Starting in the mid-1990s, campus and labor activists in the United States built an anti-sweatshop movement that has made important gains in supporting successful local worker-organizing campaigns in Latin America and throughout the world.
For example, in 2002 and 2003 a group called United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) exerted pressure through its Sweat-Free Campus Campaign to help workers at the BJ&B factory in Villa Altagracia in the Dominican Republic win the first union in a Caribbean “Free Trade Zone” in five years. The company closed the plant in 2007, despite international pressure to keep it open, but the factory reopened in 2010 under an agreement that South Carolina–based Knights Apparel signed with the Workers Rights Consortium, an independent U.S.-based monitoring organization, in collaboration with the former union leaders. Knights Apparel rehired some of the laid-off workers to produce college-logo apparel for a new “fair trade” brand, Alta Gracia. The workers are paid a living wage—three times higher than the country’s minimum—and their union contract also guarantees health and safety standards and fair treatment.42
Such efforts are continuing. In November 2013 two major apparel manufacturers, Montreal-based Gildan Activewear Inc. and Kentuckybased Fruit of the Loom, announced that they would require their Haitian suppliers to stop violating the country’s minimum wage laws. This followed a long-term campaign by Dominican, Haitian, Honduran, and Nicaraguan unions backed by Canadian and U.S. antisweatshop activists to end labor violations by Gildan and its suppliers.43
USAS and other groups have also been working to get U.S. brands to sign a legally binding agreement protecting worker safety in the Bangladeshi garment industry following the deaths of at least 1,129 people in the April 2013 collapse of a factory building at Rana Plaza in Dhaka. As of June 2014 the campaign had succeeded in convincing seventeen college clothing brands to sign the accord, while twenty-three universities had agreed to require their brands to sign it.44 Worldwide, 200 companies have signed the accord.45
Major unions in the United States and Europe are also backing labor struggles in other countries, often by linking up with local unions. In October 2014, the Metal Workers Union of the Philippines (MWAP) won a new collective bargaining agreement for its members employed by Dutch multinational NXP Semiconductors, a supplier to Apple. The contract included reinstatement for twelve union officers and “decent severance” for another twelve who had been fired in a union-busting move. The union called the victory a “showcase of what international solidarity can do.” It thanked the Geneva-based international union IndustriALL and online campaign organizations like SumOfUs, which mobilized 150,000 supporters to write to Apple, for putting pressure on NXP to respect workers’ rights.46
In early 2015 a newly formed Panamanian dockworkers union, SINTRAPORSPA (Sindicato Industrial de Trabajadores/as Portuarios y Similares de Panamá), won a contract from a subsidiary of the Hong Kong–based Hutchinson Port Holdings Limited (HPH). The agreement would raise wages by 27 percent over the next four years. The Panamanian union is affiliated with a major U.S.-based dockworkers union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which had helped the Panamanian workers in their fight for union recognition.47
3. Does the United States Welcome Refugees?
U.S. REFUGEE POLICY DEVELOPED out of a Cold War focus on defeating communism. For many years, refugees were explicitly defined in U.S. law as people fleeing Communist rule. This priority resulted in unequal treatment for people attempting to reach safety—even after 1980, when the legal definition of a refugee was made politically neutral. People displaced by U.S.-sponsored wars, or fleeing U.S.-backed human rights violators, have historically been denied asylum, while those migrating from Communist countries have generally been given the benefit of the doubt. The asylum process has gradually evolved away from its Cold War origins, yet many forms of bias still affect who is granted protection.
What’s a refugee?
In ordinary usage the word refugee refers to people forced to leave their country because of war, persecution, or natural disaster. The term has a narrower definition in international law.
The 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol define a refugee as “a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail him- or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution.”1 In other words, you must be part of a group specifically targeted for persecution. Wars or disasters that affect the whole population don’t count. Under regional conventions in Africa and Latin America, the definition of a refugee has been expanded to cover migrants fleeing foreign aggression, occupation, internal conflicts, foreign domination, massive human rights violations, or events seriously disturbing public order. However, these broader criteria have not been adopted by the United Nations.2
Refugees are people whose claim to refugee status has been established; you are considered an asylum seeker if your claim hasn’t been evaluated yet.3 The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) includes refugees and asylum seekers in a broader category of forcibly displaced people, along with internally displaced people (sometimes referred to as IDPs), who flee their homes due to violence or persecution but do not cross an international border.
At the end of 2015, the UNHCR counted 65.3 million people as forcibly displaced worldwide, the highest level since 1989, when the agency began tracking this data. Included were 40.8 million internally displaced people and 3.2 million asylum seekers; the other 21.3 million were refugees, or people in what the UNHCR calls “refugeelike situations.” Some 16.1 million of these refugees were under the UNHCR’s mandate, more than half of them from Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia. Another 5.2 million were Palestinians under the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The proportion of forcibly displaced people among the world’s population remained relatively stable at between 0.6 and 0.7 percent from 1996 until 2011, when Syria’s civil war began, triggering what the UNHCR calls “one of the largest displacement crises in recent history.” Since then, this figure has increased rapidly and steadily, reaching 0.9 percent in 2015.4
What’s the difference between a refugee and an immigrant?
Refugees have special rights to protection under national and international law, compared to people who are seen as migrating for economic or other reasons. Some people use terms like “survival migrants,” “forced migrants,” “people in distress,” or “vulnerable irregular migrants” to describe migrants who don’t necessarily fit the strict definition of a refugee but who didn’t voluntarily leave their countries.5
For most refugees and other migrants, there are complex political, economic, social, structural, and personal factors that determine why, when, and how they leave, and where they end up. Each time a humanitarian crisis erupts somewhere in the world, or a particular group is subjected to persecution, some people feel they have no choice but to flee—sometimes abandoning homes, land, livelihood, possessions, family, and community—while others make an equally difficult decision to remain, in the hopes of surviving and, in some cases, of taking action from within to effect social change. Many who seek safety as refugees also get involved in efforts to influence political and social conditions in their home countries. Some people stay behind not by choice, but because they lack the minimum resources or conditions needed to migrate.6
How do we