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Mexican leaders watch protest from cheap seats
By Colleen Cason ccason@VenturaCountyStar.com.
May 3, 2006

A protest can be a luxury, sort of a spa day for the soul.

Nothing massages the ego like being seen and heard by the people in power.

And talk about your guilty pleasure. Does anything compare to a calorie-free diet of speeches in all our favorite flavors? Also, don't forget how great it feels to exercise the right to free speech and assembly rather than our biceps and backs.

I failed to realize how truly fortunate I was to take my protests to the pavement during the Vietnam War. We well-off baby boomers could cut class, pile in cars our parents paid for, and pool our allowances for gas and food during those weekend moratoriums in Washington, D.C.

As graduation approached, though, I had to think about the day when Daddy and Mommy would no longer support me. During one moratorium, I boycotted classes only after I took my German exam. An "F" for that day would have cost me a semester of out-of-state tuition.

When idealism hits up against reality, reality often comes out on top.

I thought about that lesson Monday morning on Warwick Avenue in Thousand Oaks.

Workers had gathered on a retaining wall at an unauthorized day-laborer site. Wearing rugged clothes, the men of the wall are there most mornings. Most don't know enough English, or own a shirt white enough, to work in a restaurant.

One man told me in Spanish that his gringo boss told him if he didn't work Monday — the day of the national immigrant boycott — there would be no more work for him.

When he realized the term "gringo" might insult me, he changed that to Americano.

About half the usual number of his friends had shown up, he said. He's sympathetic to their cause, but he had to work. It was May 1 after all, the day the landlord gets his due.

An estimated 60 percent of the 11 million or more illegal immigrants in this country are Mexican nationals.

Coming here is not a matter of luxury but of survival. In Mexico, their labor is undervalued and the basics of life are not cheap.

Their labor comes at a high moral price for the U.S. businesses that employ them. Employers would rather be on the right side of the law. But they know if they hire legal workers, they must pay higher wages. And their competitors who hire illegal immigrants can undercut them in the marketplace.

Meanwhile, down on Thousand Oaks Boulevard, the normally bustling Latino Market was dark at the lunch hour.

A large sign in the front window explained the convenience store was closed in sympathy to the May Day demonstration. "Recuerden si callamos no avanzamos," the sign said. "Remember, if we stay quiet we don't advance."

Maybe a day without income is easier for a shopkeeper than for a man who waits for work on a retaining wall. But it still is a financial hardship to shut down a business.

And meanwhile, in Mexico, protest is not just a luxury for anybody living there illegally, it is foolhardy.

Americans who enter or live in Mexico without papers are considered felons and can be incarcerated. And Mexican jail is hardly a place of pampering.

Mexicans do welcome certain Americans. They throw the door open for anyone older than 50 who lives off investments from another country. The amount of that income is specified in Mexican immigration law.

Mexico, however, reserves the right to forbid aliens from living in certain cities that already have a high percentage of foreign residents.

They also give the big welcome to scientists and engineers, while not being too keen on absorbing un- or under-educated citizens of other nations.

Talk about luxury. Mexico has the luxury of dumping its failed economic model on its neighbor to the north. And then criticizing this country for trying to deal with the mess.

Ernesto Derbez, Mexico's foreign secretary, recently accused the U.S. Congress of caving into "xenophobic" extremists in crafting its immigration-reform bill, according to a Dec. 20 Associated Press report. He further called a plan to build a border wall "stupid" and "underhanded."

Now, we Americans are in a bind. We can grant legal status to the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants within our borders through some sort of temporary worker program. We can require them to learn English and U.S. history, and to hold down steady employment — if they want to become citizens.

But then what? If nothing changes in Mexico, more illegal workers will wash across our border.

Amnesty is akin to replacing a warped parquet floor every decade but failing to fix the leaking roof which caused the damage in the first place.

Mexican leaders have the greatest luxury of all: living in a glass house where the stones only seem to fly one way.