Immigrant abuse

We went to the No Kings rally in Kirkland this past weekend.   It was a great event.  People from all walks of life — old, young, families, babies, all races/ethnicities – a very, very large crowd by Kirkland standards, certainly many thousands.  Everyone was extremely friendly, carrying patriotic signs, with a lot of red, white, and blue.  Children were blowing bubbles in a nearby fountain.  There was a donation station for the food bank.  People had their dogs with them, including a couple of Corgis near us.  I am reasonably sure that any event featuring Corgis is going to be pretty laid-back, and this one was no exception.  My favorite poster at the event was the “Less ICE, more Ice Cream” poster.

This is America at its best — people speaking out, speaking respectfully, and speaking clearly.   Speaking out about freedom and liberty, speaking out against heavy-handed police actions, and speaking out in support of some of the most powerless in our community.   This is the spirit I thought our country had, and it was uplifting to see it locally, and then to read about it all over the country.  This day gave me hope for a better future.

ICE enforcement is immoral and poorly executed

I was motivated to go by the grotesque images of masked unidentified men showing up in unmarked cars and hauling people off to detention.  This is beneath all of us.  The individual officers participating in these raids should know better and should refuse this duty.  Their leaders should know better and refuse this duty. The administration that is asking them to run these raids should know better.  All these people will need to be held accountable someday.   

Look at that opening picture – would you trust or believe that these guys are legitimate police if they came to your home? Wearing mismatched hoodies, ball caps, no common uniform, and masks? This appears to be the most undisciplined and unprofessional police action ever.

And the targets of ICE raids are dumb — this isn’t where the criminals are.   Workplaces.  Small employers where people are working hard at demanding jobs.  Graduations, where parents celebrate their kids’ hard work.  These are the places we find the people we want in this country — hard workers, family-oriented people.  These are not violent criminals.  

We all want criminals to be arrested, put away, or deported.  Rounding up migrant workers at their place of employment with squads of secret police is not the way to do it.   

By the way, police were present at the Kirkland No Kings rally.   They were unmasked, clearly identified in their uniforms with name tags, and they were helpful and friendly. They respected the crowd, and the crowd respected them.  These are the kind of police we want;  the city and its employees did a great job at the event.  

US immigration policy is stupid, blind to reality, and immoral

What is further aggravating is how stupid and damaging the US immigration and guest worker policy is.   We have created the ugly situation we find ourselves in.  

In the 1950s and 1960s, the US had an expansive guest worker program, known as the Bracero program, which allowed a large number of legal guest workers to enter the country to work in agricultural jobs.  Politics tore down the program, much of the pressure coming from the Democratic side.   

But the need didn’t disappear.   Developed economies worldwide have a need for low-wage labor in agriculture and services.   It is typical worldwide that 3-4% of the labor force will come from guest worker programs.   Most countries have guest worker programs of some form that allow temporary workers to fill these jobs, with no guaranteed path to citizenship, and require them to pay full taxes without access to full benefits.  

Following the Bracero program, the US has attempted to limit guest workers to roughly 0.5%.  However, we need these workers across a wide range of industries.  Construction, agriculture, hospitality, home services, and more.  These are tough jobs and necessary jobs.  Trying to cap guest workers just hasn’t worked.  We have instead encouraged large amounts of illegal immigration to fill the gap, and have turned a blind eye to it in Republican and Democratic administrations over the past 50 years.   We have criminalized what is very normal and necessary economic behaviour.   This is stupid.  

And along with the stupidity of our policy, we have been willfully corrupt on immigration.

As has been noted many, many times, there was a bipartisan effort to address immigration issues during the Biden administration.  It had broad support — and was killed by the backroom action of the Trump campaign, who wanted immigration as a painful issue to campaign on.  This is the worst kind of political maneuvering — party before country.

And to deal with the large amount of criminalized immigration behaviour, we have encouraged the rise of for-profit entities like the GEO Group, which make money both on the number of people incarcerated, and through forced employment of these people at $1-a-day wages.  This is grotesque — there should be no one with a profit motive to incarcerate people.

What we need

I don’t pretend to have an original thought about what we need — because the needs are obvious and have been stated many times before by many observers.  

We need an appropriately sized guest worker program, which can provide 3-4% of the employment base, filling the needs of the agricultural and service industries. It should be appropriately regulated, with workers paying their full tax share, and it should all be above board. This would dramatically reduce the amount of activity that we deem as “criminal.”

For those workers who want to commit to a life in the US, we need a path to citizenship that is demanding but open.  America was built by people who came here from elsewhere, who worked hard, and who wanted to make a better country.  That still seems like a great ethos.  You could even argue that hard-working immigrants are the best Americans of all.  Citizenship should not be easy — they will have to learn our language, pay their fair share (and more) of taxes — but it should be possible.

We need enforcement efforts that are above board, that don’t reek of secret police disappearing people.  And we need enforcement efforts focused on violent criminals, not on hard-working tradespeople and service workers. 

We need political leaders who solve these problems, rather than grandstanding and dividing and placing party before country.

And above all else — each of us (with the freedom and power to do so) need to speak out about what we want America to be, and what behaviors we will tolerate.  Millions of people spoke out this past weekend; we need to keep doing it, at the ballot box, and every other day.