January 5, 2025 Essay: We Need Rational Minds Not Irrational Fears
In July 2021, Adewale Ogunyemi, a husband and father of two daughters, was working as a contract cleaner in a food production facility outside of Chicago. Responding to his screams, fellow workers found Adewale tangled in a machine. His right arm had been pulled through the conveyor and wrapped around his head. His chest was crushed. The fire department extricated him from the machine, but he was pronounced dead at the hospital.
On January 22, 2024, Elmer De Leon Perez was working as a welder at the Thoma-Sea shipyard in Houma, Louisiana helping to build a sophisticated ship for the United States that would do vital oceanographic research. Working at the bottom of a 12-foot ballast tank, using a welding tool that can burn as hot as 20,000 degrees, Elmer died from asphyxiation and fluid in his lungs. He left behind his partner with whom he had a two-year-old child.
What did Adewale and Elmer have in common? They were both undocumented workers doing work essential to our economy. The New York Times investigated staffing agencies that provided contract workers to factories, warehouses, and distribution centers. Temporary workers supplied by these staffing agencies were found to have an injury rate 67% higher than their permanently hired counterparts. The Times found that at least 50 workplace deaths since 2017 involved staffing agencies.
Elmer’s case is particularly notable. A recent Wall Street Journal column, “Worker Shortage Risks U.S. Security,” reported that the United States lacks the skilled workers necessary to build the ships that the U.S. Navy requires. In the past three years, China has built 47% of all the world’s ships, and the U.S. just 0.1%. In sheer numbers, the Chinese navy now has more ships than the United States. Elmer was working for a staffing agency that classified him as an independent contractor. As an independent contractor, both the shipbuilder and the staffing agency denied compensation claims filed on behalf of his partner and child.
Millions of persons in this country begin this new year living in fear. President-elect Trump has made mass deportations of undocumented persons in the United States a central priority. Thomas Homan, appointed to serve as point person for all matters pertaining to border security, has been ubiquitous in the media, relentlessly stressing the need to secure the borders and begin mass arrests and deportations of persons without legal status. There are also expressions of support for revoking the temporary legal status granted by the Biden administration to different nationalities for different reasons.
The hysteria surrounding immigration in this country right now obscures a truth that has been known since at least the administration of George W. Bush (2001-2009). We need comprehensive immigration reform that will make our borders more secure, bring undocumented workers out of the shadows, and provide a means by which workers can enter the United States to work in response to specific needs that cannot be met by American workers. When you look at the broad principles put forward by the Bush administration in their efforts at such reform, they are not remarkably dissimilar from those put forward by the Center for American Progress, a progressive policy institute. The devil is in the details, but rational persons, using the wealth of data now available to us concerning the importance of migrant flows to the United States economy and how those flows can be managed and regulated so as to protect American workers, should be able to create a system that is well-administered, equitable, and in our nation’s interest. Rather than cheering on those who want to pursue a policy of mass arrests and deportations that will be a shock to our nation’s economy, we should be calling for leaders to step forward and to work for that comprehensive reform of our immigration laws and policies that we need.
— Fr. Mark Hallinan, S.J., Associate Pastor