savvy that agribusiness does; they do not openly set immigration policy. What is more important, the older INS was premised on the Bracero contract labor program, which ended in 1965. As Kitty Calavita (1992: 167-8) points out, present undocumented immigration policy, which involves market movement while avoiding state authority, is not an overt mechanism for state control of labor movements. The INS has labor effects, but they are more subtle in their making. Lacking simple mechanisms such as those that obtained in the agribusiness era, two questions help reveal outlines of US undocumented immigration policy ’from above’: could undocumented immigration be stopped, and if so, why is it not halted; and why is the labor supply extensively persecuted by arrest, rather than being tolerated or even legalized? It is reasonable to posit that use of a national identification card tied to a central database could substantially reduce undocumented immigration to the US. Such a card could restrict employment to US citizens and legal residents (legal immigrants). In 1986, the employment of illegal immiwas itself made illegal for the first time, reflecting the rise of symbolic anti-immigration politics over the employer politics of previous decades. However, as Calavita had predicted, symbolism required the passage of some law, not the crafting of an effective one; direct capitalist interests and the general dominance of business ideology rendered the

grants

legal language governing ’employer sanctions’ 1990). Without

secure

ineffectual

(Calavita, 1982,

identification, undocumented immigrants

easily

obtain false documents and let the employers off the hook (Chavez, 1992: 169). Despite the increasing tempo of anti-immigrationism through the present, no meaningful politics in favor of a national identification system have appeared. (Recent initiatives, touted as increasing employment


161

control by phone calls to verify existing identification cards, are small ’pilot’ programs that mask the continuing avoidance of the national identification issue.) Incomplete employer sanctions leave the INS with an interesting task in intermittent and weak intervention in the workplace. More importantly, the de facto US illegal migration policy relies on market mechanisms and eschews government intervention to set the level and conditions of demand. In this, we see the outer limits of the case for the US state-labor regime of undocumented immigration.2 The US actively interdicts the supply of undocumented immigrant labor. Although the US has long arrested undocumented immigrants at or near the Mexican border, it had been subordinated to obvious considerations of facilitating labor supply to agriculture. In the last 20 years, however, the Mexican border has been militarized in quite serious efforts at interdicting both undocumented migrants and narcotics (Dunn, 1996). Why has this change happened? The recent history of the US has seen a weakening of the self-confident ideology, including internal conflicts and challenges to the economic and political domination of the world system. This has led to what I term a ’long wave of anxiety’. Anxiety is externalized on to foreigners, especially illegal immigrants (see Chavez, 1992: 16-20, 83-117), when major claims of prosperous Americans on the state and its order can be expressed as ’citizenship’ (on citizenship politics, see Marshall, 1950; Turner, 1986, 1990; Barbalet, 1988). An interesting feature is that economic interests do not explain this politics; both the politicians and the mass supporters of immigration restriction come from metropolitan areas where they indirectly receive surplus value produced by working migrants in hotels, restaurants, lawn care firms, construction, etc. However, mass immigration restrictionists are neither direct employers nor direct labor competitors; their concerns are with ’loss of control’ to foreigners (Cornelius, 1982). As such, the undocumented immigrant is covertly tolerated as a unit of labor, a commodity, while explicitly stigmatized as a person, family and community. As Calavita (1982, 1984) has argued, ’symbolic politics’ pervade US immigration policy, by which she means there are open restrictionist aims with ineffectual means. But symbolic action has quite real effects. Thus, to understand the empirical patterns of the INS, it helps to ask exactly what symbols are created and reinforced. The most important symbol is the border, especially the boundary with Mexico. The border is the edge of the citizen-self (Kearney, 1991), especially in defensive stance against externalized anxiety. The INS, we shall find out, concentrates disproportionate amounts of its enforcement at the Mexican border compared to the actual source nations and probable entry routes of undocumented immigrants. This also means that the INS puts most of its effort into an area that is not a workplace and has little direct effect on labor discipline (though it might restrict SUpply).3 US citizenship politics is ambiguous about racial origin -American citizenship being ideologically non-ethnic side by side with


162

real legacy of racial segmentation - so that it is important to recognize the anti-Latino bias of current US immigration restrictionism. This increasingly excuses the INS from certain criticisms of and constraints on its policing of Latinos. Finally, an entire set of border interdiction policies, anti-narcotics and refugee influx control as well as immigration, and punitive approaches to crime, come together in INS border enforcement duties.4 Although the US puts much effort into interdicting immigrants at the border, it does not work. The overwhelming majority of INS arrests of undocumented immigrants are of Mexicans near or at the border. However, arrest does not deter successful border crossing because over 90 percent of arrested immigrants are offered and accept ’voluntary departure’ soon after arrest (US INS, 1990: 111). In this legal loophole, the alien waives his or her rights to a deportation hearing in exchange for rapid return to the home country, for Mexican nationals, to Mexico. Undocumented Mexican immigrants continue to attempt entry to the US until they succeed (Espenshade, 1990).5 a

The INS in Action

begin by characterizing the range and emphasis of INS enforceDepartment (in granting visas) and the INS (in inspections at airports) try to prevent non-border undocumented immigration, but the INS hardly monitors persons, mostly non-Mexicans, who overstay visas and work illegally, although they may be the majority of resident Let

us

ment.

The State

undocumented aliens (Fix and Passel, 1994: 25). INS enforcement at interior US work and residential sites exists, and we shall consider it below, but it is minor compared to border enforcement. Well over 90 percent of INS arrests are of non-employed immigrants at the Mexican boundary (US INS, 1990: 130); two-thirds of INS border arrests occur upon entry and another one quarter within three days of entry, mostly while still moving north. Correspondingly, over 90 percent of arrestees are of Mexican nationality (US INS 1990: 112). As we recall, Mexicans arrested at or near the boundary return almost immediately to Mexico on voluntary departure, and are likely to re-enter the US as soon as possible. How does this strangely selective border emphasis contribute to superexploitation, when the boundary itself is far removed from workplace relations? We shall first look at the nature of INS boundary enforcement, including its vulnerability to smugglers and return immigrants; in this we shall prepare the ground for a later section on the immigrants themselves. Before then, however, this article considers the general stance of the INS toward Mexican-origin persons in the borderlands, including specific disciplinary roles that the Service does adopt. The variety of INS operations amount to a complex web of conflicts and conspiracies rather than a straightforward story of control.


163

Borderline Enforcement Political imagery of ’border’ control favors rigid barrier tactics, physical obstacles and armed force on the line. Timothy Dunn (1996) documents the cast-iron walls, barbed wire-topped fences, electronic and television surveillance, aircraft and helicopters, special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams, military support roles, and connections between military low-intensity doctrine and evolving INS tactics. A less dramatic, but still important manifestation of border symbolism is the emphasis put on arrest statistics. In 1991-2, when I conducted fieldwork, the Border Patrol valued high numbers because, in the in-house budgetary process and the media, this ’proved’ a mass invasion of the US and the need for more resources to defeat it. Since 1993, the Border Patrol has shifted field; for tactical reasons too lengthy to explain here, they emphasize reductions in arrest statistics as demonstration of their work. However, the political obsession with numbers continues to shape the organization, and so the 1991-2 material remains relevant. (In the material that follows, a ’sector’ is the major Border Patrol administrative unit, holding responsibility for a demarcated segment of the border, and a ’station’ is the unit in a sector roughly equivalent to a police precinct.) A Patrol Agent in Charge (PAIC) of a major California station described his angle on bureaucratic competition and its political basis:

My world is very small:

to convince the Chief Patrol Agent [head of Sector] that need resources at [Station name]. I do that with arrest statistics. [He then describes in detail how this Station has grown at the expense of other Stations.]] To get beyond that reallocation, the Chief Patrol Agent’s problem is to sell DC on more men for his Sector. To get the strength of support, I’m trying to provide numbers of apprehensions in as close proximity to the border as possible. We’re getting better at close proximity to the border, not a patrol method where we randomly went wherever we wanted seeking aliens, but focused on a specific area and not beyond a line one-half mile north.6

we

A numerical arrest strategy feeds the voluntary departure complex, since the Service quickly releases an indiscriminate arrest population. However, undocumented immigrants have to cope with the fright, time-delay and cost of being arrested (conditions exacerbated by the greater police force and barriers in recent years). The immigrant responses to borderline arrests are crucial in this analysis; among them is reliance on smugglers. Unselective, numerical arrest tactics reduced attention to criminal cases against smugglers. Processing a Mexican for voluntary departure takes 10 minutes of officer time; writing up drivers and guides for criminal cases, let alone identifying smuggling organizers and money handlers, takes 3 hours or more per case. The PAIC quoted above cautiously, but unmistak-

ably, de-emphasized smuggling prosecutions: We will go after statistics, and the cases will develop. We haven’t said ’target guides, target drivers’ but ’write up who you think is the driver, who is the


164

when you target aliens. We need to be effective in alien numbers.

guide’

Another ranking manager was blunter about the

funding by getting

politics of laying off smug-

gling : I personally would go after quality - prosecutable aliens - however, the current leadership in this Sector is very number conscious; they feel that numbers drive our budget.

Yet

smuggling occurs precisely because of the ’strong’

border.

Smuggling The INS handles smuggling cases in two ways. Two small, specialized branches, both called Anti-Smuggling (one in the Border Patrol and one outside it), focus on high-level rings hauling non-Mexicans. These cases get some publicity, assuaging concern about INS effort, and they often involve rescues of brutalized persons. Low-level smuggling that involves guided crossing and transportation north for a few Mexicans or Central Americans counts for little symbolically. A non-specialized enforcement branch, usually the Border Patrol, handles such smugglers. To make a smuggling organization prosecution, however, an officer must observe a house or pickup site over an extended period, while deferring arrest of the persons who pass through. This does not occur under the current border enforcement system, as three Border Patrol officers separately explained to me. When officers stop smuggled groups, they write up any information obtained for Anti-Smuggling. However, nothing is done with arrest write-ups in AntiSmuggling, as attested to by officers of both branches. Inattention to low-level smuggling cases should not be blamed on the INS alone; Service officers assume that US attorneys will drop or plea-bargain prosecutions. William T. Toney (1977: 92-111), who tracked a cohort of smuggling arrests to final resolution, confirmed this. In 1989, when there were just under 1 million undocumented immigration arrests, there were only 860 convictions for ’bringing in, transporting, harboring and inducing the illegal entry of aliens’. US attorneys routinely plead felony smuggling charges (conveying up to five years penalty per alien) down to felony or misdemeanor ’illegal entry’ (conveying penalties of less than a year, frequently as little as time served; Kesselbrenner and Rosenberg, 1991: §7.3 [b] ) . In 1989, there were 7659 convictions for illegal entry (US INS, 1990: 136). The most common penalty for low-level smuggling is seizure of the smuggler’s car. At several hundred dollars earned per passenger, this is but a business expense for a professional, though painful for family smugglers. Meanwhile, the physical barriers of the boundary, the massed officers there, and the periborder highway checkpoints unmistakably favor low-level assistance. Smugglers bring aliens through the boundary via the safest and most direct routes, which are also the routes most heavily patrolled by the INS. They find chinks in the work patterns of the INS (e.g. shift changes) in ways


165

that individual crossers cannot. They also take advantage of volume: as Patrol officers arrest a few, many cross, probably the most efficacious tactic of all. Smuggling is hardly a necessity on the Mexican border, especially for experienced Mexican men. However, freelancers tend to go on foot across rugged peripheries where the Border Patrol is more dispersed but the risks (e.g. bandits) are worse (Chavez, 1992: 41-5). The INS tactics of boxing in the border adds value to smuggling. Smugglers help crossers pass vehicular checkpoints through knowledge of shifts and of visual cues (torn, dirty clothing; non-US style clothes) used by INS officers to halt cars in traffic. Persons not smuggled must either rely on someone else to drive them equivalent to low-level smuggling - or use public transportation (buses, San Diego trolleys) where recent boundary crossers are visible and vulnerable. Overall, Chavez et al. (1990) found that 45 percent of undocumented Mexicans and 68.5 percent of undocumented Central Americans had paid a smuggler on their most recent trip. The escalation of border enforcement has raised the use and price of smugglers since that study (Rotella, 1995; Dillon, 1996; Graham, 1996). Furthermore, defining the issue as formal smuggling understates illegal crossing assistance broadly defined, including non-paid family, labor broker or hometown-mate help. INS Boundary Policing in Summary The unstable politics of anti-immigrationism in the US may change the pattern of INS policing and its effects that I describe here. In 1996, the US Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act that doubles the number of Border Patrol officers (authorizing 10,000 officers), requires construction of a triple wall along certain areas of the boundary, mandates a fingerprinting system designed to identify repeat illegal entrants, strengthens the punishments for illegal re-entry after previous voluntary departure, etc. (The numbers prosecuted for re-entry continue to be small, however, rising from about 50 to about 400 with the use of computerized fingerprinting, a number that hardly dents the voluntary departure complex; Migration News, 1997). Also, in recent years, quasimilitary enforcement operations have massed along selected areas of the border (Dunn, 1996), making border crossing significantly more difficult in these important zones of passage. These developments may well alter the picture, but so far they have not; the research of Audrey Singer and Douglas Massey (1997) and Timothy Dunn (1997) show that cyclical migrants from Mexico bypass the new INS barriers, and reproduce the conditions I analyze here, though at the cost of (a) riskier crossing strategies in more remote and dangerous areas, utilizing smugglers more often; and (b) reducing their chance of legalizing their status, driving them further into a covert world. Thus, the efforts of undocumented aliens to surmount the border barrier and their ability to get to their interior residential and job destination remain the fundamental features of US illegal immigration. When they enter social relations of labor, they carry the border experience with them


166

- perhaps impressed on them yet more vividly and harshly by the law enforcement approach. We might pose this as a question of ’effects at a distance’, a distinctive phrasing of the state-labor regime question. (By contrast, state effects are immediate under systems of migration control, such as pass laws or Bracero contracts, which require certification of employment and good conduct.) Interestingly, even when the INS operates in the interior, its effects resemble those of the border. Ethnic Targeting in the Borderlands Much INS interior enforcement, especially in the western states, is a legacy from the days of direct agricultural labor control combined with spillover from border control. For example, routine boundary patrolling extends throughout border communities where many Latinos reside. Also, the Border Patrol, in small numbers, sweeps highways, farms, suburbs and unincorporated towns distant from the border, in search of undocumented immigrants being transported north or otherwise on the move. As a result, Mexican-origin communities throughout the US west are constantly aware, and wary, of the Service. The Immigration Law Enforcement Monitoring Project of the American Friends Service Committee (1990: 21) termed this the ‘cotadaanadad’ (everydayness) of the INS. Importantly, routine INS encounters with borderlands Latinos are consistent with, and probably tolerated in dominant circles because of the pervasive stigmatization of,

Mexican-origin immigrants. As a legacy of the era of direct labor control, Border Patrol officers are intensively taught Spanish, and are first assigned to the Mexican border; this in turn shapes the whole INS, for the Border Patrol starts most careers in the Service. Patrol training conveys an emphasis on simple arrests of Mexican entrants (Heyman, 1995). An ex-Border Patrol officer, now doing interior investigations, articulates organizational rules-of-thumb used to identify undocumented immigrants. Despite his general caution, his reliance

on

tacit group

Q

How do you

A

That’s

pick

stereotypes7 is clear: one

Hispanic

out

of

a

crowd of

Hispanics

in downtown

Nogales? something I can’t tell you but after a year, in a crowd of ten, I can pick out the one illegal. Clothes are real important, their demeanor, how they present themselves, the way they walk, the way they look around. Dirty clothes, ill-fitted clothes. But the only way that we could really know was to ask, and we had that right, so we asked.

How INS officers handle a Supreme Court decision, United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (422 US 873 [1975], cited in Hull, 1985: 96-7), also shows ethnicized policing. INS Inspectors can interrogate anybody at a port of

entry, and the Border Patrol has similar powers of search and seizure

at

checkpoints within 25 miles of the boundary. Beyond that zone, Brignoni-Ponce declares that Immigration Officers cannot rely on Hispanic appearance as the sole factor in stopping, detaining and interrogating fixed

or


167

people. It requires INS officers to have ’articulable facts’ (e.g. initial flight) that justify a ’reasonable suspicion’ in the mind of an ’experienced officer’. Although the decision is remarkably generous to INS ’experience’ (their tacit understandings), officers still stumble on its provisions, as an INS attorney explained: Past 25 miles, the classic problem is stopping a person because he or she is Hispanic looking; the arresting officer needs some aspect of behavior. We may be more concerned about this for prosecutions [e.g. alien smuggling] than for immigration [deportation proceedings] . For an immigration case [which is administrative law], Miranda rights are not required, versus in a criminal case, of course, there are Miranda rights and subsequently the exclusionary rule.

In

reality, Brignoni-Ponce only matters if a stop is challenged in court, probably by a lawyer. Cases that end with quick voluntary departure to Mexico or Central America do not reveal ethnic targeting. Does ethnic targeting contribute to undocumented superexploitation? Let me model this by comparing immigrant nations of origin, modes of entry and risks of arrest. Undocumented Mexicans face moderately high risks of being arrested by the INS because they enter in an unsophisticated manner and reside in policed zones.8 Usually they ’enter without inspection’, which is overtly illegal, through the boundary where the INS places most of its resources. If arrested, however, Mexican immigrants will depart and return quickly. They thus face relatively low costs to re-establish jobs or housing. Central Americans face the same crossing risks, and are more vulnerable to loss by departure, since they face a harrowing and expensive journey north through Mexico. Mexican border immigrants contrast with a variety of Latin American and Old World nationalities who come to the US legally, using student or visitor visas that they then overstay. They undertook the risk of being refused a visa in their home country, and face very low chances of ’exclusion’ at entry (equivalent to deportation). Given the INS’s pattern of operations, these nationalities face a low risk of being apprehended. On the other hand, they face substantial costs to return (denial of visas; high airfares) if they are caught and deported.9 In summary, Mexicans and Central Americans face a moderate percentage of low losses. By contrast, non-Mexicans face a low percentage of high losses. Mexican undocumented immigrants thus need to temper risk, but only at a low cost. This results in a mixture of independent crossing and loosely organized smuggling and/or network assistance, which in turn probably heightens the bonds of extra-legal trust and exploitation in the Mexican immigrant community. The INS as a Dtsciplinary Agency Rouse suggests a disciplinary interpretation of the INS, that it makes undocumented immigrants internalize rhythms of capitalist work and consumption, follow job controls, and avoid public resistance or disorder (Rouse, 1992). This form of discipline must be enacted in interior

Roger


168

destinations, so the characteristic pattern of INS operations, the boundary focus and predictable quick voluntary return, disagrees with a strong assertion of the argument. However, I do accept a weaker interpretation of Roger Rouse’s argument that the Service makes undocumented immigrants act with caution in public, thus being constrained by fear and avoidance into behaviors, if not thoughts (see Scott, 1985), of US capitalist ’law and order’.1° This happens when INS officers operate at the beck and call of Anglo-American dominated local society; it is consistent with the politics of stigmatization rather than the INS being in direct service to employers. Undocumented aliens are more likely to encounter local police in residential areas than the INS. Police stop aliens for traffic violations and when fights are reported at bars. Police, furthermore, exercise many discretionary laws (such as loitering or drunk and disorderly) to arrest Latino persons they perceive ’must’ be ’illegals’. What Rouse (1992: 35-6) observed in northern California is that undocumented immigrants in northern California feared local police arrests, rather than INS patrols per se. Local and state police cannot enforce federal immigration laws, but they can hold suspected undocumented immigrants for 24 hours without charging them while the INS makes an immigration status determination. A District Directorlltold me that accepting or not accepting local police turnovers was the discretion she exercised most frequently. It linked the Director to local power networks; she had to consider whether to expend organizational time (to pick up and interrogate a prisoner) in order to maintain a relationship of reciprocity with county sheriffs and town police who provide per diem jails and other favors. Local police are sensitive to the ideas and interests of Anglo-American dominated, labor-using communities (Mexicans should be cheap living and hard-working, but not crowded and disorderly). Police thus project local disciplinary perceptions onto the INS as a tool of control. Based on interviews with INS officers who have worked in farm and metropolitan areas of Arizona and California, local discipline through the police-INS nexus is stronger in rural labor districts than in anonymous cities, though not completely absent there (Hector Delgado’s [ 1993] report of undocumented waterbed factory workers’ lack of fear of the INS in metropolitan Los Angeles supports this contention). If so, the local disciplinary role of the INS might have peaked in the Bracero and illegal farmworker era of 1942-65, and declined - though never completely disappeared - as labor relations changed from agriculture to metropolitan service and manufacturing. Our analysis of state power over immigrants should also shift. Now, the INS enters American prisons because of so-called ’criminal aliens’. Legal resident aliens, as well as undocumented immigrants, may be deported if they are convicted of one of a list of crimes, including the ’drug war’ felonies focused on narcotics, money and weapons. The INS operates systematic jail clearance programs called BORCAP for the Border Patrol and ACAP for other branches. In these programs, immigrants serve their prison terms but as soon as they may receive discretionary release,


169

INS officers take charge of them and prepare for a rapid deportation hearing. These programs respond to the vast increase in US state and federal prison numbers in the regime of drug control; it derives both from both state fiscal pressures and fear of alien crime waves (Wolf, 1988). The ’criminal alien’ programs do police immigrant ethnic groups (Perez-Trevino, 1990). However, insofar as they are ’disciplinary’, they involve different economies (e.g. drugs, felonious sectors) and forms of control than agricultural and manufacturing workplaces. They occur within the general dynamics of informal markets, consumption and criminalization in recent capitalist America rather than in specific forms of production. They partake in media-driven fear of immigrants and crime, and thus a symbolic law model fits them as well as a direct state repression of populations model.

Employer Sanctions Although the ’employer sanctions’ laws have proven ineffective in reducing undocumented labor demand, and although the INS devotes much more effort to border interdiction than workplace checks, employer sanctions do bring the INS into the workplace. Do INS officers act as direct agents of labor control, breaking up strikes, arresting troublesome workers, etc.? My fieldwork, including observations, uncovered no examples of direct INS service to employers, although such events may be hidden from the inquisitive researcher.l2 The research did demonstrate that the general climate of labor relations between employer and various employees shapes the state agency, because actors on both sides use the INS for tactical ends. Unlike the direct, instrumental (or conspiratorial) view of the state-labor regime, which assumes that the government agency stands above, but intervenes to control labor relations, my findings place the state agency directly in the middle of historically evolved labor relations, as much made by them as

enforcing them. The INS has approximately a net 530 full-time officers (the Investigations staff, prorated for their other duties) conducting workplace visits in nation of several million businesses. Thus, to winnow the workload, telephoned tips are essential. Tips have two qualities: they often involve ethnic networks; and, as a form of betrayal, they arise in the disputes and breakdowns of confidence generated by personalized workplace control: a

We often hit restaurants and hotels. This is because they provide reliable, detailed tips. It’s like a criminal conspiracy. People don’t realize that 50 employees are all involved; the employer better treat everyone perfectly, or someone will squeal. We get very good information from brothers, brothers-in-law: take

them away! You don’t get Chinese calling up. We get independent evidence, or Mexicans in Chinese restaurants rat on them. We in the INS are such a known quantity to the Mexican community. We start the majority of cases through tips. We get more tips from people of the same ethnic background - Hispanics turn in Hispanics, Poles turn in Poles,


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yesterday, a Canadian turned in Canadians. We don’t get Orientals turning in their cousin, for instance, never have a Thai turn in a Thai, yet I have done cases from other sources on Thais. Someone is fired, doesn’t get the job, sees Hispanic types speaking Spanish, ’of course, they are illegal aliens’ so they call us. With experience you can weed out what are good tips, what are not good tips. We will take the report (if it’s just ’Spanish’) to our supervisor, say to him ’this is the business, here’s what it sounds like to me’. Generic ethnic references might get worked, but they are not a high priority. There is a higher priority if someone says three guys, Jose, Juan and Antonio, are working without documents. or

workplaces, which characterize most employers of undocumented immigrants, contain personalized relations of power, trust and distrust. Lacking bureaucratic means to control the flow of work and settle disputes, they rely on the punitive consequences of distrust to enforce everyday trust (Edwards, 1979). This can be said, even more strongly, about any set of ’outlaw’ (undocumented) activities. Speaking more benevolently, similar bonds organize immigrant kin and hometown networks, suppliers of job contacts, crossing assistance, etc. Interested parties, immigrant and employer alike, can use the INS to reinforce favors, obligations, support and coercion already present in the Mexican immigrant world. The Service does not stand apart as a disciplinary or controlling arm of the state; instead, it reinforces - but also distorts and darkens - immigrant community relationships themselves. Small

Undocumented Avoid the Law

Immigrants versus the INS: Conspiracies to

What features of undocumented communities result in superexploitation? They have to be consistent with the specific actions the INS takes, rather than a vague sense of repression. They follow from the active responses of undocumented immigrants to state power, not just passive receipt of imposed behaviors. They are likely to be historically accreted responses inside the policed Mexican community and among employers. Finally, exploitability may occur for several reasons; the state is not omnipotent and it may not be the only cause. Teodor Shanin (1978) makes the important point that new immigrants are exploitable because of their character as migrant job seekers, as well as their legal status. Specifically, Shanin argued that peasant youth operate in terms of the reproduction of a household economy by periodically voyaging to sell themselves to capital (also see Piore, 1979; Selby and Murphy, 1982; Kearney, 1986). They would do this, Shanin argues, with or without the action of the state. Leo Chavez’s (1992: 132) ethnography of undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans is consistent with Shanin’s point, if more subtle about the variety of immigrant households and stages. In his account, the INS is not an all-encompassing threat. The highest priority immigrant


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goals include finding temporary shelter, finding work and living cheaply (in other words, goals of survival while seeking wages for home economies). Avoiding detection by the INS is important, Chavez tells us, but for a specific reason: the objective is to minimize disruption to higher priority job and household stability goals by unplanned arrest and departure to Mexico. Illegality itself and exit from the US is not necessarily disruptive, and Mexicans are more likely to depart on their own than by INS arrest (Chavez, 1988). The means to minimize disruption rest within the networks that also provide work, shelter and companionship. 13 The extra-legal qualities of life imposed on undocumented immigrants by the state do not so much remake these basic immigrant patterns as they bind people to them more tightly. When undocumented Mexican immigrants encounter the INS, they face nearly immediate voluntary departure to Mexico, and the need to return to the US as soon as possible after that. In addition, they face the hardest part of the return (the highest rate of arrest and other dangers) at the boundary itself and while moving north, rather than in residential or work areas. The systemic failure of INS enforcement against routine smuggling, however, opens effective coping responses. Martin West and Erin Moore

(1989: 4-5) observed that undocumented Mexican farmworkers in

Washington state readily agreed to voluntary departure, but they sought to have employers hold open jobs and retain owed wages on the assumption that smugglers at the border would soon enable them to return.14 This account implies a chain of tacit arrangements (and thus, obligations) among workers, smugglers and employers precisely to reduce disruption of immigration economic arrangements. It also rests on the immigrants’ foreknowledge that they can surmount the border barrier to return. In his ethnography of lettuce workers, Robert Thomas (1985) shows how the distant border shapes workplace exploitation; my arguments about the economic consequences of immigration politics rest directly on his findings and analysis. He writes that ’employers were able to turn the investments undocumented workers had made in getting across the border (as well as their fear of apprehension) into attachment to the firm’ (1985: 121). One worker explained that ’the foremen tell you that if you get picked up they’ll give you your job back, but sometimes you don’t get it back. So, if you have to take so many chances, you better make as much money as you can’ (1985: 123). Owners do not have to wield threats against undocumented workers; foremen do it for them. Foremen compete for their jobs by producing high volumes at high speeds. In turn, they recruit lettuce workers in four ways: family and friendship networks; other workers’ networks ; walk-ons; and smugglers. In one crew, two-thirds of the 24 undocumented workers got their jobs through one smuggler operating out of Mexicali. This smuggler sold passage and a prearranged job for $500, which took three weeks of steady, hard work to pay back. Undocumented workers owed not only monetary debts, but interpersonal debts for favors (e.g. jobholding upon INS arrest). Thomas describes the ritual of a worker offering


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repay the foreman for a job with a gift, and the foreman refusing this in order to perpetuate the debt. Even undocumented workers not affected by smuggling (recruited through family and co-worker networks), and documented immigrant or citizen laborers, had to speed up to keep up with the entrapped workers (Thomas, 1985: 140, 147-8).~ For reasons we have already explored, metropolitan settings may be less strongly affected by INS avoidance. In non-border cities, the INS is undermanned. Delgado’s (1993: 63-5) waterbed factory workers in Los Angeles manifested little concern about the Service. Chavez (1992: 157-69) reports greater fear of arrest, but he describes San Diego county, a near-border area boxed in by checkpoints and pervaded by Border Patrol movements. Still, the basic pattern of voluntary return and border crossing/smuggling applies to all settings, rural or urban, and the 1986 employer sanctions law adds new extra-legal conspiracies. The employer sanctions law, as we have learned, requires immigrants to present documentation, real or fraudulent, to employers. A San Diego county restaurant manager told me that he asks his current workers if they know anybody who wants a job. Recommended workers then appear with ostensibly acceptable documentation, although the job solicitation occurred in a labor market where workers are extremely likely to be undocumented. In this scenario, it is likely that key network persons, the existing employees, not only provided undocumented immigrants with job connections but that they helped with knowledge and even physical possession of fraudulent documentation. This additional, felonious favor heightens the inherent dependence of recent immigrants on networks. In turn, the existing workers may owe workplace obligations to the employer, but could wield their role to resist or influence work relations, for the employer also depends on the quasi-labor brokers. Broker and employers together have a mutual interest in disciplining new workers, and a subtle and effective means to realize this interests. 16 Undocumented immigrants are vulnerable to superexploitation when conspiracies to avoid the law compromise them. This is not, it should be emphasized, blaming the victim, since the harm occurs when normal immigrant patterns of assistance transfer to a realm outside the law. The responsibility for that transfer rests with the symbolic politics of fear, and the concomitant failure to confront serious immigration alternatives in the US. The idea of extra-legal conspiracy recognizes the ability of undocumented immigrants to elude policing, the key point of ineffectual state theories, but the perspective here adds concern about the consequences for human beings of their evasions. Extra-legal network assistance covers a huge variety of persons and activities. It varies from driving a relative north from the border without a cent changing hands to contacting and paying for smugglers; it mixes help in finding housing, filling out forms, and buying food with coercive laborbrokerage. Help, including the worst forms, spans relationships from close to


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to distant kin, friends, townsmates and acquaintances of dubious origin. The combinations and permutations obscure the line between mutuality and exploitation (see Conover, 1987). Networks are enacted by reciprocal transactions of goods, favors and emotion, in which future obligation is given when an immediate favor is gotten and network behavior is learned through interpersonal idioms of mutual trust (V61ez-lbafiez, 1983) particularly suited to extra-legal activity. Altruistic to highly unequal relationships partake of the same idioms (following Wolf, 1966: 86-7). When undocumented immigrants construct reciprocal exchanges, they may appear to follow egalitarian idioms but their choices are limited and channeled by the need to reduce disruption by the INS. The restriction of alternatives adds power to the superordinate partner. Debts may then be called in for use in exploitative domains. Superexploitative results flow up a channel of obligations from the immigrant to the immigrant-helper, on to the foreman and employer. Yet all parties may perceive unequal reciprocation as ’us versus them’, with them being the state, thus mystified by the language and sentiments of confidentiality and trust. Low-level assistance therefore provides a powerful means to enact and justify superexploitation.17

Conclusions The INS affects the exploitability of undocumented immigrants through an intersection between its typical patterns of enforcement and the immigrants’ relatively successful conspiracies to avoid the law. The labor effect, therefore, is relational, not imposed unilaterally. The increment of exploitability, which probably does benefit employers, is not obviously sought by cohesive capitalist elites, but rather is the result of a complex political process. Does this mean that it is just sheer chance, a plural jumble of factors, which accounts for this important labor system? In fact, no - the politics above the state, the actions of the state agency, and the relations between immigrants and employers are consistent, strikingly so, in one regard. Undocumented immigrants, especially ones from Latin America, are sought as laborers but stigmatized as people, as members of families, residents of neighborhoods, and as newcomers to the polity (see Chavez, 1992). This position is contradictory in logical terms, but is quite effective in the real world. Stigmatization occurs where large segments of the dominant society, generously subsidized by bureaucratic job ladders and political redistributions (to wit, ’citizens’), view themselves as removed from resourceless, unskilled, proletarian labor. I would further argue that stigmatization of laborers, of varying and complex forms, is a characteristic feature of class societies, because (a) in a class society, varieties of labor are given evaluations, often subtly negative; (b) the narrowing of people to their labor powers, their objectification, eliminates from view their complicated human qualities, and replaces them with simplistic,


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negative evaluations. We might call this ’anti-laborer prejudice’. To the general anti-laborer bias in the social life of capitalism, we add the inequalities of citizenship and race in the US, and we have a powerful formula for xenophobia. (Interestingly, the undocumented immigrants do not internalize American, capitalist stigmatization: witness the defiant, outlaw selfconceptions in Maria Herrera-Sobek’s collection of Mexican migrant ballads [1993: 187-9, 195-214]. Their despised status has a labor-disciplinary effect without need for internalization, since its compulsion derives from an underworld, reinforced by very different forms of order.) Among the arguments that began this article, stigmatization most resembles Manuel Castells’ (1975) portrayal of non-citizen labor in advanced capitalist societies, though undocumented immigrants are less frightened and passive than in Castells’ argument. The disregard of laborers as persons has the intentions (if not full effects) of displacing reproductive costs away from the US, consistent with Michael Burawoy’s (1976) hypothesis. The important point is that such hypotheses cannot be sustained just because they ’make sense’ for capital, or even that some predicted effects do occur. As models of labor control, they posit very deliberate actions by the state. We must turn every step of such state-labor models into an open question, using perspectives inside the state and from below

as

well

as

from above.

Beyond scholarly interest in state-labor regimes, the article offers insights into current US immigration politics. First, the present increase in border enforcement (the 1996 Illegal Immigration Act and other measures described earlier) may not be an omniscient manipulation of labor supply, as I have recently heard suggested in conversation;18 it is plausibly explained by the general tenor of social relations in nationalized and racialized capitalism (my stigmatization argument) and the specific historical crisis of confidence in the US (my long waves of anxiety argument). However, some employers will take advantage of the new situation as a labor regime, and for them it may become ’capitalist functionalism’. For an example of one such possible development, as the new border regime emerges, the covert or black market in illegal employment may differentiate from legal markets, whereas until now there has much overlap with undocumented and legal workers laboring side by side. A smaller, but more intensively exploitative sector may result. Second, the increasing distinctiveness of black markets, and the general tendency toward stigmatization of undocumented immigrant laborers, may shape the long-term placement of Latinos, and other new immigrants in the US; it may support a conceptual and political divide between established residents and new residents that undermines the inclusive capacity of US non-ethnicized citizenship. Third, my arguments are ultimately about responsibility for vulnerability and exploitation. By concentrating enforcement against the undocumented immigrants, especially at a militarized border, and by excusing the continuing demand for their labor, US political leaders and mass citizen movements are


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for events that apparently belong among the immigrants themselves: fear and avoidance of the law, smuggling, the immigrant underworld, and exploitative obligation and dependence. Whatever the ostensible good to be obtained by interdicting undocumented immigration, it has to be weighed against these manifest bads.

responsible

Notes The research for this article was supported by grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. For comments, conversations and papers I thank Merlyn Heyman, Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, Carlos Velez-Ibanez, Jim Greenberg, Michael Kearney, Hector Delgado, Roger Rouse, Leo Chavez, Timothy Dunn, Douglas Massey and John Gledhill. I thank Raul Fernandez for a key suggestion and Daniel Heyman and Mary Durfee for help with rewriting. I thank many interviewees inside and outside the INS who cannot be named. Friends in Agua Prieta, Sonora and Douglas, Arizona continued to teach me about border affairs. All responsibility for errors of fact or interpretation remains my own. 1

2

3

4

Because of space constraints, this article does not include a section reviewing the merits and limitations of these hypotheses considering the INS evidence and analysis presented in this article. Any reader who is interested in this material is invited to write to the author (Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931) for a copy of that material; please ask for ’Capitalist Functionalist Theories Redux’. An interesting observation can be made here concerning state theory from above. Much state theory concerns how positive goals functional to capitalists and/or state actors are inserted into policy. In this case, however, we see negative functionalism, the ability of capitalist interests and the climate for capitalism as a whole preventing an effective form of encroachment. Moreover, this offers a model of US undocumented politics, though one that is too simple and does not account for the dynamism of xenophobia. In this model, citizenship politics accounts for INS policing but negative capitalist functionalism accounts for its ineffectiveness, rendering an equilibrated, continuing illegal labor market system. One hypothesis, that border control policy opens and closes a valve for a pipeline of labor, depending on labor needs in the US, naturally occurs here. This hypothesis, though tempting, cannot be sustained. Border control efforts have risen steadily for 16 years (from 1981, at least, to 1997), consistent with the rising ’wave of anxiety’ about many US social changes that began in the late 1970s, but inconsistent with the up and down rhythms of the national and sectoral economies over that long period. It is fair to argue that waves of national and regional unemployment lead to political surges in xenophobia, and may set off bursts of expulsion. In this instance, social dynamics of anxiety and nationalism regulate interventions in labor supply, rather than those governmental actions being strictly functional to capitalist production. Free trade with Mexico, which is opening commercial movement across the border, is likely to clash with immigration and narcotics interdiction. The profree-trade political coalitions are quite different from those involved in immi-

gration anxiety politics.


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5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

It is useful to ask

why voluntary departure is used, since its effects on perpetuating undocumented immigration are well known. The simple answer is that, with 1.6 million arrests a year, it would be impossible, logistically and financially, to hold most undocumented immigrants for extended periods while they go through formal deportation hearings and/or criminal charges of illegal entry and re-entry after deportation. This is true enough, but high volume is premised on the politically constructed fact that there is continuing demand for employment in the US and imbalanced economic development in Mexico. Voluntary departure could change, but only as part of a general change in the labor regime. Recent initiatives in the INS to identify and prosecute repeat crossers, or to take them to distant places on the border before voluntary departure, suggest organizational recognition of the voluntary departure complex, but they are expensive drops in a bucket of huge numbers of arrests. Some PAIC concerns did constrain a purely numerical strategy, including avoidance and damage control of human rights abuse complaints, and the careful husbanding of payroll, equipment and so forth. INS stereotypes of Mexicans are generally favorable, it should be emphasized. They are regarded as docile, honest and hard-working people in a difficult economic position. However, they are also regarded as appropriate targets for routine law enforcement (Heyman, 1995). Chavez et al. (1990) found that only 45.6 percent of undocumented Mexicans ever had been arrested, while 35.8 percent of Central Americans (who enter and leave the US less often) had been arrested. We would expect the forms of superexploitation of non-Mexican nationalities to vary according to their modes of entry; for example, if Chinese immigrants use high-cost smugglers to enter the country and face a high loss if returned, we would expect far harsher superexploitation than that of Mexicans. Rouse adds other arguments (such as the role of consumption and generational change) that might bear stronger weight in Mexican immigrant internalization of US capitalist order. The District Director is the executive over the primary field operational unit encompassing all branches of the INS except the Border Patrol; the District Director possesses significant statutory discretion. The evidence on the repressive use of INS raids and call-ins is sparse and mixed. Delgado (1993: 65-8) insists that INS officers did not and would not interfere with union organizing among undocumented workers in his Los Angeles case study. Thomas (1985: 145-6) reports INS raids on lettuce farms, but the foremen hid undocumented workers and obstructed INS duties rather than revealing workers to punish them. Rodriguez, however, cites a case in Houston in which the INS raided an undocumented Central American office-cleaning crew that had voted to unionize (Rodriguez, 1987: 21). Likewise, Rodriguez (1987: 15) writes that ’the [undocumented Central American] migrants’ ability to assemble social and economic resources at the household level primarily determines whether they settle in the city or not, notwithstanding an encounter by the INS’. The INS will collect wages for arrested workers who request them, but it will also charge bus transportation for departees who bear cash; consequently, workers often prefer that the employer hold money for them. When the 1986 IRCA law made employment of undocumented workers illegal, it reinforced the hold of foremen/labor brokers in agriculture (Nagengast et al.,

1992: 18).


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16

Overcrowded and overpriced rental housing is another form of value transfer that occurs through similar principles of successfully covert but exploitative extra-legal conspiracy rather than direct fear of, or repression by, the state. For a documented case, see Sarah Mahler (1993: 7-8, 10) and on real-estate capital accumulation based on new immigrants generally, see Hagan and Rodriguez,

17

Potentials for solidarity as well as for exploitation reside in the strength of covert undocumented immigrant networks, e.g. the unionization case analyzed

(1992).

by Delgado (1993: 14). 18

For instance, it has been suggested to me that welfare recipients driven off the dole will replace illegal immigrants driven from the country. There is much to be learned about the deep politics of each initiative, but my reading is that this mistakes the rhetorical justification for simultaneous immigrant crackdowns and welfare elimination for the actual place of each in US politics and economics; neither does the US state wield that much control over the two populaces, nor are they easily substituted for each other (Fix and Passel, 1994: 47-52).

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over

Reformism.

London: Allen and Unwin. Turner, Bryan S. (1990) ’Outline of a Theory of Citizenship’, Sociology 24: 189-217. US INS (United States Immigration and Naturalization Service) (1990) 1989 Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Vélez-Ibañez, Carlos G. (1983) Bonds of Mutual Trust: The Cultural Systems of Rotating Credit Associations among Urban Mexicans and Chicanos. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. West, Martin and Erin Moore (1989) ’Undocumented Workers in the United States and South Africa: A Comparative Study of Changing Control’, Human Organization 48: 1-10. Wolf, Daniel (1988) Undocumented Aliens and Crime. The Case of San Diego County, Monograph Series No. 29. La Jolla, CA: Center for US-Mexico Studies, University of California, San Diego. Wolf, Eric R. (1966) Peasants. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Mjosiah McC. Heyman (PhD, City University of New York 1988) is the author of Life and Labor on the Border.- Working People of Northeastern Sonora, Mexico, 1886-1986, and articles on immigration, states, labor and consumption in journals such as Current Anthropology, Amencan Ethnologist, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, MI, USA. Address: Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University, 1400 Townsend Dr., Houghton, MI49931-1295, USA. [email: [email protected]]
