Fred Sneesby - Observations on Culture, Faith and Politics

Deportees

March 12, 2007

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contracts out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

Woody Guthrie wrote the lyrics to this song, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” back in 1948 - it was later put to music in the 1950’s by Martin Hoffman – after a tragic plane crash in the Los Gatos Canyon in California. Twenty-eight Mexicans who were being deported and the four American flight crew members were killed. Guthrie was struck by the fact that in the news reports about the crash, the four Americans were named but the Mexicans were only referred to as “deportees” with no names. The fact is that only twelve of the twenty-eight were ever identified. They lie together in a mass grave in Fresno.

There are scores of renditions of this song; it’s a powerful song and worth taking the time to track down and listen to. It remains, unfortunately, topical.

This loss of identity is very real for those who are in the United States (or any country) illegally. Most go out of their way not to be known. I remember going to the burial of a young man many years ago; the name on his tombstone was not his real name. They live in unfamiliar places, perhaps under assumed names, pretending to be legitimate, cut off from roots and family and language and culture. After some years of living like this, there’s not a lot of identity left.

There is this level of personal suffering in the issue of illegal immigration; poor people working hard to better their lives but without a home except the one they would forgo even in the face of hardship and uncertainty. These struggles go on everyday among us and this is what Woody Guthrie zeroed in on.

There is another strand to the illegal immigration issue, however, tightly interwoven with the personal, that represents the historical background to the plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon and which reveals a huge piece of the immigration puzzle in the present day. It seems that in 1947, Mexico and the United States agreed that anyone who was deported back to Mexico but was then issued a temporary work permit could return to the United States legally and stay there for the life of the work contract. Employers would report their own workers to Immigration who would then deport them. Once in Mexico, those same employers would offer contracts to these workers who could then return to the United States legally. The airplane that went down in the canyon was carrying such workers.

I am not making this up. You see very clearly, then, the major driving force behind immigration policy and law. Workers. Cheap Labor. Probably from the 1830’s, policy and law have been crafted by the needs of industry or the requirements of labor unions, whether that be manufacturing, construction, or agriculture.

If you study manufacturing in Southern New England, you will take note of the flight of textile companies to the south. The same factories that were magnets to Irish, Canadian, and Italian immigrants moved after the war to the Carolinas and elsewhere below the Mason-Dixon line to find cheaper labor. Then they moved further south to the islands and to Central America. While these companies were relocating to less expensive labor markets, others decided to relocate the workers and bring them here. The huge wave of legal Puerto Rican immigration in the early 50’s was engineered to solve a labor shortage. In Rhode Island and nearby states, specialty manufacturers and jewelry makers came to employ many workers who were not in the country legally.

So, in addition to the personal elements of the immigration issue, there is the fractured history of U.S. immigration law and practice that must be understood to address the pressing immigration problem today. These two elements: the law with its own logic and the human consequences of the law cannot be separated in public discussion and policy-making if we are to get the immigration thing right.

Illegal immigration is on my mind because last week there was a major raid by Homeland Security on a factory in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The owners and managers were arrested and three hundred sixty-one workers were detained for being in the country illegally. A public upset has ensued. It seems that a majority of the workers were women and a good number of them were primary caregivers to children who suddenly became abandoned when the mothers were taken away. State and local officials are still scrambling to find a fix.

Was this the just and right thing to do? Remember, both the personal and the legal must be taken into account. Some groups just react to the human consequences and call for a return of all workers and a wiping out of the legal action. Others pretend that broken families are collateral damage that can be disregarded in order to enforce the law. Both are wrong. It is more complicated than that and no one wants to deal with the complications.

A first step is to recognize how complex the matter is, much more complex than even these two principle aspects of the immigration issue that I have mentioned. A second step is to admit that U.S. immigration law and policy have been capricious and almost reckless. They have been poorly conceived and even more poorly enforced. The fact that there are over 12 million people here illegally is a result, not of foreigners brazenly breaking the law, but of the carelessness of the U.S. government for generations manipulated by business owners and labor unions. Any blame, punishment, and correction must follow upon this admission. Thirdly, we need to solve this sooner than later. Too much is at stake, not the least of which is the fate of families who are suffering like those in New Bedford.