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OP-ED: Disconnected: The Government You Have Reached Is No Longer in Service
Posted on : Wed, 10 Jan 2007 18:39:00 GMT | Author : Californians for Population Stabilization
News Category : PressRelease



LOS ANGELES, Jan. 10 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Following is an op-ed by Mark Cromer, Senior Writing Fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization:

Disconnected: The Government You Have Reached Is No Longer in Service By Mark Cromer


Neighborhood Watch programs usually enjoy strong support from city hall, which sees community vigilance as an important effort that brings neighbors together to safely help police get the upper hand on crime.

Stay alert and immediately report all suspicious activity to the police, right?

Well, yes, unless the neighborhood happens to be the United States border with Mexico, in which case active civil vigilance suddenly becomes dangerous vigilantism. Citizens who would ordinarily be commended for keeping a sharp-eye out for potential burglars suddenly morph at the border into an ominous brigade of xenophobic wing-nuts.

Or so declared the Los Angeles City Council, which in mid-December formalized its support for illegal immigrants by officially branding citizen volunteers who report illegal crossings to the Border Patrol as armed and dangerous racists.

The council's Declaration of Los Angeles, which has the support of the ACLU, calls for the government to begin surveillance programs against citizens who seek to report possible crimes at the border.

It's doubtful that novelist George Orwell could envision anything more ironically surreal: a city government lashing out at citizens who are volunteering to help uphold a law that is being brazenly violated everyday. A city council that has recoiled at virtually any effort to detain and deport people who are here illegally is now actively agitating for a federal and state campaign against citizens who are exercising their constitutional rights in an effort to see the nation's immigration laws enforced.

With a nod to Orwell's grim vision of the future, the declaration states that it is the citizen volunteers watching the border that are causing an erosion in public order, not the nearly three million people illegally pouring across the Rio Grande every year.

But the LA City Council wasn't satisfied with just officially smearing citizen activists at the border, as was plainly evident by its treatment last week of a multi-ethnic, politically-diverse band of citizens who dared to challenge the council's decision to adopt the declaration.

Led by iconic LA activist Ted Hayes, a couple dozen blacks, whites and Latinos decided they were going to take on city hall and in the parlance of the politically correct: "speak truth to power."

Though far from the border, the impact of illegal immigration on traditionally black neighborhoods in Los Angeles has been staggering.

At a press conference across the street from the civic plaza, Hayes and several other black activists from South Los Angeles described in glaring (and often unprintable) terms the increasingly hostile situations African Americans find themselves in as overwhelming numbers of illegal immigrants transform their communities.

An increased competition for scarce resources is only part of the story, with illegal immigrant gang members openly taunting blacks on the street.

"We are being called 'monkeys' by these people," Hayes said. "We are being told to go back home to Africa."

And that's the more benign side of what blacks face in some neighborhoods. Just a week before Hayes and his group spoke at City Hall, 14-year-old Cheryl Green was gunned down on the street as she stood talking to some friends. The teenager was a target, police and black residents say, because she was a black girl in a neighborhood that a Latino streetgang has vowed to ethnically cleanse of African Americans.

Illegal immigrant gang members now prowling the streets of Los Angeles and its surrounding county now number in the thousands -- and possibly tens of thousands -- and they wreck violent havoc, frequently targeting non-Latinos, especially blacks.

Yet if Hayes and his group of like-minded residents thought their stories (or at least their ethnic and social diversity) would afford them some modicum of respect or introspection from the city council, they were quickly disabused of that notion.

The same council that only moments before had been riveted by Howard Stern's perennial guest 'Melrose' Larry Green telling them about the Guns n' Roses concert he had attended, quickly became visibly disinterested by the parade of citizens decrying the council's support for illegal immigrants.

As citizens took issue with the declaration, council members shuffled papers, spoke with aides, and offered a few smirks for good measure.

Under other circumstances dealing with other issues, it's hard to imagine such a diverse range of residents hailing from all over the city being essentially ignored by the council. Indeed, had Hayes and his group rose to attack the so-called Minutemen at the border, chances are good you would have been able to hear a pin drop in those council chambers, with lots of council heads nodding in support.

Instead, these citizens got the message loud and clear: shut up and sit down -- or better yet, just go away.

And so it goes these days in Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's Los Angeles, where vocal opposition to illegal immigration is heresy and The Declaration of Los Angeles amounts to an abbreviated manifesto for a new civic orthodoxy that holds any such dissent to be racist.

Undaunted, Hayes and his cohorts filed out of city hall, unfurling their American flags for a short march to the Federal Building.

What they were fighting for in the council chambers immediately came into perspective out on the city's streets. As one car sped past the marchers, its passengers shouted "Mexican for life!" and "Viva la Raza!"

As one marcher wearily noted "Now you see who has the council's ear."

Californians for Population Stabilization