OPINION: Throw out pecking order

San Bernardino County Sun (California)
July 14, 2009 Tuesday

I find the writer of "Dead wrong" on July 4 to be barking up the wrong tree himself, a tree of his own choosing.

Minuteman Ray Herrera was displaced from his occupation by illegal aliens earning one-third to one-half of real 1980 wages, just as many Americans of all ancestries have been since the 1981 recession and the devaluation of the peso by Mexican President Lopez Portillo in 1982. The letter writer and Professor Calderon may consider Herrera to be a traitor to "his people," but no more so than Cesar Chavez was when Chavez repeatedly called the Border Patrol on illegal immigrants who broke his strikes against unscrupulous agribusiness employers.

Border Patrol spokesman Gerardo Gonzalez is doing his job of enforcing immigration law.

The open-borders crowd to which Calderon and the letter writer belong seems to be racially motivated.

The allegation that illegal immigrants "might" in large numbers be American citizens has the same spin as any number of other radical Chicano myths.

The suggestion that people who agree with Herrera, including Mexicans who immigrated into America according to the rules, need to take "ethnic studies classes" is rather disingenuous.

Those classes tend to foment racial disharmony and put forth the idea that only white people are capable of racism, as well as blame modern white people for often slanted versions of events long before their births.

The civil rights movement was about racial equality, not exchanging a largely defunct racial pecking order of the past with another just as egregious as the old, nor was it about illegal immigration as the vehicle for that new racial order.

ALLAN McNEW
Beaumont

Going downhill

What has this country come to?

There is a new bill pending in Congress to give a chance to illegal students. It was introduced by Joe Baca, a Democrat.

Any member of Congress, including Joe Baca, should be arrested for aiding and abetting people who are breaking our laws by being in this country illegally.

Not only are we paying for the education of these illegals, they also would get a discount for applying for citizenship.

Our country is going downhill because of the economy and politicians (Democrats) wanting to give everything away while wanting American citizens to tighten their belts and suck it up.

Let's get real and take care of American students and citizens first.

HARVEY M. EDWARDS
Barstow

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