A couple of days ago some of us watched George Clooney, portray Ed Murrow, being demoted by CBS from his regular show back in the 1950’s to doing 5 documentaries, including “Harvest of Shame,” exposing the plight of migrant farm workers in America. Now, just a couple of days later, that same drama continues playing itself out on the streets of Los Angeles.

So much for politicians solving our immigration issues, regardless of how badly we need immigrants to pick our food and clean our hotel rooms and houses, all the while contributing to Social Security. But what the hell? It’s only been 65 years since Harvest of Shame was aired by CBS.

A ride-along with the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, or the “INS,” was among my first assignments after arriving in Los Angeles in 1982. They were going on a raid, up in the onion fields of Ventura County. Their effort was successful, as they arrested maybe two dozen migrant farm workers, herding them onto busses like cattle. On the ride back to L.A. one of the INS agents asked me something I’ve never forgotten. “Do you speak Spanish?” he said. “No,” I replied. “You’d better learn,” he said.

The INS, the government, knew what what happening. Those of us that lived in the Southwest, knew where it was heading, as did the politicians, who year after year, decade after decade, have failed miserably when it comes to fixing our broken immigration system.

Fast forward to the present day here in Maryland, where watermen and their blue crab processing plants are threatened with extinction. According to “The baynet.com, “Maryland watermen say their way of life is being pinched from both sides: a flood of cheap crab meat from Venezuela, and an increasingly unreliable stream of foreign guest workers, without whom the industry simply can’t function.”

It’s okay to secure the borders and go after dangerous criminals. The problem, it would appear, is that more than a third of the country still has no idea that many of the people being caught up in Trump’s theatrics are honest, hard working migrants, who are badly needed by the country to do the jobs none of our sons and daughters are willing to do.

Please do go after the actual criminal element, Mr. Trump, but stop pretending that the sledgehammer you are using in Los Angeles, by federalizing the Guard and threatening to call up the Marines, is for anything but theatrics to satisfy your base and divert from the issues you currently have with Elon Musk and your “big, beautiful bill.” You are tearing families apart and hurting our economy and it is not necessary.

Instead of calling up the Marines, why not get together with the Democrats and maybe even a few officials from the Mexican Government, and work out a plan to fix our broken immigration system? You can be the hero that finally gets it done after decades of failure. Or, you can continue to fail. Perpetuating our decades old harvest of shame while the watermen go broke here in Maryland and California’s crops die in the fields.