The time has come to grow-up and find a permanent home for this blog. The folks at wordpress.com have let me squat for a while and I’m very grateful. Nonetheless, this is a buyers market and I’ve found a great piece of land where my dispatches feel quite comfortable, here it goes:
For those of you who are subscribed through RSS, make sure you have the new feed address. Migrating has been quite an experience. I hope many of you follow me to the new abode.
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Llegó la hora de madurar y conseguir un hogar permanente para el blog. Los colegas de wordpress.com me han dejado ser un okupa virtual por un tiempo y se los agradezco. Sin embargo, este mercado favorece a los compradores y he encontrado una buena parcela donde mis escritos se sienten a gusto, aquí va la dirección:
Los y las que se han suscrito via RSS deben asegurarse que tienen la nueva dirección de los feeds. La migración ha sido una gran experiencia. Espero que me sigan a mi nuevo lecho.
Image By José Antonio Rosario : Borrowed from Prensa Comunitaria
This summer has been quite heated for many poor and low-income communities in Puerto Rico. As folks try to survive in an island that is going through a three-year recessionary cycle and experiencing a massive wave of layoffs in the public sector, the national government adds insult to injury by displacing hundreds of families from public lands. Firuzeh Shokooh-Valle has published an excellent piece in Global Voices, that offers some insights on what has transpired. The lead paragraph reads:
Recently, the Puerto Rican government issued an order to remove 200 families from the Villas del Sol community in Toa Baja, under the premise that they illegally occupied lands that are prone to flooding. Police forces tear-gassed and assaulted members of the community, most of them immigrants from the Dominican Republic.
Check out the rest: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/08/11/puerto-rico-the-battle-over-public-lands/
The people who brought us The Giant Pool of Money (see my previous post) have set-up a blog, uploaded a podcast and opened facebook and twitter accounts to keep us informed and engaged on matters related to the global economy. The team includes journalists, interns and other collaborators who know how to cover and explain complex economic topics with such grace and humor that the dismal science seems thoroughly accessible. Although topics related to the US are at the top of the agenda, their work serves as a model of how to dissect the rotting bodies of the global markets and keep the public up-to-date on all things pertaining to the financial crisis. Do you know if bloggers from the Global South are performing a similar service? Let me know.
Image by James P. Wells : borrowed from creative commons
This is an interesting biographical piece published in the NYT. As I write about the Dominican migrant experience in the United States, my thoughts center on many of the issues mentioned in the article since many of my informants make their living in the cleaning trades. Nevertheless, unlike the woman interviewed, those who have shared their work experiences with me have never mentioned belonging to a trade union. Some are US citizens or have work visas, others probably don’t; but I still wonder why the union issue has not come up. Maybe I’ll pursue this issue in the next round of fieldwork.
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July 20, 2009
After Murder of Office Cleaner, a New Light on an Isolated Job
When other workers in her office building are calling it a day, Elizabeth Magda is just beginning hers. She dumps out their wastebaskets, swipes a rag across their desks, dusts their computers and stocks their bathrooms with toilet paper and paper towels.
As the vast skyscraper empties out and a twilight desolation slowly descends on her floor, Ms. Magda finishes off her night by vacuuming a half acre of carpet, making sure to discard the pizza cartons of the few office workers who stay especially late. By midnight, she is usually the only person left on the floor, yet she does not feel isolated or lonesome, she said, because she knows she will soon be on her way home to Ridgewood, Queens.
“My personality is that I don’t need much people around me,” she said. “I don’t like a factory with a hundred people. It’s my job and I’m doing my job and I’m not thinking I’m lonely or somebody is coming in. You have to do your job.”
Few people pay attention to the workers who clean their offices, as long as the desks are clean in the morning and papers are not tampered with. But every once in a while, something happens to cast a spotlight on their relatively solitary, uncelebrated occupation. On July 11, there was a grisly discovery that did just that: the body of a cleaning woman was found stuffed in an air-conditioning duct in the Lower Manhattan office building where she had worked at night.
The victim, Eridania Rodriguez, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic in the early 1990s, was last seen four nights before. The police found her face down, her hands bound behind her back with black and yellow tape, still in her blue custodial uniform. An elevator operator, Joseph Pabon, 25, was arrested on Friday night and charged with two counts of second-degree murder in the killing of Ms. Rodriquez.
Ms. Magda, like Ms. Rodriguez, is an immigrant, though she came from Poland 13 years ago. She has a master’s degree in economics from the Krakow Academy of Economics (now the Krakow University of Economics) and taught high school math and physics. But after her husband lost his engineering job, the couple took advantage of an American immigration lottery and obtained green cards. Speaking no English when she arrived in 1996 and having to support her four children, she took random baby-sitting jobs until a friend who cleaned offices at 1155 Avenue of the Americas tipped her to an opening there.
“I was thinking of my kids’ education first — then maybe mine,” she said.
There is a slight note of embarrassment in her voice that she did not do more with her own education. But economically, at least, it may have been a sensible decision. As a member of Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, which represents 26,000 cleaners in large commercial buildings in New York City, she earns $21 an hour, or around $45,000 a year, with health and pension benefits and a three-week annual vacation. It has allowed her to support her children, three through colleges like the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Hunter College; her youngest, Filip, 16, is still living at home and attending the selective Brooklyn Technical High School. (She separated from her husband in 2000.)
Ms. Magda is a slender, middle-aged woman with long brunet hair that grazes the sky-blue uniform her job requires. She is part of a cleaning force of 44 that, every weeknight, freshens all 40 floors of 1155, a glass and black-granite tower between 44th and 45th Streets owned by the Durst Organization; the tenant list includes the law firm of White & Case. Almost all the cleaners are women from either Eastern Europe or Central or South America, according to Patrick Mollin, operations manager for Durst.
From 5:15 p.m., when she changes into her uniform and starts her shift, until 12:45 a.m., Ms. Magda’s domain is the fourth floor, whose main occupant is O.K.!, the celebrity magazine. That is evident by the front-page posters of Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie that adorn the territory.
Her steady companion is her cart, which carries two ballooning plastic bags — one for trash, the other for recyclables — as well as scouring powder, Windex and a duster. As the light streaming through the broad windows steadily dims, she wheels the cart around, collecting garbage and wiping the scores of desks that honeycomb the floor. She makes sure not to disturb any papers left out on desktops.
That first phase of the job takes four hours and then she has a break for “lunch.” Hers is often fruit because, she said with a smile, “I take care of my weight.” It is the only time during the shift that she gets to chat with her co-workers. (She has learned a few words of Spanish and some of them have learned a few words of Polish.) Then she returns to the fourth floor and cleans the bathrooms. When there are almost no magazine workers around to disturb, she pushes and drags a vacuum cleaner until her shift nears its end. Then she turns off the lights, changes into street clothes and punches out.
She finds that the people whose offices she cleans are grateful — “friendly,” she said. “It’s like you belong in the building. Sometimes they say, ‘You’re working so hard.’ ” But in any case she is too busy to feel lonely, she repeated. Cleaning, she said, “is not a team job.”
“The hardest part of the job is night hours,” she said. It leaves “you tired after work.” While the murder of Ms. Rodriguez upset Ms. Magda, it did not especially sound an occupational alarm. “This is a safe job,” she said. “Security is very good. I feel comfortable.” Even other workers cannot get to her floor since keys are electronically programmed to admit workers only to the floors they clean.
Unlike most daytime workers, she goes to sleep as soon as she returns home. But during the day, she takes time to read and attend to things like dental appointments. Before leaving for work, she prepares dinner for her son, who often returns from school after she has begun her commute to work, navigating three subway lines. (On the slog home, there is also a shuttle bus, which lengthens the trip to an hour and a half or more.)
Sometimes, she said, she capitalizes on her economics training by dabbling in the stock market through an online broker. She has also taken a course in computers offered through the union. Over the three-day July 4 weekend, she and Filip treated themselves to a bus tour of Maine, including stops in Portland, Augusta and Acadia National Park.
She realizes that her choice to clean offices was a sacrifice she made so her children could thrive. She recalls that she got advice to do exactly that from a woman whose grandchild she baby-sat for.
“Elizabeth,” the woman told her, “first educate your kids and then there will be time for you.”
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The following video highlights some of the actions by Justice for Janitors, a campaign organized by the SEIU.
Con estas palabras, el Gobernador de Puerto Rico, Luis Fortuño, explicó a la los miembros de la prensa—y a los ciudadanos—su filosofía de administración pública y la decisión de dar al traste con uno de los ejercicios de planificación y desarrollo socioeconómico comunitario más innovadores y acertados que se han gestado en Puerto Rico: el Fideicomiso de Tierras del Caño Martín Peña.
La decisión no me sorprende, pues desde siempre han existido historias de promesas incumplidas y contradicciones—especialmente de parte de los gobernantes—entre lo que se predica y luego se lleva a cabo. En este caso, como en la mayoría de las veces, se trata de un candidato que fue a pescar votos a una comunidad, que se comprometió con apoyar la gesta comunitaria y, a la hora de obrar según su ofrecimiento, echó marcha atrás. Lo que resulta preocupante en este caso es lo que revela la decisión de apabullar al Fideicomiso: un desfase entre lo que predica a través de su conservadurismo político económico y social, y las decisiones que toma en la práctica. Usualmente este estilo se despacha como más de lo mismo, otro político más que dice una cosa y hace otra, pero vale la pena entender a qué nivel el discurso de la actual administración se vuelve sal y agua, cómo elabora unas propuestas antipáticas basadas en premisas incorrectas, y bajo qué coyunturas se le hace imposible mantener la coherencia y la unidad entre pensamiento y obra.
En el furor de la campaña política, Luis Fortuño se presentó como el candidato de cambio: un pequeñoburgués criado entre las paredes de urbanización de alcurnia y las oficinas climatizadas de la Milla de Oro; un abogado de práctica privada, conservador hasta el tuétano y altamente religioso, la epítome del Young Republican que por cuestiones del sino nació en unas coordenadas geográficas que no le merecen. Se vendió, no como un reformista sino como un transformador (no digo revolucionario pues el término representa casi el inverso de su imagen). Evocando las palabras visión, cambio y futuro, nos prometió que venía a dar al traste con ocho años de clientelismo gubernamental y paternalismo estatal, a romper con el “apoderamiento del gobierno”, “mercados altamente regulados” y una “sociedad controlada y mantenida por y para el gobierno”. Como si se tratara de una parodia de lo que pudiese ser el manual del buen republicano norteamericano, su plataforma de gobierno incluye frases como: “libre comercio”, “sector privado enérgico y protagónico”, “mercados libres” y “libertad individual”, entre otras tantas que demuestran la intención de posicionarse en el ala derecha del foro ideológico.
Tomando lo mencionado anteriormente como base, las declaraciones recientes del Secretario de Desarrollo Económico—en torno al rol de terrateniente que debe de asumir el sector privado—no nos deben sorprender pues están bastante alineadas con las propuestas de cambio que el candidato Fortuño esbozó con la ayuda de unos cuantos de sus colegas licenciados que recibieron el mejor de los entrenamientos académicos en el Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola. Sin embargo, el exabrupto del Secretario revela un grado de desconocimiento sobre el panorama económico del país. Me refiero al hecho de que una gran parte del sector privado en el país no está privatizado, pues depende de los subsidios, ayudas y dádivas del sector público. También parece que ha hecho caso omiso a la información que se proveyó en el informe CNE/Brookings, donde quedó claro que el número de trabajadores y trabajadoras en el sector “de libre empresa” (que no depende sustancialmente del gobierno para funcionar) no alcanza el 25% del total de personas empleadas. Por eso me pregunto cómo Pérez Riera y el Gobernador esperan que el sector privado asuma las riendas del país cuando queda claro que un gran número de estos, al igual que muchos compatriotas—irónicamente en el polo opuesto de la estructura de clases sociales—requieren de la ayuda del estado para poder mantenerse a flote.
Así las cosas, la afronta contra los residentes del Caño Martín Peña parece estar enmarcada en una gestión de gobierno que intenta hacer todo lo posible por demostrar que es a través del esfuerzo individual y bajo el andamiaje de los mercados libres y poco reglamentados que se cuajan las mejores oportunidades de progreso y desarrollo. Esta postura, a la luz de lo que hoy se discute en el debate público en los Estados Unidos y en varias regiones de Europa, a partir del recrudecimiento de la crisis financiera global, resulta estar totalmente a destiempo y fuera de foco. Quizás la prueba más contundente llegó de los labios de Alan Greenspan, antiguo Chairman del Banco de la Reserva Federal, quien declaró que se equivocó al pensar que los bancos, poniendo sus intereses por encima de cualquier cosa, protegerían a sus inversionistas e instituciones. En otras palabras, se atrevió a decir que la visión de mundo que había apoyado por décadas y que había promovido desde su cabina de mando, fundamentada en una modelo guiado por el laissez faire, laissez passer, estaba errada: mea culpa. Dudo mucho que Fortuño y sus lugartenientes no conozcan estos hechos, algo bochornosos para los fundamentalistas del libre mercado, o que vivan enajenados de las discusiones a nivel global. Siempre pensé que las posturas recalcitrantes asumidas por su grupo en la campaña política se matizarían una vez llegaran al poder, cuando sustituyeran los despachos de UBS por las oficinas con muebles remendados de los años ochenta, tuviesen que lidiar con las costumbres del sector público, los reclamos a toda boca y las miradas de reojo de los empleados que dudan de su longevidad como servidores del Estado Libre Asociado. Me equivoqué. Por esto me parece que la actitud que han asumido resulta aún más sospechosa. Si la soberbia se los ha engullido, entonces alguien en el seno de su partido debe recordarles que están siguiendo un libreto viejo y trillado, y que las consecuencias de poner en escena ese espectáculo son nefastas—si no me creen, pregúntenles a los republicanos en el Norte.
Más allá del anacronismo, el desconocimiento y la improvisación que han caracterizado a la recién llegada administración, la firma de la Ley 32 resulta ser una negación de uno de los principios rectores que Fortuño y Pedro Pierluisi esbozaron en su campaña. En junio de 2008, el candidato a la gobernación exclamó:
“Proponemos transferir las actividades de naturaleza social para el ámbito de actuación de la sociedad civil como estrategia para la elevación del patrón de calidad y de la productividad de estos servicios. Ofreceremos oportunidades de apoderamiento de las comunidades en tiempos difíciles, cuando se necesitan estrategias en equipo, bien pensadas, ágiles, continuas, flexibles e ininterrumpidas.”
Siguiendo el estilo del Partido Republicano, Fortuño propuso darle mayores poderes al tercer sector, no para fortalecer las luchas populares o para solidarizarse con los de abajo, sino como una estrategia para restarles fuerza a las instituciones del estado mediante la sustitución del uno por el otro. Para esta ala del Partido Nuevo Progresista, el estado es una masa amorfa, grande y bruta que hay que adelgazar mediante una liposucción masiva (léase Ley 7) hasta que quede como un cuerpo raquítico que coma poco y no tenga fuerzas para apretar las tuercas del país. Bajo esta línea de pensamiento, el tercer sector, siendo parte del sector privado, puede servir como lazarillo del sector público, haciendo mandados importantes mientras le ruega a su amo que le suelte unos cuantos peniques. Sin embargo, esta idea simplificada de lo que es el estado y el tercer sector no es acertada.
En el caso de las comunidades del Caño Martín Peña, las organizaciones que han trabajado por avanzar el apoderamiento de los residentes son bastante sólidas y no pretenden ser esbirros del gobierno de turno. Son entidades bastante astutas que saben navegar los mares de la política y el sector filantrópico. Conozco bien el esfuerzo pues, antes de trasladarme a los Estados Unidos con mi familia a completar un doctorado en planificación y desarrollo, laboré voluntariamente como miembro de la Junta Asesora del Fideicomiso. Por otro lado, el Municipio de San Juan tampoco está pensando en ponerse a dieta para despojarse de unas libritas de más. Todo lo contrario, su alcalde, Jorge Santini, desea poner en marcha una serie de proyectos grandes que consoliden su poderío en la ciudad capital pues en un futuro no muy lejano aspira a la gobernación de país.
En este caso, las comunidades organizadas del Caño Martín Peña representan una amenaza para el alcalde Santini, más aún cuando han diseñado el primer mecanismo de tenencia colectiva de la tierra en Puerto Rico que rompe con el patrón harto conocido de desplazamiento de los pobres como estrategia de revitalización urbana. Los que trabajamos temas relacionados al espacio urbano y el desarrollo aprendemos temprano que, para el estado, el control de la tierra es sinónimo de poder político, legitimación y dominio. Disponer del terruño para captar votos o eliminar de golpe y porrazo a un asentamiento informal en nombre del orden son muestras de la pujanza estatal. El programa de las parcelas dirigido por el caudillo, Luis Muñoz Marín, o el atropello de Romero Barceló contra Villa Sin Miedo, sirven como ejemplos claros. Lo que se ha perpetrado contra los residentes del Caño está en la misma onda: bajo el manto de la repartición de títulos, y en nombre del progreso y la justicia social, se está allanando el terreno para la especulación inmobiliaria y la eventual desarticulación de ocho comunidades humildes.
El Caño desde arriba
Como mencioné anteriormente, el Fideicomiso de Tierras del Caño Martín Peña, orquestado por el Proyecto Enlace y el Grupo de 8 comunidades aledañas al cuerpo de agua, es un proyecto ejemplar que le sigue la pista no a las misiones de Hugo Chávez ni a la Reforma Urbana de Cuba, sino a iniciativas similares en los Estados Unidos que han logrado mantener un caudal de vivienda asequible para los pobres y las familias de escasos recursos. No sé si Fortuño estaba al tanto de esta información cuando esbozó lo siguiente en su plataforma de gobierno:
“Identificaremos y eliminaremos barreras en las agencias de gobierno que impidan la transferencia de recursos e inventario mueble e inmueble del gobierno a organizaciones sin fines de lucro. Esta iniciativa incluirá la disposición de equipo tecnológico, así como propiedades que no se estén utilizando o sean calificadas como inventario en exceso.”
Según el libreto de la campaña, Fortuño debe ser el primer defensor de lo que proponen los vecinos del Caño pues presentan ideas “bien pensadas, ágiles, continuas, flexibles e ininterrumpidas” para lidiar con el problema de la vivienda de interés social y con las necesidades de desarrollo socioeconómico in situ. Lamentablemente, ese no es el caso y tal parece que a la administración de Fortuño se le ha visto la costura: prometen ser más papistas que el Papa, pero a la hora de la verdad se quedan cortos y se contradicen. El proyecto que tiene en mente el alcalde Santini promete darles títulos individuales a algunos residentes y construir viviendas, algunas de estas con tecnologías verdes. Algunos dirán que la gesta del líder municipal debe aplaudirse, pero vale la pena recalcar que por décadas les han dado la espalda a estos barrios y, ahora que los residentes tienen el sartén agarrado por el mango—pues controlan un gran número de parcelas y han elaborado un plan integral para el desarrollo de la zona con la participación de los que allí residen—al Municipio le duele tener que ceder esos derechos y asumir un rol de facilitador. Resulta curioso que lo que propone llevar a cabo Santini es lo mismo que Fortuño criticó fuertemente durante su campaña: el “apoderamiento del gobierno”.
Con la frase que sirve de título a este texto, el Gobernador intenta resolver esta gran contradicción, busca identificarse con las posturas más conservadoras y desacertadas del catálogo republicano a la vez que se desconecta de lo que ahora considera anatema: el apoderamiento en conjunto, en comunidad. Si son los juntes lo que le asustan, ¿cómo catalogamos a las alianzas público-privadas? Si las gestiones en comunidad lo ponen incómodo, ¿qué hacemos con todos esos grupos eclesiásticos que tanto han donado a su campaña y le sirven de modelo a seguir a la hora de predicar sobre las preferencias sexuales y la familia? Quizás la pregunta debe ser otra: si una administración comete sendos errores y abundan grandes contradicciones, ¿quiénes terminarán siendo apoderados?
Meeting with some community leaders in the local Catholic Church: Reunión con algunos líderes comunitarios en la Iglesia Católica
Colmado en Villa Sombrero
Tarde tranquila
Here are some pictures of my first days in Villa Sombrero, Baní, the Dominican Republic. Some were taken by me and others by Eucar Alvarez, a young community journalist who runs laesquinacaliente.net.
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Aquí les dejo algunas imágenes de mis primeros pasos en Villa Sombrero, Baní, en la República Dominicana. Algunas las tomé yo y otras son de Eucar Alvarez, un periodista jóven de la comunidad que corre laesquinacaliente.net
Yesterday I landed in the Dominican Republic to complete a month-long fieldwork excercise for my study on transnational migrant organizations and their development impacts. I was immediately taken to one of my study sites, the town of Villa Sombrero in the Baní region. First impressions: the car ride reminded me a lot of the trip I used to make as a youngster from San Juan to Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. There is a certain similarity in the physical (natural and man-made) lanscape and in the overall movement of people in the surroundings. My hosts are Doña Carmen and Don Julio, two elders of the community that have been extremely gracious and attentive. I am also under the care of the leaders from Soprovis, one of the organizations that I am studying. Yunio, one of the leaders, has become an instant friend. He’s a smart, young agriculturalist who’s devoted to his community and works hard to support his family.
I hit the ground running. Just hours after my arrival, I was taken to two community meetings where I’ve met a good number of the local leaders and got a sense of how the organizational ecosystem works. Right now, I am discovering the local amenities. I am sharing a small, cramped room with some young men and woman in an Internet center just steps away from where I am staying. While I type away these dispatches, they are chatting with friends all over the world. Using keyboards and cameras, they keep in touch and make virtual distances disappear.
For those interested, I’ll be sharing some experiences of this trip every once in a while. Hasta pronto.
This semester, I completed an excellent qualitative methods course. The professor, Kathryn Edin, is a renowned sociologist who has directed several in-depth studies on low-income, single mother households in urban settings throughout the United States as well as other projects related to housing and household economic dynamics. Asides from the field observations and interviews that we had to conduct and transcribe, she asked us to read several ethnographic and interview-based studies and review them (in 500 words or less). I chose to read and review one of her most recent books–coauthored with Maria Kefalas–Promises I can Keep, which examines the lives of poor, inner-city mothers. The text below is what I came up with.
If you want to keep up with the debate on motherhood and marriage, check out the following entry in the NYTs Room for Debate Blog: A New Trend in Motherhood. If you want to understand the dynamics at play, read Kathy and Maria’s book.
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In the 1970s, while campaigning for the presidency, Ronald Reagan introduced the concept of the “welfare queen” to underscore the problems with the administration and design of welfare programs in the United States. The story of a poor black woman from Chicago’s South Side who drove a Cadillac while befitting from government-sponsored programs was transformed into a condemnatory legend that served to dismantle parts of the welfare state throughout the 1980s and also advanced a derogatory, gendered and racialized image of being poor in America. While several decades have passed since the tale was first muttered, it has stayed fresh in the minds of many and fueled misinformed ideas of how women navigate through the harsh experiences of being destitute. Although not concerned specifically with the experiences of women on welfare, Edin and Kefalas’ book is an antidote to such perspectives, since it advances informed and thought-provoking answers to an important question that has also been in the radar of reactionary pundits: “why childbearing and marriage have become so radically decoupled among the poor” (4).
Promises I Can Keep depicts the stories of poor mothers who strive to get ahead in eight Philadelphia neighborhoods that offer very little in terms of physical amenities, social relations and economic opportunities. Using primary data collected through 162 interviews and numerous ethnographic observations, the authors are able to demonstrate how, contrary to popular accounts, poor women hold marriage to very high standards and see motherhood as “the possibility—not the promise—of validation, purpose, connection and order” (185) in “a social context where the achievements that middle class youth see as their birthright are little more than pipe dreams…”(49). Edin and Kefalas argue that the poor have not turned their backs on marriage but rather redefined it the wake of important cultural and political shifts that have redefined all aspects of family life. Having sex, raising children and establishing a household outside of married life is not as socially suspect as it once was. Thus, in this cultural context—and for the poor and well-off alike—“marriage loses its day-to-day significance” (201) but acquires a new symbolic meaning.
The narrative style used in the text allows the reader to hear the mother’s voices. The authors’ detailed interview guide (which is included in the book) helps extract countless stories of lives turned around thanks to childbirth, the unreliability of male partners and how much of their problems are also rooted in the decline of their neighborhoods. This last point, while not addressed in detail, opens the door for future research on how space and place affect family life. I agree with the authors that the policy responses should be as diverse as the types of families that exist and targeted enough to deal with the specificities of poverty contexts. Yet, I would suggest that they also add place-based approaches to their list of solutions since it seems like many of the challenges faced by poor mothers lie in the political economy of postindustrial cities.
photo by Adriano Lima : borrowed from creative commons
This article was published in the NYT. The policy choices a country makes reveal many things about their political and economic regimes. They also offer a window into a government’s cultural and ethnic discourses. This quote from a ruling party lawmaker speaks volumes:
“We should stop letting unskilled laborers into Japan. We should make sure that even the three-K jobs are paid well, and that they are filled by Japanese,” he said. “I do not think that Japan should ever become a multiethnic society.”
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April 23, 2009
Japan Pays Foreign Workers to Go Home
By HIROKO TABUCHI
HAMAMATSU, Japan — Rita Yamaoka, a mother of three who immigrated from Brazil, recently lost her factory job here. Now, Japan has made her an offer she might not be able to refuse.
The government will pay thousands of dollars to fly Mrs. Yamaoka; her husband, who is a Brazilian citizen of Japanese descent; and their family back to Brazil. But in exchange, Mrs. Yamaoka and her husband must agree never to seek to work in Japan again.
“I feel immense stress. I’ve been crying very often,” Mrs. Yamaoka, 38, said after a meeting where local officials detailed the offer in this industrial town in central Japan.
“I tell my husband that we should take the money and go back,” she said, her eyes teary. “We can’t afford to stay here much longer.”
Japan’s offer, extended to hundreds of thousands of blue-collar Latin American immigrants, is part of a new drive to encourage them to leave this recession-racked country. So far, at least 100 workers and their families have agreed to leave, Japanese officials said.
But critics denounce the program as shortsighted, inhumane and a threat to what little progress Japan has made in opening its economy to foreign workers.
“It’s a disgrace. It’s cold-hearted,” said Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, an independent research organization.
“And Japan is kicking itself in the foot,” he added. “We might be in a recession now, but it’s clear it doesn’t have a future without workers from overseas.”
The program is limited to the country’s Latin American guest workers, whose Japanese parents and grandparents emigrated to Brazil and neighboring countries a century ago to work on coffee plantations.
In 1990, Japan — facing a growing industrial labor shortage — started issuing thousands of special work visas to descendants of these emigrants. An estimated 366,000 Brazilians and Peruvians now live in Japan.
The guest workers quickly became the largest group of foreign blue-collar workers in an otherwise immigration-averse country, filling the so-called three-K jobs (kitsui, kitanai, kiken — hard, dirty and dangerous).
But the nation’s manufacturing sector has slumped as demand for Japanese goods evaporated, pushing unemployment to a three-year high of 4.4 percent. Japan’s exports plunged 45.6 percent in March from a year earlier, and industrial production is at its lowest level in 25 years.
New data from the Japanese trade ministry suggested manufacturing output could rise in March and April, as manufacturers start to ease production cuts. But the numbers could have more to do with inventories falling so low that they need to be replenished than with any increase in demand.
While Japan waits for that to happen, it has been keen to help foreign workers leave, which could ease pressure on domestic labor markets and the unemployment rolls.
“There won’t be good employment opportunities for a while, so that’s why we’re suggesting that the Nikkei Brazilians go home,” said Jiro Kawasaki, a former health minister and senior lawmaker of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
“Nikkei” visas are special visas granted because of Japanese ancestry or association.
Mr. Kawasaki led the ruling party task force that devised the repatriation plan, part of a wider emergency strategy to combat rising unemployment.
Under the emergency program, introduced this month, the country’s Brazilian and other Latin American guest workers are offered $3,000 toward air fare, plus $2,000 for each dependent — attractive lump sums for many immigrants here. Workers who leave have been told they can pocket any amount left over.
But those who travel home on Japan’s dime will not be allowed to reapply for a work visa. Stripped of that status, most would find it all but impossible to return. They could come back on three-month tourist visas. Or, if they became doctors or bankers or held certain other positions, and had a company sponsor, they could apply for professional visas.
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