"What America Owes its Illegals"

Some might be surprised that I'm posting, and agreeing with, a Barbara Ehrenreich piece in The Nation but . . . this short piece is worth reading, I think.

The "immigration issue" is (warning:  hopelessly unhelpful bromide approaching) difficult, and complicated; reasonable people of good will can, do, and will disagree about immigration policy.  One is not a racist or nativist simply because one worries about border security or cultural assimilation; one is not a corporate tool or a multi-culti-world-citizen simply because one thinks that America is enriched (culturally and otherwise) by immigration.  With that out of the way, this bit from the Ehrenreich piece grabbed me:

All right, they committed a "crime"--the international equivalent of breaking and entry. But breaking and entry is usually a prelude to a much worse crime, like robbery or rape. What have the immigrants been doing once they get into the US? Taking up time on the elliptical trainers in our health clubs? Getting ahead of us on the wait-lists for elite private nursery schools?

In case you don't know what immigrants do in this country, the Latinos have a word for it--trabajo. They've been mowing the lawns, cleaning the offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to mention all that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and poultry-plucking.

The punitive rage directed at illegal immigrants grows out of a larger blindness to the manual labor that makes our lives possible: The touching belief, in the class occupied by Rush Limbaugh among many others, that offices clean themselves at night and salad greens spring straight from the soil onto one's plate.