Refugee Resettlement Watch is mostly about reforming legal immigration, but the largest US illegal alien roundup in Mississippi recently caught our attention because the minors arrested were turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement here.
But as Judy wrote a few days ago, these immigrants are taking jobs Americans will do and the last place I would expect to read that is in the Los Angeles Times.
In an article “Immigrant raid divides Mississippi town,” yesterday reporters tell us that black workers cheered as illegals were rounded up:
LAUREL, MISS. — Fabiola Pena considered running away from her factory job when she realized she was being targeted in a federal immigration raid. She was deterred when she noticed the helicopters hovering overhead.
But helicopters were not what shocked Pena the most on her last, fateful day at Howard Industries, the largest employer in this small Southern town. It was the black co-workers who clapped and cheered, Pena said, as she and hundreds of other Latino immigrant laborers were arrested and hauled away.
Then the Times tells us that under an Obama or McCain administration these crackdowns may be stopped because both candidates are soft (The LA Times doesn’t say ‘soft’) on immigration.
If the next president decides to curtail or end raids similar to the one at the Howard Industries, it will not sit well with many residents of Laurel. The raid was welcomed by a number of native-born residents in this manufacturing hub of about 25,000 people that has been transformed in recent years by the influx of Latino workers, many of whom are undocumented.
“They need to go and do this in every little town,” Tonya Jackson said.
Jackson, who is black, said that over the years she had applied numerous times for a job at the locally owned manufacturer, which employs about 4,000 workers. Jackson, 30, said she never received a callback. The raid, she said, was a welcome purge of illegal Latino laborers who had taken jobs they didn’t deserve.
It doesn’t matter if you are a white small town American or a black one, the unfairness of businesses giving jobs to immigrants with the government’s blessing is a time bomb waiting to go off. And, most Americans looking for work are NOT GOING TO MAKE A DISTINCTION BETWEEN LEGAL AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS.
We have written about the growing tension between black Americans and African immigrants here and here (follow links back within those posts for even more on the topic). This is not about race!
And in South Africa it’s not about xenophobia! It is about people wanting only to provide for themselves and their families and being threatened by unbridled immigration.