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i wonder if this kind of idiocy would be happening if the category for referring to these folk was not the far right's preferred "illegal immigrants" but something else--something that is actually accurate--like "undocumented workers"...or migrant laborers.
it is the case that an overwhelming majority of the folk who come into the states without proper documents to work in capitalist firms that hire them (because it is acceptable culturally to hire them--and these firms, regardless of whether they are in agriculture or elsewhere, are the motor of this whole issue and the anything goes in the interest of profit ideology particular to this vast empire of flinstones we call the united states is the primary enabling condition for it)--anyway the vast majority of the folk who come without documentation do so temporarily.
and they send most of their money back.
and why should they not be able to dispose of the income they earn like anyone else?
and if there is a real problem with these folk being in the states, then shut down the motor of the migrant labor market itself--go after the firms. dont dick around the people who come here because there are jobs--they really aren't doing anything wrong, they are just looking for work--so if you have a problem with the migrant labor market, shut down the companies that hire them.
they are migrant workers.
this is a migrant labor issue.
it is not an immigration issue.
and nothing about it is new: this has been the case for any number of groups for the whole of the 20th century--folk who are planning on settling here in the main go the more formal procedural route.
THEY are the immigrants.
the others are undocumented workers.
even if some decision was made at the level of census records to count migrant workers as immigrants--which is a stupid decision---even then the issue is predicated on half the story--the estimations of inflow--and not the rest of it--estimations of reverse migration.
the actions of the state of arizona are simply a logical conclusion to a wholly fucked up way of politically framing this "issue"...it is not much more or less foul than the arguments you see in other areas of the sewer that is this debate about putting landmines on the border.
i find the appeal of the category "illegal immigrant" inexplicable.
i do not know why it is that the myth of the united states being some kind of labor shangri-la appeals to anyone. vanity? an element of some tiresome circle jerk that links ideology to people's sense of who are and where they live with the result that folk can feel like members of some fictional Elect because by accident they were born here and not elsewhere? or maybe it's a device that enables people to imagine their world sparkles just a little more when they dump a bit of reactionary ideology over it?
i dont get it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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