Thread by @brooklynmarie

Retaliatory raids have been going on for many years. But agriculture profits handsomely from this model — it makes owners very rich. It’s no accident we haven’t had comprehensive immigration reform in many years. How many industries make billions from undocumented labor?

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

To be undocumented in the United States is to live on a razors edge. You have little protection or legal recourse if you are harassed or hurt. But business owners don’t care. You’re replaceable, right? And if they start getting restive (read: expensive) this is what happens.

But that is once again why I reported so long on border and immigration issues from a humanitarian perspective before disinfo became too much of a problem to ignore. Workers are following market forces to grave human rights violations. They simply want to work and eat.

Even as bad as it is here, it is worse in other countries. Many companies (like Driscoll’s) will outsource hard labor (as with strawberries in Mexico) and then package goods in the United States so they can say they’re products of the USA. But not everything can be done that way

But think about it. You get a completely replaceable workforce and you don’t have to buy them insurance. If they get killed? No problem, bury them out back and hire some more. Who’s gonna come looking for them? But if they start demanding more rights? Call immigration.

It’s incredibly corrupt and has been for many years. Here’s a story I did in 2015 about outsourcing labor to Mexico and what workers have to go through there, and indirectly why isolationism doesn’t work. theglobeandmail.com/news/world/nor…

Field workers are routinely harassed and raped and exposed to cancer causing chemicals so Americans don’t have to pay more that $3 for a tub of berries. By the way, if you shop organic there is a much higher chance of human rights violations somewhere in the supply chain.

That's because organics are much more labor-intensive, which means more labor, which means more violations. I come off as a great big California hippie-dippie but won't touch organic foods, which confuses people who don't know my interests and history

Anyway if this seems like a great big coincidence, it's not. It's entirely by design, as are the laws being changed to keep certain people from ever being able to attain citizenship. That's why the "illegal is illegal" argument is bullshit.

digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.…

"Convinced that cheap Mexican laborers were indispensable to southwestern agriculture, Congress imposed no limit on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, though it did establish a patrol along the Mexican border and imposed an eight dollar head tax and a ten dollar visa fee."

"In 1929, the federal government required Mexicans to obtain visas in order to enter the United States.

[...]

During the Great Depression, when dust bowl farmers from Texas and Oklahoma poured into California, Mexicans were unneeded."

"Between 1929 and 1935, more than 415,000 Mexicans were expelled and thousands more left voluntarily. The legal pretext for deportation was that many Mexicans lacked proof of legal residency (even though no visa had been necessary prior to 1929)."

---

Sound familiar at all?

To bring this up before now, though, was to be shouted down by the Very Rational Reporter set, who naturally know nothing about the border but explain it to me anyway. My humanitarian concerns were seen as a fatal personality flaw. I did it anyway though, because I was right.

I'm unable to locate any copies online of Kelly Lytle Hernández's thoroughly researched book, "Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands," but I have used her work and citations in my research. This thesis (from my alma mater!) references it.

"Lytle-Hernandez utilizes Ngai’s argument that Border Patrol practice’s (1924-1955) operated to create a new site of racial formation to the U.S.44 In this history the border emerged as a point of contention,

escholarship.org/content/qt2qc6…

"...the dividing line of the American “free white race” and the "half-savage, half-civilized race of Mexico." But in reference to the “half-savage, half-civilized race of Mexico” Lytle-Hernandez argues that no distinction was made between
Mexican-Americans and Mexican nationals,

"...blurring the lines between immigrant and citizen. Hernandez explains that to be brown along the U.S.-Mexico border equated to being subject to interrogations, deportations, and vengeance campaigns...." (pp. 26-27)

The eugenicist argument this references is one that was popular in the 1920s and conveniently upheld white people as the noble ideal. There were serious academics at that time who earnestly discussed whether Mexicans, as mestizos, had enough "white blood" to overcome the "savage"

The entire eugenics movement as we know it, in fact, emerged out of southern California. San Diego, to be exact. Not a coincidence. Yet no one wants to discuss this. I'd say it's probably time. And I haven't even started on the Chinese Exclusion Act.

theguardian.com/uk/2004/feb/06…

I was looking for some old essays to add to this thread and found another thread I did on exactly this five months ago lol.

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1107324…

https://twitter.com/brooklynmarie/status/1107324899670908928

Anyhoo that's why I'm so invested in immigration stuff. It's been forced on people who just wanted to live their lives as the laws shift beneath their feet. Imagine being a citizen yesterday and an "illegal" tomorrow. That's happened again and again in the USA. You could be next.