Yahoo News Undocumented Workers Will Help Rebuild Texas After Harvey
MISSOURI CITY, TEXAS-On the way up here, there was still high water on one of the state roads, so they routed us all through downtown Rosenberg, a small place bleached by the sun with faded billboards painted on the side of the brick buildings advertising kinds of soda pop that have long disappeared from supermarket shelves. For that matter, most of the supermarkets disappeared long ago themselves, replaced by chains and big box stores in which you can buy shotgun ammunition along with your big bags of popcorn. I stopped outside an antique store to listen to Secretary of Defense James Mattis say the following:
"Our commitment among the allies are ironclad. Any threat to the United States or its territories, including Guam, or our allies will be met with a massive military response, a response both effective and overwhelming. We are not looking to the total annihilation of a country, namely North Korea, but as I said, we have many options to do so."
Mattis, I thought, sounded a little too much like John F. Kennedy on October 22, 1962, when he went on television and told the nation about the missiles in Cuba and promised, "It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." I considered the possibility of renting a house in Rosenberg for a while until things settled down. It didn't look much like a prime target.
When Kennedy spoke, everybody hid under the bed for a couple of weeks. On Sunday, Mattis' remarkable statement only spent a few hours at the top of the news cycle until it was replaced by the story in Politico in which we learned that the president*was planning to do away with the DACA program, but not until stringing nearly the 800,000 people covered by the program along for six months. This combination of bad policy with gratuitous cruelty is the primary characteristic of this administration. It is just about the only example of consistency to be found in Camp Runamuck.
Trump has wrestled for months with whether to do away with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA. But conversations with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who argued that Congress - rather than the executive branch - is responsible for writing immigration law, helped persuade the president to terminate the program and kick the issue to Congress, the two sources said.
So, this is a policy decision that was left to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and it involves depending on the Republican congressional majorities to do the decent thing in the face of the party's fire-eyed, drooling base. I would certainly feel confident if I were one of the nearly million Americans who voluntarily handed over all my personal information to the Feds on the promise that it would not be used to send me back to a country where I don't even speak the language. Sunday was one of those days, I guess, when we can all be thankful that the country was rescued last November from the neoliberal cabal led by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Anyway, the DACA story resonated deeply in Texas. In fact, on the ground here, where at the moment you can find the rubble of houses and stores, the entire conversation about rebuilding from the hurricane is shot through with a sub rosa discussion about immigration, both legal and otherwise. It's an open secret that, here in the business-friendly environment of Texas, the building trades depend vitally on undocumented workers. Some estimates have undocumented workers accounting for as many as half of the construction jobs in the state. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, one study had as many as a quarter of the workers helping to rebuild Louisiana as being undocumented. The idea that such a massive reconstruction job can be done if the administration continues to carry out its general policy toward undocumented immigrants is almost laughable to the people in Texas who are most likely to be doing that work.
As for the subset of undocumented immigrants covered by DACA, the story for Monday was that of Alonso Guillen, a 31-year old DACA recipient who drowned when his rescue boat capsized last Wednesday. From the Houston Chronicle:
Alonso Guillen was a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which temporarily lifted the threat of deportation for immigrants brought to the U.S. before they were 16, family members said. His father is a lawful permanent, but his mother is still in the application process for legal status. Reached at her home in Piedras Negras, Mexico, across the border from Eagle Pass, Rita Ruiz de Guillen, 62, said she is heartbroken. "I've lost a great son, you have no idea," she said, weeping softly. "I'm asking God to give me strength." She said she hoped U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials would take pity and grant her a humanitarian visa so that she could come to Houston and bury her son, but she was turned back at the border. "When we are with God, there are no borders," she said. "Man made borders on this earth."
The outside world keeps knocking at the overwhelming context established in Texas by the event of this storm, demanding entry like people trying to get back to their flooded neighborhoods. But the outside world, including the Korean crisis and the cruelty of what's going on with DACA, is only allowed in if the outside world redefines itself in the merciless calculation of vast natural destruction. People are still being evacuated from certain parts of Houston, the way you would evacuate primary targets when a war breaks out. Parts of the highways are still riverlike. Life goes on and some of the tributaries are unspeakably tragic while others are unspeakably dangerous.
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