Exploited and Spat Out (2021)

Book Review from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (Swift £12.99.)

There are eleven million ‘undocumented’ people in the US, mostly Latinx (a term that covers both men and women). The author was one, having followed her parents to New York from Ecuador aged four, though she has since received her green card, which makes her a permanent resident (her parents still aren’t). Her book gives a vivid and personalised account of the lives of undocumented workers.

The undocumented have no access to health care (other than Emergency Rooms), and an example is given of a man who died of brain cancer after being turned away by a number of hospitals. They have no retirement plans and few savings. Many come in order to send money back home for their children to get an education, but find themselves barely able to make ends meet: ‘This country takes their youth, their dreams, their labor, and spits them out with nothing to show for it.’

Several thousand undocumented workers are forced to be day-labourers, waiting on street corners for contractors to choose them for a day’s work. They are often cheated of their wages, and even left stranded in the middle of nowhere. Some worker centres have been set up to try and give them some kind of protection. Lots of undocumented immigrants were killed on 9/11, though it is impossible to say who or how many, and many helped to clear up in the aftermath, and working there has left some of them with severe medical conditions, from cancer to arthritis.

A chapter deals with Flint, Michigan, former centre of the car industry and notorious for having lead in its drinking water. Flyers on this were issued only in English, and when people went to houses to tell residents not to drink the tap water, many undocumented did not open their doors, for fear the visitors were from the immigration authorities. Distribution centres handed out bottled water, but only to those with a state ID, which the undocumented in Michigan were barred from having. A mother with lead poisoning breastfed her baby, and this resulted in the child being temporarily blind. She regained her sight, but nobody knows the possible long-term effects on her.

The main government body that creates problems for the undocumented is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), ‘the creation of 9/11 paranoia’. Some ‘vultures’, as Cornejo Villavicencio calls them, claim (for a price) to invoke spirits that can protect against ICE. The threat of deportation is, however, real, and a few seek sanctuary in churches, which ICE do not enter.

The author agrees with the statement that Americans treat their pets better than they treat immigrants. Her book demonstrates how much US capitalism makes use of cheap labour power and how the whole system regards people at the bottom of the heap.

Paul Bennett

Material World: Collateral damage in Flint (2019)

The Material World Column from the May 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

The wheels of justice turn slowly, and the effects of lead poisoning are also slow and pernicious.

The city of Flint’s water crisis began in April 2014. In a cost-saving measure to save around $5m the state-appointed city manager changed the city’s water source from treated Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water, sourced from Lake Huron and the Detroit River, to water from the Flint River. General Motors used the river as its private dumping ground for decades; it is highly polluted and highly acidic.

Typically, water in mass systems at the city and wider level is treated with corrosion inhibiters, chemical compounds which reduce the likelihood of pipes corroding. Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the Flint River water, in defiance of federal law, causing lead from aging pipes to leach into the water supply. Michigan state officials insisted that the water was safe, ignoring calls for the water supply to be switched back to the Detroit system on the grounds that switching back would be too expensive. It wasn’t until September 2015 that a report revealed that 40 percent of Flint homes had dangerously elevated lead levels, and declared Flint water unfit to drink. Eventually in October 2015 the state finally agreed to switch Flint back to the Lake Huron supply, but the damage had already been done. Many people had got sick. Potentially thousands of children were exposed to hazardous levels of lead. The full extent of the damage is still unclear and isn’t likely to be known for some time.

What does lead do to the human body? Infants and small children can suffer brain and nervous system damage, weakened immune systems and general physical collapse that can lead to death. Pregnant women have a higher risk of stillbirth or miscarriage. A raft of studies has pretty much concluded that lead can cause cancer. It causes cardiovascular diseases and kidney damage which, like cancer, can also kill. Five parts of lead per billion are a concern. 5,000 parts per billion is considered toxic waste. From April 2014 until October 2015 the people of Flint were drinking water with up to 13,000 parts per billion of lead in it.

Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality officials urged people worried about lead in Flint’s drinking water to ‘relax,’ saying that there was no ‘broad problem’ with contamination. They described the whistleblower EPA official, Miguel Del Toral, whose draft report initially alerted lead-poisoned Flint residents to their great danger, as a ‘rogue employee.’ They also attacked the work of Virginia Tech expert Marc Edwards and his team of graduate students, which revealed that some Flint tap water measured nearly 2.5 times more lead contamination than the EPA’s hazardous waste designation level. They cast doubts upon Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, director of the pediatric residency program at Flint’s Hurley Hospital whose research showed that after the switch to untreated Flint River drinking water, blood lead levels in children doubled, or even tripled. Residents were left to drink poisoned water for months despite warnings from experts.

Edwards explained, ‘In Flint the agencies paid to protect these people weren’t solving the problem. They were the problem’.

There are presently court cases against former and current state government officials. On April the 1st, US District Court Judge Judith Levy declared that former Governor Rick Snyder can be sued by residents in Flint. Levy wrote in her ruling:

 Plaintiffs plausibly state that the Governor acted indifferently to the risk of harm they faced, demonstrating a callous disregard for their right to bodily integrity. This indifference manifested itself in two ways. Initially, the Governor was indifferent because instead of mitigating the risk of harm caused by the contaminated water, he covered it up. In private, he worried about the need to return Flint to DWSD water and the political implications of the crisis. But in public, he denied all knowledge, despite being aware of the developing crisis… As a result, plaintiffs were lured into a false sense of security. They could have taken protective measures, if only they had known what the Governor knew. Instead, the Governor misled them into assuming that nothing was wrong. Governor Snyder’s administration even encouraged them to continue to drink and bathe in the water.

People in Flint and their children were merely collateral damage in a larger war. Which war? The class war of the capitalists against everybody else.

ALJO