The Wall Street Journal has an article up that illustrates perfectly how Hair Twitler’s immigration policies are hurting small town America, especially those with an Ag based economy. Titled “Fiestas and Apple Orchards: Small-Town Life Before Trump: My corner of Pennsylvania was thriving again—until immigration agents began carting people away”, the piece describes what can happen when voters (in this case 66% of them) heed the lies of a demagogue who promises to deport “bad hombres”, rapists and murderers, but instead, simply because it is easier, concentrates on their friends, lovers, co-workers and neighbors who live here in the open and are an integral part of our economy.
“York Springs, known locally as “Little Mexico” or “Rednexico,” has a population of 800 or so, 46% Hispanic, according to the 2010 census. This, I daresay, is now inaccurate: If you made the population 1,100 and 70% Hispanic, you’d be nearer the mark. Many people came to Adams County as seasonal apple pickers, and orchards need tending year round, so they stayed. Some became orchard managers, and some started businesses: hair salons and restaurants, grocery stores and landscaping companies.”
The article’s author, Crispin Sartwell, goes on to fill out a portrait of York that over the years had seen a common problem of rural America, as it’s young people, eager to escape what they perceived of a dearth of opportunity in a town that produced jobs mainly in the orchards and canning plants, fled to the booming information age economies of cities like nearby Pittsburgh.
Industrious migrants workers filled the void they left, and began rehabbing the abandoned homes they left behind and creating new businesses — food trucks, restaurants, hair salons and the like that were boosting the local economy.
Then came Trump.
“Now, however, York Springs has become a target for immigration enforcement. Statistics by locality are hard to come by, but an attorney speaking at a community forum last month at the Adams County Agricultural Center said there were at least 15 actions in York Springs during February and March, with many more since, including street arrests and traffic stops that have resulted in detentions. People are held at the prison in the city of York, 25 miles down the road, and the phrase “they took her to York” has become the expression for someone who’s been taken into the immigration system.”
15 “actions” in a just a few months in a town numbering about 1,000 souls. And how many have fled, or are planning to, to avoid being sent to York?
“This stringent enforcement of immigration law is destroying a rich, new rural culture. It’s likely to destroy the economy, too. The orchards generate over $500 million a year, and, one way or another, most of the jobs. But the local growers, many of whom have been operating the family orchards for generations, worry they won’t have enough manpower this fall to harvest the crop.
Sure, a lot of the white folk out here voted for Mr. Trump. Even then, many of them had reservations specifically about his immigration stance. I heard them expressed by Trump supporters in line to vote at the Latimore Township building. Now as we spiral into a local depression that is personal, cultural and economic, a lot of them are going to regret voting for him anyway.”
Democratic candidates, in 2018 and beyond, must raise their voice against this misuse of Immigration and Customs Agents.
Instead of banning immigration from Muslim countries, which throws out the good apples with the bad, and picking off easy targets of opportunity in our hard working migrant guest worker communities, ICE Agents should be doing the much more difficult police work of identifying real threats to our safety and welfare.
When the next all but inevitable terror attack comes, we must have laid the ground work to question “what was the maladministration thinking, concentrating on rounding up peaceful workers, instead of investigating those who would do us harm?”
When the inevitable ask comes to grant the maladministration more powers to deal with terror, we must be ready to question “what they have done with the power we have already given them, except to waste it in the fruitless persecution of those who only want to work for a better life here?”