Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops

Chapter 8: Immigrants and Imports

8 Immigrants and Imports when most people think about sweatshops in the apparel business, they think of immigrants. Early in the twentieth century it was Jewish and Italian immigrants who toiled in tenements and dangerous factories and struggled to form unions to protect their livelihoods. Following the Jews and Italians in New York and Los Angeles, still in the period when union protection was meaningful, were Puerto Rican, Black, and Mexican workers , migrants and immigrants too.1 Now, new immigrants from Central America, China, and other Asian countries join Mexican immigrants in the sweatshops of the rag trade. It is not surprising then that some see sweatshops as an issue for immigrants or as a problem created by the growth in immigration. There are two broad approaches that researchers and journalists currently apply to understanding the reappearance of sweatshops in the United States. The ‹rst approach focuses on the appearance of a large immigrant labor force that has grown rapidly since the 1965 immigration reforms. The second approach, the one that forms the basis of this chapter , emphasizes the structure of the global political economy, especially the free trade process, as the necessary condition for the large-scale reappearance of substandard conditions of labor in the last twenty years. This chapter shows why researchers and journalists “reach” for the immigrant 172 explanation yet why it is only a small part of the whole picture compared to the broader structural factors we have already discussed. The implications of the evidence are that immigration is not the suf‹cient cause for sweatshops while low-wage imports are necessary. Immigration restriction would not solve the problem of substandard conditions of employment for American workers. Analyses of the causes of the new sweatshops do have policy implications . If the supply of immigrants is at the heart of the problem, one might look to different solutions than if low-wage competition, inadequate law enforcement, the power of retailers, and the loss of union protection are necessary conditions for the repression of labor rights among new immigrants . As Ross and Staines argue (1972), distinctions between system- and person-blame attributions of a problem are likely to have a powerful effect on policy solutions. A group’s or a person’s political interests and preferences in›uence the constructions—de‹nitions—of a problem that are congruent with their policy preference. The analysis of a problem strongly in›uences the solutions. The academic’s search for causes has much to do with the political choices of policymakers. Immigrant Labor Explanations The immigration hypothesis explains the reemergence of apparel sweatshops in the context of cultural and economic factors at work within immigrant communities. It sees the simultaneous growth of both legal and illegal immigration as perhaps the most important reason for the reemergence of sweatshop conditions. Legal immigration rose dramatically in the United States between 1965 and 1990, and it continues now. In 1960, 265,398 immigrants entered the United States. By 1985 the number was 570,000, and by 1990 it was 1.5 million (U.S. Census Bureau 1994, 10). The ‹rst decade of the twentieth century saw 8.8 million immigrants enter the United States. The last decade of the century was the only one to exceed the ‹rst, when 9.1 million new residents entered the United States (INS 2002).2 The destination of new immigrants is consistent with the location of the greatest number of new Immigrants and Imports 173 sweatshops—at least those that have been noted in the apparel industry: the Mexican border, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Dallas (see, e.g., U.S. DOL 1996). These sites are often the global cities of our new economy , highly polarized in terms of class and wealth (Ross and Trachte, 1983, 1990). The “new immigration” of the post-1965 era is different from the turnof -the-century immigrant ›ow—just as it, in turn, was different from the one that preceded it. Immigrants in the era of the old sweatshops came in the greatest number from Eastern and Southern Europe, the Jews and Italians among them. Between 1890 and 1920, 87 percent of the 18.2 million immigrants came from Europe.3 Most of these immigrants, in contrast to the Protestant Northern and Western Europeans who preceded them, were Catholic, Orthodox, or Jewish. While their levels of formal schooling were low compared to native-born Americans, education was less of...