An editorial in the New York Times yesterday compared Postville, Iowa’s current immigration debacle to The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. A similar story woven together by Sinclair from the experiences of Eastern European immigrants working in Chicago slaughterhouses - sadly for the present day comparison - was published 102 years ago.
Sinclair depicts a world of second class citizenry, where hard work can get one killed and homes are easily repossessed, while votes are bought and paid for by corrupt local officials. I recently lamented the similarities of this book to the present day woes of poverty and immigration and it dawned on me that the immigrants described in The Jungle were legal. Legal! Can you imagine that if treatment of legal Eastern Europeans 100 years ago was as bad as Sinclair describes it, how terrible it must be now, for illegal immigrants, with darker shades of skin?
Does anyone still read Times editorials? Because they actually do tend to say things that are good, even true, which is a lovely change of pace from the rest of the paper on most days, when I’m consumed with everything that’s not been printed about a subject.
By treating illegal low-wage workers as a de facto criminal class, the government is trying to inflate the menace they pose to a level that justifies its rabid efforts to capture and punish them. That is a fraudulent exercise, and a national disgrace.
Slavery still exists. The only differences now are the terms used to describe it. So where is our Sinclair? And what are we going to do about it?
