Thread: Give Illegal Aliens' Jobs to Unemployed Katrina Victims

Give Illegal Aliens' Jobs to Unemployed Katrina Victims

by Phyllis Schlafly
Posted Sep 13, 2005

Katrina has displaced hundreds of thousands of Americans who now need food, housing, and cash. Relief for those necessities will have to be temporary and it will be many months before they can return to New Orleans, if ever, so what they need most of all is jobs.

Our government should act immediately to put these displaced Americans in the jobs now held by illegal aliens. Some 10 million illegal aliens are now working in our country, so there is no excuse for not replacing a million of them with unemployed American citizens.

President Bush should announce an immediate crackdown on employers of illegals and set up a hiring database to match up the unemployed with jobs.

Remember how Bush was talking glibly about inviting "willing workers" to come here from other countries? We should give affirmative-action preference to willing workers from Louisiana and Mississippi.

Meanwhile, the Senate voted $10 billion and then another $50 billion for hurricane relief, and that's all deficit spending. Why not take that money out of foreign aid handouts since we have an obligation to help our own first?

Our guide for dealing with the Katrina disaster should be Dr. Booker T. Washington's speech at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895. Known as one of the most memorable and influential speeches in American history, it is just as timely today as when it was given.

Dr. Washington started by telling the story of a ship lost at sea for many days. When it sighted a friendly vessel, it sent a desperate signal from its mast: "Water, water; we die of thirst!" The friendly vessel signaled back, "Cast down your bucket where you are."

The lost ship signaled again, "Water, water; send us water!" Again the friendly ship sent the message, "Cast down your bucket where you are."

After a third and fourth such exchange, the captain of the distressed vessel finally heeded the injunction and cast down his bucket. It came up full of fresh, sparking water from the mouth of the Amazon River.

Dr. Washington then admonished members of his own race to cast down their buckets "in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions." He cautioned that "in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands."

"We shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life," he said. "No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem."

"It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities."

Booker T. Washington then gave a stern message "to those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South. . . . Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth."

Continuing, Dr. Washington said: "As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours."

Ever so practical, Dr. Washington counseled that "progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. . . . The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house."

Booker T. Washington had a dream of bringing "our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth." He called for "that higher good that, let us pray God, will come in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law."

Dr. Washington's speech wowed his audience and was widely reprinted in newspapers all over the country. A faraway Boston newspaper editorialized that "the sensation that it has caused in the press has never been equalled."

President Bush, stop looking for "willing workers" from other countries. Cast down your bucket in America and guide these displaced Americans to jobs now held by those who have no right to be in our country.

Mrs. Schlafly is the author of the new book The Supremacists: The Tyranny of Judges and How to Stop It (Spence Publishing Co).
http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=9026

Ya, they couldn't wait for the illegal forces to move in and take over. I've heard more and more stories where people traveled to help and were basicly run off to keep the illegals there. Of all the disasters this one still amazes me. It's as if they don't want the people to return and want it be something totally different.

This would be too much like right.

It makes too much sense, so why in the world would anybody do it.

sorry for the double post

Is there a delete post button?

While I absolutely don't agree with giving New Orleans jobs to illegals over residents that want to rebuild and remain, New Orleans has had its own unique, deplorable dependency on welfare. If floods did not destroy that city, welfare was going to do it.

I grew up in Louisiana and lived in New Orleans, until I could no longer stand the attitude.

There has been a huge group of local folks that have been muti-generationally dependent on any and every State and Federal Program. These people wrote the book on how to get by without working. A lot of this has been due to State and Local Politics. A lot of is cultural. Much of it is the "I am owed attitude". This did not start with Mexicans. Combine these problems with one of the worst education systems and crooked City Government, and you have the perfect recipe for ghetto poor and not much hope. The crooked politicians had their huge block of uneducated voters and made sure to keep them down and dependent.

I was devastated to see so many people displaced. A lot of these people have gone and now have decided to participate in a working society for the first time in their lives. Many are in Atlanta, and I have done some volunteer work for them. Many are going to remain here because they are no longer content to just get by. The see a new way of life. Most have admitted their inherited family homes in the flooded areas were falling down and they had no money to repair them. They plan to sell the property if NO gets its act together. Most were so poor that they would never have had money to leave to go look for work elsewhere. It was a cold cruel push out of a pitiful impoverished comfort zone. Most have no interest in going back to do cleanup -they think the Government should do it and pay them to go back to their old non-working way of life.

One thing that New Orleans will see is that Mexicans won't work for the Mininum wages the working poor of this area would. Just watch. That is what has happened everywhere Mexicans go. They do not work for minimum wage. Wait till Louisiana sees that they don't pay any taxes and they send all of their money home. It will be interesting. Once wages are up maybe folks who want to go back and work will have a chance to make decent money.