5. Immigrants

I follow immigration issues regularly, but the COVID lens is shining new light on things. This is not about immigration policy, but immigrants, the people who now show up regularly on our TV screens.  

The most notable have been health care workers—doctors and nurses peer from behind masks and guards, oftentimes exhausted after a hard shift or a difficult death, their names and faces labeling them sub-Saharan African, Indian, Pakistani, Central European, or South American. Send them back?

The most tragic have been meatpacking plant workers. Cheek by jowl in factories, crowding out of the places as the virus stalks them, back into the factories as the president deems them essential and tells the plants to reopen. In Fast Food Nation, in 2001, journalist Eric Schlosser followed the conversion of meatpacking from a semi-skilled job that paid enough to a factory assembly line that paid little—and put workers on the line with limited, dangerous tasks to perform in limited time to produce maximum profits.

When one moving part in the line breaks down, there are others to replace it—no training required. New immigrants, especially undocumented ones, make perfect workers. Without English, it’s harder to complain of sickness or injury. Without citizenship papers or a green card it’s harder.

But when a virus gets loose, and dozens of worker-pieces are damaged, the machine breaks down. The Washington Post said yesterday that over 11,000 workers in over 30 closed plants have been sick. Today a local rancher told me how hard it is to move cattle through this restricted system, and had heard rumors of new breakdowns at restarted plants. Hard on growers—and meat eaters.

And as half of all agricultural workers in the US are new immigrants, we might watch what we say about the people who are keeping us fed—and healthy.

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