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BIG CITY: The aftermath, Part 2

Posted on September 15, 2011September 22, 2011 by Staff

Kirk Ross

The phone rang one night just a little later than usual. The person on the other end of the line was a member of the clergy with a story, which she laid out in detail while fighting back tears.

The story was that dozens of Latinos had lost their jobs at local Food Lion and Harris Teeter stores. In at least two places, workers said there was a mass meeting called and there was fear of an immigration raid. After a couple of hours running down the story, the count of jobs lost had gone up into the hundreds, with reports of similar events at stores elsewhere in the Triangle. A common detail also emerged: The companies had gotten a letter.

This was late November 2001. The meetings and the job losses had occurred a week earlier, just before Thanksgiving.

A lot of things happened after the Sept. 11 attacks. Clearly, the United States of America was going to bomb the hell out of somebody. Here, “home” changed to “homeland,” and the structure of the government was shifted via the Patriot Act to make way for a new super department – the Department of Homeland Security. Wrapped into the bill that created the DHS was a lot of agency consolidation and new layers of cooperation. Among them was a change in policy at the Social Security Administration.

The SSA had a standard notice that went out to employers whenever there were a significant number of discrepancies in a company’s Social Security bookkeeping. The main reason for the policy is to make sure that Social Security income is being recorded for the right accounts. When names and numbers don’t jibe, it’s called a no-match. Sometimes, it’s just a bookkeeping error; most often, it’s somebody using someone else’s number. A company with a significant number of no-matches would get a notice from the SSA, called a no-match letter, about the discrepancies. Prior to the Patriot Act, companies would get a letter if the numbers for more than 10 percent of its workforce didn’t match. After the act, the threshold went away.

What was happening at the grocery stores was the thin edge of the wedge. Letters eventually started going out to even very small employers. Different employers reacted differently; some just ignored them. Immigration lawyers I talked to said unless a company was doing something on a wholesale basis, it was very unlikely they’d be prosecuted. The government folks I talked to had a hard time explaining just how it would be enforced and what the penalties were likely to be.

For the grocery store workers who were suddenly out of work just before the holidays, it was the end of being able to hold a long-term job with benefits. For all of us, it was an indication of how different the country was becoming.

Not many people know what George Bush was up to on Sept. 11, 2001, other than reading My Pet Goat to a bunch of school kids. The president had stopped at the school on his way to Mexico and a meeting with President Vicente Fox. The two were trying to work out a deal to somehow put an end to an immigration system that keeps people in the shadows and legitimizes a black market in human labor.

The people who worked in our grocery stores had dared to step out of the shadows just a bit. Now, 10 years later, we’re nowhere near a sensible solution to immigration and there’s anger and fury and outright lies spouted about Latinos every day.

I don’t know how or when we’ll ever get to where we can solve this. What I do know is that we lost good solid members of our community that November, and it didn’t seem right. Most of the workers didn’t show up for the meeting called by the grocery store management. They knew what the deal was, and there was that worry that La Migra would be there. Those who did go were told to get their numbers straight or move on. When I remember the butcher who’d been at his job for 15 years or the married couple – one with a green card, one with a bogus SSN – who opted to move on, I still think it was a damn cold thing to do.

We’re a nation of immigrants. We haven’t stopped people from coming here in search of a better life, all we’ve done over the past decade is drive more people underground and perpetuate a system that exploits their status for profit.

When it comes to immigration, our ideals and our politics is the biggest no-match of them all.

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