By Greg Walker
Apparently Mr Trump has gone full ape deporting undocumented immigrants. He is supposed to do this as was Mr Biden. Mr Obama before him was known as “deporter in chief.”
The scale and recklessness with which this might be happening is far beyond the other presidents. I say “might,” because as a social scientist, I need to take responsibility for what I say and not simply forward memes. I have not actually seen a raid by the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Reports from credible sources say he is using offshore prisons, has built a detention center in a terrible swamp, has deployed the military and has swept up a large number of otherwise good, productive neighbors.
This is a heck of a response for what is a civil violation.
I will not feed into the political polarization. We are all to blame. Here is why: The voting population empowers and drives Trump. We elected him. The swiftness and cruelty of these anti-immigrant acts are, at heart, an emotional explosion to something having boiled to steam for a long time. To me, it is clear.
Nations need borders. Without them, we do not know who is here and we have difficulty bringing newcomers into the citizenry. Numbers are iffy, but there are likely several million undocumented workers living here. A colleague visited the border during the Biden presidency. It was utter chaos.
The extreme right might like to end immigration altogether. The extreme left might like to make everyone a citizen. What we had until recently was neither strategy. Undocumented immigrants remained at the margins of society. Most worked hard without the benefit of labor laws and social security. Nobody voted for this.
Chaos creates vulnerable off-the-books workers. This chaos only benefits one group: those who pay those workers. This not new. We cannot blame Trump, Biden, Obama or Bush. For decades we have told ourselves a story and ignored a brutal reality. “They do the jobs Americans don’t want to do.” This appears a welcoming statement, but it is actually cynical. The speaker wants cheap labor.
Meatpacking is a good example. It was such disassembly plants that brought in Haitians who we accused of eating pets. Meatpacking was once upon a time a very skilled and well-paid job that created a middle class in many towns. They paid dad well enough to afford a house and a homemaker and to paint the trim and edge the grass and pay the taxes for the good schools. A large portion of people felt normal because they were.
Then meatpacking grew in power and would bring busloads of workers up from Mexico. In one Minnesota case, they dropped them off at a homeless shelter expecting the poor wages to be subsidized by the churches and taxpayers who supported the shelter. Striking unions lost their fights. Soon, packing plants from Iowa to Colorado hid their workers in trailer parks behind the big box factories a half mile from the road. They kept two sets of books one for real one for show. OSHA was not welcome.
Immigrants are not doing the jobs we don’t want to do. Business owners used immigrants to destroy those jobs.
People might call deportations racist. But undocumented immigrants hurt Black and white Americans. For years, sociologists have said that such globalization, moving factories overseas or bringing workers here, has created the dire racially-segregated inner city ghettos we see today. The only reason we pay someone in Bangladesh less than an American is not because of their value or their skill level, but because of borders and laws associated with borders.
Trump may not want to hear this, but Karl Marx might advise him to do what he is doing. It is a classic contradiction in Capitalism. We all want cheap produce without paying wages a proper labor market requires. So we defeat the market and pretend we don’t.
I live in a relatively small Pennsylvania town where I see a connection between two different groups. Haitians, down the street, go to work and church and the grocery store. There are also white men of prime working age who stumble down the sidewalk in flipflops and pajamas. This I can say because I have seen it.
A good, easy book to read about this subject is “Fast Food Nation
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by Eric Schlosser. He wrote it in the year 2000. This is not a new problem.
Greg Walker is professor at Commonwealth University’s Lock Haven campus.
