Earlier this month, 56 people were arrested at two farms outside Mount Vernon by INS agents who stormed in with 25 agents, an airplane, and a search warrant, looking for undocumented workers. The owner of one of the farms, Michelle Youngquist of North Fork Farms, went public with complaints of the INS sexually harassing women workers, as well as the usual harassment of brown-skinned U.S. citizens. The media silence was deafening.

INS raids are happening with increasing frequency in Western Washington, particularly in the Skagit Valley and in Seattle; in another notorious raid this summer, workers at a North Seattle Denny's, many of whom turned out to be "legal," were whisked off into the night. Almost all of those detained are Latino/a, and ones who can't immediately prove their citizenship get no due process at all--they're literally isolated in jail, without legal recourse or access to basic information about what few rights they have, until the next flight out. Business is booming, so much so that the INS is hoping to get a new, larger detention facility soon in south King County-- also to be run by the same notorious private prison corporation that has faced riots over conditions in other parts of the country, and recently proposed to the state of Arizona a private, lower-cost prison in Mexico. (ETS! #41, June 17, 1997).

Quite aside from the idiocy of the concept of borders and citizenship at all, the escalating pattern of INS raids and abuses is terrifying for at least three reasons. One is the systematic denial of basic legal rights. Another is the "irony" that, under free trade, everything can move freely across nation-state borders except workers--an arrangement most convenient for transnational corporations.

Both of these rest in large part on the third aspect--blatant racism. Contrary to the stereotype, most people not in the U.S. legally don't sneak across borders at night; they come into the country legally and overstay. The single largest pool of "illegal" nationals speaks very good English, aside from their peculiar pronunciation of "out" and "about." Oddly, we don't have floodlights, infrared sensors, enormous walls, and acres of razor wire stretching across Washington's lengthy border with B.C., or INS teams pulling people out of the stands at Thunderbird hockey games. The reasons are pretty obvious: most Canadians are white, not brown, and since working people in Canada make a lot better income than those here, terrorizing them can't be used to keep menial labor wages depressed.

Abuse of undocumented workers isn't just an issue in Texas and California; it's here, it's real, and it needs to be made far more visible. To get involved in support efforts, contact the Washington Alliance for Immigrant and Refugee Justice, at 206-340-9187.

--Geov Parrish