On April 16, Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents raided Pilgrim’s in five states, arresting 300 individuals accused of various immigration violations.
|
No, this was Pilgrim’s Pride, the country’s largest chicken producer. Although ICE has not released a detailed report on the arrests, it can be safely assumed that the 300 immigrant workers—subject to immediate deportation—came overwhelmingly from Latin America.
The executives of Pilgrim’s Pride, in fact, notified ICE of discrepancies in their employees’ paperwork. The company spokesman said the corporation “knew in advance and cooperated fully” in the raids. Employing over 55,000 workers nationwide, Pilgrim’s can clearly survive the arrest of 300 workers with little disruption to production.
If these raids follow the historical trend, the targeted workers were probably those who the company considered “disorderly”—the wage slaves who dared to talk back or complain to management. The company’s leading role in the raids serves as a powerful threat to its thousands of other immigrant workers.
The Pilgrim’s Pride raids were the largest of many to take place on April 16. Early that morning, ICE agents arrested 30 workers in a doughnut factory in Houston, Texas. Some of the arrestees had been living in the factory’s dormitory. Forty-five other Mexican restaurant workers were arrested in New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Ohio, and West Virginia.
What makes these workers “illegal” and other workers “legal”? Their only “crime” was to have been born years earlier on the other side of an artificial border. When they woke that Wednesday morning, they were no different from the rest of the working population.
They cursed the alarm clock and tried to sneak a few extra minutes of sleep—just like the rest of us. They showered, brushed their teeth, put on their work clothes, and bid their loved ones goodbye—just like the rest of us. And when they arrived at their jobs for another day of grueling and underpaid labor, they immediately began counting the minutes until the end of their shift—just like the rest of us.
But before the day could get going, heavily armed agents swooped in, put them up against a wall, frisked them, snapped handcuffs around their wrists, crowded them into police wagons and hauled them off to jail. Their “crime” was to have been forced by economic necessity to come to this country in search of a more decent living. In short, their crime was to have followed the capital stolen from their own countries back into the United States.
This May 1, International Worker’s Day, marks the second anniversary of the historic nationwide immigrant workers’ strike. On that day, millions upon millions of immigrant workers—documented and undocumented—flooded the streets with their supporters in small towns and large cities demanding respect for all workers.
These demonstrations constituted the largest collective protest in the country’s history. They stopped a particularly odious piece of anti-immigrant legislation—the “Sensenbrenner” bill—in its tracks. The terrified ruling class jumped into action, devising policies aimed at both pacifying the multitudes and protecting corporate profits.
But Congress failed to pass any legislation, and protesters were told that a sweeping reform was impossible without a Democratic majority in Congress. The demonstrations subsided.
Nearly 18 months of Democratic control of Congress have provided not one iota of change for the country’s 12 million undocumented workers. Since the 2006 protests, the daily abuse of immigrant workers has only intensified and the shameful raids have only become more frequent.
The Democrats cannot blame John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. He co-authored the leading immigration bill with Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy. And they cannot blame Bush, who would have supported the Kennedy-McCain bill had it passed Congress.
The achievement of full rights for immigrants clearly has little to do with which ruling- class politicians of which parties hold which offices. It has everything to do with mass action and powerful protest from the workers themselves. This year should not be another one filled with broken promises. The fighting spirit of May 1 must be revived.
