tags: Comunicados

The human and economic costs of raids begin to take hold

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Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:

While continued reports of Donald Trump’s immigration raids spread across the country, including in Puerto Rico, their human and economic costs are beginning to show their ugly face. 

In Idaho, a business owner we will call Marta, in order to not use her real name, opened a Mexican restaurant with her husband 26 years ago. Their clientele is white and Latino, especially Mexican people, that come from a dairy farming community, where mostly undocumented people work — many who have lived decades in the United States, have citizen children, and have established lives.

On Tuesday, January 21, one day after Trump’s inauguration, Marta’s clientele began to shrink.

“Lunch is from 11:00 to 1:30 or 2:00, and it’s always full. But at that time, it was mostly white people. In the evening, very few people came in. Not even one Hispanic came. The following day, at night, more or less the same thing happened,” she indicated.

“We realized that there were many takeout orders and just one person came to pick them up,” she narrated. 

“The people are afraid of going out because they think that they are going to take everyone. In social media, they say that they’re going after criminals, but the people believe that while looking for others, they too can be detained. These are people who have children and are afraid of being separated from their children,” she added.

NBC reported that at least half of those detained in just one day of operations had no criminal history.

Marta fears that ICE is  racially profiling community members, and does not believe that people like her are U.S. citizens.

What Marta is narrating has happened before. When states like Arizona and Alabama implemented their anti-immigrant laws, SB 1070 in 2010 and HB 56 in 2011, respectively. The measures sowed terror not only in the immigrants in the states but also among their citizens and authorized resident relatives.

Parents stop sending their citizen children to school for fear of being detained and separated from those children; they stop going to the doctor—despite being sick—with the risk of creating a health crisis; they stop going to the supermarket, pharmacies, and other businesses—with a devastating effect on the economy. They stop working in the fields, leading to the loss of crops and disrupting the food chain, increasing the price of goods. They stop working in construction, caring for children, the elderly, and homebound people; in manufacturing; and in hotels and restaurants. This is already happening.

What’s worse, Marta points out, is that these very dairy farm owners voted for Trump — a person who now wants to deport their workers.

“If all of these raids begin, there are going to be dairies without workers. The night that Trump won, the restaurant was full, and one of the owners of the dairies told me, ‘We all came to celebrate that Trump won.’ It made me so sad. One of them has an undocumented manager; if they deport him, what will happen to the dairy?” Marta asked.

Just this past November 11, the CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, Rick Naerebou, said on CNN, “We absolutely cannot survive without an immigrant workforce… Americans don’t want these jobs.” Idaho Press reported that there are 35,000 undocumented people in Idaho, and 86% work in key industries like agriculture, construction, and hospitality.

Let’s underscore the analysis of Robert Lynch and Michael Ettlinger, of the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Of the 11 million undocumented people, 8 million work, which represents 5% of the U.S. workforce. They comprise 22% of all farm workers, 15% of construction workers, and 8% of all workers in the manufacturing industry. The loss of those workers would be devastating to the U.S. economy.

Marta added that at one of the local supermarkets, some employees wear Trump MAGA hats and Trump shirts. Marta’s daughter recalled that that same business has expanded its variety of Mexican products, aware that they are their clients. What’s ironic is that they voted for someone who will deport their customers.

Marta’s daughter has a cafeteria and her clientele has also diminished.

“It makes me sad and angry that families are afraid. That they have been here for many years, working hard, and that they call them criminals when they are people who just want a better life. They don’t even have a traffic ticket, and sometimes they are the first to be taken, the first to be deported,” concluded Marta’s daughter.

The original Spanish version is here.