Sherry Chandler » Postville
Postville
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.”
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6 Comments
1. Max replies at 29th July 2008, 2:40 pm :
CONFUSION!
These people only want to work, apparently to do jobs that others don’t want.
Why are not people exiting the Inner City getting in line for these jobs the way the Mexicans do? As the article states, education is not the issue.
2. sherry replies at 29th July 2008, 3:29 pm :
Hello Max. You ask a good question. I doubt there are any simple answers to any of this stuff, and goodness knows I’m more emotional than smart about some of this. But I don’t buy the notion that our own citizens won’t do these jobs. What I think is that our own citizens won’t do these jobs without certain protections. In New Orleans, for example, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, I read reports that illegals were doing cleanup work without the same kinds of environmental protections you or I would expect — hazmat suits and that sort of thing. I think this is all a matter of depressing wages.
3. Max replies at 29th July 2008, 3:46 pm :
I do agree. Solutions to these problems are not simple.
The reason I put that post on the board was ……. Since I was a teenager, I always wanted work; farm, mow lawn, bricklayer, carpenter uncle. When I was first married besides being employed with the Coast Guard, I always had a 2nd job, at a point 3 jobs. Didn’t really have to, just wanted the work and of course, I’m money driven, don’t want to get caught short.
Barriers can be overcome by fortitude to excel.
Then there are those that have barriers and prejudices, which, I never had; but I think I’d battle through them.
4. Rebecca Clayton replies at 29th July 2008, 7:14 pm :
When I was growing up in Iowa (1960’s & 70’s), the meat packing plants were unionized, and the jobs there were skilled–hard work, but good pay. Increasing mechanization, bigger and bigger factories, and the decline of unions have left it a dangerous, minimum-wage or worse workplace.
You have to be really desperate to work for long in a place like that–in the 1990’s I heard the companies were going to big cities’ skid rows, loading up buses full of homeless men, and dropping them off at the slaugher houses to work. This didn’t work out too well for the homeless guys–they had money, but not enough to find a place to live, and they were in strange towns with harsher climates than they were used to.
Where’s Upton Sinclair when you need him?
5. Rosalie replies at 30th July 2008, 12:45 am :
And, speaking of Sinclair, remember — we eat this meat that is produced under these conditions. We eat this abuse, this exploitation. And, then we wonder why we’re sick, why we’re angry, stressed, cruel…Sorry. Once I get started…
6. sherry replies at 1st August 2008, 12:33 pm :
Rebecca and Ro: The NYTimes joins you in invoking Upton Sinclair. They’re calling Postville a kosher jungle.
In the WWI years, by the way, Sinclair tried to work with Wilson instead of against him, but he found that while Wilson promised and promised to do something about oppression of dissenters, he somehow never got around to acting on his promises.
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