So Mexicans are taking jobs from Americans

Posting a few links to stories about the recent raids on factories near
Boston employing illegal immigrants and the detentions and family
break-ups that ensued. Similar bullshit has happened and is still going
on in Australia, where the government remains under heavy criticism
from Amnesty International, UNHRC, and the international community
for its prolonged detention of asylum seekers. Other "developed"
countries also have refugee detention as standard policy and practice,
in the face of international humanitarian and refugee agreements as
well as domestic laws against such inhuman treatment.

Following the links is a poem written 30 years ago by Jimmy Santiago
Baca. How true it still rings today....

"Illegal immigrants are here to stay" (Boston Globe)
"Children Stranded after Immigration Raid" (SF Gate)
"Prison-like Conditions at Hutto Detention Centre" (ACLU)


So Mexicans are Taking Jobs from Americans
- Jimmy Santiago Baca

O yes? Do they come on horses
with rifles, and say,
                     Ese gringo, gimmee your job?
And do you, gringo, take off your ring,
drop your wallet into a blanket
spread over the ground, and walk away?

I hear Mexicans are taking your jobs away.
Do they sneak into town at night,
and as you're walking home with a whore,
do they mug you, a knife at your throat,
saying, I want your job?

Even on TV, an asthmatic leader
crawls turtle heavy, leaning on an assistant,
and from a nest of wrinkles on his face,
a tongue paddles through flashing waves
of lightbulbs, of cameramen, rasping
"They're taking our jobs away."

Well, I've gone about trying to find them,
asking just where the hell are these fighters.

The rifles I hear sound in the night
are white farmers shooting blacks and browns
whose ribs I see jutting out
and starving children,
I see the poor marching for a little work,
I see small white farmers selling out
to clean-suited farmers living in New York,
who've never been on a farm,
don't know the look of a hoof or the smell
of a woman's body bending all day long in fields.

I see this, and I hear only a few people
got all the money in this world, the rest
count their pennies to buy bread and butter.

Below that cool green sea of money,
millions and millions of people fight to live,
search for pearls in the darkest depths
of their dreams, hold their breaths for years
trying to cross poverty to just have something.

The children are dead already. We are killing them,
that is what America should be saying;
on TV, in the streets, in offices, should be saying,
    "We aren't giving the children a chance to live."

    Mexicans are taking our jobs, they say instead.
    What they really say is, let them die,
    and the children too.