Rancho La Luna

Sam Seders web site is down this morning. That's a real shame. Today's topic covers an issue I'm very passionate about - so I'm posting references to his story. This is about institutionalized racism.

Sam discussed the recent cruel ICE raids on the Swift & Co. Meat packers around the country. This story is not about illegal immigration. It is about racism. It is especially cruel because of the affect it will have on the primarily Christian children who are being separated from their parents over this "Holy" Christian holiday.

First of all America has a huge illegal immigration problem. It impacts our sovereignty, homeland security, wage disparity, *cough* food security.

It does not produce a noticeable economic drain or historically relevant social phenomenon. When the Cato institute says it, who really wants to argue the point? Oh, yeah,yeah, I forgot bigots want to argue about it.

But that's isn't what the ICE raids are about. I'm saying it's about institutional racism not immigration.

We are not following policy fairly with these raids - No charges had been filed against the company. - per AP. Instead we are forcing people to stand in a line by U.S. immigration agents. Non-Latinos and people with lighter skin were plucked out of line and given blue bracelets. This is clearly just racism. Cruel racism:

Women were crying as they were handcuffed with plastic ties and put on the buses. Some weren't allowed to get their belongings from their lockers. Maria, who declined to use her last name, argued with an agent because she was getting the coat for her 34-year-old niece, Blanca, who was arrested.
''She [the agent] told me, 'Do you think it's going to be cold in Mexico?' '' Maria said, holding back tears. ''I've never seen people get treated como animales.''

Contrast that reality with this mental masturbation:

We can calculate the gain to U.S. GDP due to immigration, known in econ parlance as the immigration surplus, using a simple formula that is a function of three things:

• The importance of labor to the U.S. economy

• The size of the immigrant labor inflow

• The change in U.S. wages due to immigration

Even this discussion seems intellectually trite. Do these people know how irrelevant these discussions are?

What about the new form of slavery? What about indefinite detainment? What about wage disparity? What about homeland security? Why does it just reek of racism? This is not the American way. I believe the whole Immigration and Customs Enforcement organization needs to be re-engineered until they figure out that people are not animals.

Unnecessary cruelty and unfair application of the law, well that's just plain racism. American citizens harassed at work because of their skin color - now that is the definition of institutional racism.

You can still hear Sam's show here: Full Show: Play | Download (today only)