On the morning of Dec. 12,
immigration and other federal officials launched a simultaneous
raid — the biggest ever of its kind — at Swift &
Co. meatpacking plants across six different states.
At
the plant in Greeley, Colo., about an hour’s drive north of Denver,
agents surrounded the windowless, monolithic facility, then
entered, carrying hundreds of pairs of handcuffs. By day’s end,
they had detained more than 250 meat plant workers and trucked them
off in buses or vans for questioning. Some were released, some will
end up in jail, and some were deported, separated from their
families just before Christmas.
Many of those carted off
had broken the law by working without documentation, and co-opting
someone else’s social security number to navigate the plant’s
employee verification process. That’s not unusual: Like the
agriculture, construction and service sectors, around one-third of
the meat processing employees in this country are undocumented
immigrants. Their timing was lousy but, in the end, the immigration
officers were just doing their job.
Nevertheless, the
raids were a glaring example of an ugly and ineffective approach to
dealing with immigration. Like establishing English as an official
language, further militarizing the border and putting more
restrictions on public services for immigrants, the raids worsen,
rather than solve, problems associated with immigration.
Call it the marginalization approach: Make them as uncomfortable as
you can, and perhaps they’ll just up and leave. This might work for
pesky houseguests, but it’s not going to cause some 12 million
undocumented immigrants in this country to just up and head home.
After all, they’re not here for comfort, they’re here for jobs in
places like the Swift meatpacking plant, where wages start at $12
per hour, plus benefits. That’s enticing to people who would make
closer to $10 per day back home. Many of those who are deported
will simply turn around and come back. And even as lawyers in
Greeley struggled to determine where their apprehended clients were
held, workers lined up to take the newly available jobs at the
meatpacking plants.
Even without the raids, living as an
undocumented immigrant is to always live in fear. Each morning in
places like Greeley, hundreds of immigrants watch their spouses or
parents go to work, always wondering whether they’ll come home, or
end up instead in a detention center on the way to being deported.
The raids heightened that fear.
Now, the rest of
Greeley’s immigrant community — not to mention other Latinos
who may be targeted by raids simply because of their skin color
— is even more anxious. They’ll move deeper into the shadows,
be less involved with the community, and maybe even keep their kids
out of school. Afraid of being caught, they’ll become more
suspicious of the police, meaning they’ll be less likely to report
crimes or cooperate with criminal investigations.
Out of
this dynamic comes a group of second-class citizens partitioned
from the rest of society. Assimilation is stifled. In turn, we as a
society miss out on the exchange between natives and immigrants
that has shaped and enriched United States culture for centuries.
Meanwhile, the institutions that bind our society — social
services, public education and law enforcement — face the
challenges of dealing with an alienated population, and must build
bridges that faulty immigration policy and xenophobic attitudes do
their best to destroy.
Ultimately, the only solution to
illegal immigration from Mexico is a dramatic change in the
economic landscape. Barring a collapse of the U.S. economy, or a
miraculous reform of Mexico’s entrenched politics, that’s not going
to happen anytime soon. There is a realistic approach: immigration
reform that accommodates economic realities, provides a
guest-worker program, and gives an easier route to legalization for
the millions of undocumented workers already here.
But as
the Chinese established themselves, starting businesses and
becoming active members of the community, they were first
ridiculed, their businesses were boycotted, and then they were
intimidated. Finally, angry mobs rounded up the Chinese and
threatened or beat them until they left town. By 1910, this ethnic
cleansing of many small communities was complete. We look back on
that moment in the West’s history as an ugly time that ultimately
took a toll not only on the victims of the intimidation, but also
on the culture of the communities where it happened.
Judging by December’s raids and their painful aftermath, we haven’t
learned much from our mistakes.
Jonathan
Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He is the paper’s
associate editor in Paonia, Colorado.
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