As in a Cell...

 Trump's latest tactics for making life hell for immigrants appear to have taken on a specifically financial form. It's not enough that the administration has threatened people with such medieval horrors as deportation to a Salvadoran torture-dungeon—or to a sprawling migrant detention complex in Libya where trafficking, sexual violence, and enslavement are rampant practices. Now, the administration is also putting the screws on people by taking away the money they have earned through work. 

This effort starts with taxing remittances—the small payments that people are able to send home to their families abroad, and which are often critical props of support to local economies in Central America and elsewhere in the Global South. But the financial thumb-screws don't end there. Now, the administration is also proposing to fine people for every day they are in the country unlawfully. If people can't or won't pay, the White House proposes to "garnish their wages," put liens on their property, etc. 

Nor are all these measures targeted purely toward immigrants who are in the country unlawfully. Some of the measures in the new GOP tax plan would deprive tax benefits of US citizen children whose parents have been paying taxes without social security numbers. Coupled with the spending bill's massive tax cuts to the wealthy and its evisceration of safety net programs—the whole package amounts to a trillion dollar wealth transfer directly from the poor and the stranger into the pockets of the rich. 

I'd quote the many Old Testament passages, if I knew them better, that talk about grinding the faces of the poor and denying the laborer his day's wages. Since I don't have all the Bible on the back of my hand, however—I'll instead quote Thomas Carlyle's works of Victorian-era social criticism on this head: "'A fair day's-wages for a fair day's-work:' it is as just a demand as Governed men ever made [....] It is the everlasting right of man. Indisputable as Gospels, as arithmetical multiplication-tables[.]"

After all—all that immigrants are asking—while living under the shadow of constant vilification and violence at the hands of this administration—is to be allowed to keep the pittance they earn and send some of it home to their families as remittances. But it seems, from those who have not, that even that little that they have is to be taken from them, just as the Bible says. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, of the orphan without a home: "Because I haven’t that, must everything else be taken away from me?"

And yet, the Wall Street Journal reported last week: all of these tactics of financial and governmental terrorism have not actually succeeded at all in depressing the labor market participation of the undocumented workforce. In spite of all Trump's threats, that is to say—there has been no observable decline in the number of people working without permission in the U.S. economy. Even under the threat of deportation and abduction and other outré horrors—people still show up for work. 

The explanation the Journal provides as to why they do so is depressingly mundane and obvious: people simply have no choice. Even under this onslaught of violence and cruelty—they still have to eat. They still have to work for their daily bread. As one day laborer puts it to the reporters—when they ask him why he still shows up in the same Home Depot parking lot where ten people were arrested and slated for deportation just the day before: "What alternative do we have?"

To be forced to work for a starvation wage while your jailer dangles over you the threat of deportation to a torture-dungeon in El Salvador or Libya—that is getting desperately close to a condition that could only be described as slavery. And this—in a country that ostensibly has a thirteenth amendment. 

Is this the price we pay for our outstanding economic growth that is the envy of the world? Is this what we mean by "American exceptionalism"? 

I'm reminded of the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski's words: "Only now do I realize what price was paid for building the ancient civilizations. The Egyptian pyramids, the temples, and Greek statues—what a hideous crime they were! [...] Antiquity—the conspiracy of free men against slaves!" (Vedder trans.) Or—as Brecht's "Worker Who Reads" would ask: is this how they built the pyramids? 

Obviously, the undocumented workforce in our country works for a cash wage—unlike the slaves of antiquity. But when the government is trying to steal that wage from them that they have earned through sweat—and when they have to show up for work delivering pizzas or building houses under the threat of arrest, transfer to Texas or Louisiana, and indefinite confinement in a hideous prison in El Salvador or Libya—is it really so different from outright enslavement? 

As Shelley once wrote, of the early proletariat—in perhaps the first description in English of what the later Marxists would call "wage slavery"—: ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well --
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.

'Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrants' use to dwell[.]

Trump threatens people with deportation to a notorious facility in Libya where slavery and labor trafficking are rampant. A federal judge has stopped him for now—but the ruling is only temporary—and Trump has tried to flout and circumvent the judge's order every chance he gets. And meanwhile, he has made life for immigrants in the United States a kind of extension of that prison. The long arm of the threat of slavery makes of life for immigrants in this free country a kind of slavery too. 

As D.H. Lawrence once put it, in his poem "Wages": 

since the work-prison covers

almost every scrap of the living earth, you stroll up and down

on a narrow beat, about the same as a prisoner taking his exercise.

This is called universal freedom.