Douglas Turner Ward (1930-2021) wrote a searing play, “Days of Absence,” that depicted the way life might be like in a small Southern town where all of the Black people disappeared.
Predictably, white people could not boil water, feed their children, nor manage their own feeding. The fictional town just about falls apart in the absence of the Black labor backbone. The play ends when, the next day, one of the missing Black folks reappears and feigns ignorance about the disappearance.
“Days of Absence” won both a Drama Desk Award in 1965 and a Tony Award in 1966. It captured the notice of the Ford Foundation; they awarded Douglas Turner Ward a grant that he used to establish the Negro Ensemble Company.
The sardonic play, with no definitive conclusion, is a metaphor for those who are invisible, the people who serve our food, clean our homes, run the buses and trains, and facilitate lives of people who are seemingly too important to notice them.
Where is the 21st-century Douglas Turner Ward, the playwright or author who will write about the days of absence that immigrant workers might stage to underline their essential importance in our economy?
In agriculture and hospitality, and in science and medicine, as well as in other fields, we will be the net losers if the 47th president’s diabolical scheme to deport 3,000 people a day is successful. If ICE gets to its quota and works every day, it means that we will lose more than a million people a year.
They are housekeepers and construction workers, childcare and health care workers. About one in five workers is foreign born, and about a quarter of those are likely undocumented. Some of these undocumented people have been here for years, making lives for themselves and their families.
Others have come recently. Relatively few are receiving government service or assistance. Most live under the radar, paying taxes and receiving no benefits.
What would we do without immigrants, documented or undocumented? Which construction projects would slow? Which hotels would experience labor shortages because housekeepers and landscapers are unavailable?
How will massive deportations affect the ways we live, and does it matter?
To be sure, the rule of law is to be respected, and those who are here illegally have been delinquent in handling their business. But most of these people are not the “dangerous criminals” that our very dangerous president rails about. He has been using them as a prop since he announced his candidacy for our nation’s highest office in 2015.
Who, really, is disturbing domestic tranquility with harsh and inhumane rhetoric, and absurd raids at schools, churches and graduations?
Who is attacking the economy with inflationary tactics that will increase wages for those in industries not heavily supported by immigrants?
Who has incited violence by targeting even legal immigrants, those who once had protected status, with hateful vitriol?
To be sure, everyone must have legal status, but bipartisan committees have twice offered legislation that provides pathways to legal citizenship. Our legislators, led by bipartisan groups of senators, have declined to move forward.
Again, what would we do without immigrants?
Julianne Malveaux is an economist, author and commentator based in Washington, D.C.