CARLTON FLETCHER: No one-size-fits-all answer to ‘immigration crisis’

“Won’t you let me in, immigration man?”

— Graham Nash and David Crosby

I don’t believe there’s a one-size-fits-all answer to the “immigration crisis” in this country, no one solution that should be applied in every case. This country was, after all, founded by “immigrants” who came here from other lands, and America has benefited greatly from the ingenuity and technology brought here by men and women seeking their portion of the American dream.

But I get so tired of hypocrites calling the people trying to get into this country derogatory names and demanding that we keep everyone out except maybe the white immigrants from the Scandinavian or European countries. Of course, when the person who is the president of the country calls a nation of people rapists and terrorists, it stands to reason that his sycophantic followers would follow suit.

Here’s what’s ironic about the people clamoring for a wall to be built along our southwestern border with Mexico because the man they blindly follow says it’s the right thing to do: The overwhelming majority of them, including all those at the upper reaches of government, wouldn’t get off their asses to do even the easiest of the menial jobs those “illegal immigrants” are “stealing” from “hard-working Americans.”

It’s not just the politicians whose hypocrisy shines bright when they send their military units to round up people who have lived in this country for decades and send them to lands that are now foreign to them. It’s their supporters, the people who laud them for “taking action” who would not, as we used to say in Ocilla, hit a lick at a snake when it comes to jobs like, oh, say, picking fruit, roofing, construction work, domestic work and all other sorts of unskilled labor.

Businesses, especially American farms, have come to rely so much on the labor of these people who come to America seeking work — those who come legally and illegally — management has lamented the fact that they can’t get their work done without these laborers who gladly do these jobs that require only a strong back and a willingness to sweat in the hot sun.

Then there are the unscrupulous — and there are plenty of them out there — who not only hire workers they know are here illegally, they pay them less than minimum wage and refuse to give them any kind of benefits because they know these laborers won’t report them.

A meat-packing plant in Tennessee was recently raided by ICE and dozens of its workers taken into custody because the plant owner had millions of dollars in the bank on reported family income of less than $50,000. He was able to accumulate millions on the backs of employees who were summarily rounded up and placed in detention centers. Oh, and while those people who had done nothing more than provide slave-like labor in an effort to live a decent life were remanded to custody and kept in squalid cells, the evil SOB who hired them and paid them inadequate wages is walking around a free man, out on bond with little likelihood that he will even serve time.

The sad truth of the immigration issue is that these human beings who will risk everything just to come to this country to do work no American citizen seems willing to do are deprived of their humanity by politicians who use them as pawns in an effort to win the votes of gullible people who buy into their lies. To the fatcats in Washington and in statehouses throughout the union, these mostly hard-working people are demonized by people who often have relied on their labor for their own selfish needs and are now using them as political capital.

And while, yes, there are plenty in this country who did not go through the proper processes to gain citizenship, to take those who have been living in America for decades, paying taxes, supporting local businesses, raising their families and send them to places they no longer know is much more a crime against humanity than crossing some imaginary line in the sand in search of a better life.

In some ways, I wish the fatcats and politicians would get their way and the immigrant problem was solved to their liking (minus, of course, the relatives of many who are as undocumented as the people they seek to deport … can’t have these good family members shipped off with the riffraff). I’d like to see that just to see the resulting clamor when so many unskilled labor jobs sit unfilled and production in many industries comes to a standstill.

Perhaps then these people will send their own young and healthy offspring to work in the fields, on rooftops, in restaurant kitchens, on construction sites. That, of course, is about as likely to happen as the politicians who created this “crisis” admitting that there is a better, more humane solution.