Sherry Chandler

Agriprocessors, Inc. of Postville, Iowa is back in the news, or perhaps still in the news. According to this morning’s NYTimes:

POSTVILLE, Iowa — About 1,000 people, including Hispanic immigrants, Catholic clergy members, rabbis and activists, marched through the center of this farm town on Sunday and held a rally at the entrance to a kosher meatpacking plant that was raided in May by immigration authorities.

The march was called to protest working conditions in the plant, owned by Agriprocessors Inc., and to call for Congressional legislation to give legal status to illegal immigrants. The four rabbis, from Minnesota and Wisconsin, attended the march to publicize proposals to revise kosher food certification to include standards of corporate ethics and treatment of workers.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid of Agriprocessors on May 12 resulted in the criminal prosecution of nearly 400 illegal workers, many of whom were Mayan villagers from Guatemala who could neither speak nor read English (many apparently didn’t even speak Spanish very well) and so were incapable of the “aggravated identity theft” and “Social Security Fraud” with which they were charged.

A translator on the case, Erik Camayd-Freixas, has been speaking outagainst government actions in this raid, which included an inflated charge, a rigged plea bargain, and a rushed-up legal process to avoid habeas corpus. All of this legal slight-of-hand was designed, not to deport these illegal workers, but to imprison them. (Like we need more non-violent offenders in our prisons.)

Rosalie O’Leary brought my attention to an Alternet posting of Professor Camayd-Freixas’ essay describing the raid and its aftermath. I recommend that you read all of it for a look at the human face of many of these illegal immigrants. The NYTimes article also has a link to a PDF copy of this essay. Here is part of what the professor writes:

Then began the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see, because cameras were not allowed past the perimeter of the compound (only a few journalists came to court the following days, notepads in hand). Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment. They sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10.

They appeared to be uniformly no more than five feet tall, mostly illiterate Guatemalan peasants with Mayan last names (Tajtaj, Xicay, Sajché, Sologüí). Some were in tears; others had faces of worry, fear, and embarrassment. They all spoke Spanish, a few rather laboriously. It dawned on me that, aside from their nationality, which was imposed on their people in the 19th century, they too were Native Americans, in shackles.

I want you to read all of this essay to learn just what a cheesy operation this was. But on this post I want to draw your attention to two passages that deal with the politics of this situation.

First (my emphasis):

The lawsuit [AFL-CIO vs. Chertof] also charges that DHS overstepped its authority and assumed the role of Congress in an attempt to turn the Social Security Administration into an immigration law enforcement agency. Significantly, in referring to the Final Rule, the Annual Report states that ICE “enacted” a strategy to target employers, thereby implying ICE’s lawmaking authority. The effort was part of ICE’s “Document and Benefit Fraud Task Forces,” an initiative targeting employees, not employers, and implying that illegal workers may use false Social Security numbers to access benefits that belong to legal residents.

This false contention serves to obscure an opposite and long-ignored statistics: the value of Social Security and Medicare contributions by illegal workers. People often wonder where those funds go, but have no idea how much they amount to. Well, they go into the Social Security Administration’s “Earnings Suspense File,” which tracks payroll tax deductions from payers with mismatched Social Security numbers.

By October 2006, the Earnings Suspense File had accumulated $586 billion, up from just $8 billion in 1991. The money itself, which currently surpasses $600 billion, is credited to, and comingled with, the general Social Security Administration’s Trust Fund. Social Security Administration actuaries now calculate that illegal workers are currently subsidizing the retirement of legal residents at a rate of $8.9 billion per year, for which the illegal (no-match) workers will never receive benefits.
Again, the big numbers are not on the employers’ side. The best way to stack the numbers is to go after the high concentrations of illegal workers: food processing plants, factory sweatshops, construction sites, janitorial services–the easy pickings.

And then this:

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we had to create a massive force ready to “prevent, prepare for and respond to a wide range of catastrophic incidents, including terrorist attacks, natural disasters, pandemics and other such significant events that require large-scale government and law enforcement response.”

The problem is that disasters, criminality, and terrorism do not provide enough daily business to maintain the readiness and muscle tone of this expensive force. For example, “In FY07 (fiscal year 2007), ICE human trafficking investigations resulted in 164 arrests and 91 convictions.” Terrorism-related arrests were not any more substantial. The real numbers are in immigration: “In FY07, ICE removed 276,912 illegal aliens.”

ICE is under enormous pressure to turn out statistical figures that might justify a fair utilization of its capabilities, resources, and ballooning budget. For example, the ICE Fiscal Year 2007 Annual Report boasts 102,777 cases “eliminated” from the fugitive alien population in fiscal year 2007, “quadrupling” the previous year’s number, only to admit a page later that 73,284 were “resolved” by simply “taking those cases off the books” after determining that they “no longer met the definition of an ICE fugitive.”

De facto, the rationale is: we have the excess capability; we are already paying for it; ergo, use it we must.

Our domestic “War on Terror[ism]” is beginning to look a lot like our “War on Drugs.”

During her summer workshop, Revision as Regeneration, Leatha Kendrick cited a paucity of rhyme words in English as one reason that Shakespeare and other Elizabethan practitioners of the sonnet deviated from the Italian/Petrarchan form. The classical Petrarchan sonnet works with only two sets of rhymes — ab in the octave, cd in the sestet. This kind of rhyming is easy enough to do in Italian, with its inflected endings, but bloody hard in English. By contrast, the English/Shakespearean sonnet allows twice as many sets of rhymes — ab, cd, ef, gg.

While such practical craft may have driven the change, Paul Fussell implies, in Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965), that there is something essentially English about the Shakespearean form. The Italian sonnet is shaped for emotion, the English for wit:

Although the basic action of both Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets is similar, it is the proportioning that makes the immense difference between them. Both present and then “solve” problems, the Petrachan sonnet form in its octave and sestet, the Shakespearean in its comparatively hypertrophied initial twelve lines and then its couplet. In the Petrarchan sonnet the problem is often solved by reasoned perception or by a relatively expansive and formal meditative process, for the sestet allows enough room for the undertaking of prudent, highly reasonable kinds of resolutions. But in the Shakespearean sonnet, because resolution must take place within the tiny compass of a twenty-syllable couplet, the “solution” is more likely to be the fruit of wit, or paradox, or even a quick shaft of sophistry, logical cleverness, or outright comedy. In the Shakespearean sonnet, the turn tends to pivot on one of the logical adverbs — for, then, so, but, yet, lest, thus, therefore — words which constitute syntactical figures of self-conscious dialectic. The crucial operations of such words in assisting the Shakespearean sonneteer to “solve his problem” tend to make the Shakespearean sonnet a little showplace of rhetoric or advocacy or logic—or mock logic. Furthermore, the very disproportion of the two parts of the Shakespearean sonnet, the gross imbalance between the twelve-line problem and the two-line solution, has about it something vaguely risible and even straight-faced farcical: it invites images of balloons and pins.

And even when the final couplet does not resolve the conflicts or entanglements presented by the preceding quatrains, there remains something ineffably witty about the form of the Shakespearean sonnet, something that distinguishes it essentially as a form from the Petrarchan. If the shape of the Petrarchan sonnet, with its two slightly unbalanced sections devoted to pressure and release, seems to accord with the dynamics of much emotional experience, the shape of the Shakespearean, with its smaller units and its “commentary” couplet, seems to accord with the modes of the intellectual, analytic, and even satiric operations of the human sensibility. [pp. 122-123]