Transcript

(drumming)

I'm Keith Olbermann, and this is The Resistance.

First they came for the undocumented Americans,

and I did not speak out because I was not,

you knew that original speech from Pastor Martin Niemoller

from the late 1940s, and you knew you heard

the first few letters of the first word

of the confession of eternal guilt and regret

as they began to echo over the last long weekend

in Southern California, in Atlanta, in Austin,

in other places, and you knew that ICE,

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, may have said

there was nothing unusual about the roundups,

and yet you also knew that the Barbarian in Chief

could not resist boasting about the truth

and making liars in the process out of his gangs

of deportation stormtroopers.

And you knew that he would say something like,

the crackdown on illegal criminals is merely

the keeping of my campaign promise.

Gang members, drug dealers and others are being removed.

Others?

Like the mother of two Americans, teenagers.

She's been living here since she was 14.

She checked in annually for eight years

with her immigration officer just as they told her to.

Each time receiving work authorization,

until last week when she checked in with them

and they seized her and drove her to Mexico.

Gang member?

Drug dealer?

No.

When she was originally arrested she was part of the

cleaning crew at an Arizona waterpark.

Her name is Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos

and Donald Trump is proud of having removed

the danger she represented to this country

because Donald Trump is a cowardly, hate-filled bully who

was elected on a promise to scapegoat people with dark skin.

Because from disease or abuse, or as Clarence Darrow

said of the murderers Leopold and Loeb,

because somewhere in the infinite processes

that go to the making up of a boy or the man,

something slipped.

For whatever reason, Donald Trump thinks expelling people

who will uncomplainingly do the jobs that people

who were born here often do not want to do

is somehow to his credit, and is somehow to this

nation's benefit, when in fact the whole history of this

country is predicated on people who came here,

like Friedrich Trump, and like Friedrich Olbermann,

who uncomplainingly did the jobs that people who had been

born here would not do, in the hopes that their sons

or grandsons or great great grandsons might flourish

in this nation of bounty and goodness.

Instead we have this Trump advisor Stephen Miller,

the one with the dead eyes, shifting side to side

as if the eyes themselves were rebelling

against his racism and deception, insisting on television

that quote, before a job is given to a foreign national,

that job is offered first to an American worker.

Because they're gonna be overwhelmed at that Arizona

water park with American workers who want the job, for

minimum wage, of cleaning the shit from the toilet bowls.

And again on behalf of Friedrich Trump

and Friedrich Olbermann I apologize.

To Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos.

And her family.

And the world.

And I also have to apologize to Trump's supporters,

so filled with misdirected rage about the failures

in their own lives, that they have never considered

what happens to them if all the people who do all those jobs

suddenly disappear.

Step back from Niemoller's lament for a moment

and table the hatred and the racism and the scapegoating

and the terror by night and remember, Trump supporters,

who is now expected to do Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos's

job at that waterpark, or somebody else's job in the kitchen

or yet another's job in the crop fields on the farms?

You are.

Or your son.

Or the ex-factory worker who isn't getting his factory job

back no matter what Trump promised him, because there's

nobody anywhere who will buy the product

the factory produces, not at those prices.

Take the emotion out of it.

Take the rightness and the wrongness out of this un-American

spectacle, this Salem witch trial of 2017,

and ask yourself what happens to the food on your table

when the people who harvest it aren't here anymore

because you decided they didn't belong here anymore?

That food rots in the field.

See the thing is, this throw the illegals purge has been

done here before, in America, recently

and the results were disastrous.

In 2011 the state of Georgia passed a bill called HB 87.

A proud state representative from Peachtree City,

Matt Ramsey, a coauthor, said at the time the bill would

give the police the right to demand immigration documents

from anybody detained for any reason.

It would also, he said, punish those

who hired or harbored undocumented Americans.

Our goal is, said Representative Ramsey, to eliminate

incentives for illegal aliens to cross into our state.

And how well it all worked.

An estimated 425,000 undocumented Americans were employed

in Georgia in 2010, but by the harvest time of 2011

at least 40 percent of the workers

Georgia farmers needed were gone.

The Georgia born unemployed whose jobs those

quote illegals unquote had taken from them?

They not only wanted no part of the backbreaking labor,

those few who tried it were evidently not as good at it.

40 percent of the men and women who actually knew how

to work the farms of Georgia, and how to

survive on minimal incomes, suddenly vanished.

And as Representative Matt Ramsey and the others cheered,

an estimated 140 million dollars worth of Georgia produce

rotted in the fields.

By 2012 as farmers planted less due to the

sudden labor scarcity in Georgia, the state was

forced to find new farm workers.

Prisoners!

They bused in prisoners to work the farms!

Georgia's agricultural economy

still has not fully recovered.

Oh and he's now Former Representative Matt Ramsey.

So if you are so lacking in human soul that

what this madman bigot Trump has just begun to roll out

doesn't sear your flesh when you embrace it,

forget the ethics for a while and think instead

of what it will do to your wallet

when the ticket to the waterpark doubles in price

because Guadalupe is not there to clean it for you,

and the price of the meal at the fancy restaurant,

or the fast food shack triples

because her cousin isn't there to cook it for you,

and the price of the food you buy

at the supermarket quadruples because

none of them are there to pick it for you.

You don't have to have the heart of Pastor Niemoller

to have the regret of Paster Niemoller then, do you?

In fact you don't have to have a heart at all.

Just a wallet!

First they came for the undocumented Americans

and I did not speak out because I was not undocumented.

And I didn't realize that without them

it would cost too much for me to feed my own family.

Resist.

Peace.