Communities Struggle with Immigration Rules as Bush Returns from Mexico
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SAN FRANCISCO, Mar 17 (OneWorld) - Politicians in Washington are debating the issue of immigration this week. Many Democrats want to create a guest worker program through which undocumented immigrants would be able to earn legalization over time. Conservative Republicans have their own ideas--from stepping up deportations, to building a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border, to punishing employers who hire undocumented workers.
Speaking alongside Mexican President Felipe Calderon Wednesday, President Bush said he would work with Congress to pass a law that "will respect the rule of law" and "respect humanity." But across the country those political machinations have been overshadowed by a series of raids carried out by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) service of the Department of Homeland Security. In Colorado, raids at area meat packing plants and a cleaning service have scared away a large percentage of migrant workers. "We've seen a good 40 percent of the workforce decrease," Harold Lasso of the Denver day labor center Centro Humanitario told OneWorld. "We hear from the local farmers that they lost a lot of manpower," he added. "The people who stayed in the fields are working double shifts. They're trying to make up for the loss of the workforce." The state of Colorado has responded with a plan to employ prison labor in the fields. Under the plan, farmers would pay the state a wage of about $10/hour for each inmate. Prisoners would get the state's standard 60-cents-a-day credit for prison labor, while the rest of the money would go toward their housing, food, transportation, and guards while they are working. Lasso thinks that's an "immoral" idea. "On one hand you arrest the workers, and then when they become prisoners you send them to the fields to work," he said. "That's like modern slavery." In the San Francisco Bay Area, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took away more than 800 people in February and March. The raids were widespread and diverse across the region. They occurred outside schools, near subway stations, at homes, and near workplaces. ICE said the raids were part of "Operation Return to Sender" and targets undocumented criminals and immigrants who are avoiding deportation proceedings. But immigrant rights groups and many elected officials saw the situation differently. In the Silicon Valley town of Redwood City, ICE agents stopped Latino parents at random while they dropped their children off at an elementary school. Afterwards, the city's Mayor Barbara Pierce told OneWorld, "there was a drop-off in enrollment," which she called a "cause for concern." Pierce added the raids made her city less safe. "The way we keep our entire community safe--immigrants, undocumented, everyone--is by people feeling comfortable calling the police," she said. "If there's a fear of the police, we can't keep them safe." In San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom released a statement in both English and Spanish condemning the raids. "These raids jeopardize the public health and safety of the city by instilling fear in those who may come forward with information about a crime or those who are in need of medical treatment," the statement read. Arnoldo Garcia of the Oakland, California-based National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights said the entire controversy points toward the need for what he calls comprehensive immigration reform. "What's at stake is the way our country is being shaped," he told OneWorld. "Is it one that's going to be based on equality and fairness--that's colorblind?" Garcia noted that in California, one in four residents is foreign-born. "Whatever happens to that one fourth is going to affect the other three fourths," he said. Harold Lasso of Centro Humanitario said immigrant rights activists will continue to pressure lawmakers to give undocumented immigrants a way to become legal.
This year, Lasso said, immigrants will stage a week-long economic boycott. "Hopefully, Congress will feel the pressure and do something before the year ends," he said. ....................................................................................
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"Author of article is naive, misinformed and misguided"Author:
Lawabiding American citizen
Time: 03/17/2007 17:42
Comment: Using convict labor is a smart idea. Save money by having the convict labor pay for some of the cost of his incarceration (thus saving tax dollars or allowing tax dollars to be used elsewhere). It also allows helps psychologically rehabilitate. Those who don't like it are more concerned with the security risk.
I am tired of the lame excuse -- we need people to be responsible enough to call the police to report crimes therefore we should not enforce immigration laws on illegal aliens. Where I'm from, the police are smart enough to solve crimes without having to bargain with people who break laws. Perhaps the police in sanctuary cities need to step up their game and do the job better. Taxpayers pay them to police so they need to police. The author of this article is naive about the affects of illegal aliens. I guess the author believes strangers roaming the streets (many could are killers and rapists in their home country), identity threat perpetrators, and other fraud driven folks are good for the community? Perhaps I should give the author a warning from a retired San Diego police officer. The police officer warns us about people like the writer of this article. **************************** The following was posted anonymously on a site regarding the current Hazleton, PA trial. "Date: 2007-03-16T17:10:44 I respectfully submit the following commentary on illegal immigration for your benefit and consideration. I was not only born and raised in California, but was a San Diego police officer from the late 60’s through the early 90’s. More specifically, I was a police supervisor from 1976 on, and was head of the police department’s anti-gang unit during the latter 70’s. There is a saying, “As California goes, so goes the rest of the country.” In the matter of illegal immigration, Pennsylvania’s leaders would better serve its citizens by not following California’s lead. It would be my pleasure to discuss any of these issues with you or answer any questions you may have. In the mid-70’s the City of San Diego ordered all its police officers, me included, to stop detaining - or even questioning – the illegal aliens we frequently encountered in the course of our duties. Ignore the issue of illegal immigration altogether, the directive said. The reason for this new order? The city had come under ferocious attack for its long-standing, reasoned policy towards illegal aliens. Along with the threat of lawsuits, such words as “racism”, “xenophobia”, “bigotry” and “discrimination” were being bandied about by shadowy, strangely-aligned illegal alien advocacy groups from both sides of the border. The common denominator linking these leftists was their alliance with the American Civil Liberties Union. And they all kept to the same script, as they do even today; they would never acknowledge that the only issue on the table was illegal Mexican immigration. None of the city’s leaders at that time - or since then, for that matter - had the stomach for the vitriolic, in-your-face gutter fight these belligerents were looking for. Against all common sense, the city put its head in the sand and capitulated to the inflammatory rhetoric of a few, loud militants....to the detriment of its own citizens’ best interests. By the late 70’s, the unabated flow of illegal aliens into San Diego resulted in the melt down of its criminal justice system. The jails were filled beyond capacity, and - because of an ACLU lawsuit - under a court order to start releasing criminals, including illegal aliens, into the streets. Prosecutors and the courts were overwhelmed, unable to keep up with the load. Mexican street gangs comprised of illegal aliens were on the rise in all parts of the city. The police department responded to this crisis, in part, by instituting a policy wherein only violent offenders and felony suspects actually went to jail. Those arrested for misdemeanor crimes, including illegal aliens with no local address or identification, were issued “citations” on the spot and told to appear in court at a later time. That policy, of course, only served to exacerbate the already sky-rocketing crime rate. And though there was indisputable proof that the root cause of the crisis was illegal immigration, none of the city’s leaders had the personal courage to actually do anything about it for fear of being tagged “racist” or “bigot”. It was around that time San Diegans were beginning to hear those slurs from a new quarter – the Mexican Consulate’s office. In the early 80’s, San Diego taxpayers learned that Mexican children were entering the United States daily to attend local public schools. At the end of the school day, these children would walk across the border and return to their homes in Mexico. Outrage over the fact California taxpayers were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for the public education of foreigners was lost to those now familiar screams of “racism”, “bigotry” and...because they were children...“mean-spiritedness”. The local school boards said it wasn’t their problem to address, that laws prevented them from asking such intrusive questions as, “Who are you and where do you live?” when enrolling students. And, they added, what harm was there really in educating those poor Mexican kids. They also said they needed a lot more tax money to hire new Spanish-speaking teachers because, inexplicably, more and more of their students didn’t speak a word of English. By the late 80’s, the illegal immigration crisis brought San Diego’s tax-paid social services programs to their knees. Local tax money earmarked for indigent emergency health care – money set aside as the last safety net for those resident citizens who needed it most – was being spent almost exclusively on the flood of illegal aliens now in the city. Compounding the problem was the U.S. Border Patrol’s new policy of “unarresting” in-custody illegals when they needed medical care, and dropping them off at the entrances to local hospital emergency rooms. This new practice, of course, was the federal government’s ingenious way of avoiding its legal responsibility for medical bills incurred by in-custody illegal aliens. As the tax money dried up, hospitals received less and less government reimbursement for the medical care given to illegals – who had no money, no health insurance, and no means whatsoever of ever paying their medical bills. Politically savvy hospital administrators weren’t about to take the steps necessary to remedy the situation, and risk incurring the public wrath of the illegals’ advocacy groups. They chose instead to artificially inflate medical care costs across the board for everyone. That prompted the health insurance companies to raise premium rates for their policy holders, and it was once again demonstrated to San Diegans the many ways in which they were going to pay for the presence of illegal aliens in their city. By the early 90’s, San Diego’s long-running illegal alien crisis had become California’s nightmare. Public policy regarding illegal immigration degenerated into theater of the absurd throughout much of the state. Because of fraudulent voter registration schemes concocted by those leftists, illegal aliens were now voting in both local and federal elections – and in one case, actually making the difference in a congressional district race. Many communities witnessed the collapse of entire medical care systems under the weight of illegal immigration alone. Billions of public dollars were being spent annually just for the medical care and education of illegals. It was driving the state ever closer to bankruptcy, and severely strained the bounds of civil discourse on the issue. It was time to draw a line in the sand, and millions of California citizens did just that in 1994. Through the state’s initiative process, a grass-roots proposition was put on the statewide ballot which would finally and absolutely put an end to “business as usual.” It sought to end all government subsidies to illegals in the state, including public welfare, public housing, public education, and all medical care except in the cases of true emergencies. In spite of the leftists’ rabid campaign of slurs and name calling, common sense ruled the day and Proposition 187 overwhelmingly passed on a two-to-one vote. The victory was short-lived. The ink had barely dried on the governor’s signature when the leftists found a single sympathetic federal judge to claim the new law unconstitutional. Since then, California’s illegal immigration nightmare has blossomed to become this nation’s cancer, and it’s destroying the very fabric of our society. No matter how you slice it, there is nothing benign about immigration fraud, identification fraud, welfare fraud, voting fraud, social security fraud, and tax evasion. It all boils down to deceit and theft. Illegal aliens in our country today are committing these crimes on such a massive scale it boggles the mind, and no community in this nation will survive the scourge. There is nothing an illegal alien can bring to a community by way of beneficial productivity which will compensate for his/her drain on that community’s social services, criminal justice, educational, and medical care systems. It’s never happened and it isn’t going to happen. Local tax dollars are a community’s life-blood and are not infinite. History has shown that illegal immigration bleeds that critical supply dry. In spite of these facts, and against all logic, politicians across the country are seriously debating whether to give illegal aliens the “right” to vote, the “right” to higher education, the “right” to state-issued drivers’ licenses, and even the “right” to accumulate social security credits while using stolen or counterfeit identification. The leftists’ mantra, “immigration (illegal immigration, if you please!) is the sole responsibility of the federal government”, is a lie. The federal government has proven over the past 30 years it isn’t capable of, or even willing to, control illegal immigration. The ugly fact of the matter is - the feds alone will not, and cannot, do it. This is precisely why the battle against illegal immigration is an absolute and moral responsibility of every elected official in this country, including county commissioners and local township supervisors. I’ve been a student of illegal immigration since the late 60’s, when I was a rookie cop assigned to the police department’s border sector adjoining Tijuana, Mexico. During those early years, and over the span of my police career, I witnessed events and had first-hand, personal experiences with illegal immigration few other Pennsylvanians have had. And I’ve seen the devastating consequences illegal immigration can have on a city, a region, an entire state. These are the lessons I learned and my advice to anyone concerned about the presence of illegal aliens in their community: (1) Be suspicious of public officials - with control over tax dollars - who claim illegal immigration isn’t a crisis....or worse yet say, “it isn’t MY crisis.” Hold on to your wallet if you see that happening! (2) Be skeptical of any media that reveals a transparent leftist agenda in support of illegals. You’ll recognize this when the editorials and reporting are slanted, and one-sided, and when illegal aliens are continually referred to as “undocumented workers” and characterized as victims rather than suspects. (3) And be very, very wary of those self-appointed, self-proclaimed “community activists” who profess to be the guardians of ethnic sensitivities – but whose real motives for involvement are murky and self-serving. These will be the ones who seem to be afforded a little too much legitimacy and garner a little too much attention by the media. These will be the only ones spewing personal insults and slurs, and threatening lawsuits at township meetings. Finally, if nothing you’ve read here has hit a familiar chord or raised a flaming red flag, consider this scenario - which isn’t all that implausible, believe me....There is only one tax dollar left in the government treasury which is to be used for the public good. You are an honest, law-abiding American citizen and desperately need that last dollar just to survive the day. So does the illegal alien who recently snuck into your country, and is now standing in line next to you. Your only witness to this event is your personal sense of decency and fair play. His witnesses include an ACLU attorney, several “community activists” holding inflammatory placards, and a few media types with cameras rolling. And the government bureaucrat, about to decide who gets that last dollar bill, tells you the law forbids him from acknowledging the obvious in making a decision." LE XXXXXX, Sergeant (Retired) San Diego Police Department |
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