On March 17, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour signed into law SB2988, the Mississippi Employee Protection Act. The law makes it a felony for an undocumented immigrant to work and for anyone to employ an undocumented worker.
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According to a statement from Gov. Barbour posted on his website, “Any employer who knowingly hired an illegal alien should be held accountable, and that is the goal of SB2988.”
To verify a potential employee’s status, all employers in the state will be required to check employees’ immigration status with an electronic system called E-Verify, available at the Department of Homeland Security’s website. While the accuracy of this electronic data system is questionable, employers will be absolved from any liability for hiring undocumented workers so long as they use the E-Verify system.
Though the “justice” system is much more likely to show leniency toward employers than immigrant workers, the employer sanctions nevertheless indicate that government officials are ratcheting up their anti-immigrant offensive. The threat raised by the spontaneous 2006 upsurge in the immigrants’ rights movement is still fresh in the mind of bourgeois politicians.
Mississippi may have as many as 130,000 immigrant workers. Immigrants arrived in large numbers in the 90s after a law was passed permitting casino development in 1991. Today, their labor is essential for catfish farms and chicken plants, as well as for the construction industry and the casinos on the Gulf Coast.
Under SB2988, any undocumented worker or employer of an undocumented worker caught shall be subject to imprisonment of up to five years and a fine of up to $10,000. Furthermore, anyone charged with the crime of working without documentation will not be eligible for bail. The law will become effective for large employers beginning July 1.
The bill even has local law enforcement agents worried. Hinds County sheriff Malcolm McMillin warned that there was not enough room in state jails to cover the impending crowd of convicts.
The struggle for immigrants’ and workers’ rights has met many obstacles in recent years. Despite passage of this new anti-immigrant law, Mississippi has one of the country’s most active immigrant rights coalitions—the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance. They are building a base of African Americans, immigrants and union workers to fight against discrimination and for better working conditions for all workers.
The MIRA was born out of a 2001 struggle to pass a state bill allowing everyone to have drivers’ licenses. Many Mississippi towns set up roadblocks to trap immigrants without licenses. Immigrant workers were taken away in handcuffs and fined over $1,000 before they could get their cars back. The State Senate passed the license bill unanimously, but the Mississippi House defeated it.
In 2002, MIRA helped pass six bills that stopped schools from requiring Social Security numbers from immigrant parents and won in-state college tuition for any student who had spent four years in a Mississippi high school. After Hurricane Katrina hit, the immigrant rights’ coalition fought evictions and advocated for workers who were cheated by employers.
Mississippi’s racist lawmakers upped the ante last year, introducing 21 anti-immigrant bills into the state legislature. The bills would have imposed English-only requirements for all state license and benefit applicants, created penalties for hiring undocumented workers, prohibited undocumented students from attending state universities and required local police to check immigration status. MIRA and other activists succeeded in defeating all of them.
Only under an economic system based on the exploitation of workers could someone be criminalized for an honest day’s work. The attacks on immigrants makes them vulnerable to superexploitation and weakens working-class unity through racism. Working people must fight a united struggle against this right-wing offensive.
The anti-immigrant attacks are a shameless display of hypocrisy by some of the same lawmakers who defend free plunder agreements such as NAFTA, which decimate the economies of underdeveloped countries and force workers to leave their families behind in search of work in the United States. No human being is illegal! Equal rights to all workers!
