That the president doesn’t see that his ICE raids in Mississippi are separating families the same way his tactics at the southern border did is incredibly disturbing. But it’s not surprising. A zebra doesn’t change its stripes, nor a leopard its spots. A Donald cannot change his pathological tendency to bring cruelty on other human beings.
We must not stop making a huge deal of this behavior. We must not stop asking that our president and his lackeys take the time to look at a bigger picture each time the president decides to wreak havoc on a particular group of people.
The president said, in response to the cruelty of engendering absolute terror in the hearts of children and adults in Canton, MS, that his actions were meant as a deterrent for immigrants from southern countries. Even though all evidence indicates that these acts of downright meanness do not deter immigration.
What the president has done is create, unnecessarily, an environment of terror in this town of 12,000 people. It has driven too many Hispanic people behind the locked doors of their homes. It has kept children from attending school. It has deprived the local processing plants of labor, thus impacting the financial health of the city. It has separated families, in many cases without cause, and deprived them of needed income while an individual is detained.
But what does the president care?
He doesn’t.
Did he take time to understand that in the bigger scheme of things, singling out this town and these poultry plant employees is just a drop in the bucket? No. He didn’t care that this act by ICE would do nothing more than incite terror. That is all he really wanted to do in the first place. (Do you see how acts like this qualify the president as a terrorist?)
Did he look for the root causes of undocumented labor? No, he punished the workers instead of the employers who looked the other way for the almighty dollar.
At one time, residents of Canton, MS, expressed their displeasure that the poultry plants were employing immigrant labor, whether legal or not. Canton, which is 85% African American, was informed that without Hispanic labor the plants would close. Jobs were going unfilled because no one else wanted the jobs. The complaining ended immediately and has not resumed. Apparently, residents of Canton see the bigger picture. The immigrants are not a threat. They are an asset to the overall financial health of the city.
What other repercussions are there of this latest ill-advised act against Hispanics that we can’t know about?
Fewer than half of those arrested and detained (God knows where) have returned home. Can they go back to work, or will their families now require government assistance to survive, whereas, while adults were working, they were earning their own way?
How many families will default on rent or mortgages or car payments while in custody? And what will be the long-term effects where earnings have been interrupted?
How will delinquent rent affect the landlords?
How will the cessation of shopping by those families impact local commerce?
How will the overall health of the community be affected due to stress, anxiety and PTSD? How many children will be left without biological parents to raise them? How will social services be strained? What will be the impact on schools whose funding is dependent on student counts if children stay at home on crucial days.
How can the administration not take any of these things into account?
And what questions haven’t even been asked yet that influence the big picture?
It truly baffles me.
Those immigrants who are here legally are suffering the anxieties related to fear that they will be mistakenly “taken away.” They are developing a hatred of the white status quo, whom they cannot help but see as the enemy now. As families are separated and deported willy-nilly, psychoses will develop and intensify. The nation will see another disenfranchised group morph into a domestic hate group that could eventually turn to violence, much like what we are seeing happen with young, white men armed with assault weapons and dressed in military garb, seeking to retake a white nation that was never theirs in the first place.
We live in an era where negativity reigns. America is punitive in nature toward all transgressions, regardless of their degree of “sin.” America is inconsistent in applying its rules of justice. It’s as if the United States has become a very inept parent, unable to praise or lift up its children equally, playing favorites with its light complexioned and well-to-do children, while treating the rest, the “others,” like bastard children.
Yet those in power cling to the delusion that they are acting in the interests of Christianity and God, as if the extreme punishments it seeks for “the lesser of these” is actually something a loving and compassionate God would approve.
How have we lost the grand lessons we learned as children of the 1950s and ’60s when we studied Your Weekly Reader to learn about and understand the world’s diverse cultures? How have we lost the wonder of the exotic lives and cultures around the world, learned when we earned our Girl Scout badges for cultural exploration? Where is that sense of pride when our high schools brought in foreign exchange students, whose friendships were highly sought for their intelligence and their uniqueness and their cosmopolitan world view?
None of this is going to end well if we don’t wake up and smell the coffee.
The United States of America sits on property that never belonged to white people. White men decided that this continent needed to be wiped clean of indigenous peoples so that “civilized people” could expand their domain.
What has it gotten us?
Displaced Natives whose nations are scattered and identities all but erased. Africans who were kidnapped from their homelands, forced to assimilate and lose their cultures, then punished for being here. Immigrants – Irish, Italian, Jewish, eastern European — who believed the promise on the Statue of Liberty and came here for streets paved with gold, only to find them running with filth – the filth of human detritus and the filth of dark, white, human hearts full greed.
It is not going to end well, my fellow Americans, unless we learn to live outside ourselves, to put others before self, to live to relieve the suffering of others.
That is the immutable truth of God’s intentions for creation.
Otherwise, what is living for?
So let me grasp this new line of thinking. If what someone is doing is illegal and a raid be it evolving immigration, drugs, money laundering , or any other illegal activity we must stop all raids that have to do with illegal immigration but any other illegal activity it’s ok to separate families.
Guess, I’m one of those deplorable old white men not in step with the current logic being spoken as gospel .
Break the law ( ie: being an illegal immigrant or other illegal activity) suffer the consequences.
Harry, my apologies for not making my point clearer. I’m not against enforcing laws. What I am suggesting is that perhaps this particular move was not necessary at this time. Canton, MS, is a small city of only 12,000 people, and the poultry processing plants are a large part of their local economy. The major disruption here and now seems, to me, an exercise in wasted time, effort, and taxpayers’ money when there are much larger issues to deal with regarding our immigration crisis.
680 people were detained, then processed, and almost half returned to their homes. Of those, a great number were legals, and the illegals were not allowed to return to work, but were fitted with ankle monitors to track their whereabouts.
Hispanics in Canton now live in varying stages of fear and anxiety, and children are traumatized in ways that will be long lasting.
Meantime, we have greater numbers of immigrants to process at the border, with more streaming in daily.
As far as I can tell, few of those detained in Canton are hardened criminals. They have broken immigration laws, but most have lived there a decade or more, living peacefully, raising families, contributing to the local economy.
When there are bigger fish to fry, why is ICE terrorizing this microcosm of immigrant life in America?
If I had the luxury of prioritizing law enforcement, I would leave peaceable neighborhoods such a Canton alone for the time being. Perhaps somewhere down the road we’d be allowing these folks a pathway to citizenship, and all of this would have been unnecessary. And in the meantime I’d be investigating the employers of the undocumented residents for their complicity in the violation of law. Why has none of these been marched off to detention, ripped from family and source of income?
There are many questions to be pondered, and priorities to be established, and there is no good reason for imposing terror on any community in the name of law enforcement.
Again, my apologies for not being clearer in my opinion.
I don’t know about god or intentions, or immutability, but but what you have to say about the here and now is well reasoned and worth serious consideration. Why aren’t employers sanctioned for use of undocumented labor? Why are so many of the working people angry at immigrant labor and so forgiving of the employers that use the undocumented to save on labor costs?
Basura
The answer to the employer question is in the article. The people of Canton refused to do that type of work and to keep the area financially able to function were willing to look the other way.
Illegal immigrants working becomes a double-edged sword. They do the work no one else wants to do, and for low wages.
Because we want the fruit and vegetables, milk, poultry, lawn maintenance, roofing etc., we all ignore the fact those making our life easier or getting products we need, may be illegal immigrants. We want what they provide.
We proclaim that slavery is abolished… so what do we call using those illegally in our country, to do the labor at low wages our citizens refuse to do?
We can blame the business owners… but in reality we the consumers are the root of the problem. If we didn’t use the food, products, or other services these illegal immigrants are doing they would return or become citizens.
So how long could you survive without using these products or services??
The residents of Canton refused to do the job for the wages on offer. Offer pay at a living wage, and see who shows up. But that’s not necessary; hire the undocumented. A restaurant in GR was paying their undocumented workers 50% of the legally mandated minimum wage. Clock in for 40 hours. Get paid for 20 hours. In that particular case, the employer faced legal consequences.
The recent raids are an example of selective enforcement to make an example of a relatively narrow slice of the overall chicken processing industry in the US. In this case, the plant in Mississippi is owned by Koch Foods, whose business is processing chicken into six frozen products. Three kinds of chicken strips, chicken nuggets, popcorn chicken and chicken fries. Couldn’t help but notice no processing plants owned by Tyson or Perdue were raided.
Reading the accounts of the ICE raid on the plant, I couldn’t help but notice there were no members of plant floor management and I’ve seen no reports of ICE showing up at the home(s) of local plant upper management and making arrests of any responsible for hiring the illegal plant employees.
As of 2008, Mississippi has required employers to use E-Verify to guard against employers hiring people who aren’t in the US legally and are using a Social Security number that wasn’t assigned to them. ICE arrested 680 workers at the plant. 300 were released and are awaiting their court date. That begs the question(s), who was asleep in the personnel office not checking SS#’s provided on employment applications through E-Verify or does the federal government need to invest and upgrade the E-Verify infrastructure to address a massive fraud seen in Morton, MS.
As American consumers, it’s time people belly up to the bar and expect to pay more for produce, dairy and meats, whether we’re talking frozen processed from the freezer aisle, processed meats and meats in the coolers or in grocer’s display cases. We can’t have it both ways. You like low prices on your grocery bill, then you had better come to grips with the fact that those prices are low because they are supported by artificially low labor costs.
Last year, in Gilroy Calf., the garlic harvest was coming. Because of labor costs, harvesting the garlic has become mechanized like Michigan’s cherry crop. But the processing plants that have used immigrant labor paying them $8 to $9 per hour for seasonal work were hurting. That immigrant labor pool, fearing what we just saw in Morton MS didn’t show up.
After complaining about not being able to attract workers, applications to process the garlic for weeks, plants started advertising $15/hr and all positions were filled in a week.
What are we going to do without the products and services? We can do what other developed countries do when they have an economy that’s experiencing a labor shortage. Have a working immigration system that allows workers to come from other countries (like Mexico) and take jobs in sectors that need guest workers (like chicken processing plants). That takes work, not 30-second sound bytes and speeches denigrating citizens from countries other than our own. That also takes increased Federal spending for immigration processing, issuing green cards and oversight of employers use E-Verify making sure they aren’t cheating to save money.
In 2017, we saw another tax cut for individuals and corporations. I don’t see corporations and businesses rushing to amend the Tax Act of 2017 and restore some of their tax burden to pay to police themselves.
However, we currently have a significant portion of the population and a Federal government that wants the benefits of cheap labor that results in lower cost goods and services while at the same time, refuses to hold employers responsible.
And so it goes
There is a guest worker program.
A friend of mine used it last year to harvest fruit. It is a comprehensive program to allow Mexican workers to work and live in the state until the harvest is completed. They must return home. The government inspects living and working conditions and they must meet their standards.
If the guest worker program is working, why didn’t ICE and Mississippi go after the plant’s manager and head of HR for not using E-Verify when hiring the over 600 employees who were arrested?
Its good, at least in the case of a friend who is a fruit grower, that individual followed the rules and used the guest worker program.
But that doesn’t wipe away the fact that the Mississippi plant’s owner(s) and management did not use E-Verify or the program failed miserably to have a significant portion of their work force as illegal immigrants.
It also doesn’t address the fact that there are a lot of chicken, swine, beef and dairy operations in addition to the slaughter/processing portion of those industries that employ large numbers of people where English is their second language and haven’t seen ICE agents for years. Unless we see an uptick of ICE raids directed toward many other facilities one can legitimately start asking if we are witnessing selective enforcement.