Cactus, Texas Confirms Need For Comprehensive Immigration Reform
Today's Dallas Morning News has a thought-provoking editorial about the Texas panhandle town of Cactus, where approximately half the population is illegal, and most work at the Swift meat-processing plant.
The Face of Desperation: Cactus confirms need for reform
There's no reason to move to Cactus, a lonesome and woebegone Texas Panhandle town. There's not much there aside from a Swift & Co. meatpacking plant, where the work is nasty and bone-crushingly hard. But as The Dallas Morning News reported in a three-part series last week, the slaughterhouse draws thousands of workers from Mexico and Central America who come out of raw desperation. Town officials estimate that three of every four people living there are illegal immigrants.
Anyone who romanticizes the illegal migrant worker population should talk to Cactus officials. The town is chaotic and crime-ridden. There's drunkenness and drug abuse, robbery and prostitution, and fraudulent schemes that exist solely because illegal immigrants are easy targets for exploitation. Zoning and food safety regulations might as well not exist. Cops are overwhelmed. The rule of law is, in many cases, nothing more than a nice idea.
Lawlessness is intolerable.
So, round 'em up and ship 'em home? Do that, the plant closes and the town dies. Period. Does anybody really think Americans are going to be willing to relocate to this miserable hamlet, where, according to the News reporters, "most yards are dirt, weeds and gravel" - and to do so for grim, backbreaking jobs that pay little more than twice the minimum wage? Said a local preacher who ministers to the exhausted workers, "It is a job for animals."
But these are not animals. These are human beings who toil largely beyond the protection of labor laws, for employers who drive them to work harder and faster, putting cheaper meat on American dinner tables.
Grinding the face of the poor is also intolerable.
Whether you're a friend or foe of the lawbreaking migrants, it's easy to maintain opinions and an untroubled mind about the crisis when you don't have to live face-to-face with its complex legal, economic and moral realities.
Nothing about this crisis is abstract in Cactus. Cactus is reality. Nobody in Cactus can live in denial about the urgent need for comprehensive immigration reform to account for hard facts. We can't let Cactuses grow indefinitely. That this situation festers because America chooses denial is perhaps the most intolerable thing of all.
