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.
The answer as always is capitalism. They force workers to fight each other because otherwise they’d fight the real problem.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah but joining the cause of the bread shortage when they have bread and give it to you isn’t that farfetched.