By HOLBROOK MOHR
Associated Press Writer
LAUREL, Miss. –
The largest single-workplace immigration raid in U.S. history has caused panic among Hispanic families in this small southern Mississippi town, where federal agents rounded up nearly 600 plant workers suspected of being in the country illegally.
One worker caught in Monday's sweep at the Howard Industries transformer plant said fellow workers applauded as immigrants were taken into custody. Federal officials said a tip from a union member prompted them to start investigating several years ago.
Applauding as your fellow workers are arrested - their only crime to sneak into this country hoping to provide for their families?
One person snitching is one thing. Other people complacent, I could understand. But standing there like someone who has no clue what his or her own real place is in the world - with no clue that the bosses only distinguish between workers to the extent that they can get away with screwing some of them more than others - with no intuition born of long, hot days, let alone historical knowledge, that workers have always been helpless when disunited - and banging your hands together like a buffoon, as if they were doing all this for you? As if your birthright were being reclaimed, when your status as a wage slave is simply being confirmed?
In Mississippi, things used to be all black and white - literally. If you were white, you could speak out; if you were black, you kept your head down to stay alive. Mind you, if you were white and you didn't agree with any of this, you were well advised to keep your mouth tightly shut.
Immigration, on any sizable scale, is a pretty new thing in Mississippi. Like most of the South, it historically received far fewer immigrants than the rest of the country. But historically, and still today, it has the highest percentage of African-Americans in the country.
Despite that, it's one of the most Republican states, because the whites vote so overwhelmingly for the party of Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.
It wasn't always like this. Back in the days of the one-party Democratic South, Mississippi was the second-most Democratic state in the country (after South Carolina). This started changing in 1948, when Truman came out for civil rights, but as late as 1960, no Republican presidential candidate had secured even 40% of the vote in Mississippi since 1872 - back during Reconstruction, when Black people could actually vote.
Then came 1964. Lyndon Johnson was running for reelection after shepherding the historic Civil Rights Act through Congress, banning most forms of racial segregation and discrimination. The Republicans nominated Senator Barry Goldwater, who had led the opposition to the bill.
Johnson won 61.1% of the national popular vote - the highest percentage since they started tabulating a national popular vote in 1824. Goldwater got only 38.5%.
In Mississippi, however, Goldwater got 87% of the vote.
Now, bear in mind that in those days, black people pretty much couldn't vote in the state. Because of literacy tests and other laws designed to disenfranchise them, administered by racist registrars, plus the ever-present threat of violence, the black registration rate in Mississippi was only 5%.
Johnson, after winning his landslide reelection, got the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. Black voter registration stunningly went up to 70% in time for the 1968 election. Democrat Hubert Humphrey got 23% of the Mississippi vote - almost all of it from blacks - while segregationist George Wallace romped to a landslide victory with 63.5%. Richard Nixon, en route to the White House, came in third with a mere 13.5% of the Mississippi ballot.
The Republicans have been winning the state ever since, presidentially, and, more recently, on the Congressional and state levels as well. They can't get 87% of the vote any more - the Voting Rights Act saw to that. In the delta region along the Mississippi river, where African-Americans have been the majority population since slavery days, most local offices have passed from ultra-racist whites to blacks since the civil rights movement. But statewide, racist, Confederate-sympathizing whites can still outvote anyone of a different hue or persuasion.
1 | 2
www.newsince.com
Michael Lubin served on the first democratically elected governing board in the history of KPFA, the nation's oldest listener-sponsored radio station. There, he was a founding member of the pro-democracy listeners' movement People's Radio. Although a Ph.D. student in History of Culture at the University of Chicago, he perversely insists on living in California. He is known variously as Nuisance Man, Caveman, Lubejob, the Dialectrician, and "Hey, you bozo with the long hair!" He blogs, or something like that, at newsince.com. He also highbrows at dialectrics.com and fictions at thenoondaysun.com.
| 7 comments |
|
I am a conservative independant. I believe in the Constitution of the United States. |
Illegal Dude!!! What part of illegal do you not understand? First of all Bush loves illegals, he is the reason they run rampant in this country. The only reason that ICE is doing anything is because "We the People" demanded someone do something to stop this theft of jobs for cheap labor. Now you can accuse Bush of favoring Big Business, because he does, all his buddies want to make billions on illegal cheap labor. I don't know what friggin planet your from, but maybe if they take your job away and give it to some dude that has no legal reason to be here, you might change your mind. Americans first and foremost, everyone else only if there is something left, which there isn't at the present time. by
Jay Timmins (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 105 comments)
on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 4:10:15 PM
|
|
Mississippi "divide and conquer" I'm against slavery. When these plants are raided no management is every arrested and prosecuted for holding slaves. Illegal immigrants are the new corporate slavery. The corporations figuered out how to make the slave transport themselves by offering them jobs through patrones ! I live in Las Vegas NV. and have watched for over 25 years the importation and abuse of these illegal alien slaves . It sells radio and Tv time for people like you to bemoan the treatment of these poor slaves. But you never speak out against the slave masters who bring them here and abuse them ! Poor southern African Americans are hurt the most by the new slaves brought here illegally ! by
A VET (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 4 comments)
on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 7:27:27 PM
|
|
|
slave masters "But you never speak out against the slave masters who bring them here and abuse them !" Maybe you didn't click through to the second page of my article, where I say: As in the rest of the Deep South, wages are low and laws privilege corporations over workers with a Victorian savagery, with few of the nuances of job safety, state minimum wage laws, and organizing rights seen elsewhere in the country, however inconsistently. Unions are profoundly unpopular among whites, because of memories of strikes carried out by overwhelmingly black unions - and because unions can only function when ALL working people, black, white, brown, or otherwise, band together. The whole point is that we need to stand up to these slave-masters. by
Michael Lubin (16 articles, 2 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 48 comments)
on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 7:46:33 PM
|
|
The author is a very "with-it" old lady who aspires to bring a bit of truth, justice, and commom sense to a nation that has lost touch with its humanity in the search for societal "perfection". |
Question How does one break laws "non-criminally"? How can we claim to be a "nation of laws, not men" when we wait to decide what the law is until after it has been broken? How is it decided who can break a law and then be forgiven because of their identity or their reason for violating the laws of THIS land? We of the leftish persuasion are fond of saying, when it regards Bush and Company that "no man is above the law". Can we say now that there are those below it who are immune from its punishment? I have no personal animosity to anyone because of national origin but I have been imbued with a respect for the laws of our nation which have, to date, done a fair job of maintaining an orderly society. Can we then throw open all the doors to all comers for whom "our laws mean nothing" and expect to retain our national identity and security? These are questions that should give any person who is concerned with the welfare of our nation cause for contemplation. by
Mary Pitt (66 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 190 comments)
on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 6:40:07 PM
|
|
|
not my point Legally speaking, entering this country illegally is not actually a crime, though it does of course subject one to deportation. I don't have a problem with enforcing the law, but it seems to be done through mass terror and ethnic profiling. Anyway, my point in my article isn't that the immigrants should have been there, assuming they're really undocumented -- which we don't even know, and why should we trust the feds? My point is the stupidity and inhumanity of workers reacting this way to their own colleagues, who they worked side by side with, being rounded up this way. If workers don't unite across national and other boundaries, they're powerless. by
Michael Lubin (16 articles, 2 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 48 comments)
on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 7:22:04 PM
|
|
|
Standing Up to Corporate Slavemasters Amen Brother! I agree with you wholeheartedly. I can understand how the "other" workers feel though. It's just a shame that people (as usual) put MONEY ABOVE HUMANITY however. I don't care how many illegal aliens were working beside me or even instead of me, I could never clap and stand idlly by and watch men and women of any race or country, legally or illegally, being rounded up like cattle and sent back to a desert to die. I know a Mexican man who works hard and came here for the sake of his family when he finally realized that he couldn't support a family of six on $15/wk. in Mexico. Now his family can eat and live without fear except for the fear that someone here might harm or kill him for his job. Come on people! There is a right and a wrong way to do everything. And don't you know the corporate "slavemasters" are more than likely white and will get away with it by paying some kind of meager fine amounting to a "slap on the wrist"! It's true. It all goes back to the "minimum wage" being too low for the millions of "indebted" Americans and too high for the spoiled corporate execs! As long as they can afford huge million dollar homes and three cars, "Blood Diamonds", furs of helpless animals, fake boobs, and plastic surgery...to hell with the "average Joe and Jane"! And, nevermind the Immigration Department! What? They are so overloaded and understaffed and saddled with an antiquated immigration system that all those illegals who only want a little trailer to live in and food to eat and enough money to send home to their parents and kids so that they don't starve to death...they're happy. In my opinion, either the whole immigration system needs to be overhauled or the corporate "slavemasters" must be heavily fined and jailed. Now we know neither one of those things will be done unless the poor people of the world and the declining middle class of America stand together and demand reform of the minimum wage and health care for everyone or be willing to just lay down and vote Republican again! And, in Mississippi they probably will. Why? Because poor whites are struggling to survive in this country just like poor blacks and who are they going to blame for this? Not the system and not the corporate "slavemasters"...NO, they will blame the next person down the rung of the monetary ladder: the illegal aliens who can do nothing in their country but live in starvation and poverty or come to the "land of the free" and risk death to do it. Can anybody put themselves in another person's shoes? It really is time for a change! Who knows what to do about it? Maybe it really is Obama. One thing for sure: it's not McCain. I'm not smart enough to suggest how it should be done but I am smart enough to recognize a "whipping boy" when I see one...and it's not the selfish people of this world or the rich who get richer. It's the the poor and downtrodden just as it was 200+ years ago when the first pilgrims fled Europe for the very same reasons and came here seeking a decent life. by
O'Terry (2 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 14 comments)
on Friday, August 29, 2008 at 3:31:34 AM
|
| 7 comments |
|
||||
|
||||||||||||||
Must Read (
Well Said (
News (
Touching (
Funny (
Supported (
Interesting (
Inspiring (
Valuable (
