Synopses & Reviews
For two decades veteran photojournalist David Bacon has documented the connections between labor, migration, and the global economy. In Illegal People Bacon explores the human side of globalization, exposing the many ways it uproots people in Latin America and Asia, driving them to migrate. At the same time, U.S. immigration policy makes the labor of those displaced people a crime in the United States. Illegal People explains why our national policy produces even more displacement, more migration, more immigration raids, and a more divided, polarized society.
Through interviews and on-the-spot reporting from both impoverished communities abroad and American immigrant workplaces and neighborhoods, Bacon shows how the United States' trade and economic policy abroad, in seeking to create a favorable investment climate for large corporations, creates conditions to displace communities and set migration into motion. Trade policy and immigration are intimately linked, Bacon argues, and are, in fact, elements of a single economic system.
In particular, he analyzes NAFTA's corporate tilt as a cause of displacement and migration from Mexico and shows how criminalizing immigrant labor benefits employers. For example, Bacon explains that, pre-NAFTA, Oaxacan corn farmers received subsidies for their crops. State-owned CONASUPO markets turned the corn into tortillas and sold them, along with milk and other basic foodstuffs, at low, subsidized prices in cities. Post-NAFTA, several things happened: the Mexican government was forced to end its subsidies for corn, which meant that farmers couldn't afford to produce it; the CONASUPO system was dissolved; and cheap U.S. corn flooded the Mexicanmarket, driving the price of corn sharply down. Because Oaxacan farming families can't sell enough corn to buy food and supplies, many thousands migrate every year, making the perilous journey over the border into the United States only to be labeled illegal and to find that working itself has become, for them, a crime.
Bacon powerfully traces the development of illegal status back to slavery and shows the human cost of treating the indispensable labor of millions of migrants--and the migrants themselves--as illegal. Illegal People argues for a sea change in the way we think, debate, and legislate around issues of migration and globalization, making a compelling case for why we need to consider immigration and migration from a globalized human rights perspective.
David Bacon is the conscience of American journalism; an extraordinary social documentarist in the rugged humanist tradition of Dorothea Lange, Carey McWilliams, and Ernesto Galarza. --Mike Davis, author of No One Is Illegal
Illegal People documents how undocumented workers have become the world's most exploited workforce--subject to raids and arrests, forced to work at low pay and under miserable conditions, and prevented from organizing on their own behalf. In this richly reported book, David Bacon makes a powerful case for the centrality of 'illegals'--of all nationalities--in the global struggle for economic justice. --Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
David Bacon's book brings us the reality of the deplorable conditions under which immigrants live when they get here. David also demonstrates that there is hope, and we can win something better, today, notjust for immigrants, but for all working people. We just have to commit ourselves to make the policy changes that create these unacceptable conditions. ?Si Se Puede --Dolores Huerta, co-founder of United Farm Workers and president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation
Read this book to understand why we must stop uprooting people abroad and how we can ensure rights and jobs for all people in this country. Bacon's book highlights the real value of a comprehensive approach to immigration reform, which America supports --Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee
In clear and comppelling language, Bacon connects the dots between trade, migration and the maldistribution of wealth. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the cynical politics and human costs of the corporate protection racket we call globalization. --Jeff Faux, distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and author of The Global Class War
This new and urgently needed rethinking of the global economy and migration is a unique roadmap, showing not only how we arrived at our current immigration debate impasse but outlining the possibilities for what lies ahead. --Raj Jayadev, journalist, organizer, and executive director of Silicon Valley De-Bug
As he has before with both pen and camera, Bacon reminds us that we're all in this together--and that organizing to reject divisive racism and nativism both celebrates our common humanity and promotes a twenty-first-century vision of global citizenship. --John W. Wilhelm, presideent/Hospitality Industry, UNITE HERE
Illegal Peopleeeee is like a fine Oaxacan tapestry woven ever so carefully with the human face of the main protagonist of the immigrationdynamic--the mighty migrant laborer. --Nativo V. Lopez, national president of Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana and the Mexican American Political Association
Synopsis
For two decades David Bacon has documented the connections between labor, migration, and the global economy. In Illegal People he explains why our national policy produces even more displacement, migration, immigration raids, and an increasingly divided and polarized society. Arguing for a sea change in how we think, debate, and legislate about and around immigration, Bacon promotes a human rights perspective in a globalized world.
About the Author
David Bacon is a writer and photojournalist based in Oakland and Berkeley, California. He is an associate editor at Pacific News Service, and writes for TruthOut, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Progressive, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. He has been a reporter and documentary photographer for 18 years, shooting for many national publications. He has exhibited his work nationally, and in Mexico, the UK and Germany. Bacon covers issues of labor, immigration and international politics. He travels frequently to Mexico, the Philippines, Europe and Iraq. He hosts a half-hour weekly radio show on labor, immigration and the global economy on KPFA-FM, and is a frequent guest on KQED-TV's This Week in Northern California. For twenty years, Bacon was a labor organizer for unions in which immigrant workers made up a large percentage of the membership. Those include the United Farm Workers, the United Electrical Workers, the International Ladies' Garment Workers, the Molders Union and others. Those experiences gave him a unique insight into changing conditions in the workforce, the impact of the global economy and migration, and how these factors influence the struggle for workers rights. Bacon was chair of the board of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, and helped organize the Labor Immigrant Organizers Network and the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health. He served on the board of the Media Alliance and belongs to the Northern California Media Workers Guild. His book, The Children of NAFTA, was published by the University of California Press in March, 2004, and a photodocumentary project sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, Communities Without Borders, was published by the ILR/Cornell University Press in October 2006. In his latest project, Living Under the Trees, sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities and California Rural Legal Assistance, Bacon is photographing and interviewing indigenous Mexican migrants working in California's fields. He is currently also documenting popular resistance to war and attacks on immigrant labor and civil rights. He has received numerous awards for both his writing and photography.