There’s More to Immigration Than People Piling Up at the Border

By JIM VAN DER POL

The idea that immigrants only take jobs that American citizens don’t want has gotten to be a kind of liberal mantra, appearing often enough even in the pages of The Progressive Populist. We should examine this tendency closely to see if it is not related to our lack of a coherent political vision, which causes us to lose one election after another.

What are we saying with that statement? Do we think that there is any necessity for example, that grapes must be picked by hand-as a recent “foodie” article insists — at wages less than it takes to support a human life so that we can have cheap wine at our tables? It is certain that these kinds of jobs have been for years filled by what amounts to temporary work of people with uncertain immigration status and that such an arrangement benefits agriculture and agribusiness hugely. But that is not to say that it is right. What is the impact of the steady supply of very cheap-and effective-labor in the fruit and vegetable production industry on start up kinds of farm businesses that are trying to build a farm out of local vegetable production, much of it sold into markets that desire local supplies?

The last half century has seen a shift in the meats processing industry toward immigrant labor. Jobs that once paid a working-class living in the nation’s slaughterhouses are filled with people working at not much over half the former rate. And these jobs are dangerous, as the industries increasingly wink at work rules once established and gotten into law by unions. This puts start-up kinds of farms wanting to sell into markets desiring clean and local meats in the bind of either paying a decent price for help in the processing and swallowing the increase in cost, or following the industry lead into the labor abuses common in the nation’s major slaughterhouses.

Much of the livestock and milk production on the nation’s farms is now done by very cheap, sometimes nearly slave immigrant labor in the animal confinement houses — practices detailed in a recent Frontline story. We could ask what impact that has on the children of rural American citizens, some of whom show an interest in livestock and would wish to pursue a career in the ancient and honorable tradition of animal husbandry. And we should certainly explore the value to our nation and its people of cheap meat.

The central issue here is the philosophy of those of us who consider ourselves progressives. Do we believe in the value of the dignity of every human being or do we not? What does it say that we are so apt to wink at the “need” for some of us to hire for very little someone to cook and clean for us? What kind of society gets structured on the thought that there is work to do that some of us think we are too good to do? Where is it written that we cannot clean our own toilets? This failure of progressives, as it is not just right wingers and conservatives who keep maids and gardeners and expect super cheap house repairs, to accord proper place to human dignity and try to live accordingly, gives the lie to our professed political interest in just that.

And working people of all colors know it. When the statement is made that immigrants only do work that citizens do not want, working class citizens figure it out. We know that the slaughterhouse job we do not want is what is left of slaughterhouse work that formerly paid well enough that a worker there could sponsor his son in six years of professional university education while not allowing the son to work so that he could concentrate on his studies. (This story is real. I saw it first hand in the ’70s) And the confinement livestock industry jobs that we do not want is the fallout left over from the decades long sell out of agricultural diversity, including diverse ownership of the nation’s farms and their families. I grew up among farmers who made, in many cases, a decent living from producing their own livestock in their own way on their own farms. This is in many ways my own story. This is an agriculture that has been disallowed by our race to the bottom. Anger and resentment on the part of people that have been disallowed is merely expectable.

An In These Times article in the May 2018 issue does a good job of pointing up the abuses of the visa system and how it is used to disemploy skilled concrete workers in rural Iowa and Illinois. Check it out at: <inthesetimes.com/features/farm_industry_migrant_workers_h2a_visa_exploitation.html>

Shouldn’t progressives be making the observation that it is poor and sometimes desperate people sitting in detention and having their children taken from them after border crossing, but never the employers that are encouraging them in? And why are progressives not exploring the reasons for economic misery south of the border, misery that provides the push, misery that benefits my big corn farming neighbors, all of this via NAFTA? We don’t hear an analysis that the market economy is simply making labor as portable as capital, human lives and national borders be damned, that this is simply capitalism at work.

It is about the market reducing human value to a dollar bill. Instead of a politics based on this logic, we get fuzzy feel-good stuff about tolerance and multiculturalism. And Trump in the White House and his allies and enablers in control of too many state houses and legislatures. Should we wonder why?

Jim Van Der Pol farms near Kerkhoven, Minn. A collection of his columns, Conversations with the Land, was published by No Bull Press (nobullpressonline.com).

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2018

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