Thread: Citizens in the Shadows (or Life Among the Roosters)

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=69972

Op-Ed: Citizens in the Shadows (or Life Among the Roosters)

7/28/2006 6:36:00 PM


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To: Opinion Editor

Contact: Jo Wideman of Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), 805-564-6626; Web: http://www.capsweb.org

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., July 28 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following op-ed Mark Cromer was released today by Californians for Population Stabilization:

Just how utterly oblivious the government, from the White House to city hall, often remains from the reality of illegal immigration's corrosive impact on the everyday lives of ordinary Americans and the seething cultural resentments it has produced kicked me hard in the gut the other day, following a trip to the local dog pound.

It was amid the grim confines of yelping strays that I was again treated to just who is "living in the shadows" in this nation.

I had recently been slapped with a ticket - a notice to appear in court - by an animal control officer from the Inland Valley Humane Society for having a dog whose license had expired.

The officer explained I could go down to the Humane Society and clear it up by renewing my dog's license and paying a small fine. At first I thought 'no biggie,' as I knew I had been remiss in not renewing my dog's license when I moved back to my hometown of Pomona, Calif., this year.

Yet when it was finally my turn with the desk clerk at the pound, I was informed that unless I could present proof that my dog had been licensed from the time I moved from the city until I returned, I would actually have to pay for three years of back license fees. When I asked how I could be charged to license my dog in the city for years I didn't live here, she explained that I should have notified the pound when I was moving away and then immediately obtained a new dog license when I returned.

This is the sort of sheer bureaucratic idiocy that drives some men in the hinterlands to "snap," join a militia, declare their home a sovereign nation, raise the 'Don't Tread On Me' flag and barricade themselves during a standoff with the Feds until Bo Gritz arrives to talk them out.

But just like the vast majority of Americans struggling through their daily grind, I simply muttered under my breath as I paid the bill and went home.

It's when I got home that the sense of being a citizen totally abandoned by my government truly crystallized for me. There in my neighbor's front yard was the rooster that's been waking the neighborhood faithfully at 5 a.m. for months now.

Roosters are illegal in Pomona, yet animal control has followed a graduated policy in order to remain "culturally sensitive" to the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants here that have made the bird ubiquitous within the city limits. Rooster owners, it was explained to me by an animal control officer, are given the better part of two months to get rid of their illegal fowl, a routine marked by warning letters in Spanish and friendly follow-up visits by officers.

Not far from where Rhode Island Red hunts and pecks is the house - marked by the Mexican flag flying out front - that seems to be doubling as an auto repair shop, used car sales lot and KOA campground. There have been as many as nine cars ringing the corner house at various times, some with 'For Sale' sale signs in their windows, others with their hood up or on jacks and missing tires.

In the evening, ragged looking motor homes pull up and extension cords are snaked through the windows of the house and hooked up to the decrepit coaches.

Across the city, occupancy limits have become a joke, with illegal garage "conversions" now commonplace and multiple extended families jammed into single-family housing. Unlicensed and illegal street vendors navigate the sidewalks across Pomona, selling various Mexican dishes from stolen shopping carts.

Illegal immigrants and their supporters in Pomona have pushed for the city council to instruct the police department to suspend its practice of towing the unregistered cars of unlicensed drivers.

Despite empty pleasantries about assimilation, the Mexican tri-colors, blasting banda music and window stickers proclaiming "Hecho en Mexico" speak to a different reality.

And on and on it goes, in Pomona, all over Southern California and increasingly across the nation.

Illegal immigration is no longer a battleground defined by the closing of trauma centers or public schools filled beyond capacity, areas where federal relief might actually help. It now flares in the faces of citizens everyday in ways most mundane.

Yet just like tiny, incremental shifts in the tectonic plates, the head of pressure that is building underneath this issue for working Americans is like a cultural atomic bomb waiting for its trigger point.

But that ominous ticking sound hasn't stopped elected leaders of both parties from sounding like they are dosed on Xanax as they continue to lecture citizens on the paramount need to be "sensitive" to illegal immigrants. This bipartisan brain trust ignored what happened in the American southwest following the 1986 amnesty, and they still don't get it now.

Despite their sporadic lip-service, they still don't understand just how deeply infuriating it is for working Americans to see hundreds of thousands of people who have no legal right to be in the country take to the streets waving a foreign flag while demanding their "rights."

So as Americans of every hue and stripe sweat over our taxes, renew our registrations, buy the required insurance, submit to absurd security checks at airports, show up under threat for uncompensated jury duty, license our dogs, pay our fines, fees and assessments and more or less play by the Byzantine rules we've been issued, we aren't exactly expecting relief anytime soon.

But we know who is really living in the shadows of this nation today, as our eyes have finally adjusted to the dark.

Mark Cromer is a journalist in Los Angeles and is a senior writing fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), http://www.capsweb.org . He can be reached at Mrcromer@aol.com or info@capsweb.org .

http://www.usnewswire.com/

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Despite their sporadic lip-service, they still don't understand just how deeply infuriating it is for working Americans to see hundreds of thousands of people who have no legal right to be in the country take to the streets waving a foreign flag while demanding their "rights."

Just some thoughts...
Everytime I am reminded of that day, I get cold chills down my back.
On the flip side, its the "motivator" I need to keep the fight going.

WELL SAID! OH, SO TRUE!

So as Americans of every hue and stripe sweat over our taxes, renew our registrations, buy the required insurance, submit to absurd security checks at airports, show up under threat for uncompensated jury duty, license our dogs, pay our fines, fees and assessments and more or less play by the Byzantine rules we've been issued, we aren't exactly expecting relief anytime soon.

Yet we will persevere and YES we will reclaim what belongs to us!