Marguerite Telford
National
Public Radio’s This
American Life promotes anti-immigrant propaganda
By Eric London
13 December 2017
On December 8, National Public Radio (NPR) ran an episode of This American Life titled
“Our Town,” which legitimized workplace raids against immigrants and justified
tougher sanctions for employing undocumented workers.
The program’s host,
Ira Glass, is not a far-right talk show host, but a favorite of affluent
Democrats. His show has 2.2 million listeners.
The episode titled “Our Town” could very well have been aired
on Breitbart Radio. Couched in the language
of nationalist populism, the episode advanced an anti-immigrant agenda by
blaming corporations for giving jobs to immigrants instead of US citizens.
In the episode, Glass
describes Albertville, Alabama, a small town that is home to poultry processing
plants, as having been overrun by immigrants. It “got a flood of outsiders,”
Glass says, using the language of nativists to describe the influx of Latino
workers seeking employment in the poultry plants as “immigrants pouring in,” “a
ton of immigrants” and “tons of Mexican workers.”
Toward the beginning
of the episode, Glass gives airspace to Roy Beck, the founder of NumbersUSA,
which the Southern Poverty Law Center has denounced as part of the “nativist
lobby.” Beck has spoken before the white supremacist Council of Conservative
Citizens and is the protégé of the fascist anti-immigrant advocate John Tanton.
Glass uncritically quotes Beck while introducing him simply as “the founder of
a group called NumbersUSA.”
Glass then references the massive “SouthPAW” workplace immigration
raids during which hundreds of agents descended on small southern towns in 1995
and deported 4,000 workers. PAW stands for “Protecting
American Workers.” During the raids, immigration police dragged people out of
their workplaces, split them from their families and summarily deported them to
violent, war-torn Central American countries.
“The goal was to
create job openings for American workers by arresting lots of people at work
sites,” Glass says. “At the Gold Kist plant outside of town, workers cheered
when [immigration agents] arrived.”
This reactionary effort to present deportations as “pro-worker”
echoes the line of Bernie Sanders and the trade union bureaucracy. During the
Democratic primary election campaign, in an interview with Vox ’s Ezra Klein, Sanders
attacked open borders and free migration as “a right-wing proposal, which says
essentially there is no United States.” He added, “It would make everybody in
America poorer.”
This American Life’s producer, Miki
Meek, then interviews the immigration agent responsible for leading the
SouthPAW raids, Bart Szafnicki. This
American Life uncritically repeats his claim that the raids
did not go far enough.
Meek says: “Bart pointed out, there’s never been a serious
crackdown on employers. These raids were short-lived. The fines were low. The
chances of getting caught were small. Bart found it frustrating. Congress never
had the political will to go after the companies that hire undocumented
workers. There are congressmen who talk tough on immigration, but when INS went
after worksites in their districts, they told them to back off.”
Meek and Glass
criticize the corporations for being insufficiently tough on hiring immigrants,
citing a 1986 immigration reform law that prohibited companies from
interrogating their employees to discover their nationality.
Glass says these laws
were too lax on employers who hire immigrants: “In 1995, Congress, in a very
practical, bipartisan way that we almost never see any more, decided that it
had to fix the problem and come up with a simple way for employers to tell who
is legal to work in the United States and who isn’t, to figure out who they
could hire… Senator Dianne Feinstein
warned, at the time, they had to solve this crisis now—of immigrants coming in
illegally and getting these jobs.” BLOG: FEINSTEIN IS AN ADVOCATE OF AMNESTY, OPEN BORDERS AND NO
E-VERIFY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. THERE ARE 15 MILLION LOOTING MEXICANS IN HER
STATE OF CA.
But these efforts,
Glass says, did not go far enough. “Obviously, they didn’t solve it. And here
we are today. A bipartisan commission called the Jordan commission considered a
bunch of solutions. One of the things
they ended up proposing was a national computerized system to check people’s
IDs, and make sure they were valid, and their social security numbers are real.
This is the system we’ve come to know as E-Verify.”
The reference to the Jordan Commission, led by Texas Democratic
Representative Barbara Jordan, is significant. The commission’s findings are
well known among immigrant rights advocates as the wish list of the extreme right. Breitbart praised Jordan
in an August 2017 article as “one of the
few Democratic politicians that believed in a pro-American legal immigration
system that ceased on inundating working class neighborhoods with low-skilled
immigrants.” The same article noted that the Trump administration’s
anti-immigrant program, including calls for expanding E-Verify, “has the same
tenets as Jordan’s recommendations.”
The Jordan commission
called for militarizing the border, massively increasing the size of the border
patrol, and blocking immigrants from receiving benefits and work permits in the
US. It is frequently cited by NumbersUSA and white supremacy groups like the
Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration
Studies as a model for mass deportation.
This American Life criticizes
E-Verify as insufficiently strict in stopping undocumented people from seeking
employment. Miki Meek says, “A study commissioned by the
government in 2009 found that over half of undocumented workers with fake papers—people
E-Verify should have caught—got a clean bill of health… So by the early 2000s,
you have all these undocumented workers not getting caught by E-Verify working
in the Albertville plants, which raises the central question you come to when
we talk about immigration—did Americans end up out of work because of it?”
NPR then gives space
to bureaucrats from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union to air their
dirty xenophobic laundry. One shop
steward, Martha, denounces immigrants for poisoning the atmosphere at the
plant:
ZOGBY
“In Mexico, a recent Zogby poll declared that
the vast majority of Mexican citizens hate Americans. [22.2] Mexico is a
country saturated with racism, yet in denial, having never endured
the social development of a Civil Rights movement like in the US--Blacks
are harshly treated while foreign Whites are often seen as the enemy.
[22.3] In fact, racism as workplace discrimination can be seen across the US
anywhere the illegal alien Latino works--the vast majority of the
workforce is usually strictly Latino, excluding Blacks, Whites, Asians,
and others.”
“[A]fter they’d [the
immigrant workers] been there a while, they kind of thought they owned it. And
there was more of them. You know, they kind of stay with their group, the
family, you know, like aunts and cousins. And just about all of them’s kin
somehow, you know? They started changing their attitude… You know, and it
started causing problems. We had quite a few fights in the break rooms. Then we
had them carried out to the parking lot, you know.”
NPR also interviews
the UFCW local president at the time, Joe Ellis. Ellis blames the immigrant
workers for reducing the bargaining power of the union because of their
unwillingness to pay union dues:
“And then when the
Latinos come in, that changed. And when that changed, then the bargaining unit
changed. Because we didn’t have any bargaining power.”
Though NPR presents this as legitimate, in actual fact the unions’
bargaining power was reduced not because of immigrants, but because the unions
are rotten, corrupt institutions that police the workforce in collusion with
the corporations. A 2004 press release from Kroger
supermarkets cites Ellis as praising a deal that the company boasted “will
provide wages and benefits that will allow Kroger to compete with other
retailers in the market.” Ellis praised the sellout as the product of the union
and the company “working together.”
Glass says there are
many factors behind the decline of wages for US-born workers, including
shareholder wealth, automation, lower unionization rates and trade with China. While Glass concludes that immigration is
not the biggest factor overall, he claims that immigration is to blame for
declining wages for undereducated workers in the region. He cites an economist
who “found that after 20 years of immigrants pouring into the area around
Albertville,” wages dropped “up to $1,200 per year, per worker. So it’s real
money.”
Meek then confronts a
white worker with these figures, telling her that she would be thousands of
dollars richer if it weren’t for the immigrants.
This American Life concludes the
show by referencing Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who, Glass says, is
“always talking about working people” when he “explains what he’s trying to
achieve by limitation.”
Implicitly backing
the fascistic propaganda portraying attacks on immigrants as a struggle against
the corporations in defense of American workers, Glass adds, “He barely sounds
like a Republican… says our system’s too biased toward corporations.” He
includes a sound bite of Sessions defending his mass deportation plans with
arguments about benefiting native-born workers.
On this final note,
Glass previews part two:
“Next week on our
show, we go into town to see what 6,000 newcomers cost taxpayers, and what it
was like to have all these immigrants who’d never driven cars before suddenly
on the roads not understanding what a stop sign is, and why a Latino business
owner told his friend to run for mayor on the platform of kicking out all the
immigrants.”
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