An Army in Retreat

Every night, after the sun goes down and an army of tired office
workers and business people leave downtown Boston in a mass exodus to
the nearby towns and suburbs, another army invades the center of the
city. Thousands upon thousands of humble janitors, cleaning personnel,
trash collectors and maintenance workers flood into the area and work
through the night, starting at the highest floors of the urban skyscrapers
and working their way down to street level, cleaning as they go. They
remain invisible and anonymous to the members of the mainstream economy,
who arrive each morning to find their offices clean, their wastebaskets
empty and their floors waxed and shiny.

One of the poignant ironies of US Immigration Policy is that a great
number, perhaps the majority of the these workers, are undocumented illegal
aliens, often working two or three jobs and sending home monthly payments
to relatives in economic disaster areas. These payments, in some countries,
represent the second or third largest source of national income, outstripping
exports, loans and tourism, and keeping millions of people from starvation,
if not poverty.

This week, however, many of these phantom night-workers are shaking
in their boots, afraid that the incredibly intense police presence on
the streets of Boston represents a serious threat of detention, arrest
and deportation. In many cases these people have scarring memories
of the the traditional treatment of powerless peasants at the hands of
third world police forces…

For many immigrant workers in Boston, the security checkpoints, subway
searches, and beefed-up police presence for the Democratic National
Convention are more than just pesky commuter inconveniences. They’re
cause for alarm and anxiety.

Many undocumented workers fear they will be detained or
even deported if they are stopped by police checking for identification.
Even immigrants here legally, especially those who fled countries with
repressive governments, are shaken by the prospect of random stops and
searches.

from the Boston Globe