Thread: COLUMN WITH A BLEEDING HEART

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Sunday, September 3, 2006
Last modified Saturday, September 2, 2006 6:06 PM PDT




Protesters in the wrong place

By: PAUL JACOBS - For The Californian

The city of Temecula has been visited by a group of misguided vigilantes from the cities of Redlands, Upland, San Juan Capistrano and Orange to chase away the "blight" of day laborers from Old Town, as was reported in last Sunday's edition of The Californian.

Day laborers gather seeking employment, which suggests they value earning an honest living, and the article revealed that at least several of those standing in a dirt lot were, in fact, legal residents. But facts don't get in the way of the zealots on the anti-illegal immigration crusade.

As a truck pulled up presumably looking to hire one or more workers for the day, several protesters grabbed their video cameras and threatened the driver: "Smile, you're going on the Web site!" What happened to presumed innocence in the home of the free and the brave? Have people become so crazed over an imagined invasion that they have lost all their senses?

That truck driver may have been inquiring to hire legal day laborers and asking for identification, but the vigilantes instantly accused him of being an illegal employer. This country has celebrated free enterprise a very long time, for better and for worse.

I have read letters to the editor hostile to labor unions yet as the labor movement has been repelled, American jobs have been expelled. Union-busting successfully put the kibosh on the gains of workers in this country. Many of the unionized manufacturing and processing jobs proudly filled with American labor have been reallocated to immigrant labor ---- and that is where you'll find a concentration of illegal employment.

A more meaningful place to hold a rally would be at the corporate headquarters for Tyson Foods, which has been accused by a federal grand jury of actually smuggling undocumented workers into the country to work at multiple food-processing plants in the United States.

You really can't call it an invasion when our own corporations allegedly help immigrants bypass our borders and our laws. Many anti-illegal immigration activists appear to be politically conservative, but it is the Republican Party that has been responsible for stifling the wages and economic opportunities for middle-class America.

They have given us trickle-down theories, outsourcing, corporate megamergers, deregulation and privatization. The public has been plundered through commerce.

The middle class is being attacked, but from within. Our supposed representatives in Washington, D.C., couldn't even see their way to raising the minimum wage to help those on the bottom rung of the social ladder without trying to slip in a provision to protect those at the top of the economic stratosphere from paying estate taxes.

Our political system has become an unscrupulous marketplace that advances the profits of corporations while dismantling regulations that served to protect consumers from the very abuses we have seen take place with virtually every "public utility."

The media has the power and responsibility to question government policies on these issues, but corporate interests limit the debate to hysteric hyperbole.

American media is programmed to provide entertainment, not information. That's why misinformed vigilantes drove many miles to protest a legal, peaceful gathering of day laborers for three hours. They came to correct a blight of their own misperception.

Paul Jacobs of Temecula is a regular columnist for The Californian. E-mail: TemeculaPaul@aol.com.

I wonder which gated community he lives in up in Temecula, because if he had to live with the human refuse that us ordinary prople have to put up with, I'm sure he'd change his traitorous tune. It's dipwads like this clown, whose only contact with illegals is when they bus his table or mow his lawn that could make idiotic statements like he does. Notice how he makes no mention of the skyrocketing crime, filfth and graffiti that have become regular additions to our communities ever since the invasion of illegals has taken place.

Notice how he makes no mention of the bankrupted hospitals, overcrowded and failing schools and overpacked jails, ever since Bush has started spouting his amnesty garbage. How many regular Americans need to die, get raped, robbed or molested by illegals before he pulls his head out from behind his gated walls, safe from the effects of the mass invasion of lawbreaking, third world scum?

And why is it these traitors always turn to calling names like vigilante and racist, all the while ignoring the actual facts, visible to anyone who has to live among the illegals on a daily basis? Maybe because he has no leg to stand on when it comes to the facts, plain for anyone with a brain to see. I guess when you live safe and secure behind the walls of your gated enclave it makes no difference to you how many people get killed and injured, just as long as you have your cheap landscapers to manicure your perfect lawns and nannies to watch over your spoiled brat kids.

What frightens me the most about all this illegal immigration is the fact that is resembles that of the early 1900s. The days of long hours in sweat shops for 6 days a week, living in the employer's provided housing in some cases and paying him exuberant rent, and child labor. The government outlawed those practices back then but it seems that it has been forgotten and is creeping back in. Has anyone else started noticing this?