CNN is reporting that a year after the “largest single-state immigration crackdown in history,” four employees at two Mississippi poultry plants were indicted for “harboring” undocumented workers and basically providing them with the means—legal or not—to work those nasty, difficult and unhealthy jobs. Remember that Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Ken Cuccinelli, Chad Wolf and all their friends at Fox News have been telling us that these illegal “Mexicans” are all a bunch of violent rapists, drug dealers, MS-13 gang members—and if not, just freeloaders “gaming” the public welfare system.
But the 680 people that were arrested last year were none of those things, just hard working people doing a dirty job that few want to do. Months after the arrests, one reporter who visited the sites noted that employees still working remember the ICE charging in like Gestapo thugs, and the continuing difficulty in finding and keeping replacements, many of whom quit soon after being hired because they simply do not like the work, or are fired because they are not motivated to come to work on time or every day. Sorry to say it, but it’s the truth—and the people there know it, even if they are annoyed to be reminded of it.
And let’s be frank about this: With all this talk about “violent criminal aliens,” why are immigration authorities targeting places like the Mississippi poultry plants, where there are just people working hard to survive? Because it is PR stunt to “bag” as a big “haul” of undocumented “Mexicans,” who on the social hierarchy scale in this country and in the media are its lowest ranking members. Nobody really cares about what happens to the “Mexicans.” And yeah, when non-Hispanics use the word “Mexican” in the country it typically has the same “meaning” as the “N-word.”
A New York Times story by Miriam Jordan last year wondered why nobody seemed to care about the “overlooked undocumented immigrants,” particularly from India and China. Why? “Especially if they’re not from Mexico or Latin America, no one suspects them of being undocumented,” according to Kathy Gin, executive director of a San Francisco-based advocacy organization for undocumented children. That’s part of the truth; the other part is simple racism, whoever it is applied most stringently on. In fact American tech companies—many of them with Indian and Chinese managers—are probably the worst abusers of the “system” that allows workers to “stay on” without bothering to legally extend their work visas, and no one over at the ICE office is “checking,” because they are not “Mexicans,” because nobody likes the Mexicans. We need “high skill” phone operators more than we do farm and poultry plant workers.
The Times story notes that many hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions) of mainly Indian and Asian residents in the country illegally—and estimated one-in-six of all residents— escape notice because “Nobody ever thought we were illegally here because we didn’t fit the stereotype,” according to one individual from South Korea whose entire family is in the country illegally. Jordan writes that “They are hardly alone. Though President Trump has staked much of his presidency on halting the movement of undocumented immigrants across the southern border, the Oh family’s roundabout route to residence in the United States is part of one of America’s least widely known immigration stories.”
Jordan notes that “350,000 travelers arrive by air in the United States each day. From Asia, South America and Africa, they come mostly with visas allowing them to tour, study, do business or attend a conference for an authorized period of time. But when they stay beyond when their visas expire, some of them fall into the same illegal status often associated with migrants showing up at the border. Nearly half of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now in the country did not trek through the desert or wade across the Rio Grande to enter the country; they flew in with a visa, passed inspection at the airport — and stayed.”
The story also points out that “roughly 3.5 million undocumented immigrants who entered the country between 2010 and 2017,” of which 65 percent arrived with full permission stamped into their passports,..During that period, more overstayers arrived from India than from any other country.” In fact, in the past decade twice as many people who are here illegally came through initially on visas than crossed the border. Yet Trump has focused immigration enforcement almost solely on the southern border and focusing almost exclusively on “Mexicans” elsewhere, because it plays well to a racist, white nationalist base.
What is now happening is that the focus only on Hispanics immigrants means that the percentage of illegal immigrants in this country that come from other parts of the world, particularly from India and Asia, is rapidly rising. Nearly 50 percent of illegal immigrants in this country are said to be visa “overstayers,” but a San Francisco Chronicle story some years ago noted that not all illegal immigrants from India and Asia came in on visas, in fact the estimates are as low as one-quarter of them, up to 65 percent. In the past, the southern border was a favorite entry port for Chinese migrants, and in the past several years 10,000 Indian migrants a year have been apprehended on the border. But many others enter the country from Canada or by sea on cargo ships. And we probably shouldn’t be completely blind to the phenomenon of “birth tourism” from Russia.
The Times story notes that “The government reported that nearly 670,000 travelers who arrived by air or sea and were supposed to depart in the 2018 fiscal year had not left by Sept. 30, 2018. That number had dropped to nearly 415,700 by March 2019, because many people overstay by just a few months.” Well, more than a few months. This seems to indicate that close to 40 percent of those “travelers” are now in the country illegally. “Once they are in the country, they are home free because there is so little interior enforcement,” according to Jessica Vaughan, who worked in the federal visa office, and now works for the far-right Center for Immigration Studies.
But no matter; the focus on the “Mexicans” and Central American migrants is because, well, it’s a turkey shoot with them.
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