So what were you expecting?
Donald Trump has absolutely no sense whatever. He thinks that reading off a
teleprompter a statement condemning hate ideologies and the “fascination” with
mass murder that led to the weekend shootings was “sufficient” to wipe-out
years of racist hate-stoking. We should know by now that Trump is incapable of
empathy for anyone save for his own miserable self. Reports that he was
shouting at his staffers while on Air Force One about how “no one” was defending
him (maybe he was too busy to watch “Fox & Friends”), and that it had taken
only a day or two for him to resume his hate-filled tweet storms, showed once
more that Trump has no self-control, that he fails to realize that no one
outside his racist “base” trusts his “judgment,” and that he has to have a
“track record” of moderating himself before people are willing to give him the
benefit of the doubt. He has to prove that people are “wrong” about him, and
instead he continuously demonstrates that his critics are right about him.
News of the largest workplace
immigration raid since the Bush administration also underscores the fact of
Trump’s massive hypocrisy and lack of credibility when it comes to being a “healer” rather
being an unapologetic divider. Trump repeatedly claims that most Hispanic migrants
are “violent criminals” and “rapists”; yet the arrest of 680 human beings at
Mississippi poultry plants demonstrates that the ICE and Republican administrations are more interested
in high body counts than stopping “crime.” It is notable that the Obama administration refrained from authorizing the ICE to conduct such mass workplace raids, and why should
they have? These jobs are difficult to fill with “native” labor; poultry processing
plant jobs in particular can be demanding of one’s ability to tolerate
difficult workplace conditions, and the danger of health risks; OSHA lists them
as “exposure to high noise levels, dangerous equipment, slippery floors,
musculosketal disorders and hazardous chemicals…biological hazards handling
live birds or exposure to poultry feces and dusts which can increase risk for
many diseases.” Hispanic immigrants seem more willing to do this work, and
employers know this, which why they employ them in first place; we should be thanking these people, rather than attacking them, for doing this work.
Yet these people are treated like
“criminals.” Racist contrarians and populist politicians (Bernie Sanders for
one) insist that the “solution” is to raise wages to attract “native” workers,
but the amount required to make this “work” would not only drive these
companies out of business, it wouldn’t even necessarily attract long-term workers,
but foster a revolving door of disgruntled people who hate the work. It’s like offering
someone $1 million if they would eat a bowl of feces; for most people, no
amount of money is “worth it.” Undocumented labor in this country has a long
history of filling labor needs, and historically it has only been administrations
which saw political benefit from such well-publicized raids that authorized the
targeting of hardworking people contributing to the economy and doing what is
necessary to keep food prices affordable for other working class people.
The focus on Hispanic immigrants,
especially those fleeing dangerous conditions in Central America that the U.S.
has had a historical hand in fostering, is ironic considering migrants from
other countries that border agents have encountered. The largest group from
outside the Western Hemisphere is from India, from which 9,000 persons in
fiscal 2018 were caught, and this year the numbers have only increased. The Pew
Foundation now admits that illegal immigration from India is the fastest
growing among all nations, and unlike migrants from other parts of the world, many
if not most of these people are hardly coming from “deprived” situations. Many
reportedly pay “coyotes” up to $25,000 to assist them in crossing the border—which
in India is enough to live extremely comfortable lives for several years; the
average yearly income in India is $1700—although the country does have one of the
widest income disparities in the world, typically based on caste discrimination
that prevents a lower caste person from improving their condition by “interloping”
onto the privileges of a higher caste--a "system" that continues to function despite laws supposedly outlawing caste discrimination. Nevertheless, once they cross the border
undetected, Indian migrants can avail themselves to the protection of not just the
fact that they are not the principle targets politically or by law enforcement,
but because there is large network of Indian-owned businesses (anywhere from
convenience stores to tech companies) offering them protection from such inconveniences
as immigration authority attentions.
On the other hand, any person who looks Hispanic is “suspect." The subhuman conditions of
migrant detention—particularly of children—only reinforces the belief in many that they
are little more than “animals” who come to “infest” the country with whatever
Tucker Carlson’s latest racist rant is about. The fact that family separations
have not only continued but have only increased since the initial “outrage”
over them testifies to the fact that even those who claim to “care” are numbed into
inertia by its very ubiquity. And let’s not ignore the fact that starting with the
“criminalization” of cross-border labor streams in 1986 and up to the Trump
administration’s virtual halt of asylum applications from Central America is the
real reason for the so-called “crisis” on the border. Furthermore, deliberate raids
like the ones in Mississippi should counter-demonstrate that there is not only
a place for their labor in this country, but that it has just as much if not more merit
as any Asian and Indian tech worker brought into this country, because they help put affordable food on the table of working people, while most office drone "tech" workers perform work that has little direct positive impact on the lives of most people. Instead, such
mass raids only seem to reinforce the notion in many of an alleged “invasion,” which of
course is how we arrived at the point of the El Paso massacre in the first
place. Even MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, in an otherwise sympathetic piece about the children left out on the streets, referred to the employment of these workers as a "crime."
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