Once again immigration is making headlines in the American
media as thousands of children - most of them from Guatemala - have been
apprehended crossing into Texas from Mexico. To deal with the astonishing
volume of these unaccompanied children, attempts have been made by the Federal
government to transfer some of them to other states while their individual
cases await processing. This has provoked protests from people - all
descendants of immigrants (unless they're native Americans) - in some
communities who fear that the children will simply be let loose on their
streets, rather than processed for eventual deportation back to their home
countries. They're afraid that the children will become tax burdens by
attending their public schools and will - eventually - take away jobs from its
legal citizens.
In 2001 I was living in Des Moines and that summer I read in
the news about the discovery of a railway car that was filled with
the bodies of undocumented alien immigrants, who had been suffocated in the
overheated car. An investigation failed to find enough information about where
the immigrants had come from, how they got all the way to Iowa, or where on
earth they were going. In the nearly five years I lived in Des Moines (If you
could call it living) I had three dead-end jobs, one of which was with a
private security company. My duties included the patrolling of Des Moines'
downtown skywalks - a public network of elevated passageways that passed over
streets and through office buildings. Since they were heated during the winter
months and air-conditioned during the summer, the skywalks attracted the city's
many homeless people, looking for shelter from the elements. My uniform
resembled a policeman's, with the subtle difference that the patches on my
shoulders were shaped like shields rather than the circular patches worn by the
Des Moines P.D. So I actually looked more like a cop than the cops. The
skywalks were closed between midnight and six a.m., so I had to roust them out
if they were sleeping in some hiding place, which were sometimes easy to find,
sometimes not. With nothing but time on their hands, the homeless could be
surprisingly creative when they had to be. But what surprised me the most about
them was that they were relatively young, and almost all of them were white. I
should add that, for various reasons, most of them suffered from some form of
mental illness.
The only people who were permitted in the skywalks after
midnight - besides my fellow "officers" and I - were the cleaning crews,
who usually paid me no notice as they went about their work. Their jobs ranged
from mopping floors to vacuuming carpets to emptying innumerable waste baskets
floor by floor in the office buildings. One night on duty, a co-worker and I
decided to visit the break room in one of the many buildings through which we
were walking. It was on a floor below the skywalks, so we took an elevator
down. The moment we entered the break room, a group of cleaning women - all
Hispanic - who were sitting around a table, jumped up and fled from the room,
despite my attempts to reassure them. They mistook us for cops, and, for
mysterious but suspicious reasons, ran from us. Whether they were in the U.S.
illegally or were simply wary of policemen, I will never know.(1)
A few years later, living in Anchorage, Alaska, I got a
similar job and I came across other office cleaning people, all Hispanic, all
presumably holding green cards (permanent resident visas). What always struck
me was the obvious fact that these people from Mexico and Guatemala and
Honduras and Nicaragua had come all the way to America - all the way to Des
Moines and Anchorage and every other American city,(2) and that they must've
known there was work waiting for them when they arrived. Why, indeed, would they
have come so far if they weren't convinced that work was waiting for them? And
the work that was waiting for them is tailor-made for immigrants: an army of
men and women to clean office buildings, no qualifications required, no
education, with little or no knowledge of English, unafraid of hard physical
work, probably earning a minimum wage and, obviously, no questions asked about
their immigration status.
Feeble attempts are sometimes made to penalize the companies
that hire illegals, but nothing changes. And what about the office building
managements who contract the companies that hire illegals? Aren't they also
culpable? The people on the right of the immigration issue always argue that
these immigrants are taking away much-needed jobs from Americans, at a time
when unemployment is high. I can't claim to know how these undocumented aliens
live, but I know where and how they work. Most of the jobs that these
immigrants get when they arrive at their destinations are the kind that few
Americans are either capable or willing to perform for a minimum wage. Only
people for whom a job that pays far more than they could possibly earn in their
home countries would take these jobs. Yes, their employers are exploiting them
by paying them the merest minimum the law requires them to pay. Americans would
be more amenable to accepting such jobs if the wage were higher. Americans
could probably be persuaded to pick fruit if the wage were commensurate with
the labor. Americans may be lazy, but they're understanding of quid pro quo is,
by now, quite sophisticated. But, for now, who else but these immigrants,
documented or undocumented, will do the work?
(1) I also noticed, whenever I stopped at a convenience
store on my way home from work, how everyone shopping in the store began to act
suspicious the moment they saw me in uniform.
(2) I knew a man who got a job as a deputy sheriff in Dodge
City, Kansas, who told me that more than half the population of the city, home
to a huge meat-packing industry, was Hispanic.
You are a self-important fool with very little to say. You do not write well, either. You are just another manifestation of blogger pollution--yet one more curse the Internet has brought upon us.
ReplyDeleteWill people like you ever stop? There is a reason writers used to have to go through a vetting process: editors, readers, copy editors, etc. YOU and bloggers like you are the reason.
I'm on Dan's side
ReplyDeleteI'm preparing a longer rebuttal to Mr. reddy's comment. Stay tuned.
ReplyDelete