By Dara Lind. Originally posted at America’s Voice.

This morning, the Associated Press and Minnesota Public Radio reported that 1,200 undocumented janitors had been fired from Twin Cities company ABM under pressure from the Department of Homeland Security.

ICE worked with ABM, giving employees a few months to produce documentation and then firing those who couldn’t in four waves throughout October. None of the janitors were arrested, and ICE hasn’t yet fined the company.

This “silent firing” is the same process we saw earlier this fall, when L.A.-based American Apparel was forced to fire a quarter of its employees in September. It’s clear that the Obama administration favors these immigration enforcement tactics to the showy, headline-grabbing workplace raids ICE conducted in the Bush era, most notoriously in Postville, Iowa, in 2008.

But just because the ABM janitors weren’t arrested by ICE, unlike workers in Postville and other raid victims, doesn’t mean mass firings cause less trauma to communities. In fact, in some regards they’re even more disruptive. Three times as many people lost their jobs in the ABM firings as in Postville, after all.

They may not be deported, but as one of the victims told Minnesota Public Radio:

I really want people to hear — and if possible even get to the ears of President Barack Obama — that we don’t come here for anything other than to work…And if anyone could see the places we come from and were in our shoes, they would do the same thing.

Depriving 1,200 men and women of a livelihood doesn’t bring us any closer to fixing our badly broken immigration system. Mass deportation may be inhumane (not to mention impossibly expensive), but even “silent” enforcement-only immigration policy severely disrupts communities, families and businesses.

As the DC Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents workers across the country, argues in a press statement today:

Enforcement without comprehensive reform is like redecorating when the house is on fire. Instead of solving problems, it only succeeds in pushing undocumented workers away from responsible employers and deeper into the shadows–benefitting the most unscrupulous off-the-books employers and degrading the quality of life for the rest of us. In the end, we are no where closer to solving the broken immigration system: communities lose; responsible businesses lose; families lose.

Enforcement-only immigration policy isn’t working. It’s time to fix the system so we can stop penalizing immigrants who are.

Categories: California, Iowa, Minnesota, enforcement