Our Serfs

Did you know that we have serfs, right here in the United States? You may think that serfs vanished some time after the Dark Ages, or when Russia formally “abolished” serfdom in 1861, about the time we freed our slaves. If so, you have some rethinking to do.

We have a whole class of serfs. Their number is uncertain. There are somewhere between eleven and twenty-five million. We don’t know exactly because we don’t keep track of them. We don’t like to think about them.

But they do exist. In some ways, our serfs have it worse than the Dark Ages’ serfs. Those serfs lived in huts around their Lords’ castles. They were outside the castle walls, so they were ever vulnerable to attack. And they had to serve as the Lord’s foot soldiers and provide over half their crops to the Lord, his Knights, their families and retainers. But because they provided the food, the Lord and his Knights protected them. They were at the bottom of the food chain, but they were part of a system with some share of protection and some rights.

Not so our serfs. Our hypocrisy is legendary. Section 1 of our Fourteenth Amendment, written in the blood of some 620,000 Americans, reads as follows:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (emphasis added)

The distinction between “citizens” and “any person” is as clear as anything in our Constitution or law. You don’t have to be a citizen to enjoy due process of law protecting your life, liberty and property, or to have “the equal protection of the laws.” But in fact we have a whole class of people living among us who, in practice, have few or no such rights because they can be deported with a phone call to ICE.

By now, you know who’s under discussion: those we euphemistically call “undocumented migrants.” They do our most backbreaking, dangerous and tedious work. They pick our crops and grapes for our wine, as Woody Guthrie sang so poignantly in his ballad “Pastures of Plenty.” They butcher our meat, raise our beams, install our drywall and build our bridges and viaducts. They tend our kids, make our beds and clean our toilets. Many, if not most, work without the “safety net” of medical care or unemployment insurance. When they get sick or injured, they rely on each other, or they suffer or die.

Many who do the most dangerous work are children, whose very employment violates our laws regulating child labor. Yet do their employers get prosecuted? Mostly not: enforcement actions for illegally employing minors have dropped by half or more since around the turn of the century.

Do you really want to exclude undocumented migrants from the US? If so, the means would be childishly simple. We don’t need a wall. We don’t need mass deportation. We don’t need detention centers.

Just pass a law imposing a fine for employing undocumented migrants. Charge the employer a year’s worth of the serf’s wages as a fine for employing every undocumented serf. Create a foolproof system of online documentation, so that every employer has a way to verify every employee’s citizenship status or possession of a legitimate Social-Security card.

Just as in the Dark Ages, work is what our serfs do to survive. Work is the magnet that draws them from their so-called “Shithole” countries. Stop the work (and their exploitation) and two things would start to happen immediately. The tide of undocumented migration would slow to a trickle, and the migrants now living here would start to go elsewhere, voluntarily.

No fuss, no muss, no violent roundups. No cruelty, no brutality. No extreme border measures, which only impair international trade and tourism anyway. Just mass emigration.

Why don’t we take these simple steps to “cure” our undocumented migrant problem? Isn’t the answer obvious? They do all our dirty work. Every single one of us citizens gains from their serfdom. We get our hardest, most dangerous and least desirable work done cheaply. Our oligarchs get lower labor costs and higher profits. They can compete better, both here at home and globally. We non-oligarchs—our vast majority—get lower prices. It’s a “win-win” for everyone but the exploited serfs.

Think this is all theoretical? Think again. Recall the name Cesár Chavez? He was awarded (posthumously) the Presidential Medal of Freedom for co-organizing the National Farm Workers Association, a labor union, in 1962. He could do that because the so-called “Bracero” program then gave migrant farm workers temporary legal status to pick our crops. Though temporary, that legal status let them form their labor union and bargain for better pay and working conditions, including better housing than ghastly rural slums.

But the oligarchs learned their lesson. That’s why there’s no “Bracero” program any more. [See Endnote below.] That’s why, in general, there’s no legal status for undocumented migrants that’s not temporary and fragile. It’s easy to stop union organizing by deporting the union ringleaders. And oligarchs and employers can do it quietly, without publicity or fuss, so that no one even notices but the workers, who see their union-organizing brothers and sisters silently and suddenly disappear.

Now do you get it? Now do you see the practical effects of a party policy that demonizes migrants for crime and depredations (even though crime by citizens is reliably higher) while, at the same time, exploiting their employment (mostly in jobs citizens won’t do) to keep prices low and profits high? Do you really think all this is coincidental? And do I have to identify the political party primarily responsible?

If you work for a living and are reading this, please ask yourself a simple question: How does this relentless policy of exploitation—and the relentless union-bashing it entails—help you? Does it help you form a union if you work for Amazon, Starbucks or Uber?

At least we’ve made some progress since the Dark Ages. Then, the majority of our human population was serfs. Today, in the US, even at twenty-five million, our serf population is only about 7% of us.

I suppose that’s progress. But it sure does dim our self-image as the “shining City on the Hill,” doesn’t it? Just picture a medieval castle on that hill instead.

Endnote. There are so-called “guest worker” programs, which provide temporary visas for seasonal farm work (H2A visas) and other specialized employment, mostly high-level. However, these programs are controversial, subject to political debate, and frequently changed. They also require employers to certify that citizens are not available for the same jobs. So many employers find it easier to use undocumented immigrants, and not just because they are easier to control and intimidate.

One possible solution to our undocumented manual-labor problem would be to vet all current undocumented workers, deport those with criminal records, and give the rest temporary guest-worker status. But apparently no one has seriously suggested that.

Anyway, getting our divided Congress to approve that solution—let alone employers who exploit the undocumented—would be practically impossible. So the serfdom continues.

Permalink to this post