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What the War on Terror Has Done to Texas

By Mary Jo McConahay, Texas Observer. Posted September 25, 2006.


The number of National Guard expected to serve on the border in the next two years will reach into the tens of thousands. Yet Bush insists, "The United States is not going to militarize the southern border."
092506story
What the War on Terror Has Done to Texas

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Under the night sky an armored skybox lifts its sleek head from the sand and rises into the air on hydraulic legs, jerking into place like some monstrous desert insect. At the controls, a 21-year-old Texas National Guard soldier packing a 9 mm semiautomatic sidearm watches a gray-toned screen, where figures tracked by a night-vision camera appear from behind a mesquite bush, duck behind it again, then materialize once more, moving north toward the Rio Grande. The soldier, recently returned from Iraq near the Kuwait border, watches alone in the air-conditioned box. He's looking for illegal border-crossers, just as he searched out "the enemy" -- the object of military reconnaissance -- in the other desert. From this height, an irrigation canal winds slender and graceful as a rivulet below, under a half-moon that gives just enough light to confuse the naked eye about what it might be seeing in the distance. People? Animals? Iraq prepared him for this mission, the soldier says, with experience in "staying vigilant, alert."

Later, on the ground, the soldier's partner emerges from a white vehicle parked on the canal road, packing his own Beretta, wearing a couple of ropes of extra ammunition around his neck. Will he have to use the weapon? The soldier, dressed in camouflage, stands in the dark with a million stars behind him. "I doubt it, but if I have to, I'm prepared," he says.

Five years after the events of 9/11, this is what the war on terror looks like on the West Texas border. During a rare, prime-time television address to the nation in May, President Bush announced Operation Jump Start: the deployment of 6,000 Guard troops from San Diego to Brownsville, an increase in Border Patrol personnel from its current strength of 12,000 to 18,000, and "bringing the most advanced technology" to the border line, including the kind used in Afghanistan and Iraq: more infrared cameras, motion sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles. Because of rotations, the number of National Guard expected to serve on the border in the next two years will reach into the tens of thousands. Yet Bush insists, "The United States is not going to militarize the southern border."

But the terror war here is not just marked by the coming of soldiers. It's a campaign marked by elements of low-intensity conflict, or LIC. That is the same doctrine, codified during the Reagan administration, which shaped U.S. assistance to Central American countries in the 1980s. Areas were militarized to control local populations while insurgencies flared. There's no insurgency here, but there are drug runners and unlawful immigrants. LIC includes military deployment, such as that of the Guard, and paramilitary presence, like the Minutemen, but it's more. It's a doctrine that blurs the lines between civilian and military, and between local and federal authorities. It's a doctrine that calls for militarization in the name of national security, turns civilians into suspects, puts rights at risk, changes the air, uses fear as a tool of control.

In San Elizario, a town near the skybox, neighbors often come over to Ray Carrillo's on afternoons when they want to drink a beer and shoot the breeze, and lately to talk over the change in atmosphere, a feeling like the coming of war. They call Ray Camaron, either because he was red as a shrimp when he was born "or because I'm real short." It's not just the soldiers they talk about. Citizen militias like the Minutemen-a local one is called the Border Regulators-have appeared. And they talk about the sheriff. From January to June, the El Paso County Sheriff's Department jumped the firewall between local and federal authority, setting up Operation Linebacker blockades in colonias and towns like this one, asking even U.S. citizens who looked Mexican to present papers.

Late in 2005, Gov. Rick Perry initiated Operation Linebacker "to increase both public safety and national security," distributing $10 million to date to 16 border sheriffs' departments. Perry's Linebacker is a politically mindful, "get-tough" stand, taken while immigration is exploding as a national issue. It plays well to voters who can be convinced that we have "lost control" of the border. But the cost can be high. El Paso deputies detained 860 undocumented persons under Linebacker in the first half of 2006, many with deep roots in local communities, and turned them over to the Border Patrol. Rights monitors claim public safety is being undermined because residents have become more afraid to call law enforcement for any reason, out of concern they will be asked for documents. Arguably, the air of mistrust also crimps any search for bona fide terrorists, work that depends greatly on community policing and intelligence. Not every sheriff's office in the coalition uses Linebacker funds the way El Paso does. Local enforcement chooses how grants are spent. Yet Linebacker's motivator statewide is national security, central to its drawing power for funds, and it's the kind of sanction that gives a green light to local law enforcers to become de facto federal law enforcers.


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Mary Jo McConahay is an independent journalist and contributing editor for New America Media.

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2 Points
Posted by: NoPCZone on Sep 25, 2006 12:39 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
1- As long as the economic causes are still there, the border will be breached by a- people seeking to live and work here and b- mules moving drugs. The mishandling of both drug & immigration policy by the US has made the border a whack-a-mole game. No fence and no amount of troops/guards we can deploy will stop it.

2- As to Ft Bliss. The author speculated as to the relocation of thousands of troops to Ft Bliss when so many bases were being closed. It has nothing to do with border security.

Ft Bliss was kept open and expanded under BRAC for a number of reasons and it's proximity to the border is not a major one. Ft Bliss is one of the largest chunks of real estate the DoD has for training and maneuver anywhere in the world. Replicating it's size and constructed facilities would be almost impossible. It is also adjacent to White Sands Missile Range, also an Army installation with lots of room for training. Combined, they make an irreplaceable national resource for military training.

The increase of troops/units assigned to Ft Bliss is NOT related to the border. When the US decided to pull tens of thousands of troops out of Europe and Asia they needed to be relocated to the US. Few other US installations had the capacity to absorb as large an influx of people. When you relocate units you are also relocating families, so moving 10,000 troops is actually like moving a small city of 30-40, 000 people.

Ft Bliss simply was one of a few bases that had the space, infrastructure, etc to accommodate a large influx of troops and their families. As it is, huge sums of money are having to be spent to construct family housing and other facilities to take care of so many people. Most other large US bases are either strapped for room or are located in remote & harsh climate areas (California desert, Alaskan interior, Utah desert) and lack the infrastructure to support such an influx. Converting these bases would be like constructing a mid-sized city from scratch from utility infrastructure to roads, schools, highways, housing and hospitals.

There is no ulterior motive in the Army's move of so many to Ft. Bliss. It was simply the most cost and time efficient move that could be made. For once, someone in Washington got it right.

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» Speculation Posted by: YogiBear
» RE: Speculation Posted by: NoPCZone
freedom
Posted by: rsaxto on Sep 25, 2006 12:49 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The more any society is militarized the less freedom there is in that society and the farther away from democracy that society is. The war on terror is in reality a war on democracy and necessarily causes degredation of freedom and of constitutional safeguards. The Bushies are creating more harm than good and more death than survival.

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Immigration
Posted by: PoBoy on Sep 25, 2006 12:59 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Either we make Mexico government accountable for their lack of taking care of the PEOPLE,or we build a stupid and expensive KBR stone wall?
That's not a choice.
Every person on the face of this earth deserves to have a living wage. To eat. To have clean water and air. To get an education. To have a roof over their head. To take care of retarted people.
To be able to create. To be able to go to the doctor.
Or am I just another socialist a**hole ? Just wondering.

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» RE: Immigration Posted by: AlienSlave
» Re:Either Posted by: NoPCZone
» RE: e:Either Posted by: adp3d
» RE: e:Either Posted by: zedaker
» One half of the argument, overstated Posted by: eddie torres
» which is alot Posted by: AdamG
Somewhat misleading
Posted by: YogiBear on Sep 25, 2006 1:13 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Several things caught my attention in this article:

1. The attention to weapons and ammo that the soldiers use. Sidearms are hardly militaristic. You want the fear of God put into you by civilian-military forces, try crossing the Coast Gaurd sometime. They have sidearms, rfiles, riot guns, and heavy caliber mounted machine guns. And describing the Minutemen as paramilitaries is just absurd. Milita is more appropriate.

2. This article implies that since 9/11 the border patrol functions differently. But it gives no description of how the border patrol functioned before the War on Terror began. A before-after comparison would give us more understanding.

3. Soliders' referring to border crossers as "the enemy." While I don't like that either, pretty much every soldier and cop in the country semi-demonizes potential arrestees, whether they are guilty or not. Most cops I've known refer to people they arrest as "the bad guys." "We got the bad guy" or "we're here to catch bad guys." Soldiers tend to see things even more polarized, I imagine.

4. You wouldn't know it from the article, but the Guardsmen are there for support purposes only. To me, that reeks of failing to fund the law enforcment agencies that do the work. Time and again I hear right-leaning folks complain that the problem isn't gun laws, it's enforcment. The problem isn't immigration laws, it's enforcment. But guess what happens to virtually every enforcment funding bill that comes across their desks? Yep, kill bill. The GOP-controlled House of Representatives just finished blocking a bid by Democrats for a House vote on their bill to fully enact the 9/11 Commission's recommendations for securing America's borders. You know, securing ports and whatnot. So we get some fencing and soldiers, but not fudning for the border agents themselves. Classic.

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» Also, could compare Calif. to Texas Posted by: karma_ran_over_dogma
The poor are the enemy now ?
Posted by: mo1912 on Sep 25, 2006 1:30 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
What a sad and ugly world we are creating and its got nothing to do with "freedom " or "democracy "
The " haves "are going to hold onto what there is like grim death . The "have nots" are going to have even less if thats possable !

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LOL
Posted by: LMNOP on Sep 25, 2006 2:45 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
What were you expecting from a race of Klingons? Peace and love? This is the new American character: harsh, violent, xenophobic, hateful, ignorant, arrogant. Very pretty, no. Are you beaming with patriotic pride at what your country has become? They're just good boys having what my neighbor calls "a little Christian fun."

Texas again. Yee-haw!!!

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Same misdirection again and again
Posted by: lclark on Sep 25, 2006 3:42 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The national guard is a bogus ploy. More border patrol have been diverted away from bordord duties to guard the unarmed national guard.

The majority of citizens do not want mass illegal migrations. However, the current administration wants its north american union and wage suppression so they do pr stunts like assigning some national guard to the border.

The rich and economicly upperclass democratic senators argue humanitarian concerns to legitamize cheap labor and a future political force they can use to obtain political power. Is there a U.S. Senator from either party that is not a millionaire?

Exporting jobs, importing cheap labor ( not really controlling the border ), using the lives of citizens and wealth of the nation to enter bogus wars to get control of foreign resources is what is really up, and the end game is a north american union where the majority of are low wage slaves and the constitution is eroded.

This a a phony 'progressive' issue.

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every soldier on the border decreases labor supply and raises american wages
Posted by: rebel_pig on Sep 25, 2006 5:08 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
oh, but that's right. THe fakeLeft does not really care about the wages of the people who have to compete with illegal aliens. THe FakeLeft only cares about the rich and the yuppies. Gotta have that cheap labor, right?
So demonize as racists those who oppose mass immigration, right?

Damn fakeLeft traitors! Every soldier on the border decreases the labor supply by just a little bit and therefore raises wages by just a little bit. What a shame for your upper class fakeLefties that you might have to pay a little bit more at your favorite foo foo restaurant because the bus boy is now making 7.25 an hour instead of just 7 an hour. Oh, the horror!

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The SOLUTION
Posted by: sofla100 on Sep 25, 2006 5:43 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Look, dump NAFTA, pull-out of the stupidity of the Iraq war, and use some of the tens of billions saved to help Mexico out a little bit (ie, improving infrstructure, schools, etc.). What would we get? Illegal immigration would grind to a halt. The Mexicans only come here due to the severe economic plight of their country. That plight is a direct result in many ways of USA policies. We want our corporations to be able to use the cheap labor in Mexico, but we are all paying the price for it now, aren't we? That is why I don't like being so hard on illegal immigrants. I mean, if you aided and helped create the conditions for the crime in the first place, what gives you (the USA) the right to act like this now. But a solution is possible and the money is there. Shut down the unwinnable stupidity of Iraq now, use the money saved to really help people, and move forward in a positive manner.

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» RE: The SOLUTION Posted by: karma_ran_over_dogma
» Here y'go, wise guy. Posted by: sausage
» RE: Here y'go, wise guy. Posted by: karma_ran_over_dogma
» The wisdom of my latin barber. Posted by: Sojourner
» RE: The Good Old Days Posted by: Shehova
Evolution of Alternet illegal immigration stance
Posted by: karma_ran_over_dogma on Sep 25, 2006 5:57 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
1) anyone concerned about mass illegal immigration is a racist... 2) the immigration "crisis" is phony & doesn't adversely affect poor citizens (unless they are racist, in which case they deserve it)... 3) nothing can be done anyway... 4) but anything being done shouldn't be done... 5) it's all just a Republican distraction from Iraq... 6) although now there's speculation it's being conflated with Iraq/war on terror so now it affects citizen Hispanics, so return to #4...

Well, keep trying -- maybe something you cook up will convince the 70% or so of your readership that hasn't bought any of this so far. As for winning elections in the southwest and plains, obviously you have given up on old-fashioned stuff like that.

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» RE: Liberatrians have all the answers Posted by: karma_ran_over_dogma
» Breakfast ruined Posted by: YogiBear
» Not an either/or issue Posted by: YogiBear
» don't stop there Posted by: AdamG
How long til the guards hit the barrios?
Posted by: BeeGee on Sep 25, 2006 8:00 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
These pitiful attempts to prevent new border crossings really must be a pro-illegals PR effort, which we better hope goes no further. If the government gets serious about removing Latino illegals, those guards are going to be assigned coast to coast, north to south and the military takeover of the U.S. will be complete. Please lobby your Congressional representatives for a peaceful solution now! And work for a restoration of Posse Comitatus, a U.S. law -- still officially in force -- passed in 1878 to remove the Army from civilian law enforcement during the post-Civil War period.

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Bipolar Border Disorder Part I
Posted by: AdamG on Sep 25, 2006 8:47 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Borders are a thing constructed by humans minds. America, in a sense, suffers from bioplar border disorder. We, on one hand, construct physical borders which we try and maintain in some form or another and call sovereignty. On the other hand, we are deconstructing social and economic borders which we call democracy and free trade.

Ideally, when one sets borders, whether it's a family, town, city, county, state, nation, whatever you have a clear cut chain of command, or bureaucracy, that is accountable. When the area within a border is small, it is much easier to be held accountable. At a certain point, though, the area within the border becomes so large that consensus and accountability become difficult, and sometimes impossible.

Economies are constructed, in theory, as a way for people to interrelate to have our needs, physical and otherwise, met. Capitalism is an economic system that uses a medium of exchange, in our case money, to make transactions between entities possible. In nature, you have a similar arrangement with energy, minerals, nutrients, eetc. being the mediums for exchange. Problems in human economies arise when the system become so big that it is difficult for the entities involved (humans) to percieve of the system as a whole. As you limit what is knowable, you also limit what is accountable.

What humanity has done, is to construct a global economy, which in most cases recognizes no borders, and by extension, honors no sovereignty as sovereignty is wholly dependent upon recognition of it boundaries.

What this means for ordinary people, is that we have limited opportunity to exercise accountabilty over our economic systems. We have become wholly reliant upon a shrinking group of people to be accountable for our economy.

In regards to Mexico, this means many things. We destroy their domestic markets by dumping cheap agricultural goods on their markets. This means that Mexicans cannot contribute toward meeting their own needs domestically. That makes them dependent upon meeting someone elses needs and hoping that in doing so, they will have their needs met. This puts the power in the hands of those that are in the business of manufacturing and moving goods toward other markets.
This is a situation that is in effect world wide. We have delegated our power to a small group of people because we are not relating directly with each other to have our needs met. This same small group of people then exercise their given powers by controlling who runs our bureaucracies by limiting who can have the opportunity to be a part of the bureaucracy.

For Mexico, this means that government that is beholden to this small group of peoples is perpetuated and those that would make government be beholden to it's citizens as a whole, are either hampered or outright restricted from having the opportunity to do so. This keeps the corrupt government in place that continues to perpetuate the suffering of it's citizens possible. Any that try and seriously confront and challenge the situation will be deprived of even the smallest amount of opportunity to participate in the economy. This is what poverty truly is, is restricted participation in an economy. Most of the people of the world live in poverty to some extent. Some obviously more then others.

For the US, people in the world whose level of poverty has become intolerable, will see immigration here as their only opportunity to alleviate their poverty, to more fully participate in an economy.

By playing to people's passion by saying their boundaries are threatened, and by extension their sovereignity, we are distracted for the time being from trying to exercise our own right to the opportunity to more fully participate in our socioeconomic system.

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Bipolar Border Disorder Part II
Posted by: AdamG on Sep 25, 2006 8:55 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Until Americans exercise their rights and responsibilities over our own social and economic systems, we will continue to perpetuate poverty and suffer from all else that comes with it (illegal immigration, terrorism, exclusive political campaigns, rigged election, etc.).

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Lots of feelings, not many numbers
Posted by: eddie torres on Sep 25, 2006 11:06 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Does a progressive article need to be purged of all real world numerical and economic data to make it onto AlterNet?

Are progressives and liberals unable to process basic high school concepts like percentages, demographics, history, and geography?

Or do US reporters need more guts than brains to risk a real investigative report these days?

Tired of the feelings, ready for the bill.

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» Part 2 Posted by: Jesse
» lol jesse i like you! Posted by: zedaker
Metamorphosis
Posted by: Habaro on Sep 25, 2006 12:38 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
At the rate we're going, all this border security will inevitably be used to keep people in--not out.

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» RE: Metamorphosis Posted by: Coleman
A High Tech Maginot Line
Posted by: hotlipsin61 on Sep 25, 2006 3:11 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Efforts to halt illegal immigration (or broder crossings) has come down to this chilling aspect of "policing" the southern border: It'll only get worse if dead bodies are found in the Rio Grande and in the Gulf of California. Dead people have turned up in the forbidding Sonoran desert.
No matter what we do along the U.S.-Mexico border, we cannot distinguish between various civilian groups and federal agencies involved, giving it a warlike agenda and appearance.
We will send national guard troops south and assist them with all kinds of spy gadgets and military hardware. Civilian groups must resist the urge to kill these migrants. They are not granted a license to use force if things got ugly.
In our desire to employ a high tech Maginot Line south of the Arkansas River, we should remember that erecting a barrier to human movement only divides us. What are we afriad of?

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WHY THE BIG FUSS?
Posted by: sofla100 on Sep 25, 2006 3:19 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
"Illegal immigrants" work the jobs Americans won't take. Here in Florida, there is widespread panic fruit will rot on the vines now and farmers will lose billions due to a shortage of "illegal immigrants". Unemployment is low, the Bush economy means crappy wages, but "citizens" can do better now at McDonalds or Wal-Marts and with much easier working conditions. "Illegal immigrants" also pay milliions in taxes like Social Secuirty that they will never see. So, why the big fuss? And, this is without even considering how the USA has screwed Mexico in many ways and created the current problem. So, now we have eveyone from the police, to the military, to vigilante nut groups on the border, to keep out workers desperately needed in much of America.

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» Why not keep better track of immigrants? Posted by: karma_ran_over_dogma
Clinton Started The Militarization of the Border, Not Bush
Posted by: logansafi on Sep 25, 2006 4:32 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The Democratic Party glued Texas Observer wants liberals to believe that Bush has militarized the Border with his phoney 'war on terrorism'. While Bush has made things much worse, it should not be forgotten who started the militarization of this region. It was Bill Clinton and his agent, the despicable Democratic Party politician, Silvestre Reyes. They thought they would gain by outRepublicaning the Republicans on the immigration issue.

Reyes was made head of La Migra, and began the militarization process in the El Paso area, which was his home town. It was 'Operation Blockade', and later 'Operation Hold The Line'. What had been an area where many workers living in Ciudad Juarez commuted to work in El Paso, now became a zone of terror for the Hispanic working poor of this bi-national metro area. This operation by Reyes, became the model for Clinton's further militarization of other Border regions. The money flowed into La Migra, and the militarization of the entire Border picked up high speed.

One might also mention, that Clinton never put any real pressure on the Mexican giovernment to terminate the slaughter of young women working the maquiladoras of this region. And Silvestre Reyes was basically silent about this, too. As the border was militarized on both sides, this helped promote a generally high level of lawlessness everywhere. The stakes in the transport of drugs, prostitues, and workers grew higher, as the penalties grew worse. And now, areas like Laredo/ Nuevo Laredo have turf wars that make Al Capone and Chicago of that erea look like a kindergarden kid playground in comparison.

All the Texas Observer has to do, is to go back into their own back issues to review this issue. They will find that the Democratic Party started this witchhunt against Hispanics off, way before 9/11. And now the Border has been transformed into an increasingly unsafe zone for folks living there. National Security has gotten worse, the more the US has militarized our country's borders.

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Yes Clinton Also Failed on Immigration
Posted by: sofla100 on Sep 25, 2006 5:55 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Sometimes the Dems lionize Clinton when he really does not deserve it, immigration is such an issue. Clinton also supported NAFTA and the disastorous and violent "counter narcotics" approach in dealing with Mexico and South America which made things much worse. Swarms of DEA and the military were sent in. It only ultimately made the cartels stronger and more violent. The Dems never seem to learn that you cannot out do the Repubs. by taking the Repub. line and just stretching it. But now as a solution we are going completly the wrong way. Violence, troops, private militias will only result in innocent people being killed. A better solution is possible and I think improving Mexico and the Mexican economy is one way. If we can give $10 billion to Israel and hundreds of billions to Iraq, we can help Mexico a little bit. And not by just throwing NAFTA at them and trash like the IMF which are only US bankers that steal from them.

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All Politics!
Posted by: yellow on Sep 25, 2006 11:19 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The entire immigration issue is overblown! I have argued in the past that the current Mexican immigration rates that now cause so much furor are much less compared to the immigration rates which we saw in the mid to late 1990s that were the result of the dislocative effects of NAFTA. At the time we saw very little concern about immigration due to the fact that it was part of the NAFTA deal. Vincente Fox got Clinton to agree to a certain amount of immigration in exchange for Mexico adopting economic policies such as tariff reduction, financial deregulation, the removal of capital controls, and allowing subsidized US grain imports all of which resulted in foreign control of Mexico's economy. This led predictably to enormous amounts of outmigration to the US.

Mexican immigration to the US is less than one-fifth of total immigration here. It is dwarfed by waves from South and East Asia and Eastern Europe. When taken together with immigration from the Middle East and Africa we have over 80% of immigrants currently reaching the US. The jobs that are taken over are generally ones for which other Americans including other immigrants don't compete. This makes Mexican-Americans something of a "peasantry" that the US historically prides itself on never having relied upon for its agro-export agriculture and bottom tier jobs. It is interesting to note, as does cultural geographer Richard Walker in his excellent work, The Conquest of Bread, that the State of California never had a big Yeoman farmer class and was significantly integrated into the US economy at the same time it integrated into the global economy as an agro-export economy based on large-scale, labor intensive plantation style agriculture. Even before WWII, California was based on the export of a wide variety of export crops that it also supplied to the rest of the US market in great quantities. This trend continued and intensified after WWII. This is the historic basis for policies such as the Bracero Program and of the general pattern of northward migration of poor unskilled migrants from Mexico. The early integration of the Mexican economy with the US on a complementary but subordinate basis began with the "factories in the fields" that Carey McWilliams discussed in his work on Mexicans and the US economy and with the more recent development of the Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations (CAFOs) in the post-WWII era that fed such industrial markets as fast food chains and large national and regional supermarkets. This last development resulted in the ruralization of the once urban meatpacking industry which now is over 25% immigrant overall and pays on average less than half the wages once enjoyed by generally white unionized labor. Conditions have declined in the industry as well pushing meatpacking's industrial accident rate well above the national average. All this is the result of greedy US capitalists in an industry that has always tended to have much immigrant participation.

It is very easy to vent rage on impoverished immigrants and scapegoat them for problems faced by society overall. This is an ignorant and counterproductive was to deal with the problem especially for progressives. The strategy which would most help the working and middle classes of America is to embrace the immigrants and organize them as well. This is what the US labor movement had to learn 100 years ago. It would never have met with the success it began to enjoy in the 1930s and 40s unless it internalized this vital lesson. By embracing all workers in one big movement, the capitalists can no longer divide and rule. It also creates greater sympathy and openess in US society making progressive policies more easily received. This is the only way forward for US labor. Large immigration waves have always been the shot in the arm that the ailing US labor movement needs. The current situation is no exception. An injury to one is an injury to all!

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Quick response
Posted by: eddie torres on Sep 26, 2006 2:25 PM   
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Without dragging this out too much longer, the best thing progressives and liberals can focus on is "What is the economic cost of a xenophobic police state?"

When they focus on how bad they feel because they oppose a xenophobic police state, they lose elections.

If they translate the cost-per-victim of domestic murders and the cost-per-victim of the GWOT into taxpayer dollar terms, they may persuade more voters to support candidates who want to avoid grand expeditions into the valley-of-the-shadow-of-death.

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