CSotD: Todos somos braceros
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Having just gone off on hackneyed media images of kids, I should dock Jeff Danziger for this depiction of lazy slackers, but I'm gonna give him a pass on a ruling of mutual satiric sarcasm.
His defense is the jolly promises of the nice man in the truck. If he can joke about the jobs, he can joke about the people who don't want them.
The issue of illegal workers is so complex that a good reporter could probably base a weekly column on it, to be compiled later into a book. But who would pay for in-depth reporting and analysis on the topic — especially if it didn't start from a stated position on the topic to which all findings would be bent?
There was a time when it seemed non-controversial to urge that the workman be worthy of his hire, and that owners treat workers with the same sense of loyalty.
It didn't flow automatically, and there were times when arms got twisted, but there was a general sense of fairness that everyone — however begrudgingly — admitted had to be part of the system.
I supported the grape and lettuce boycotts of the 1970s, held a fundraiser for the farm workers, handed out pamphlets about the conditions in slaughterhouses. Some people wanted their cheap meat and produce, but they at least had the decency to feel guilty about it, and quite a few decided they could do without table grapes. Others agreed they could shop somewhere other than Safeway.
Not all. But some, and enough that the stores, and the farmers, began to come around.
But that was four decades ago. The dialogue is different now, in a country that not only hates minorities and foreigners — and especially foreigners who are minorities — but has also declared organized labor to be an enemy of the people. A call for "fairness" has become unpatriotic, disloyal, suspect.
And it's no good at all to appeal to the past in a nation whose sense of history is confined to a triumphalist recitation of Great Inventions and Great Battles.
Our largely apocryphal tales of our own hard-working immigrant ancestors are unclouded by the knowledge that the concept of "illegal immigrant" is fairly new, and that the only notable category of "illegals" until modern times were those classified at the time as "Mongolian labor," specifically Chinese workers who were barred because they were willing to work for substandard wages.
Today, we bar alien labor under the theory that only Americans should allowed to work for substandard wages.
Which, as Danziger notes, they don't want to.
Though, as Steinbeck noted, things occasionally have gotten to that point.
Though, as Woody Guthrie noted even then, "California is a Garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see, but, believe it or not, you won't find it so hot, if you ain't got the dough-re-mi."
Our country has always had "remittance men," immigrants or refugees or temporary residents who worked here to send money home, "home" being somewhere other than the United States. And there were many others who brought their families, or who had no families yet, and who came because their own situations at home were so wretched.
They have, historically, taken jobs at the bottom of the ladder, in the mines, as domestics, in the fields, the sweatshops and the factories.
And they've been resented and hated for it, but primarily by those who wanted to see higher wages and better working conditions.
There were bigots, of course. But the organized opposition, the legislative opposition, was — with the obvious and chillingly familiar exception of the Know-Nothings — mostly pro-labor. The stories of immigrant children rolling cigars in dark, filthy tenement buildings were true, but the do-gooders like Jacob Riis and Theodore Roosevelt who responded to those stories were led to the evidence by Samuel Gompers and others in the union movement.
Their objections were based on sympathy for the horrors endured by the immigrants, not on hatred for those reduced to such de facto slavery.
I guess I'd feel better about all this hostility to "illegal aliens" if it were accompanied by louder, more broad-based calls for boycotts of the meat packers and farmers who benefit from their labor, and if it were accompanied by support for better wages and working conditions for the citizens who are expected to take those jobs.
If it were not coming from the same people who want to outlaw collective bargaining and cut health care.
If I could believe that, if an airplane headed back to Mexico crashed today, its occupants would not be summarily dismissed as "deportees."
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