In 1948 the great Woody Guthrie wrote the song Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).
The crops are all in and the peaches are rott'ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"
My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters they working the old church,
They rode the big truck still laydown and died
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"
Woody wrote the song following a plane crash in California which killed 28 Mexican farmworkers who were being deplorted. The newspapers never printed their names, only describing them as deportees.
As I watched the hysterical reporting on the news last night about the thousands of people on our southern border and the cynical political moves by Florida’s Governor DeSantis an Texas Governor Abbott to bus thousands of refugees to New York and Chicago, Woody’s song came to mind.
“They're not migrants,” I said to nobody. “They’re refugees.”
The word migrant doesn’t carry the emotional weight of the word refugee.
They not just trying to move somewhere. They’re trying to escape something.
And that something are conditions that the a long line of U.S. administrations have created.
Chicago congressman Chuy Garcia spoke to this yesterday.
The driving factors that have led to the surge include our foreign policy in the region, including Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela. Second, I think because of Covid and the ravaging of the economies in those countries that we’re seeing new migrants. And there are climate refugees. Those are folks being displaced from their countries because they can’t make a living and it’s spreading violence in those communities.”
“And, of course, our immigration laws have made legal pathways more scarce for people coming here, and Congress’ inability to enact immigration reform has sent a clear message that the only way to get here is through unauthorized means.”
What Chuy wouldn’t say is that Democrat Joe Biden has continued many of the policies of previous administrations, policies that have ravaged the economies of the countries where these refugees came from.