TomPaine: Human Junk Mail

[marmar]

Human Junk Mail
Laura Carlsen
March 01, 2007


Laura Carlsen is director of the Americas Program in Mexico City, where she works as a foreign policy analyst for the International Relations Center. This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus.

The titles that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attaches to its operations reveal a great deal about the logic behind current U.S. immigration policy.

Among the most suggestively titled is the ongoing Operation "Return to Sender," one of the largest such operations in U.S. history. The program, supposedly designed to target "fugitive aliens," has resulted in the indiscriminate roundup of over 13,000 undocumented migrants in cities throughout the United States.

The cynical name given to this even more cynical operation implies a sender, a receiver—and an object. The object, or rather objects, are migrant workers and their families.

Operation Return to Sender is an instrumentalist policy that ignores the humanity of migrant workers. It refuses to recognize that migrants have hopes and dreams, that they have a legitimate need to eat and think and act. It denies family ties and affective relationships. It also ignores the central role that undocumented workers play in the U.S. economy and the factors that brought them to the country in the first place.

In short, Operation Return to Sender acts on the premise that the millions of undocumented workers in the United States today are little more than globalization's junk mail. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/03/01/human_junk_mail.php

[Ian David]

1. Are those Halliburton Concentration Camps then to be called "The Dead Letter Office?" n/t

[rurallib]

2. "We wanted cheap labor and we got human beings"

That remark was made in Germany many years ago concerning Muslims who came into Germany as cheap labor.