Today is a day of protest. I am very aware of how often I write political stories on my blog. I know that for the three weeks I was traveling, I hardly wrote anything political as I was engaged in my travel experience. But now I am back here not traveling and faced with the realities of life in these United States in times unlike any we have seen since the 60s. I was too young and too absent from the scene in the 60s to really feel the civil unrest that characterized much of the decade. I know what it was about and I understand the flashpoint created by the war in Vietnam, but those protests were mostly a case of action and reaction. The protestors were reacting against what they perceived as an unjust imperialistic action by the government in a part of the world where we had few immediate economic interests and less justification for being there. And then the reaction by the government to protests that came about was really about property rights by owners that were suffering under the destructive forces of the mob. To be fair, there was a strong undercurrent of racial inequity which had bubbled up during the Civil Rights movement and that was strongly connected to the anti-war movement by virtue of the conscription bias that favored drafting those from lower socio-economic status, especially racial minorities. The point is that the grievances were real and the actions were less preemptive than reactive. That seems very different from where we are today.
The part that is not so very different is the racial undertones. We may not be in the midst of the George Floyd riots, but with all the deportation issues it’s hard not to feel like the racial issues are not far from the surface. What does seem dramatically different is the preemptive nature of the actions being taken by the government. I can’t be certain, but I don’t recall in the 1960s the government troops were ever sent in to action against civilians based on a concern about what they might do as opposed to what they had done. In other words, it seems considerably different to send police in to stop looting versus sending troops in to stop looting…which is even more different from sending troops in to keep people from protesting. And it is considerably different to send troops in to corral and possibly deport people who are illegal aliens versus deploying troops (police, National Guard or, worse yet, active duty military like the Marines recently sent into Los Angeles). I understand that some of the Trump administration narrative likes to distort the truth enough to suggest that things are less preemptive and more reactive, but that is less and less believable. The same credibility issue surrounds the reality of who is being put upon by these troops. What started as an attempt to round up the criminal element among the illegal alien population as gone radically astray. It’s morphed from criminals to suspected criminals to fictionalized criminals to begin with. Then, it has gone from illegal aliens to legal aliens and documented aliens who have legal residency status, to the children of aliens who have lived in this country their whole lives or perhaps were even born here. There is now a challenge to both birthright citizenship and a denigration of “anchor children.”
“Anchor children” is a politically charged term used primarily in U.S. immigration debates to refer to children born in the United States to parents who are undocumented immigrants. The term suggests that these children serve as an “anchor” that helps their parents remain in the country or gain legal status. The concept is based on the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants automatic citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil (birthright citizenship). Critics of current immigration policy sometimes use this term when arguing that undocumented immigrants have children in the U.S. specifically to gain immigration advantages. Having a U.S. citizen child doesn’t automatically prevent a parent’s deportation or grant them legal status. Parents can still be deported, and the citizen child would either have to leave with them or remain in the U.S. with other family members or guardians. While U.S. citizen children can theoretically sponsor their parents for legal status, they must wait until they turn 21 to do so, and the process can take many years with no guarantee of success. Many immigration advocates and scholars view “anchor baby” or “anchor children” as derogatory language that dehumanizes children and misrepresents the complex realities of immigration law. The term really reflects broader debates about birthright citizenship, immigration policy, and family separation in the United States.
And now we are seeing a strange reversal of sorts. Through intensive lobbying by the farming and hospitality industries, Trump seems to have awoken to the reality that immigration matters to those businesses. Agriculture has the highest concentration of undocumented workers of any industry…even more than food processing. Approximately 40-45% of all U.S. agricultural workers are undocumented immigrants. More specifically, as of 2020-2022, about 42% of hired crop farmworkers held no work authorization. Among crop production workers specifically, about 36-37% are undocumented. While this is a longstanding general condition, it is even more so today. In 2017, around 14.2% of agriculture workers were estimated to be undocumented immigrants, indicating that the recent growth is quite meaningful. The hospitality sector has a significantly lower, but still substantial, share of undocumented workers. In 2014, undocumented immigrants made up about 9% of the leisure and hospitality workforce. Nearly 1 million undocumented immigrants work in accommodation and food services, approximately 8.4% of all workers in the industry. Nationwide, immigrants (both documented and undocumented) make up 22% of the hospitality workforce with difficulty in sorting out who is or isn’t properly documented. Overall, undocumented immigrants account for about 5% of the total U.S. workforce , making their concentration in agriculture particularly notable. Despite comprising just 3.3% of the U.S. population, undocumented immigrants represent 4.6% of the country’s employed labor force. The agriculture industry’s heavy reliance on undocumented labor reflects broader challenges in attracting domestic workers to physically demanding, often seasonal work that typically pays lower wages than other sectors.
But now Trump is starting to draw back from his mass deportation programs that hit those two sectors. His comments are laughably ironic. He has suggested that it would be wrong to deport people who are hard-working contributors to our economy just to have those jobs then risk being filled by necessity from the ranks of criminal illegal immigrants. It’s interesting that it does not occur to him when he says this that if his focus were truly on deporting the criminal element that he so likes to highlight and exaggerate, there would be none to take these jobs that are being freed up by his mass deportation policies that are attacking the non-criminal and perhaps even legal part of that immigrant population.
This is a sad place for the world and especially for the United States. In some ways, Palestine/Gaza are today’s version of Vietnam in the 60s. Israel’s preemptive attacks on Iran’s nuclear capabilities is at least understandable even if not totally justified, given the proxy attacks by Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houtis. No one is lying (think WMDs) about the fact that Iran is working hard to try to give itself a nuclear capability or that that represents an existential threat to Israel, given the longstanding narrative from Iran that Israel needs to go away. That sort of Israeli aggression is bad enough in a delicately balanced Mideast. But seeing the land of the free and home of the brave proactively stifle dissent by militarizing what would otherwise be considered normal protest is unfathomable. Throwing out due process in favor of some sort of faux national security interest undermines the whole foundation of the American principles of freedom and justice. The confluence of authoritarianism and disinformation (trending to outright deception) are the basis of the civil unrest we are seeing growing day by day. And the worst part of all of this is that there is little or no ideology behind any of it. It is pretty much all just showmanship like the big bad military parade in D.C. yesterday. Scratch the surface and you find that it holds up only until some constituent screams about the economic impact, which is when the chickening out takes place. Where economic interest pushed for government action in the 60s, now it pushes for an end to government action. Trump may have unearthed the strongest version of civil unrest that exists…economic unrest.