An article in Monday's Des Moines Register threw some much-deserved attention toward a new proposal to use wage enforcement as a way of cracking down on the rampant practice of worker exploitation that for too long has been the elephant in the room of the national immigration debate.  The bill, sponsored by Iowa Senate Majority leader Michael Gronstal and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, would raise penalties for violating minimum wage laws and for improperly classifying employees as independent contractors in order to avoid reporting their wages for the purposes of taxation and worker's comp payments.

These measures are particularly welcome coming from Iowa, which this May was the site of the this year's largest immigration raid in the tiny manufacturing town of Postville.

As has been well documented by now, the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant targeted in the raid had been for years the site of atrocious worker exploitation.  In a recent piece on Alternet, Joshua Holland provides a shocking laundry list of the abuses:

The AP reported that the plant's management "improperly withheld money from employees' paychecks for 'immigration fees,' didn't allow workers to use the restroom during 10-hour shifts, physically abused workers and didn't compensate them for overtime work."

According to MSNBC, workers at the plant were routinely started at $5 per hour for their first three or four months on the job and then raised to $6, still well below Iowa's minimum wage of $7.25.

Iowa Labor Commissioner David Neil confirmed to the Des Moines Register that Agriprocessors was being investigated by the state on suspicion of wage violations, paying people off the books and hiring underage workers. A copy of the federal warrant obtained by the Register described an incident in which "a supervisor covered the eyes of an employee with duct tape and struck him with a meat hook."

This is to say nothing of the manner in which the nearly 400 workers targeted in the raid were literally rounded up like cattle and taken to the Waterloo National Cattle Congress, where they were subjected to mass trials in which 85 people were sentenced in one day, some receiving as much as 5 year prison sentences for the minor infraction of using fake identification.  Or the fact that no charges have been brought against Agriprocessors for their leveraging the immigration status of some of their employees as an excuse to create abominable working conditions for all of their employees.  Or the chilling effect that the deportations have had on the United Food and Commercial Worker's attempts to organize the Agriprocessors work force.  Or the fact that responsible employers who don't abuse their workers but who want to avoid future raids will in all likelihood avoid hiring immigrant workers regardless of their immigration status, while those same immigrants flee the region, leaving a vacuum in local economies.

What the raids call to our attention, is that workers -- documented and undocumented, immigrant and non-immigrant alike -- are the real victims in the current broken immigration system.  What the proposed Iowa legislation dares to do is shift the blame from the victims of this exploitation onto its perpetrators.

As Gronstal says in the Register article:

We think the real cause of this problem isn't people who are trying to seek a better life for themselves and their family. The real cause is companies that deliberately use immigrant labor to drive down wages and cut corners and save money.

At PSN, we've been making this argument for a long time.  

In the current debate, the Lou Dobbses of the world have been remarkably successful at pushing a populist message that preys on working families' justifiable anxieties about disappearing jobs and shrinking wages and redirects those anxieties against their fellow workers.  As progressives, we need to stand up and insist that these anxieties be redirected toward their proper targets: toward the corporate race to the bottom that is shipping jobs over seas to workers who can be exploited in other countries; toward the cynical business practices that leverage fear of deportation to illegally drive down wages in our own country.

We need to start making the case, in plain and simple terms, that legalizing the immigrant work force is the clearest road forward to raising wages for all workers.  We need to start making the case that integrating immigrants into our communities is not only more humane but also more practical and economically sensible than scapegoating and then deporting them.  We need to move away from the rhetoric of division posing as "American" values and toward the truly American ideals of dignity, inclusiveness, and respect for hard work that most of the country shares.

In the meantime, we need to throw as much support as possible behind the brave state legislators who are daring to buck the trend of racist anti-immigrant sentiment and take important steps toward reframing the immigration debate on sensible terms.

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Cross-posted from sirotablog