Nearly 600 immigrant workers were swept up in a massive Aug. 25 raid on a factory in Laurel, Miss. It was the single largest immigration raid in U.S. history, surpassing the previous record set this spring in a Postville, Iowa, factory sweep.
|
ICE temporarily released 106 detainees for what officials called “humanitarian” reasons, including illness and childcare needs. Eight workers have appeared in federal court in Hattiesburg, Miss., facing criminal charges.
“Most of the families are not leaving their homes because they are afraid,” said Rev. Ken Ramon-Landry of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Hattiesburg, referring to the families of detainees. “It’s just horrific,” said Victoria Cintra, of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance. “We’ve got a woman who is 24, 26 weeks pregnant, and she’s got a husband, brother and brother-in-law who were detained.” (New York Times, Aug. 26)
The raid is part of a multi-purpose U.S. government campaign to isolate and repress undocumented workers. One purpose is to drive the undocumented even further underground, making them susceptible to greater exploitation by greedy bosses.
Another purpose of the campaign is to make it harder to organize workers and foster solidarity across national and ethnic lines. They want to make it more difficult to improve conditions for undocumented workers, which would benefit all workers, regardless of nationality or immigration status. The bosses will do everything they can to whip up racism and blame undocumented workers for a crisis caused by capitalism.
Bill Chandler, founding executive director of Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, explained that one of the motivations behind the raid was to destroy unity among Black and Latino workers. “We believe that that is one of the reasons that there has been so much focus on xenophobia in political campaigns in the South, and particularly in Mississippi, and this may have been a factor in the decision to go after these workers in Jones County, Mississippi.” (Democracy Now, Aug. 28)
The Laurel school superintendent said that approximately half of all Latino students were so terrorized that they were absent from school the following day.
Howard Industries has shut down production after losing three-fourths of its workforce. A local pastor, Roberto Velez, said 30 to 40 percent of his parishioners had been arrested in the raid. (AP, Aug. 27)Immigrants come to this country looking for work when their own economies are destroyed by neoliberal trade agreements forced upon their native countries by the U.S government. Scapegoating immigrant workers divides the working class and serves the interests of the banks and corporations represented by agencies like ICE.
Working to build multinational working-class solidarity among all races and nationalities is the answer to such ruling class divide-and-conquer tactics.
