Half of border agents are Latino, and they are part of a long history of Hispanic support for – and enforcement of – harsh immigration policies
Why? Latinos have often occupied an uneasy middle ground in American society – subject to discrimination and exclusion, yet also susceptible to appeals that promise belonging, security and status. Like every other group, they can embrace political movements that harm others and sometimes even themselves.
This precarity is why Latinos join immigration enforcement agencies in such large numbers. For years, scholars and historians have tried to find other explanations, including economics and stable employment, a desire to serve their communities and seeking proximity to whiteness. But these capture only part of the story.
The phenomenon began as early as the 1950s, when prominent Latino leaders and organizations supported deportation campaigns such as Operation Wetback, which sought to remove hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants (and their citizen family members) from the country. Their support was often rooted in not entirely unfounded fears of labor competition; US employers routinely used migrant labor to undermine unions, suppress wages and break strikes.
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Because your race doesn’t exclude you from being a scumbag.
Look up the very real group, “Jews for Hitler.”
Or the IDF.
They don’t discriminate between Palestinian Jews, Christians, Muslims, or other.
Wow. As Jew, this is terrifying. Is Miller the President?
Oppressed people tend to have three responses to oppression: fighting back, doing their best to ignore it, or joining the oppressors and hoping they get a pass.
Israel’s founders were pro-Nazi Germany and viewed them as allies against Britain (who controlled Palestine at the time)
The answer as always is capitalism. They force workers to fight each other because otherwise they’d fight the real problem.
It’s crazy this is like the first time I’m seeing this really talked about. Families don’t talk about it, or lie. If you need a job, the best paying one might be for ice, a lot of people are gonna be taking that job. Just like they work in civil service, or corrections, or go to the military. Those masks are for plausible deniability at a family gathering.
Ice didn’t just successfully recruit every piece of shit who needed a job, it netted a lot of struggling people who felt forced to compromise their morals because they’re offering real money and will hire anyone.
It’s horrible, these people are tainted, they may pay a price, but the choices aren’t real in this oligar-chic hellscape. I bet if you look at recruitment stats for ice, they’ll be the highest where the poverty line is the lowest.
I wouldn’t say force them, as much as manipulate them to do it. Trick them with promises and prizes they’ll never attain, while throwing obstacles in their way to attaining prosperity, and you can get them to fight one another willingly.
It’s easy to take advantage of people who lack critical thinking skills, as that isn’t taught in primary education.
The very few who do manage to claw their way to the top off exploiting others, become part of the problem as they pull the ladder up from behind them.
In this case the question is how they get them to buy in and do it. “They force them” isn’t an answer.
Scumbags can work for assholes in any economic system, real or imaginary.
Yeah but also regular desperate people will do stuff for money that they ordinarily wouldn’t.
Especially if they were raised as conservatives in general.
You don’t think it’s possible for someone to do something they are ideologically indifferent to or even ideologically opposed to if they need the money bad enough?
I think the vast majority of these men were raised to be ideologically aligned with this in the first place. Conservative plebians are never known to act in their own best interests, why expect rational actors at this point?
I think you’re probably right for some or even a good chunk of them but I don’t think that explains all of them.
Everyone will suddenly see stealing bread as acceptable if they’re starving.
Stealing bread certainly, but suddenly joining the cause of the bread shortages is a bigger stretch than that.
Uncle Tomás
The age-old mentality of “fuck you, I got mine.”
Yeah, and there’s a cultural version of this which is like “Our community has come a long way since I came - we’re real Americans now. You’re not. You took the easy way and stayed in the old country while I took the hard path of coming here. Now you want to ride in on my coattails.”
It’s actually pretty universal for immigrants to look down on more recent immigrants from wherever they are from. It’s partly self-shame - being reminded by them of where you used to be in life. It’s partly “I paved the way now you want to coast in.” And it’s partly cultural self-hatred. After spending years assimilating and shedding their accent, they simply despise the fresh immigrants they have worked so hard not to be like.
Once I suggested my father find a community of other immigrants from his country. He said “With these fucking villagers that are coming over now? No thanks.”
That moment said a lot.
I guess one final factor: sometimes immigrants left their home country because they didn’t like the way things were there, and people fresh from there may represent what they didn’t like and tried to leave behind.
It’s very white-centric to just assume Latinos would always stick up for other Latinos. Because you know - they’re all the same, aren’t they???
While I can’t speak for others, as an immigrant, there are times when i hear of news of immigrants committing crimes and in my mind I say “oh jeez you are making us look bad!” Eventually, it dawned on me that one of the reasons as to why immigrants throw other immigrants under the bus is because the former think it’s signalling to locals that “we’re one of the good ones. See! Please don’t hurt us.” It’s like with any oppressed groups where they occasionally feel the need to sacrifice some of their members to the oppressors in the vain and pathetic attempt of self-preservation. It is a similar thing with “Jews for Hitler” group.
I asked my Mexican coworker why he supports Trump. Even tho he was an illegal alien that finally got his citizenship. I asked him about the others that had to struggle like him. His answer. “I got mine. They gotta hustle to get theirs”
The Republican motto almost verbatim: “I got mine. Fuck you.”
Selfishness knows no end.
His hustling days aren’t over, if ICE has anything to say about it…
This unfortunately
There are way too people who are just like him who exists
They are called chuds
Wait til you find out the kinds of things the cartels do to other latinos
Ladder pulling.
The ones working for ICE have legal status, thanks to previous generations that did not.
Now they want to keep the labor market free from scabs.
Also, an opportunity to show out for their new jackboot overlords.
They think that since they “did it right” they’ll be free from persecution when they run out of immigrants
In the short run it probably does help to have ICE identification when you get pulled over by ICE. Have ICE killed any of their own off-duty yet?
Because bootlickers who value money over morality can come in any color.
Their support was often rooted in not entirely unfounded fears of labor competition; US employers routinely used migrant labor to undermine unions, suppress wages and break strikes.
WOAH the exact same thing that every other labor movement in the world and in American history has realized but Schumer’s “pro-union”, “pro-worker” modern DNC? Color me shocked
This comment is brimming with red hot irony.
Because racism isn’t exclusive to white people. There i ruined it for you.
Operation Slur??!
Are you fucking kidding??
Turns out slurs originate from somewhere.
I don’t see that in the text?
Welcome to America, always.
I think you’ll find a high correlation with organized religion and conservative upbringing. The article mentions “fears of labor competition” but I think the fact that it goes back almost a century paints a very different picture about how deep rooted the culture can be.
