THE SET-UP: Today’s featured image of a newspaper clipping from 1891 is a brutal reminder that a group of Sicilian men were erroneously lynched by an angry, zenophobic mob in New Orleans.
Like many Southern Italian migrants, they were regarded as inherently criminal carriers of disease who, simply by their presence, threatened the character and the culture of the nation. They were even targeted by the Ku Klux Klan.
Today, Italian-Americans are thoroughly integrated into the fabric of the nation. But, like the waves of Irish, Jewish and Eastern European immigrants who arrived by the boatloads after the Civil War, they were once treated—or mistreated—in a hauntingly similar ways to today’s “tired, poor, huddled masses.”
TITLE: Trump’s Big Immigration Raid Snared Them. They’re Still in Mississippi.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/us/arrestees-trump-workplace-immigration-raid-mississippi.html
EXCERPTS: Baldomero Orozco-Juarez was slicing chicken meat into tenders at a poultry processing plant in Carthage, Miss., when immigration agents stormed in with guns drawn. Some workers tried to flee. There was nowhere to run.
Mr. Orozco-Juarez was arrested, along with dozens of other undocumented workers at the plant. He was held in federal detention for 10 months before being put on a plane to his native Guatemala.
The raid was one of many carried out across Mississippi that day in August 2019, part of the largest workplace sweep in more than a decade and the biggest under President Donald J. Trump. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took 680 people into custody at poultry plants across central Mississippi.
But five years after the Mississippi raids, Mr. Orozco-Juarez, 40, is back in the United States, living in Carthage. Gone for 19 months, he said he was determined to find a way back to his family. Today, he works at a different chicken plant, paid $12.50 an hour to clean blood and meat scraps from the machinery used to debone carcasses. He now has a work permit, but he still faces the possibility of deportation, and he has been speaking out about the conditions many undocumented workers endure.
In Morton, a town of about 4,000 people roughly 40 miles east of the state capital, the ammonia-laced air marks the Koch Foods plant even before you see the sprawling building. This is chicken country. The meat and eggs produced in Mississippi are worth about $3.5 billion annually in 2023, making it by far the biggest sector of the state’s agriculture industry.
Central Mississippi poultry processing companies began recruiting Latin American immigrants in earnest in the 1990s, after a series of unionization efforts by mostly African American workers. Since then, Cubans, Argentines, Mexicans and now Guatemalans have all worked the lines.
Even before the Trump years, rumors of raids rippled through the community. But mostly, immigrants considered their home “tranquilo.”
On the morning of Aug. 7, 2019, production lines ground to a halt. Hundreds of ICE agents streamed into seven processing plants in six towns. At a plant in Sebastopol, northeast of Morton, workers found that doors were closed. “People started to get alarmed, that it was immigration and that we had to run, but I said, ‘Run where?’” said Carolina Perez, 26, who had worked at the plant for two years before the raids and still lives in Mississippi.
Agents loaded nearly 700 people onto buses and drove them to an airplane hangar outside of Jackson.
It’s not clear exactly what happened to each of the 680 people arrested. Once they were in deportation proceedings, ICE did not keep particular track of how they had ended up there, though lawyers who provided legal assistance after the raids estimate that about 230 were deported.
For many, it was the first time they had talked to a lawyer about their immigration status, and some were told they had solid arguments to be allowed to stay. Lawyers said clients applied for legal status based on how long they had lived in the country, or a claim for asylum.
While the Mississippi cases were pending, many were eligible for work permits. Some got their old jobs back.
Today, the poultry industry here continues to rely on immigrant workers, and immigrants rely on the jobs. Indeed, the shortage of workers willing to do difficult, often dangerous work for low wages, is what draws so many undocumented immigrants to the country. (One of the raided plants recently advertised 100 open positions.)
It’s still possible to get employment at chicken plants in the area without work authorization, immigrant workers said. Local intermediaries provide the documents, arrange the work and take a hefty cut of the worker’s pay, the workers say.
Morton and Carthage sit in solidly red counties that Trump won by double digits in 2020. Some residents said the raids punished people who were breaking the law.
Others have more complicated views, saying immigrants do the jobs others won’t.
“I know that they’re doing it because of the law and all,” said Patrick Kelly, the owner of a grocery store in Morton less than a mile from a plant targeted in the raids. “But I question, how can they go to sleep at night knowing that they done that to a person?”
After the raids, some of his longtime customers simply disappeared. His sales dropped.
Still, Mr. Kelly plans to vote for Mr. Trump, who he expects will lower inflation. He hopes Mr. Trump will assure undocumented immigrants with deep ties to the community that they’re not going to be “uprooted and sent back.”
TITLE: Central Valley growers and farmworkers fear mass deportations if Trump wins election
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/politics-government/article294848924.html
EXCERPTS: The uncertainty rippling across the Valley’s undocumented immigrant community ahead of Tuesday’s election is akin to the anxiety many of them felt when Trump won the 2016 election. This time, however, the former president says he plans to “launch the largest deportation program in American history.”
Trump has said he intends to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which was last used during World War II, to target criminals who are in the country illegally, if elected. He would also attempt to expand a removal process that does not require due process hearings, build giant camps to detain people awaiting deportation and end birthright citizenship, the New York Times reported.
Sandra Garcia, a Central Valley resident who’s worked more than 40 years in the fields and is president and founder of Campesinas Unidas del Valle de San Joaquin, said Trump’s campaign promises “worry us a lot.”
Garcia is concerned about the undocumented farmworkers in the Valley, including her sister, if Trump wins and makes good of his promise.
Garcia said her sister has been working in the fields for many years and finally was able to get a work permit through the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which provides a special pathway to lawful immigration status for victims of domestic abuse.
“There are many people like my sister who are getting their documents sorted out, others already have their permits, their children also have DACA, but the majority of farm workers do not have documents,” Garcia said in Spanish.
Garcia said if Trump’s mass deportation proposals become a reality, “it will not only affect the farm workers who do not have documents, but also the farms, which will be left without workers.”
That potential reality weighs on the mind of commercial grower Joe Del Bosque, who is particularly concerned about the impact mass deportations would have on Valley growers with hand-picked crops like melons, cherries, and tomatoes.
“I don’t know if he (Trump) understands that a mass deportation may include a lot of our farmworkers who are essential to our food chain,” said Del Bosque, owner of Empresas Del Bosque farm in western Fresno County near Firebaugh. “Farmworkers are some of the least understood people among our politicians.”
Del Bosque, who politically identifies as centrist, said growers need to publicly voice their concerns about mass deportations.
“We can’t plant and harvest crops like melons and cherries and tomatoes without these people,” Del Bosque said. Del Bosque is no stranger to advocating for immigration reform. He said he worked on the stalled bipartisan bill Farm Workforce Modernization Act in 2019, which aimed to provide a path to immigration status for agricultural workers.
“We can’t plant and harvest crops like melons and cherries and tomatoes without these people,” Del Bosque said.
Del Bosque is no stranger to advocating for immigration reform. He said he worked on the stalled bipartisan bill Farm Workforce Modernization Act in 2019, which aimed to provide a path to immigration status for agricultural workers.
Del Bosque has also seen the impact of past deportation sweeps. He recalled that it took growers months to recover from a labor shortage following a wave of deportations during the Obama administration.
“We have to have a stable workforce,” Del Bosque said.
TITLE: Voices: Construction companies like mine need immigration reform. Utah’s economy can’t afford to wait.
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2024/11/03/voices-utah-construction-companies/
EXCERPTS: Speaking of the industry that I know best, migrant workers play a significant role in construction, manufacturing and heavy equipment distribution operations. Roughly 30% of workers in the United States construction industry — and up to 40% of workers in states like California and Texas — are immigrants. These workers are essential in industries that were hit hard at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and are still on the path to recovery. For instance, during the early days of the pandemic, about 1.4 million manufacturing jobs were lost and, as of January this year, 622,000 openings are yet to be filled.
But even before the pandemic threw a wrench in our workforce pipeline, the construction industry has always been highly dependent on foreign-born labor from South and Central America. This is where political leaders must be willing to work across the aisle and pass legislation that ensures that any immigration reform policy takes into account the dependence our economy has on legal immigrant labor which can be accomplished through circular migration.
Not a new concept, circular migration happens when international workers have clear pathways to legally enter a country for work for a limited amount of time and, according to the United Nations, is “often seen as a win-win-win proposition,” because it alleviates labor needs and increases economic production in the destination country, while helping provide unemployment relief and skill building for the country of origin. Embracing policies that encourage these pathways to migration can help critical industries.
Migrants are not taking Americans’ jobs. The reality is, there are more than enough roles in construction and manufacturing that we can fill, and we need migrants working legally alongside American workers.
The construction industry alone is expected to bring in nearly 454,000 new workers on top of normal hiring to meet industry demand by 2025. Without taking action to develop meaningful, bipartisan solutions that boost our economy and help reform our broken immigration system, we risk negatively impacting the U.S. economy in ways that will take years to recover from.
SEE ALSO:
TITLE: Immigration brings complex changes to Alabama towns, schools, data shows
https://www.al.com/educationlab/2024/11/immigration-brings-complex-changes-to-alabama-towns-schools-data-shows.html
EXCERPTS: Experts say that more and more migrant workers from Mexico and Central America are likely coming to Alabama from states like Florida and Texas, possibly accounting for changes in the older population.
“What we are seeing is not so much births, but definitely migration,” said Rafael Gonzalez, a program director with the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama. “That’s what’s pushing it, and that’s mostly around that age between 16 to 54 which is primary working age.”
Gonzalez said that many migrants are driven by economic opportunities, particularly in industries like agriculture and construction.
TITLE: As Denver Mobilized to Support Arriving Migrants, the City’s Unhoused Population Has Grappled With Feeling Left Behind
https://www.propublica.org/article/denver-colorado-migrants-unhoused
EXCERPTS: Then in May 2023, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending busloads of migrants to Denver.
Mike Johnston became Denver’s mayor two months later.
As Johnston mobilized the city to care for the newcomers, he was also grappling with a growing unhoused population. More than 5,800 people were experiencing homelessness; many lived in downtown encampments. Johnston had declared a state of emergency on his first day in office, and promised to house 1,000 people by the end of 2023.
But by the following January, Denver was feeling the full weight of being a welcoming city. More than 300 migrants a day were rolling into Denver, just over 4,000 were living in shelters and hundreds more were sleeping on the street. The city had spent $42 million to help them, with no sign of meaningful alternatives from the federal government. And with record numbers of asylum seekers arriving at the border, it seemed likely more would make their way to Denver. Local newscasters called it a crisis. Aid workers reported flaring tensions between migrants and the unhoused at food banks and shelters.
TITLE: Immigrants -- scapegoats in US governance dilemma
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202411/04/WS67287e6fa310f1265a1cb533.html
EXCERPT: The United States has seen the biggest gap between the rich and the poor since the Great Depression in 1929. As noted by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz during the 2022 James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Lecture in Economic Inequality, hosted by the Institute of Politics, the United States has "more inequality than other countries and remarkably less equality of opportunity than almost any other country."
Locked into this tense economic environment, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle face mounting public pressure. Once willing to negotiate and collaborate on nuanced immigration reform, Republicans and Democrats now find themselves at an impasse. And miserably, immigrants have fallen victim to deepening political polarization.
Neither side can afford to alienate wealthy donors or find palatable solutions to create enough jobs, increase incomes and narrow the gap between the wealthy and the poor to alleviate voters' frustrations.
As a result, rather than seeking a bipartisan approach to address immigration constructively, they have taken to using undocumented immigrants, who cannot vote in the elections, as convenient scapegoats in the political battle.