The Shadow
Dear Editor.
So we have a new national industry; the mass deportation of non-Americans.
But the irony is that we actually need many of the people we are now deporting, to do the jobs they were doing before they were grabbed and locked up. Entire industries (construction, agriculture, health care) are losing large chunks of their workforce. Companies and businesses are losing money because work is not getting done.
Countries and societies tend to see a rise in xenophobia (the fear and dislike of people from other countries) when they face immigration pressure, and here in the U.S. we have lots of both. Our politicians now talk loudly about the criminality of undocumented immigrants (gangbangers, rapists, murderers, the worst of the worst!). We cheer the construction of vast new incarceration facilities and approve the spectacles shown us; of violent arrests carried out by plainclothes agents wearing masks, lines of shackled people stumbling off airplanes to be shoved into foreign hellhole prisons. We justify this by telling ourselves what bad people they are, though many of them were friends and neighbors, valued members of a community.
And we’re gonna carry through on it…while a study underwritten by the United States Department of Justice shows that violent felony crime offense rates for illegal immigrants are less than one half that of U.S.-born citizens (data from the state of Texas). Have we met the enemy, and he is us?
I have a feeling that when future Americans look back at this point in our Nation’s history, it will not be with pride.
Steve Metzler
Hot Springs, VA
