By Norman Jameson
American economic policies caused much of the debilitating poverty that now compels Latin Americans to risk everything trying to find work in the United States, according to the producer of “The Second Cooler,” a documentary on immigration.
Ellin Jimmerson, an ordained Baptist minister whose work was named best feature documentary at the Peace on Earth Festival in Chicago when it premiered in 2013, said its title comes from the “second cooler” morgue which Pima County, Ariz., had to install to store bodies recovered from the desert, pending identification. Some will never be named.
Jimmerson screened the documentary at Wake Forest University prior to its public release April 17 at www.thesecondcooler.com. The screening was sponsored by the Wake Forest University School of Divinity and the university’s Pro Humanitate Institute.
The documentary highlights policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1992 which were intended to open borders for easier commerce and raise the standard of living in poorer countries. Instead they decimated the farm economies in Mexico and Central America and drained the life from U.S. textile towns.
Now, displaced farmers and often their families crawl northward to find any kind of work, borrowing thousands of dollars to pay guides and job brokers and are often left with only debt, despair and death in the desert.
The heavily militarized border between the United States and Mexico has effectively closed the easiest urban crossing points, forcing illegals to attempt desert crossings with no knowledge of geography. They are often robbed of their food, water and travel money by parasitical thieves who know the migrants will be carrying all their valuables as they dream about starting a new life.
More than 5,000 bodies have been recovered in the desert, only a portion of those who experts believe have died chasing their last hope across a continent, a river, a fence and, at last, a desert where temperatures boil in sunlight and freeze in the dark.
Who benefits from this human carnage? Taking questions from students and others, Jimmerson said the benefit accrues to private enterprise, both in Mexico and in America. American farmers dump cheap corn and wheat south of the border, killing local agriculture. Textile companies and auto manufacturers ship jobs south where wages are low. Plant nurseries, construction companies, vegetable farms and orchards benefit from defenseless workers who will toil for little or nothing — for fear of being sent back.
Unscrupulous employers take advantage, often paying less than minimum wage, which drives down the pay scale for all unskilled labor. Unemployed Americans fight the migrating horde, believing Latinos are taking their jobs.
And the privatized prison system holding a guaranteed contract for 36,000 beds to be filled with immigrants captured on their way in, or being held while on their way out, lobbies to continue such policies.
In an earlier discussion with divinity and communications students, Jimmerson said even the language used to describe such policies “masks” their real intent and description.
Legislators work on what they call “comprehensive immigration reform,” she said, because no one would sponsor legislation more accurately labeled “comprehensive immigration exploitation or injustice.”
She said the term “guest workers” masks what are in effect “indentured servants,” and the bill authorizing it would better be called a major expansion of “federally authorized human trafficking.”
Her film rejects the notion that illegal immigrants fill jobs Americans might have taken. She said Americans will not take certain jobs for the pay that is offered, and that pay is kept artificially low by undocumented immigrants willing to accept that scale.
“If you have the ability to walk away from being doused with pesticides [while you work], you do,” she said. “But it’s not a good humanitarian or justice strategy to say you’re lazy because you won’t get out there. No one should have to work like that.”
“NAFTA was not about fear; it was about corporate greed,” she said.
Jimmerson, who holds a Ph.D. in 20th-century U.S. history, has spent years studying illegal immigration. She is working for justice, she said, and trying to expose the shibboleths Americans use to categorize, box and shelve the human beings behind the issues.
Although she will use the term “illegal migrant” in context, she said no person is illegal. It is only the government’s failure to create a process for access that “makes people either legal or illegal.”
Allessandro Von Burg, Wake Forest associate professor of communications, joined Jimmerson for a panel discussion on language and she said discussions around migrants and citizenship are really about “who is not a citizen, … who does not have the rights a country affords to its citizens?”
Persons who lack those rights, who reside inside a nation of which they are not citizens, “are vulnerable.” And that is what drives Jimmerson to push for economic reform and a demilitarized border.
She is working on legislation that would be more accurately described as “comprehensive migrant justice,” a term she would like to see used more.
“Citizenship is neither the issue, nor the answer,” she said. “It won’t solve [the problems caused by] free trade agreements, food production based on exploitation or a militarized border. People need a lawful status they can get quickly that will shield them from deportation and exploitation.”
She urged her viewers to “say no” to further free trade agreements, to further militarization of the border, to “guest worker” status in legislation and to “an economy based on exploitation.”
“Justice” for migrants who strap their dreams to their backs to cross a continent should involve the church. Lay preacher Mike Wilson, who on his own supplies water caches in the desert around Tucson that save some scurrying migrants, says in the film that churches ignore the issue, even when a starving migrant dies on the steps of a Baptist church.
“If they acknowledge a moral question, they must acknowledge a moral responsibility,” he said. “And they don’t want to do that. It’s easier to let them die.”
“The Second Cooler” will be available to the public beginning April 17 at www.thesecondcooler.com.
Norman Jameson is a writer in Winston-Salem, NC. Follow him at WordsAndDeeds.me.