Blood, Sweat and Tears
Repression and Resistance of Latin American Immigrants

A three-part series focusing on the post-9/11 experience of undocumented immigrants in the United States

mmigrants, including millions of undocumented immigrants, have always been the invisible class that keep this "great" country working.

They do the hardest jobs, work the longest hours, and ask little in return except low wages to save and send back to their families in their home
countries.

Even though this country prides itself on being a land of immigrants, a "melting pot," immigrants have always suffered racism and xenophobia from their neighbors, exploitation from their bosses, harassment and abuse from the police and neglect or persecution from the government.

In the past Irish and Italian immigrants bore the brunt of racism and economic hardship.

Today, millions of immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as Eastern Europe make up the bulk of the low-wage, often undocumented labor force, vulnerable to exploitation and mistreatment and in extreme cases even literal slavery by their employers.

Now immigrants from Mexico and Central America make up the largest group of newcomers, due to the geographic closeness of these countries and the dire economic conditions there, which have been made even worse over the past decade by the institution of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and free trade measures affecting Central America.

An average of almost one immigrant a day dies crossing the US-Mexico border, not to mention the deaths and other calamities that happen to immigrants from Central America and southern Mexico making their way up to the US-Mexico border. If immigrants do succeed in making the dangerous crossing into the US, which has gotten even more treacherous since the institution of Operation Gatekeeper in the mid-1990s, they face a host of new challenges and dangers in the US. Getting safe transport from the border to their destination is one matter—note the discovery of 18 dead immigrants in a truck trailer in Victoria, Texas in May or the 11 decomposing bodies of immigrants found in a sealed boxcar in Denison, Iowa in Sept. 2002.

Once in the US, undocumented immigrants have long been virtually at the mercy of their employers, afraid to seek help if they are denied pay, subjected to dangerous working conditions or sexually harassed.

Because of their sheer numbers, Latino immigrants used to bear the brunt of racist and anti-immigrant sentiment, making them the target of everything from anti-immigrant legislation like Prop. 187 in California to hate crimes like the brutal beating of five elderly Mexican immigrants by a crowd of teenage boys in San Diego last year.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Arab immigrants found themselves the primary targets of xenophobia and hate. But the policy, economic and public opinion changes that have taken place since the attacks have also had an extreme effect on Latino and all other immigrants, who despite the increased hardship and danger have no choice but to keep coming to this country.

In this series, we will examine several aspects of the Latino immigrant's experience in the US:

• The difficulty of everyday life for Anna, an undocumented immigrant mother in San Diego, a beautiful, wealthy city which epitomizes the cross-border economic and political divide. As if life wasn't hard enough already, the increased border security and police-INS cooperation since Sept. 11 has made her struggle to survive even harder.
  
• The wild west mentality of the Arizona border region, where armed vigilante militias patrol the border with the support of the Border Patrol, hunting down immigrants and making citizens arrests until the Border Patrol can come deport them. These militias, like Glenn Spencer's infamous American Border Patrol, have also been implicated in shooting deaths and other violent attacks on immigrants over the past few years. Meanwhile other humanitarian groups like Humane Borders also patrol the area, putting out vats of water and looking for immigrants in need of aid.
  
• The day labor industry and the struggle for day labor rights. Run out of fly-by-night storefront operations with names like Elite and Manpower, day labor contractors ship undocumented immigrants out to do construction or other heavy labor and then take a hefty cut of the pay themselves, often paying the workers below minimum wage or sometimes not paying them at all. But in cities and rural areas around the country immigrants are creating workers centers where they can be hired on their own terms and share information about workers' rights. In Chicago, a multinational group of day laborers are embroiled in a fight with city officials who destroyed their day labor center and want to kick them out of the area.
  
• The existence of slavery, literally, in Immokalee, Florida, where Central American, Haitian and Mexican immigrants are held under armed guard while picking tomatoes and other produce for extremely low wages. The FBI has been investigating slavery in south Florida, but they are slow to move and meanwhile the modern slave trade in undocumented immigrants continues.

—Kari Lydersen