"...hope for a civil and benevolent society in the future." I clicked some links today and made it to this story Union officials are outraged over a massive immigration sweep yesterday, which sent 1,000 Homeland Security Department agents -- some in riot gear -- to meatpacking plants in six states to round up immigrant workers suspected of using fake identification, but may have picked up legal workers in the process.

The take on it in the Muckraker is of course different from the article in the Washington Post Federal agents targeting illegal immigrants raided meatpacking plants in six states yesterday, arresting hundreds of workers on the uncommon charge of identity theft and shutting down the world's second-largest meat processing company for much of the day.

But it was some of the comments of the Muckraker that really got me. This crazy idea that our country is somehow being harmed by all the illegal immigrants.

First off, these people are my friends. I have worked in the restaurant industry most of my adult days and there isn't a bar or restaurant that isn't cleaned by illegals. Our food runs on the picking ability of people so much poorer than me they will work a job, risk their everything that pays less than I was willing to do it for at 12. I don't remember the price but it was something like 10 cents a flat of raspberries, bending down, getting pricked, hauling a few of them around in a crate. EXHAUSTING and so NOT worth 10c a flat. Did it for part of a day and I was gone. This was in a small local farm near the town I grew up in.

Do you realize how much you have to have that money, money that even the poorest of entrenched, entitled americans I have met will not do the job for? I mean, you have got to need it desperately to work that hard for so little and in generally criminal conditions.

And they aren't taking the food from people. Others who have to pay the rent and costs that are the United States have to make more. They are not living 12 to a room, working all hours and then taking their measly amounts back home to a family that can survive on it.

One of the comments even mentioned they take jobs minorities can do, as though illegal immigrants aren't also minorities and as though it would be a way to put all "those" people to work. I'm saying wow, Smell the racism in that statement.

How about this, all those rich white fucks who seem to think they are losing out with having a massively hard-working, low-cost, workforce in country, how bout they come do the jobs for the same cash. The ones they seem so eager to dole out to all those welfare moms. How bout rich with folks get the fuck off their high horses and come live a life on the shitty end of the stick, THEN lets hear how they think this system should be reformed.

Oh and I so fucking wish a mexican trying to get work in this country would steal my social security number. GOD the things they would do for my credit! Take my financial identity PUHLEASE!!!! I kept trying to live the american dream and it ate me up. Maybe having an extra set of hands on my number would just make my life better - at their expense, of course. Pretty much the system as it stands now anyway. I win while they are victimized and criminalized.

The greatest strides in the standards of living and the pursuit of happiness, seem to happen as the individual human being gains more respect. Respect that also seems very hard to maintain once you get to the point of power, money and greed.

And just as white slave owners raped and brutalized and killed their low-cost answer to respected employees and recognized individuals with rights so too does a white government and capitalistic society brutalize, demonize, criminalize and victimize the illegal immigrant of today.  ¶ 10:56 PM