I am writing this letter to the undocumented immigrants working and living in the US.
Very few of you will ever see this on FB, and so I humbly ask my friends to share this message with you as far and wide as possible.
I know that many of you have faced incredibly difficult circumstances that I could never imagine. You have faced impossible choices, with no good options available.
You have come to my country in hopes of finding dignity, hope and life. You have not always been received well. I am sorry, truly sorry for the way you are being treated. We have an immigration and economic system that is broken, and has for many reasons been unfair to you. We know it, but we won’t admit it. We refuse to change it.
Our arrangement with you is confusing, and penalizes you for the choices we make.
On one hand, we seem to want you here very much.
Hundreds of thousands of employers, including contractors, factory owners, meat packers, landscapers, cleaning services, individual families and many more, are recruiting and hiring you for jobs that they either can’t fill with US born workers, or for which they are unwilling to pay legal wages. Though many of these employers truly appreciate you and treat you fairly, many others take advantage of you, make you work dreadfully long hours, give you no benefits and frequently refuse to pay you the agreed upon wages you have already worked for. They do this because they know you have no recourse. You can’t take them to court or demand what is owed to you. If you complain, you put your job, your family, your life at risk. We want you very much exactly because we can exploit you.
As consumers, we want you because you provide services and goods at cheaper prices than we would otherwise have to pay. We prefer to buy cheap vegetables without asking who plants and harvests them, or how well they are being compensated. You help keep the cost of the services we need as low as possible in dozens of industries across the economy.
There are millions of you here doing difficult jobs, and our economy relies on you to an incredible degree.
On the other hand, we don’t seem to want you here at all.
We have enacted laws which make it impossible for you to come to the US legally. Our immigration enforcement agencies regularly arrest, detain and deport you, making you live in constant fear, separating your families, and traumatizing your children.
Most of us understand that the deportations that devastate your communities will have little effect on the number of undocumented workers in the country, because the companies which brought and hired you will recruit and hire another person the day after you are removed from the US. Those companies will never face any punishment or consequences for hiring and exploiting you. They face none of the risk which you know only too well..
We deport you anyway.
We do this because it makes you live in the shadows and in fear. Sporadic deportations are essential in ensuring that you remain under the control of an unjust system. These deportations also placate the masses of people who, although they want to exploit your labor, don’t want you to be a member of their communities. Deporting 50,000-70,000 of you each year gives for them the appearance that the government is taking action.
There is an even darker side to this enforcement regime. There are some people, those most entrenched in the desire to blame you, those most threatened by your presence here, who feel better seeing the pain and suffering that deportations inflict on you.
A significant portion of our country has decided to BLAME YOU ALONE, scapegoating you for the failures of the entire nation. We ignore our complicity in creating this system, we ignore those who illegally employ and exploit you, and we ignore the benefits you bring to the country, focusing only on the costs (which we could mitigate if we were to bring you out of the shadow economy and into full membership in the economy).
I want you to know that I stand with you. As an even higher frequency of deportations are being planned, I will do all in my power to protect and value you. I will do all in my power to change a system which condemns the powerless for the sins of the powerful.
This was originally a post on Facebook by Ray Schellinger. To know more about Ray, click here.
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