I wish I had hard facts for this diary - all I have is a story I heard yesterday from a family member living in western North Carolina. This individual is involved in the construction industry, and lives in an area famous for its Christmas tree farms. This week, the INS has staged several raids on illegal workers at these farms, just as their season is at its peak.
The INS has swooped down on at least one farm known to my source, and they netted several dozen men working to cut and prepare the trees for the coming Christmas tree sales season. Local "legal" workers won't take these jobs, as they are typically low-wage and labor intensive. As per usual, no "American" is losing their job to an illegal immigrant.
Other INS tactics are currently including using the local sheriff departments to set up road blocks to look for illegal workers returning home in the evenings. Luckily, someone on the inside got the word out to a local hardware store (where the contractors pass through several times a day), so the word got out. Several contractors told their workers to stay home (some with pay, some without) if they didn't want to get rounded up. My family has offered to bring food to their co-workers so they don't get picked up on the roads. There are rumors that they went to local schools to pick up kids as well - but these appear to be only rumors.
So, why post this on D-Kos? It should be fairly obvious. Now that the Democrats have wrested the power back from the Republicans - can we please get a reasonable, humane, and just immigration policy? Forget the dumb fences - let's meet Bush in the middle and see if there is any value in his proposed guestworker program.
Who are these workers hurting? As has been shown time and time again, NO ONE is losing a job to them. Who benefits? Well, the county in the story above is small enough that those missing workers (and their paychecks) will be sorely missed immediately, financially speaking. It's an area with a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart wiped out nearly every store within a year or two of their opening day. It is now the only place to get practically anything, including groceries. Let us estimate that the illegal workers are dropping, oh, $100 a week in there. Multiply that times 40 - the number of men scooped up in one raid. That's $4000 a week missing from the local economy. Multiply that times the number of raids they're carrying out this week. Even at one a day, this county is now missing $20000 in revenue, in taxes on goods and services, and in productivity. Tree farming is a typical extraction industry: low wages and low returns on the goods sold. I can't wait to see what they'll have to charge down in Charlotte or Raleigh for their trees this year, given that most of them are still in the ground back in the mountains! Get ready for $200 trees, urbanites!
Are these raids only going on here, or does anyone know of any big sweeps going on in their area? Does anyone out there know what might be going on right now - i.e., why raid now?