i POWER AND FORCED LABOR: A GENEOLOGY OF LABOR AND MIGRATION IN THE UNITED STATES By Rory Delaney Rohan ABSTRACT Recently, federal agents across the United States have uncovered an unprecedented number of forced labor operations. Many, though not all, of these incidents involve non-citizens, both with and without legal residency status, who are forced to perform farm work under threat of violence and deportation. Contemporary scholarship explains this phenomenon as the effect of increasingly liberalized economic relations, changes in industrialized agriculture, and the persistent consumer demand for cheap products. While such explanations are instructive, they leave open questions of whether and how historical factors sanction the coercive farm labor relations we see today. Using the genealogical method, this paper examines the history of labor practices in Florida, a state in which forced labor not only flourished before the Civil War, but also in which forced labor remains common today. After highlighting how Florida’s ante-bellum and post-bellum labor practices and discourses functioned to imbue employment with normative valuations, I argue that such discourses and practices have been taken up by state and federal institutions, eventually influencing laws and policies concerning prisoners and immigrants. I conclude that although economic liberalization, agricultural industrialization, and mass consumerism provide helpful structural context for how coercive labor relations flourish today, the practices through which ii these relations emerge and the discourses with which they are justified rely heavily upon historically embedded, normative discourses that function to discipline the lives of non-citizens and govern their status through employment. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………….i TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………...iii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 Literature Review……………………………………………………………………….....5 Research Gaps……………………………………………………………………………..9 Foucauldian Genealogy as a Methodology………………………………………………10 Florida as a Case Study…………………………………………………………………..14 Summary of Paper….…………………………………………………………………….15 CHAPTER I: ANTEBELLUM LAWS AND SURVEILLANCE PRACTICES…………….….19 Passes & Patrols………………………………………………………………………….21 Rearticulating Bondage…………………………………………………………………. 27 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….32 CHAPTER II: THE CONVICT, THE WARD, AND THE DEBTOR………………………….33 Situating Post-Bellum Florida…………………………………………………………...36 Convict Leasing………………………………………………………………………….41 Wardship Practices………………………………………………………………………48 The Micro-Politics of Coerced Labor…………………………………………………....52 An Emerging Penology…………………………………………………………………..60 CHAPTER III: ROAD GANGS, PRISON FARMS, AND REFORMATORIES………………62 The Demise of Convict Leasing in Florida………………………………………………67 The Convict Road Force…………………………………………………………………69 The State Prison Farm…....………………………………………………………………75 The Correctional Facility………………………………………………………………...79 iv Florida’s New Agriculture……………………………………………………………….84 CHAPTER IV: THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF MARGINALIZED LABOR…………..89 Marginalizing Migrant Labor……………………………………………………………93 Institutionalizing Dependency …………………………………………………………..97 The Disapprobation of the American Farmworker…………………………………….100 WWII Farm Labor Importation………………………………………………………...103 Police & Prisons as Strategic…………………………………………………………...110 CHAPTER V: CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES OF DISCIPLINING LABOR…………….112 Immigration Discourses & Practices in Florida Post-WWII………………..………….117 The Reduction of Status………………………………………………………………..123 Criminalizing Immigration……………………………………………………………..133 Deputizing Enforcement, Distributing Authority………………………………………139 The Detention-Industrial Complex……………………………………………………..148 CONCLUDING REMARKS…………………………………………………………………...159 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………164 1 INTRODUCTION Although the United States (US) outlawed involuntary servitude nearly 150 years ago, instances of forced labor continue to emerge throughout the nation. As recently as September 2010, for example, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents uncovered a human trafficking and involuntary servitude operation that spanned thirteen states. Labeled as one of the largest cases of its kind, four employees from Global Horizons Manpower, a US-based labor recruiting agency, along with two labor recruiters from Thailand, were charged with holding four hundred Thai guestworkers against their will and forcing them to work on farms.1 At first glance, the occurrence of such cases in the US may seem surprising, but in fact they are far from abnormal. According to a 2006 FBI Intelligence Report, between 15,000 and 18,000 people are trafficked into the US and forced to work against their will each year.2 As the Department of Justice (DOJ) notes, between January 2008 and June 2010, federal human trafficking task forces investigated over 2,500 cases of suspected human trafficking,3 confirming nearly four hundred cases and eventually making nearly 150 arrests, the majority for sex and labor trafficking. According to the DOJ, at 82%, sex trafficking made up the vast majority of federal human trafficking investigations conducted from January 2008 to June 2010, while labor trafficking accounted for nearly 14% of all human trafficking investigations. However, although 1 Mark Niess, “Feds Charge 6 In Forced Labor Of 400 Thai Workers, Largest Human-Trafficking Case In U.S. History,” The Huffington Post, September 2, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/02/us-human-trafficking-thai-forced-labor_n_704290.html (accessed 10 September 2012). 2 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Human Trafficking: An Intelligence Report,” June 12, 2006, http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2006/june/humantrafficking_061206 (accessed 10 September 2012). 3 U.S. Department of Justice, Characteristics of Suspected Human Trafficking Incidents, 2008-2010 (Washington, DC, 2011), 1. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2372 (accessed 10 September 2012). Also see: Tresa Baldas, “Human Trafficking a growing crime in U.S.,” USA Today, 22 January 2012, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2012-01-22-us-human-trafficking_N.htm (accessed 10 September 2012) 2 the DOJ reports that 83% of all sex trafficking victims from January 2008 to June 2010 were identified as US citizens, the statistic is almost entirely reversed for victims of labor trafficking. Close to 95% of all labor trafficking victims were identified as non-citizens, mostly Hispanic and Asian, and while agents identified 67% as undocumented non-citizens, they identified 28% as “qualified aliens.” Thus, not only does nearly every confirmed case of labor trafficking involve non-citizens, but a significant proportion of such cases involves non-citizens with valid residency and work authorization documents.4 Interestingly, however, as Shelley Cavalieri’s argues in her study of labor trafficking in the US agricultural sector, federal law enforcement officials regularly favor investigating, charging, and prosecuting individuals for sex trafficking crimes.5 As Cavalieri notes, federal police statistics indicate that “from 2001 through 2009, 66% of cases filed, 69% of defendants charged, and 72% of convictions for human trafficking prosecutions are for sex trafficking.” But because police reporting statistics do not account for all crimes committed, such investigation and enforcement rates, Cavalieri argues, fail to reflect the true prevalence of labor trafficking in the US, which often is not investigated and therefore goes recorded and unprosecuted.6 Cavalieri finds that the number of trafficking victims certified by Health and Justice officials under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000, which provides trafficking victims access to certain resources and protections if they file for special visas and cooperate with federal agents, demonstrates that labor trafficking likely makes up a much more substantial proportion of all human trafficking cases than indicated by enforcement statistics. In 2009, for example, labor trafficking victims received 82% of all certifications under the TVPA, while sex trafficking 4 U.S. Department of Justice, Characteristics of Suspected Human Trafficking Incidents, 1. 5 Shelley Cavalieri, “The Eyes that Blind Us: The Overlooked Phenomenon of Trafficking into the Agricultural Sector,” Northern Illinois University Law Review 31 (2011): 507-508. 6 Ibid., 508. 3 victims received just 13% of all certifications.7 Thus, not only does labor trafficking disproportionately affect non-citizens, but it is also likely that the phenomenon’s prevalence is much more common than authorities contemplate. In what ways, then, might labor trafficking occur? A substantial number of labor trafficking victims, Cavalieri argues, likely include those trafficked into the agricultural sector. However, accurate estimates are difficult to find, as government statistics often fail to sufficiently disaggregate labor trafficking data. Nonetheless, according to the DOJ, over 65% of all labor trafficking investigations opened by federal agents between January 2008 and June 2010 involved “unregulated” industries, a rather vague category that includes not just day laborers (which are often migrant farmworkers), but also domestic workers, roadside vendors, and those involved in illegal sectors.8 However, although this data is imprecise, it succeeds in raising the possibility that forced labor in the agricultural sector accounts for a significant portion of all labor trafficking