[fhkatari]

I want to share a couple of stories of immigration.

1. Personal. In the aftermath of 9/11, a simple switch from F1 Student Visa to H1 work visa became a perfect Kafkaesque nightmare. The consulate denied the visa without giving a reason. After two months of non-response, my company reached out to the congressman's office. Apparently, the consulate wanted a copy of my transcript and they reached out to my university, but did not tell me that. The university would not release my transcript without my permission, but did not tell me that DHS was asking for it. It was an infinite loop that left me out.

2. In 2006-2007, I was consulting for Hormel Foods (this time with a legit green card). There was a raid at one of their plants, and I was talking to a couple of middle managers who commented how difficult the jobs are, and people only last for a short time. Only migrants are willing to do the job. I would later learn that meat packing jobs used to be unionized, and that put limits on the number of animals processed per shift. The deregulation of the eighties did away with unions and regulations, and created an untenable work situation. This can ONLY be done by disposable labor, which happens to be immigrants.

A simple solution to the immigration problem would be to arrest the CEO of the company employing illegals. Perhaps that will percolate down to the line level to make the jobs humane.

[_DeadFred_]

Imagine launching $75 billion dollar war on drugs where you didn't arrest drug dealers, only users. Yet the party of law and order and their supporters somehow aren't demanding these large scale abusers of employment law, and encouragers of illegal immigration be included in enforcement action. Really makes it look about racism more than smart/intentional/traditional law enforcement.

[array_key_first]

The right requires the machine in order to maintain their propaganda about bringing down the machine. They don't want to get rid of drugs, or undocumented people. They want to take undocumented people one-by-one off the street, so there's a constant "need" to continuously ramp up authoritarism.

The end of undocumented immigration would spell disaster for the Republicans, and they know that. For many red states, it would be literal economic disaster, even if we look past the messaging.

So it's flashy non-solution after flashy non-solution.