Immigrants- a feared and despised group, a needed one

Oct 24, 2019 Editorial

Illegal Guyanese immigrants are feeling the sharp pinch. ICE has increasingly assumed the menaces of a feared American Gestapo. The very acronym (ICE) is now enough to induce running. As the US immigration debates rage, it might be helpful to look (again) at the workplace contributions of outsiders, particularly colored outsiders.

It is worth repeating, if only to lay bare the harsh realities of what foreigners, illegal ones, must endure. Those mandatory things to taste the American Dream: dirty jobs. Sickening ones. Despised occupations. No self-respecting American, including Black Americans, would be caught dead doing them, for the pittance of minimum wages. The Latino immigrant, the focus of so much anger, is the best example.

Like Upton Sinclair of The Jungle fame from a century ago, today’s truthteller is Eric Schlosser, through his book called Fast Food Nation. In this exposé, the beef industry giants in the Deep South states had recruited Mexican immigrants during the Ronald Reagan era to break unions. Reagan was the hailed archconservative leader and union buster, who declared war against unionized workers, including air traffic controllers. With unions sidelined in the beef industry, wages were soon cut to half. Big businesses using big money to break strikes were given a pass by authorities. Today, similarly sacrificing foreigners-Mexicans mainly-are found leprous.

Production rates increased, with illegal Latino immigrants forced to pay the price. On most occasions, injured workers remained on the job to keep it. The same story prevailed in the pork and poultry industries in the rural South. Warned a study done by the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University, “The industrial produce and animal production and processing systems in the U.S. would collapse without the immigrant and migratory workforce. Predatory firms exploit them for profit.”

Across many difficult sectors, the secrets are: low wages, dangers, injuries, exploitations. The meat industry plants serve as the first revealing case study: these are dirty, smelly, nauseating, low esteem, low returns jobs. Native-born Americans not only recoil from pondering such a living, they disdain those who do. That would be the lot of migrants, mainly of Mexican origins, with traces of hardy Guyanese visible.

The dark truth behind this narrative is that of bigshot business making big donations to little politicians hoping to make it big. When a Reagan does, those bigshot business interests recruit illegal workers from outside the United States to break strikes, as Mexico is right over there. In Morton, Mississippi, Mexicans were used to undercut African American workers at a poultry processing factory, who were agitating for a union. The foreigners are very submissive.

The Elks and Chambers of Commerce and Boy Scouts-the establishment cream-are given powerful clearance to recruit and exploit vulnerable migrants. Now those same profitable foreign human resources are undesired. These are mostly hardworking, mostly taxpaying, mostly conscientious migrant toilers, who the American leader relishes emphasizing are felons, terrorists, dirty, and an assortment of menacing predators, who undermine Caucasian safety.

Lined up at the forefront of the war against now excoriated and damned immigrants are the cerebral policymakers and the equivalent of their street enforcers in the form of factory raiders and entry points sentinels. The palpable hardlines extend also to legal immigrants, who are treated coldly, interrogated sharply, and hassled frequently. It is a different temperature at international ports of entry.

Separately, for the first time in its history, ICE, the latest US immigration border control agency endorsed a presidential candidate in the 2016 election. The returns followed. In the first eight months of the current administration, immigrant arrests increased by some 42%. Meanwhile, the anti-immigration heavyweights search for openings in existing law to craft regulations that extend the reach and police powers of agents in the trenches. Immigration has reached such a fevered pitch that, earlier, Congress also jumped into the fray by voting more money for ICE than for the combined budgets of the FBI, DEA, and others.

Like Mexicans, Guyanese and West Indian immigrants live with doing dirty jobs for minimum wages, no insurance coverage, and neither workplace safety nor security. Such jobs include health aides, porters, and cleaners. Americans spit on such endeavors. This is the reality of now feared and hated migrants.

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