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The Morning News
Local News for Northwest Arkansas

City Governments Speak Up In Immigration Debate

By Bob Caudle
The Morning News
OK. What's wrong with this picture?

The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund sued the city of Hazleton, Pa., last month because the city council passed a law against illegal immigrants.

The law will fine landlords $1,000 for renting to illegal immigrants, deny business permits to companies that give them jobs and make English the city's official language.

Presumably, that also means residents there won't have to walk into their local Wal-Mart store and have to read signs in English and Spanish -- something that has seemed to irritate at least a few Springdale shoppers.

Hazleton is a city of about 31,000 according to The Associated Press, located 80 miles from Philadelphia.

The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund said their lawsuit is the first in the nation against a city that passed an illegal-immigration ordinance. The group and other plaintiffs contend the measure violates the law and asked a federal judge to prevent its enforcement, according to the AP.

You read that right.

Laws were passed to help enforce laws already in effect, and the defense league wants those laws declared illegal.

What's more, the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan agency that writes reports for lawmakers, said in a recent analysis that federal law probably precludes municipalities from enforcing such measures

So who's left to enforce any kind of immigration laws?

The U.S. government?

As they say on TV, "Give me a break."

The government and our current pat-business-on-the-back lawmakers encourage illegal immigration.

(The assumption here is that we all know here that we're not talking about Canadians.)

Illegal immigrants coming across the border are a cheap source of labor. They get caught, get a free bus ride home, come back over, and get their old jobs back.

The businesses that hired them get a slap on the wrist, if that, and then it's back to business as usual.

And government is doing nothing more than subsidizing the bus industry by busing them down to Mexico over and over again.

Here's a prime example of government in action -- a proposal that went before the Springdale City Council that had "lawsuit" written all over it.

The proposal was to pay a $100 stipend for bilingual employees. It was mainly for police because they face a lot of situations where they're dealing with people who can't speak English and need a translator.

That sounds all well and good on the surface. Certainly anytime an officer is heading into a situation where he or she doesn't know exactly what's going on, breaking the language barrier would help.

But what happens when a Marshallese gets into trouble and there's no taxpayer-sponsored translator to be found?

Well, that's discrimination.

Granted, Springdale doesn't have the overwhelming number of Marshallese that it has of Hispanics, but Springdale is home to the largest concentration of Marshallese people in the United States.

Large enough that the president of the Marshall Islands, or his representative, pays a visit to Springdale every year.

Their overall numbers might not be as high as Hispanics, but percentage-wise, for the United States, the number of Marshallese is high in Springdale.

Why, then, not hire a translator for the minority that's in the majority percentage-wise?

One can quickly see how political correctness, running amok, can wind up doing nothing but costing taxpayers more and more money.

Springdale's council turned the stipend ordinance down, saying it would not encourage people to learn English.

Good for them. In fact, some members of the Springdale City Council should be encouraged to learn English.

If government is bound and determined to spend money on the language barrier, let them give a 25 percent break to anyone convicted of a misdemeanor who can speak English -- regardless of race.

We've got enough people looking out for the rights of illegal aliens.

What we really need is someone who will look out for the rights of legal American residents -- again, regardless of race.