The controversy surrounding Fresno City Council Member Miguel Arias and his comment about a possible ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raid on a flea market last month is further evidence of the hypocrisy of many people’s behavior regarding migration.
Migration is a global and historical phenomenon. Thousands of people migrate from one region to another for reasons such as the search for jobs and to escape violence. This has been happening for hundreds of years.
Today, migration is at the forefront of narratives by racist and “nativist” individuals and organizations. Immigrants are easy targets when it comes to blaming people for economic or social problems, especially if these immigrants are non-white, speak a different language and/or have a different culture.
Historically, the United States has rejected Irish, Chinese, Italian, Filipino, Armenian and Mexican immigrants. The list is long. Laws have even been passed to exclude people from certain countries—China, for example.
Immigrants—with the exception of those who are wealthy—arrive in a new region or country to work and almost always take jobs that the locals don’t want. An immigrant who doesn’t find a job will likely continue their journey to another region or return to their point of origin. Who wants to stay in a place where there’s no work, where there’s no future?
Today, Americans don’t want to work in the fields or packing plants. Yet, those industries need workers. And where will they get them? Many companies conduct recruitment campaigns in Mexico. Workers from China and the Philippines were once similarly solicited.
The key point is production. Productivity. Work. Those who work in the fields, packing plants, hotels and restaurants are mostly immigrants, and most are undocumented.
These workers want proper documentation, but laws put in place by legislators who hate immigrants for racial, cultural or ideological reasons make it nearly impossible for these workers to obtain such documentation.
Moreover, keeping them undocumented creates a social underclass: people who produce, who work for low wages in jobs that no one wants and who, because of their “undocumented” status, are afraid to demand their labor and human rights.
Also, there is fear that if these workers obtain their documentation, they will leave their low-paying jobs. So they must be kept undocumented.
These immigrants not only work and produce but also pay taxes, even though they cannot receive benefits such as unemployment or Social Security. By law, people without legal residence cannot collect these benefits even if they have paid for them, nor can they receive, for example, food stamps.
So the narrative that immigrants come to benefit from Social Security or any other social program is false.
As farmworkers grow old and can no longer work, they lack income and almost always end up depending on their family, while the politicians who passed laws to keep these immigrants at the lowest rung of society receive excellent pensions and benefits.
According to a recent Fresnoland report, one of the owners of the Cherry Auction flea market has donated money to Donald Trump’s campaign and other Republican candidates. Today, Trump is pursuing an immigration deportation policy with a clear excess of violence.
Cherry Auction is another business that benefits from immigrant-related business activity. The conflict is that Arias’s comment about a possible ICE raid on the market led to a drop in sales due to the absence of many vendors and customers.
Instead of getting angry at Arias, it would be much more productive to open a broad debate about the importance of immigration and the economic, social and cultural contributions of these people who leave their homeland and families to work hard, contributing to the development of regions such as the Central Valley.
The narrative against immigrants only generates more ignorance and, precisely, hatred.
Till next month.
