The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

340 critical reflections
even stronger ones. What is more, Border Patrol agents who accuse their fellow
agents of abusing suspects or other wrongdoing up to and including murder, or
who testify against them in court, often suffer retaliation and are sometimes fired
(Human Rights Watch, 1992, 1995).
Most of the people that the Border Patrol apprehends are not drug runners or
terrorists, but migrant workers who cross or attempt to cross without papers. Migrants
have long come to the United States both seeking a better life and responding
to demands for their labor power (Hoffman 1976; Cockcroft 1986), but
the most recent of them have done so within the context of the global economic
restructuring that, in this hemisphere, is epitomized by the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Although NAFTA, combined with Mexican government
measures that have removed price supports for food staples and “liberalized”
agriculture, have meant increased prosperity for some, it has also translated
into increased poverty for many others, the reduction of social services,
privatization of once communal land, and ever larger numbers of foreign-owned
corporations moving into the border zone looking for cheap labor and relaxed environmental
standards (Barry 1995; Ross 1995; Collier 1994; Kearney and Nagengast
1990). When labor is regulated but capital is not, workers from countries
to which globally mobile assembly plants have relocated are discouraged from immigrating.
However, the number of export assembly factories (maquiladoras) along
the Mexican side of the border has quadrupled since the mid-1980s, drawing far
more displaced small farmers and urban poor to the area than can be employed
(see, for example, Tiano 1994). If potential workers still manage, or are allowed,
to cross the border illegally, their illegality renders them economically and politically
vulnerable. They can be better channeled into U.S. secondary and tertiary
labor markets as agricultural workers, gardeners, or day laborers. In those markets
they are often underpaid and exploited (Zabin et al. 1993; Sassen 1991, 1996).
Historically, vast numbers of Mexicans went into the agricultural labor market in
the United States, but the expansion of the service sector and the restructuring of
urban manufacturing since the 1980s has meant the growth of manufacturing:
“sweat shop” jobs that are filled by illegal workers. For example, undocumented
workers fill some 90 percent of Los Angeles garment factory positions (Andreas
1994; Sassen 1996; cf. Tiano 1994). When they no longer need them, agricultural,
service sector, and manufacturing employers often dispose of their labor force by
calling the Border Patrol (Zabin et al. 1993).
The employer sanctions that were mandated by the much-heralded Immigration
and Reform Act (IRCA) of 1986 and that are supposed to punish employers
who knowingly hire undocumented workers are sporadically enforced at best.
“There are 7.2 million employers out there,” said an immigration official. “In their
lifetime, they’re never going to see an immigration officer unless they stand up and
scream that they’ve got a factory full of illegal immigrants” (quoted in Andreas
1994:232; see also Andreas 2000). The 1996 immigration legislation is more dra-