Thread: McGONIGLE CANYON : UPDATE

Site: www.nctimes.com
Name: Skip
City: M
Emailadd: Skip@comcast.net
Phone: 951xxx-xxxx
Letter: RE: It's doubtful the rally would have taken place if the homeless workers had been white.>>> Want to bet! If these people had been Caucasian (white) they would have been gone long time ago, and there would have been no fuss about it. This editorial has to be the most racist piece of trash I have ever seen published in the North County Times.
Submit: Submit Letter to the Editor

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2006/11 ... _25_06.txt

SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE
NOVEMBER 30, 2006

Letters to the editor: North Edition

Environment at risk from immigrant camping

Regarding “Group protests immigrants in canyon” (Local, Nov. 19):

I am a restoration biologist for a large environmental consulting firm in San Diego and have a 25-acre wetland restoration project within the McGonigle Canyon site.

The migrants live in the hill above this restoration site. Over the past three years, the restoration site has matured from one-gallon plants to large 20-foot-tall willow and sycamore trees.

I have been well aware of the migrant population living in the canyon since I started working on this project. In fact, I have spoken to many of the campers on several occasions. I can say that they have never posed a threat to humans. However, they have posed a major threat to the environment.

As your article stated, there are about 200 inhabitants within Deer and McGonigle canyons. The problems they have caused on an environmental level are numerous:

These campers have repeatedly altered the irrigation system that once fed the wetland restoration site so they may bathe and wash their clothes. The soapy runoff then enters the small stream, which eventually drains into the ocean a few miles away.

The 200 people have been using the wetland restoration site as their 25-acre toilet for the past three years. All of this untreated sewage enters our waterways once the first rains arrive.

The migrants who live in the hillsides remove native plant material to create their camps. These activities increase erosion potential while impacting sensitive vegetation communities that are home to several state and federal threatened species of wildlife and plants.

The trash they create is left for us to clean up. On several occasions, my company has rented and placed empty Dumpsters in the canyon in anticipation that they may be used to deposit the trash but to no avail.

My biggest concern, perhaps, is the impact that could occur if these campers are left unchecked. The threat of fire.

PETER TOMSOVIC
San Diego

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib ... tters.html

NCT POSTED MY LETTER ONLINE

Racist editorial in the NCT

Re: the Nov. 26 editorial, "Evicting migrants not a solution."

"It's doubtful the rally would have taken place if the homeless workers had been white." Want to bet! If these people had been Caucasian (white), they would have been gone a long time ago, and there would have been no fuss about it.

This editorial has to be the most racist piece of trash I have ever seen published in the North County Times.

Skip

Murrieta

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2006/12 ... _21_59.txt

MY LETTER DID NOT MAKE THE PRINT EDITION

Gary in Murrieta (Skip) wrote on December 03, 2006 12:18 PM:"RE : "RACIST EDITORIAL IN THE NCT" : I bought several copies of the Sunday Paper to cut out and save my Letter to the editor. That is when I found out your paper is just too Bleeding Heart Liberal to Print it. You cannot keep hiding the truth from everyone forever. Whether these letters and comments get printed or not, Americans are fed up with Illegal Immigration. When I am at work or amongst friends I never bring up the subject, but it is being talked about a lot. Even while I was at a military function this week, the subject of illegal Immigration came up."

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2006/12 ... _21_59.txt

The workers are sleeping wherever night finds them

How canan American city stand for this? This is asking for crime and disease.

Originally Posted by DavidWidman

The workers are sleeping wherever night finds them

How canan American city stand for this? This is asking for crime and disease.

By losing control of their government and it dictating just how we all must live.

P.S. With the way things are heading we will be camping with them soon for real. Back in the depression in the thirties there were camps that popped up and grew to the size of cities.

Illegal immigrants and their open-air church evicted from wealthy San Diego-area canyons

By: ELLIOT SPAGAT - Associated Press

December 23, 2006

SAN DIEGO -- For 20 years, many of the illegal immigrants drawn by jobs in tomato fields have worshipped at an outdoor church, a concrete altar in a canyon where they slept under the shelter of plywood and plastic tarps and bathed in a stream.

Today, however, McGonigle Canyon is overshadowed by multimillion-dollar homes, and police and landowners want the eyesores gone. The squatters and their tree-covered place of worship, which the Roman Catholic church installed in the 1980s, are being expelled in one of the latest skirmishes in the nation's battle over illegal immigration and homeless squatters' camps.

"We're wandering pilgrims once again," Monsignor Frank Fawcett told about 75 people at a Mass earlier this month. The service was held in a dirt parking lot at the top of the canyon because rain turned the path leading to the altar into thick mud.


Many of the homes and strip malls that surround the makeshift chapel in McGonigle Canyon are just a few years old.

"This is a 25-year-old problem, but now that new housing projects are right on top of them, it has brought more attention to it," said San Diego police Capt. Boyd Long. "This is just scratching the surface of a much bigger problem: immigration, which is something our nation is struggling to deal with."

Anti-illegal immigration activists have tried to accelerate the evictions. They collected pay stubs in the canyons and called a boycott of the companies listed on them -- nurseries, farms, a landscaping company. A sticker on a post that once supported a basketball hoop reads "No Amnesty to Illegal Aliens."

Canyon squatters were estimated to have numbered in the hundreds, even thousands, in the 1980s.

In Carlsbad, a city of 100,000 some 35 miles north of San Diego, police closed a migrant camp of about 20 huts in June because big homes, a new golf course and new trail system made it impossible for them to stay, police Cpl. Kevin Lehan said. He estimates squatters in the city have dwindled from 300 in 1996 to fewer than 100.

"The landowners and farmers are selling out because it's a lot more lucrative to sell your land for multimillion-dollar homes than to grow poinsettias," Lehan said.

Developers were required to preserve the canyon as open space to win permission to build, but now police-installed fences block cars from driving in. One developer, D.R. Horton Inc. of Fort Worth, Texas, has peppered huts with signs that warn squatters their belongings may be hauled away at any time.

The altar -- covered with blue, gold and pink tiles portraying the Virgin of Guadalupe -- sits along the stream in front of four rows of wooden benches and six picnic tables. The church plans to destroy it as soon as the ground is dry.

Some squatters have already moved to nearby canyons; others sleep in the tomato fields.

Some decided to chip in about $100 a month to share an apartment, but Juan Ramirez said that would mean less money to send home to his wife and three children in Mexico.

"My children are studying, and they need pencils. They don't have enough money," he said. Ramirez makes $6.75 an hour plucking tomatoes six days a week, and sends two-thirds of his wages to his family while he sleeps under a tarp tied to trees. It's a slim return on the $2,000 he paid a smuggler to sneak him across the border last summer.

Other migrants live in ramshackle camps elsewhere in the country, but few live next to exquisite homes like those overlooking McGonigle Canyon. Just north of the canyon lies Rancho Santa Fe, where the median home price is $2.8 million. For San Diego County as a whole, the median home price this year is $575,000.

Homeowner Julie Adams, an outspoken critic of the squatters, said the huts pose fire and safety risks.

"It's a transient camp in the middle of the community and that shouldn't be allowed," said Adams, whose husband and son stopped mountain biking on trails in the canyons because they felt unsafe.

Other homeowners are sympathetic.

"They get kicked out of one place and go to another," said Barry Martin, 54, a retired airline pilot. "As long as people are willing to hire them, as long as there are jobs, they'll be around."

The priest told his parishioners at the recent Mass that he would follow them.

"Even though you find yourselves strangers in another land, we pray that you will still feel welcome from some," Fawcett said.

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2006/12 ... _23_06.txt

Comments On This Story

Reardon wrote on December 23, 2006 8:01 PM:"In their home towns in Mexico they have beautiful churches, and warm homes with loving families to go home to. They have elected to travel hundreds of miles, break the immigration laws, live in shacks, and break the employment laws. Some have also used forged documents or stolen identities -- causing untold harm to law-abiding American citizens. We need a Guest Worker program for workers to come without their families because it is the families that cause the gang, school and medical problems, not the workers. We need the workers, just not the social problems caused by their families. If our military can go overseas for months and even years without their families, the Guest Workers can do so also. Once we have a Guest Worker program, employers should be required to provide sanitary housing...but not of the quality or to the government specifications that make housing so expensive to build. If the housng is too expensive to build, the employers will not do it and we will be back where we are now with people living in cardboard shacks. anwhile we need to enforce the existing laws to raise the costs to the illegals to keep their numbers under control. The Pew Center says 70% of Mexico wants to be here, and we see today what problems just 10% can cause. "

Yes Reardon wrote on December 23, 2006 10:53 PM:"They have a wonderful life in Mexico, that is why they pay 2000 dollars to a smuggler to pick tomatoes for $6.75 an hour. You are very out of touch with reality. As for families, most come with a family so that you can have tomatoes on your Big Mac. It is good to see that you realize the value of a big brother state that requires employers to provide housing for workers, just like the military. Yes, socialism is the answer."

I'll grow my own tomatoes if it will get rid of the illegal aliens and the commies that support them.

Dixie

If these people are illegals then they have no right anywhere in the U.S.. If they want to squat on land let them do so in Mexico. They have to be shown if over and over and over again they have no place in America, and they will be hounded constantly until they get it through their heads Americans will tolerate their illegal presence no more. I think it is time Americans understood that We The People are the United States and the government not a handful of corrupt politicians aiding and abetting illegal criminals. I think many Americans have forgotten this and allowed these corrupt to deceive the Nation and falsely set themselves up as our overlords. What does the Constitution say? "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense".

Letters to the Editor - 2/28/2007

By: Readers nof the North County Times and North County Times -


Penasquitos Canyon cleared of migrants

I just want to thank my fellow residents, the San Diego Minutemen, Rick Roberts and Brian Bilbray for helping to get the city and property owners to clear the migrant squatter camps off of their property after 20 years of hearing excuses why it couldn't be done. We all came together and solved a major problem in our community.

There was documented child prostitution and drug dealing going on right next to the camps along Penasquitos Creek, and SDPD said nothing could be done. That didn't fly with the local residents, and we demanded the migrants, almost all of them illegal aliens, be removed.

Thank you also to Mayor Sanders for standing up to the illegal alien activists who wanted these 300 to 400 men, women and even children to continue to live in their own filth for their political purposes. The story of the clearing of McGonigle Canyon has gone nationwide, and the citizens of San Diego are now able to hike and enjoy this beautiful open space near the heart of San Diego.

Rod DeShano

Rancho Penasquitos

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/02 ... _38_39.txt