Posted by Helen on: 03.19.2007 /
My mother told me about this news story. From a Mar 7 Associated Press report :
NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Dozens of young children were stranded at schools and with baby sitters after their parents were rounded up by federal authorities who raided a leather goods maker suspected of hiring illegal immigrants, authorities said Wednesday.
[...]
Immigration officials said 327 of the 500 employees of Michael Bianco Inc., mostly women, were detained Tuesday for possible deportation as illegal aliens.
About 100 children were stuck with baby sitters, caretakers and others, said Corinn Williams, director of the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts. The state Department of Social Services found at least 35 children whose families were affected, authorities said.
“We’re continuing to get stories today about infants that were left behind,” she said. “It’s been a widespread humanitarian crisis here in New Bedford.”
The article continues:
Company owner Francesco Insolia, 50, and three top managers were arrested. A fifth person was arrested on charges of helping workers obtain fake identification.
Authorities allege Insolia oversaw sweatshop conditions so he could meet the demands of $91 million in U.S. military contracts to make products including safety vests and lightweight backpacks.
Investigators said the workers toiled in dingy conditions and faced onerous fines, such as a $20 charge for talking while working and spending more than two minutes in the bathroom.
From a New York Times editorial:
A screaming baby girl has been forcibly weaned from breast milk and taken, dehydrated, to an emergency room, so that the nation’s borders will be secure. Her mother and more than 300 other workers in a leather-goods factory in New Bedford, Mass., have been terrorized — subdued by guns and dogs, their children stranded at school — so that the country will notice that the Bush administration is serious about enforcing immigration laws. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of poor Americans, lacking the right citizenship papers, have been denied a doctor’s care so that not a penny of Medicaid will go to a sick illegal immigrant.
This was the Governor’s response to the raid:
An angry Governor Deval Patrick blasted federal immigration officials today for a massive raid at a New Bedford leather manufacturer that left dozens of children without caregivers.
from here
However, it seems that the Governor knew this was going to happen, well before the event:
Federal immigration agents first briefed senior members of the incoming Patrick administration about plans to raid a Massachusetts sweatshop that employed undocumented workers last December, days before Governor Deval Patrick even took office.
In the following two months, there were face-to-face meetings and conference calls between state officials and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to discuss the potential human as well as legal consequences of the planned roundup of laborers working illegally at the Michael Bianco Inc. leather factory in New Bedford.
Patrick himself was told in February that the raid would target the defense contractor that was using a largely undocumented female workforce to make safety vests for US soldiers in Iraq. Commissioner Harry Spence of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services was told a raid was coming several days before it occurred. The night before the sweep, Bruce Foucart, the ICE agent in charge of the operation, spoke with Spence to coordinate law enforcement and child protection aspects of the raid.
So, enough with the breast-beating pretense that the Patrick administration was blindsided by the stealth tactics of shadowy federal immigration officials. This is political grandstanding of the most transparent kind.
from here
As I’ve looked this news story up I’ve seen widely divergent opinions on it. Many have expressed concern about the raid victims. Many others have objected to all the concern over these people who are, after all, here illegally - here’s a typical comment from one of them:
Why then must I also foot-the-bill for those Mexicans (and others) that come here to the United States looking for ways to invade our economy, take seats in my children’s schools, use our medical facilities and take up precious housing at the expense of the taxpayers, of which I am one.
Thoughts, comments?
Comment by: Karen
1The schizophrenic immigration policies in this country are completely insane. And as long as the conversation is dominated by xenophobic people like the final commenter you quoted, there won’t be any improvement, I’m afraid.
What happened to those children is terrible. And I find it difficult to fault their mothers, who are risking everything they have so they can give their offspring a better life. Wouldn’t each of us do the same, if we were in that situation?
There are reasonable solutions to the immigration situation, but I fear that the politicians will never find the will to implement them.
Comment by: Doreen
2It’s another case of going for the easier target - those who are trying to build a better life - than those who bring them here as slaves.
It reminds me, although on a much more serious scale, of the cops in my old neighborhood, which was at the end of a dead-end road, who liked to cruise through and ticket people who parked facing the wrong way. This was much easier than finding rapists, murderers, drug dealers, etc.
Karen - I’d love to hear some of the reasonable solutions.
Comment by: Helen
3I’d like to hear about the reasonable solutions too, Karen.
Comment by: Karen
4Take away the incentive, in the first place. While there are good-paying jobs readily available in the U.S., and desperately poor people in Mexico and further south, the most ambitious, hard-working, healthy people will come here to work. No fence or border patrol agents will keep them out.
Actually enforce the labor laws strenuously and meticulously, so employers cannot get away with hiring illegal workers (and paying them diddly-squat and exploiting them).
This means that business owners will be put out. They will scream and holler. They will have to pay living wages to U.S. citizens to do the low-level jobs that illegals do now in much of the country. They will have to hire specially trained HR people to check and doublecheck documents. As a result, we will all have to pay more for stuff we buy.
Where there are jobs that U.S. citizens simply will not do, such as the physically demanding seasonal agriculture jobs and manufacturing jobs, there will need to be a program similar to the old brasero program that allows immigrants to enter temporarily if they are sponsored by an employer. Such a program, again, would cost money because it would have to be monitored so that these legal immigrants would not be exploited and would not overstay their time frames.
In conjunction with all this, we have to be realistic about the millions of people already here illegally. They aren’t going away. Their children are citizens, they’re in school, they have jobs, they have ties inside the U.S. There must be a way for them to legally earn a way in to our society and our economy. It’s not fair to the would-be immigrants who have been on waiting lists for years, I agree. But it’s just not practical to think they’re going to “go back.”
Meanwhile, we also need to do everything we can to strengthen the Mexican and central American economies, so that these people can find reasonably paying employment there, and won’t have the need to work here. Just a few thoughts, I’m sure there are plenty of other good ideas out there.
Comment by: jim henderson
5I think this makes complete sense
Comment by: Rachel
6Fire the current Attorney General and replace him with Karen!
Comment by: Karen
7Heh. ;-) The job may be opening up soon!
Does this mean I have to go to law school?!? Drat…
Comment by: benjamin ady
8I’m still not clear on … why we need restrictions on the entrance of immigrant workers? I mean what if we just allow anyone who wants to come to the U.S. and work for a living to come? That seems reasonable to me.
Comment by: Helen
9Karen, thanks - I’d love to see employers held more accountable. I don’t suppose they ever get whisked off somewhere in the middle of the day leaving their young children stranded.
Benjamin wrote:
I’d love to see the reasoned arguments against no restrictions since I don’t really know what they are and I’d like to. I’m sure there are plenty otherwise we wouldn’t make it hard for people from other countries to move here and obtain the right to work here legally.
Comment by: Doreen
10Karen wrote
I wish they would happen.
I lived in upstate NY from the mid 60s to the early 70s. Every year at the same time, the same families came to our area from FL, where they picked oranges, to pick apples. They were US citizens.
Part of the problem is not that US citizens will not do the type of work that immigrants will do. Part of the problem is that a living wage in the US is far above what immigrants will accept as pay.
Comment by: Karen
11How about stooping over all day picking strawberries, or lettuce, in the hot sun? I remember some years ago there was a big immigration raid at the height of the Southern California strawberry harvest. A lot of publicity resulted because farmers were frantic that their berries were rotting on the vines, and they put out a widespread call for harvesters.
A group of unemployed U.S. citizens showed up the next morning, eager to take on the job. None of them lasted past noon. The work is so terribly grueling, they simply refused to do it.
The other thing that never gets mentioned is that even agriculture workers have a lifetime of hands on training for the work they do. They know instinctively when a berry is ripe and when it needs to stay on the vine a couple more days. The average American, who never sees food outside the supermarket, doesn’t have what is really a developed “expertise” - although it’s not an expertise that is valued monetarily.
That’s for sure.
Comment by: Mike Clawson
12Exactly! These are the real criminals. We should be punishing those who exploit others, not those who are victims of that exploitation.
And to answer that Republican’s question:
Because you’re a human being first and an American taxpayer second.
Besides, if we weren’t spending over half our budget to invade other people’s countries, we’d probably have plenty of money to help the poorest of the poor in our own.