Ille­gal immi­gra­tion. It’s appar­ent­ly one of the key issues that moved the work­ing class elec­torate to vote for Trump, so I feel com­pelled to offer my two cents on the sub­ject based on my own thoughts and experiences.

“All of us assign blame in our own best inter­est — blame is rel­a­tive. So one of the most impor­tant func­tions in soci­ety is con­trol­ling the blame pat­tern. Why is it that [the work­ing class] assign blame down­ward to some wel­fare chis­el­ers down at the bot­tom, ​“Tryin’ to get a lit­tle some­thin’ for noth­in’” — and they nev­er assign blame upward to a hand­ful of big-time chis­el­ers who get a whole lot of some­thing for doing noth­ing at all?” -Utah Phillips, labor activist and folk singer

It’s not a ter­ri­bly well kept secret to any­one who has ever trav­elled across Iowa and passed the heavy nox­ious air of a hog con­fine­ment along the inter­state, that Iowa has more hogs than peo­ple. It’s always been that way. The Mid­west I call home has long been a bas­tion of all things agri­cul­tur­al; of corn and beans and hogs and cat­tle, and all of the indus­tries that spawn from them.

In the 1970’s, long before we had round­ed up all of our free range pigs and chick­ens and crammed them into huge stink­ing cor­po­rate con­fine­ments, the Mid­west was also home to much of the nation’s meat pack­ing industry.

The indus­try had come a long way from Upton Sin­clair’s eye open­ing account of it in The Jun­gle too. By the late 1970’s the pack­ing hous­es of the Mid­west were almost exclu­sive­ly union­ized estab­lish­ments, and as the old men used to say, you had to wait for some­body who worked there to die and inher­it a job from them if you ever want­ed to get in on those good union wages and benefits.

While by no means rich, the meat­pack­ers of my youth were suc­cess­ful blue col­lar men and women. Their chil­dren went to col­lege. If they fished they owned boats. And if they were wise with their mon­ey, they even had a lit­tle cab­in down by a lake some­where. And then Rea­gan hap­pened, and PATCO.

It must seem to peo­ple out­side of the labor move­ment like we hate Rea­gan just because he was a Repub­li­can, or we are over­ly sen­ti­men­tal about a rel­a­tive­ly small group of 12,000 strik­ing air traf­fic con­trollers being fired and replaced by him. But that isn’t the case at all. In fact, the Team­sters and oth­ers actu­al­ly endorsed the man and in the grand scheme of things, PAT­CO was small pota­toes for orga­nized labor. What hap­pened in its wake how­ev­er, sent seis­mic rip­ples through­out the land that led to an anti-union tsuna­mi that labor has nev­er ful­ly recov­ered from.

There have always been strikes. Always. And there were always attempts by employ­ers to break them. Labor his­to­ry even tells us sto­ries of times when employ­ers would attempt to bring in strike break­ers from the deep south. And there are uplift­ing accounts from those same annals of for­ward think­ing orga­niz­ers and orga­ni­za­tions who orga­nized them as well.

But 1981 changed the rules of the game, and when meat pack­ing hous­es had strikes soon there­after, some CEO or com­pa­ny pres­i­dent got the bright idea of recruit­ing strike break­ers from the poor Mex­i­can coun­try­side. It was­n’t a par­tic­u­lar­ly nov­el idea for any era, but the dif­fer­ence is that in the 1980’s under a Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion, nobody said a word. Even the employ­ers were sur­prised. Over the course of the next decade, the entire indus­try fol­lowed suit and a pat­tern occurred that you could set your watch by.

Con­tract time would come up and the com­pa­ny would demand huge con­ces­sions they knew the work­ers would nev­er accept. The union would go on strike. The com­pa­ny would send recruit­ing agents to the Mex­i­can coun­try­side, and right out of the pages of John Stein­beck­’s The Grapes of Wrath, if they need­ed 500 work­ers, they would adver­tise for 5,000.

Overnight, Mid­west com­mu­ni­ties would be over­run with hun­dreds of Mex­i­can replace­ment work­ers. And just for good mea­sure, to make sure that no claims for old pen­sion promis­es hung over their heads, the com­pa­ny would shut­ter their entire oper­a­tion and reopen either across the street, or under anoth­er name in a cor­po­rate shell game. And nobody in the era of dereg­u­la­tion and Lais­sez-faire eco­nom­ics ever said a word about any of it or did any­thing to stop it. Fast for­ward anoth­er decade and they began call­ing them jobs that Amer­i­cans would­n’t do anyways.

Then, they start­ed show­ing up in oth­er indus­tries. When I came onto the scene as a con­struc­tion work­er in 1990, my Labor­ers Union Hall in Des Moines, Iowa had become the quin­tes­sen­tial mod­el of his­tor­i­cal irony, with Blacks, Irish, and Ital­ians all stand­ing arm in arm chant­i­ng about His­pan­ics that ​“we don’t want those fuck­ing peo­ple in our union!”

I saw them from a dis­tance. I eyed them on jobs across the street from mine with sus­pi­cion and con­tempt. We could feel the noose tight­en­ing on our abil­i­ty to pro­tect our work, and I could see the work­ers on sur­round­ing job­sites who were obvi­ous­ly to blame for it.

A num­ber of years lat­er I had my first real eye open­ing expe­ri­ence when two Span­ish speak­ers came into the union hall point­ing at a piece of paper. I called a Mex­i­can staffer I knew and he trans­lat­ed over the speak­er phone. The paper­work they were show­ing me were check stubs. There was a line for their pay of $7.00 per hour (union scale at the time was around $18). There was a line item for a deduc­tion for tools they were being charged to use they had nev­er received. And there was a line item for union dues being deduct­ed. Their pay after deduc­tions was around $4 per hour, less than the min­i­mum wage. A co-work­er had just fell and been seri­ous­ly injured and the com­pa­ny own­er dropped him off out­side the emer­gency room, returned to the job­site and fired the oth­er two.

They had believed that they were union mem­bers because they were being charged union dues. They had believed that the union could help them. They had believed that a nation as great as ours would help them. We could not help them. There were few pro­tec­tions for them under the law, and where the law had been vio­lat­ed, no gov­ern­ment agen­cies would pur­sue it.

This played itself out a mil­lion times around the coun­try. Wher­ev­er ille­gal immi­grants can be found work­ing, there are employ­ers who use them to skirt every labor pro­tec­tion. Female employ­ees are raped. Work­ers are cheat­ed. And work­ers are rou­tine­ly injured and killed. And no one ever talks about any of it. There is nev­er a thought giv­en to actu­al­ly pun­ish­ing the peo­ple who employ them. Ever.

Trump can build his wall, but so long as there are employ­ers seek­ing to prof­it, ille­gal immi­gra­tion from all nations will con­tin­ue to be a prob­lem. We, as Amer­i­cans, blame immi­grants for tak­ing our jobs. We blame them for using ben­e­fits that come out of our tax dol­lars (even if social pro­grams are only a tiny bud­getary sliv­er, and even if the major­i­ty of them pay into social secu­ri­ty for ben­e­fits they will nev­er be able to col­lect AND pay more in pay­roll tax­es than Don­ald Trump has in the last twen­ty years). And we even blame them for the ris­ing cost of health­care for those times their employ­ers dump them off at the emer­gency rooms.

But no one on the right or even the left ever talks about the one thing that could real­ly end the prob­lem. Imprison the employ­ers who import, hire and exploit these work­ers, and all of it would end. You would­n’t need to build walls (and good luck build­ing a wall in South­ern Texas with­out using immi­grants to build the thing any­ways). You would­n’t need an army of ICE agents sweep­ing into homes and busi­ness­es to round up and detain immi­grants. You would­n’t need any of it. Lock a hand­ful of employ­ers up, and all the rest would fall in line. The bor­der cross­ings would fiz­zle out and many of the peo­ple would leave on their own.

Drug deal­ers do cross the bor­der every day. ​“Bad hom­bres” come too. But the vast major­i­ty of the mil­lions who have made the dan­ger­ous and cost­ly jour­ney come in search of oppor­tu­ni­ties. Often promised oppor­tu­ni­ties. And I can hon­est­ly say that if my own fam­i­ly suf­fered for the want of the basic needs of life and my chil­dren and grand­chil­dren went to bed hun­gry each night, and there were no oppor­tu­ni­ties for me here and some­one promised me a job with a good wage in Mon­tréal, that no wall would be high enough, no desert would be wide or dead­ly enough, to keep me from the oth­er side and the promise of some­thing bet­ter for them.

Want to make Amer­i­ca real­ly great again? Stop blam­ing the peo­ple who have no con­trol over the sys­tem and start look­ing at peo­ple who real­ly do.

In the para­phrased words of Utah Phillips, ​“The world [as we know it] is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”