Thread by @AlexandraErin

So, this is something that came up in the exposes on the Republican-owned farms in Iowa, but: the reason rich white people who depend on immigrant labor are pro-GOP is they want to be able to call ICE on their own workforce to keep them in line.

https://twitter.com/nwmalinowski/status/1159912808387108864

Not only are the employers not in legal trouble for hiring ineligible workers and paying them illegally low wages, but having 680 of their workers hauled off in chains is a victory. They won. It wasn't their ideal solution, but they nuked a negotiation process they were losing.

And if the next batch of recruits starts making waves... I'm sure the bosses will have some newspaper clippings to show them, to remind them of what happens when they don't play ball.

All those crying kids left behind?

Leverage.

"Think carefully. Your children need you."

There are reasons that Trump's having better luck with the wanton cruelty, deportation, and community terrorism prongs of his immigration agenda than building a wall or otherwise keeping people out.

Very few of his allies -- though some highly placed -- want to keep them out.

The rank and file voters? Sure. They believe him when he says the country is "full" (somehow), that we don't have enough resources to take care of even our own people (lol, we are the wealthiest nation in the history of wealth, nations, or histories), and all the murder talk.

But at the actual decision making level, there are still more people who understand those are all lies that exist to create a useful and reliably exploitable scapegoat within our society, a group of second class people who exist outside the protection of law.

The alignment of capital with the apparatus of the state to the point where uniformed officers of the alleged law are strikebreaking Pinkertons doing private "security" for captains of industry (some of whom are also in Congress!)... blurring lines, consolidating forms of power.

Try to imagine how many steps it might take to get from here to the decision that food processing is vital for national security (we need food!) and that if we have millions of people in detention anyway they might as well be put to work doing this vital service...

That's how we get from detention camps to labor camps. There's already a legal pathway in lucky amendment number 13, though that calls for a conviction first. Still, the GOP has been greasing the skids in terms of "undocumented == AN ILLEGAL == guilty".

And even more efficiently, they've been widely spreading the complete and erroneous and disastrous myth that the Constitution's protections only apply to citizens in the first place.

All of this is part of why Trump will keep hammering the "invasion" rhetoric, keep talking about the camps he created and filled as a "crisis" and the border in general a "national emergency".

This all gets easier when we're on a war footing.