Immigrants Becoming Citizens versus Temporary Workers: The Community of Wholeness

My lazy day of eating too much and watching videos on YouTube turned into a worrisome amount of information about at least some in Homeland Security and ICE, and an American agricultural program referred to as H-2A visas. This left me with deep concerns about what is occurring in my country, greater concerns than I’ve had about just ICE and Immigrants. 

I first watched an ICE raid on a market, Glenn Valley Foods, in Omaha Nebraska. Although several other news stations did a report, reporter Ali Bradley for News Nation, was given exclusive rights to report and film the whole event. Toward the end of the report Bradley interviewed the owner of Glenn Valley. The owner, Gary Rohwer insisted that he had verified all of his workers as legal. He stated that the workers were like family, and he just could not believe that they were undocumented. 

 However, Rohwer stated “Well I understand there’s a program we can work with Homeland Security and we can get visas from them along with a list of employees that we can interview and the ones that we want we give them a visa and its squeaky clean. And Homeland signs off on it.” I found this statement strange—how could Homeland Security give out visas in that manner. 

Later in the day I watched another video. People Breaking Immigration Law are not who you Think, which I did not realize was going to explain a lot about the first video. It was about the H-2A program and how it was affecting both local farm workers and those immigrants who were given visas to work in the United States. The video is produced by More Perfect Union, and it explains how the H-2A program is being used by some corporations to not hire local workers, (against the law) and the misuse of temporary migrant workers. There is suspicion that it is also being used to do away with any migrants seeking citizenship. 

Some of the complaints of local workers is that the agricultural corporations fire them and wait to hire temporary migrant workers. The temporary workers have many complaints. Poor crowded housing, long work hours without overtime, insistence that they pay for their travel expenses which is also, under the program, against the law. Probably the biggest problem is they cannot ask to stay in the United States-they will.

 If this program is being used to place Mexico and other countries, with brown skinned peoples outside of American citizenship, then it well become racist for several reasons. The owner of Glenn Valley Food kept saying that his workers were family and mentioned that they had families there. In other words, they were part of the community—This is the better idea for our country. To make farm workers less than members of our community and in some ways almost slaves is racists.

 Antonio de Lorea-Burst, communications director with the United Farm Workers, states in the video, “Theres a very nightmarish vision of the agricultural economy that effectively sees the entire labor force being composed of guest workers who are permanently excluded from citizenship who are denied basic labor rights and I think they see this moment as an opportunity to get closer to that.” 

 The President has even encouraged the farm workers to go home and then apply for a workers visa.

 Today a friend on Facebook reposted a comment by Trump: 

“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace. In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!" 

I think this is simply another setup to remove immigrants and replace them with temporary workers who will have no rights and will not be a part of our communities. They will be outsiders who we will use to make sure we have plentiful food. But they will not contribute to our schools, our church communities, our gatherings as citizens. We will be less than we should be and if we are Christians we will sinfully contribute to the dehumanization of others.