Title: Largest Workplace Raid in History- Laurel, Mississippi
Summary: This is a photograph that shows the ICE personnel detaining hundreds of working illegal immigrants in Laurel, Mississippi. With roughly 12 million illegal immigrants working in the U.S., the process of enforcing huge raids would be extremely costly. Also, the business in Laurel suffered from the raid, hurting the U.S. economically. It’s hard to deport 12 million people.
Category: Institutional
What is it? A picture of a workplace raid carried out by the ICE on a blog website called the Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM).
Publication Information: Sept. 2, 2008
Author: FIRM
Accessed: 3/11/09
Support: Howard Industries, ICE,
Last year, Howard Industries in Laurel, Mississippi was raided by the ICE. The ICE arrested nearly 600 unauthorized immigrant workers. It was the largest workplace bust in U.S. history.
Audience and Agenda:
FIRM is a project of the Center for Community Change. They are a national organization which seeks to improve the lives of low-income people and people of color. They are led by a group of 30 organizations committed to immigrant rights from across the country called the Immigrant Organizing Committee.
Usefulness:
This is a useful image because it shows the complexity of detaining 600 people in a workplace raid. It is a very costly process to deport 600 immigrants and it rattles the remaining community. It is similar to the Postville, Iowa raid. These raids also raise the issue of human rights. From a global standpoint, it doesn’t help the image of the U.S. to handcuff and arrest 600 minorities for simply being illegal workers. I’ve noticed that there never is any photos of the employers in these raids. The argument for the employers in these cases is that the immigrants will do work that American’s don’t want to do themselves.
Works cited:
WordPress, FIRM, wikipedia, Google images
[...] Source Notes #29 (Institutional, Image) [...]