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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy It's Immigrants Who Pack Your Meat
Why Its Immigrants Who Pack Your Meat
What Trump has called an invasion was actually a corporate recruitment drive.
6:00 AM ET
Eric Schlosser
The immigration raid last week at seven poultry plants in rural Mississippi was a perfect symbol of the Trump administrations racism, lies, hypocrisy, and contempt for the poor. It was also a case study in how an industry with a long history of defying the law has managed to shift the blame and punishment onto workers.
Planned for more than a year, the raid involved at least 600 agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, helicopters, and a staging area at a local National Guard base. The agents carried handguns, wore black body armor, and led 680 immigrant workersalmost all Latino, many of them womento waiting buses with their hands zip-tied behind their backs. One worker, an American citizen, was shot with a Taser for resisting arrest. Children gathered outside the poultry plants crying as their parents were taken away and sent to private prisons; other kids sat in classrooms and at day-care centers, unaware that their families were being torn apart. It was the first week of school.
The timing was unfortunate, Kevin McAleenan, the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, later acknowledged. Twenty-two people had been killed a few days earlier in El Paso, Texas, where a gunman had targeted Mexican customers at a Walmart out of a desire to halt the Hispanic invasion of Texas. President Donald Trump expressed no regret and applauded the Mississippi raid, arguing that it would deter undocumented immigrants from taking American jobs. I just hope to keep it up, he said.
Despite the fact that the poultry workers were merely arrested, not yet found guilty, Mike Morgan, the acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, dismissed concerns about an 11-year-old girl photographed sobbing outside one of the plants. I understand the girls upset, and I get that, but her father committed a crime, Morgan told CNN. He also denied that raids had occurred, calling them targeted law-enforcement operations. His comments reinforced the big lie at the heart of Trumps presidency: that undocumented immigrants are threatening and scary parasites who can be kept away with a wall. The Mexican government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States, Trump said while running for office. They are in many cases criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.
As The Washington Post and others have noted, immigrants to the United States are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. Far from being a drain on the American economy, immigrants have become an essential component of it. According to a recent study 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. The handful of multinational companies that dominate our food system are hardly being forced to employ immigrant workers. These firms have for many years embraced the opportunity to exploit them for profit.
more...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/trumps-invasion-was-a-corporate-recruitment-drive/596230/
elocs
(22,540 posts)Unfortunately when they come, they are punished and the big business goes free or gets a small fine.
virgogal
(10,178 posts)Sherman A1
(38,958 posts)Eating vegetables and fruit?
Our whole food system is designed around cheap immigrant labor, not just meat packing
virgogal
(10,178 posts)I thought the article was about corporations exploiting immigrants for cheap labor. Silly me.
Buckeyeblue
(5,499 posts)These people had jobs and families. They were not hurting or a threat to anyone.
sharedvalues
(6,916 posts)Our policy for decades has been to admit immigrants and look the other way at those who came outside the approval systems