In the gym locker room on Wed I heard a conversation:
- Those jackasses in New York want to give illegals the vote.
- We’ve got to take it back.
- Yea, I’m ready, just waiting for the word to come down.
I’m distinctly aware that this is not go out and vote talk, it is gun revolution talk.
I’ve got 4 guns in the house, maybe it’s time to accumulate more ammo.
The real jackasses are the ones who don't understand we need immigration reform, not least to meet labor shortages, ensure the decent treatment of and fair wages for guest workers and provide a path to permanent residence for law abiding undocumented workers.
Some of those workers have been here working, paying taxes and improving local economies for decades, so it seems disingenuous to talk about how they should be deported because they're "trying to jump the line". How long do you have to pay into the system and not qualify for retirement benefits before you've paid any virtual dues for having jumped a line you didn't jump, just worked your ass off to survive the wait, same as the wait anyone with papers would endure, but for less security and less money? And with the blessing of the USA's pols and fans of cheap labor...
Their main fault is not theirs but an understaffed and messed-up immigration adjudication system, one that winks and nods at the existence of undocumented workers unless, after hiring, they turn up injured or sick or have the temerity to complain about wages or treatment... and then the employer of those undocumented works just shifts gears and calls ICE to get them deported, because he knows there are more can be rounded up from somewhere with a few more winks and nods to the right people.
It's shameful to wink at this stuff. It enables abuses like that recently uncovered in indictments covering some bad labor contractors in six counties in south Georgia where --for years!-- over a hundred immigrants had been effectively treated as slaves, even sometimes forced at gunpoint to finish onion harvests with bare hands, making 20c a bucket, living with food insecurity, inadequate shelter and sanitation.
ATLANTA — A yearslong human trafficking operation trapped migrant workers in “modern-day slavery” on South Georgia farms, according to a federal indictment.
omaha.com
Sure, not every undocumented worker ends up in such a hellhole, but none of us should imagine that our all-American life is free from reliance in some part on invisibly undocumented labor. It's not like we know where our Vidalia onions come from past being stacked in a supermarket... and so the same with people in NYC not having a clue who packs and unpacks boxes of stuff for markets and bodegas every day, or who sweeps up and takes out the trash or cleans toilets for that hole-in-wall diner or the places we brag about as a neighborhood go-to for world's best eggs and home fries or a vast number of ethnic dinner options.
I have no patience with right wingers carping about immigration issues when they're not also carping about how come Congress doesn't get off its wink-and-nod dime and get the reforms done. We had perhaps a best shot in decades at doing that during the Bush 43 administration, and yet his own side of the aisle shot it down.
Shame isn't even a good enough word for this stuff. I once thought we'd get the USA's immigration issues settled in my lifetime. Now I really wonder if a tolerance for exploitation and scapegoating has just settled permanently in American culture. The locker room talk you overheard doesn't make me feel more optimistic.
