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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.