Thread: South Jersey Politicians Need to Stand UP

If you are from South Jersey, contact your legislators.

UB

Immigration forum with elected officials needed
By David Fisher

Last month, The Daily Journal and Nuestra Comunidad cosponsored an open forum on immigration held at the Vineland Public Library.

Thanks must be extended to both David Stump (The Daily Journal's managing editor) and Mariana De Maio (editor of Nuestra Comunidad) for their efforts in creating the event and offering the community an opportunity to engage in a debate about one of the most significant social, political and economic issues of the decade. Also, a special thank you is due Valentine Brown for the extraordinary tact, grace and diplomacy she exhibited as the forum's host.

It was an honor and a privilege, and the highpoint of my summer, to have served as one of the guest panelists where one could hear the views of others and at the same time express his own. Most certainly the forum served to properly refocus the issue from the national level to the local and from the tangential to the specific.

Whether from our southern or northern borders, the effect of illegal migrations is omnipresent. It has touched upon states, counties and municipalities across the country and will continue until all elected representatives, community leaders and private citizens recognize that for the common good it is their responsibility to manage the problem.

Article Four, section four of the U.S. Constitution clearly guarantees from the United States to every state in the union a republican form of government and protection against invasion.

We know that the U.S. government has failed to protect our borders or curtail the invasion of illegal immigrants. Deep in debt, it cares not a whit that it is costing the U.S. taxpayer-citizen $65 billion a year.

Ironically, the state of New Jersey, also in fiscal disarray and with the eighth largest number of illegal immigrants at a cost of perhaps $3 billion burdening its taxpaying citizens, also cares not a whit. And, the Cumberland County freeholder board, which presides over the poorest county in the state and can ill-afford its 10,000 illegal immigrants, appears to care not a whit.

Apparently, the Founding Fathers had reservations about Article Four and sought to clarify a hierarchy of duty and power by forming the Tenth Amendment which states "... powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states, ... or to the people."

The amendment, the last item in what is known as the Bill of Rights, clearly prescribes to American citizens a responsibility and a duty to protect, defend and govern themselves.

The Immigration Forum was an honorable and dutiful expression of the Tenth Amendment. However, the deafening silence from our elected representatives here in South Jersey is indicative of ignorance, ambivalence or avoidance. Their inaction and neutralism is failed abidance to the amendment and may be precisely the reasons the framers of the Constitution sought its making.

The time for our elected representatives to publicly declare themselves is long overdue. The time for a second forum, one which will afford our representatives the opportunity to declare themselves, is now.

David Fisher is a retired businessman from Vineland. He is a member of The Daily Journal's Community Advisory Board.


Originally published August 31, 2006

I have wrote and called mine in New Jersey! We have the highest property taxes in the nation. Most of which, goes to fund our schools.

We've raised the sales tax to 7% this summer and the citizens of NJ want to consolidate the districts to save money. We are already billions of dollars in debt! I do not want another 3 billion on top of this tax nightmare!! :twisted


60,000 people moved out of NJ last year! If they raise the taxes anymore and have the nerve to let illegals stay, people will be leaving in greater numbers! We just cannot afford illegal period!!!