In January this blog expressed surprise that a Harper's magazine article hostile to Nebraskans who mobilized against illegal immigration had little to say about the ruthless, wage-slashing strategy of Hormel that had driven Americans from the local meat-processing plant in the town of Fremont. The plant, like many others in recent decades, hired a workforce that drew heavily from illegal immigrants.
Well, the new issue of Harper's includes a letter from a Jerry Bronk in San Francisco who makes the point more eloquently than I did.
Bronk notes that the article in the liberal Harper's "devotes just one paragraph to the plight of U.S. workers displaced by low-wage foreigners." He goes on to make a key point that so many of my liberal journalist friends seem incapable of understanding because of their belief that illegal immigrants are a victim class.
Writes Bronk: "The hiring of undocumented workers, who are championed by both middle-class liberals and the large corporations that profit from their labor — Cargill, Hormel, Tyson, et al. — quite often cheapens the jobs of other minorities and of legal immigrants. The real story is that importing and exploiting cheap labor is just one facet of the total dismantling of the last vestiges of an industry-labor social compact. It is, as such, a fundamentally un-American activity."
There is much more discussion of the failure of liberal journalists to cover this story in Part Two of our critique of the New York Times's work on immigration.
