You are correct about all of this, but your explanation misses two important points.

#1. Who creates the laws and loopholes that allowed corporations to bring in cheap people? White men. Who created the systems that allow these people to work under the table? Who brings them here on visas and then refuses to renew it causing many of them to be here illegally? White men.

#2. Who hires them, and does so frequently? White men. Who helps them circumvent laws so they can pick produce, hang chickens, slaughter pigs, maintain farms. White men.

The laws created, the loop holes that have allowed it, the hiring of illegal immigrants and undocumented workers, and the displacement of White/Black/Brown citizens is done by White men. They create the legislation, policies, and trade acts to make them rich and make us poor. So no, I’m not conflating anything. I just choose to look systemically at the problem and you’ve chosen to view this as a more local/intimate problem.

I have been displaced. I’ve worked in meat processing. I have worked in textiles. I got a degree and worked in business/nonprofits. Thanks to G.W. Bush, I was displaced again in 2006–07 due to our funding being cut to fight a war with people who didn’t do anything to us (9/11). Also, deregulation by the GOP that led to the economic melt down. But we forgot all about that haven’t we. Yes, I’ve had a lifetime of being displaced, and I know where to place the blame. White men. I blame White men. They have all the power, and they cause all the mayhem. They just gin White folks up with the Southern Strategy, give you a new enemy, make you a cloak of victim hood, and you all wear it proudly. It doesn’t matter if it’s LBJ, Nixon, Clinton, Regan, Bush I or Bush II. They all do the same thing, and White folks react the same way.

The White men are the same ones who will tell me to pull myself up by my bootstraps and keep kicking me back down when I get up. They are the same ones who kicked you down too, but you choose to look at the new beneficiary from your losses (Spanish speaking undocumented people) instead of the White owner who choose cheaper and foreign over his own people.

I know my evil. White people need to learn how to identify theirs. Your own people hurt you, just like they do me. That’s not conflated. That’s a fact.