Tell Us About That Immigrant Scourge, Mr. Builder

By JOHN YOUNG

He was in a pinch, on a deadline, and short on cash. So the employer hired undocumented workers.

Working day and night, they demolished a building that the employer ultimately would replace with a structure that would make him a lot of money.

When the workers complained about pay and dangerous conditions, the employer threatened to have them deported.

That employer: Donald Trump.

Reporting on this (how many of his supporters know this?), Time magazine quotes Trump’s own associate as saying the Polish nationals doing the groundwork that preceded Trump Tower in 1980 were paid “starvation wages.”

Illegal immigration is a scourge, unless it makes you money.

Listening to profiteers like Trump painting those horror stories about illegal immigration, it sounds to me like those high-profile sorts who, strumming Bibles to denounce homosexuals, later are found to be batting on both sides of the plate.

Hypocrites.

Adlai Stevenson had this to say about Trump’s kind of politicians: The type who would “chop down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.”

It is sadly fascinating to see the ranks of the most alarmist people when it comes to this issue.

Recently the governing board of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department rejected a proposal by the federal government to use the shuttered Corsicana State Home for housing Central American children who came into the country illegally.

The objective: temporary shelter for the children until their relatives can take them.

Leaders in the city of Corsicana supported the idea as a way to use a facility whose closing hurt the local economy. But Texas Republican leaders, led by Gov. Greg Abbott, were more interested in posturing. They dare not be seen as capitulating to President Obama about anything, particularly immigration.

Pompously, Republican State Sen. Brian Birdwell said he would not “validate the mass influx of immigrants” manifest in this proposal, denouncing the president’s “willful malfeasance” of immigration law. Harrumph.

Big words, small attitudes.

Of course, what this president is doing with these children, as with Syrian refugees, is what all developed countries do in times of humanitarian crisis. They help.

Texas Republicans know what Trump knows: Illegal immigrants are a serious problem unless big business can exploit them. And if they’re dark-skinned adolescents, who wants them?

A newly released Gallup study of Trump supporters finds this: Those who are the most strident about immigration are the least likely to encounter an immigrant in their neighborhoods. In other words, they know not what they would demonize.

In the case of Latino immigrants, says the study, individuals in areas with heavy Hispanic populations, particularly close to the border, are more hospitable to them, and less hospitable toward Trump.

Reports Gallup, “Those who view Trump favorably are more likely to be found in white enclaves — racially isolated zip codes.”

In other words, the likelihood that these people would ever encounter, or ever be impacted by, undocumented individuals is slim to none.

These Trump supporters are living a white-flight fantasy but have no reason to flee.

We don’t need Gallup to tell us that in whatever case of stereotyping and alarmist generalizations, whether the objects of the generalizations are Mexicans, blacks, homosexuals, Muslims, or anyone else from a world of difference, people resolved to live in that world are more understanding.

Those who never interact with Muslims, who hardly ever see a black person except on ESPN, or who for all they know are surrounded by 100 percent pure churchgoing heterosexuals — those oblivious sorts are the most inclined to fear them.

So, Mr. Trump, when you build that wall, will you be using Poles? Mexicans? Syrians? Whom?

John Young is a longtime Texas newspaperman who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. Email jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. See johnyoungcolumn.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2016

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