Posted on 07/03/2007 4:01:40 AM PDT by theothercheek
In a classic application of bottom-up management denizens of small towns let their elected representatives in Washington D.C. know exactly how they expected them to handle the compromised immigration compromise bill that neither secured our borders, nor was any more enforceable than previous legislation it was meant to "fix."
Earlier waves of immigrants – legal and illegal – flocked to CA, , FL, IL, NJ, NY and TX ("gateway" states) but have been dispersing across a wider swath of the U.S. since 2000. The foreign-born, non-English speaking populations of DE, GA, IN, NE, NV and SC have exploded, say demographers, with the "newcomers" (as President Bush is wont to call them) preferentially settling in (some say, overrunning) small towns and sleepy suburbs. And people who live in these places saying, "enough!"
Here’s what Stephanie Usrey, 39, a stay-at-home mother who lives in Gainesville, GA, tells The Washington Post about the "aha" moment she had at a local Wal-Mart about five years ago:
"That was the first time I looked around and said, 'Man, I didn't realize how many Mexicans there were here.' And they don't seem to feel any discomfort when they're, like, six inches from your face and talking to each other in their language, either. I just felt very encroached upon. . . . It was like an instant feeling of 'I'm in the minority, and if we don't get control over this, pretty soon all of America will be outnumbered.'"
Spurred into activism by talk-radio Usrey and tens of thousands others like her in small towns all across the U.S. "bombarded their senators with phone calls and e-mails decrying the bill as an unacceptable amnesty for the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants," says the WaPo. And they didn’t let up till they got results:
Nowhere were the bill's opponents more influential than here in Georgia, whose two Republican senators, Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss, originally helped craft the legislation. Two days after its unveiling in May, Chambliss was booed at his state's Republican convention. Isakson's office received more than 21,000 calls from opponents of the bill, compared with 6,000 from supporters.
[B]oth Georgia senators voted to kill the bill they once supported.
Another example of bottom-up management: With the federal government unable or unwilling to enforce existing immigration laws, small town governments, like Hazelton, PA, and Framers Branch, TX, took matters into their own hands by enacting local ordinances against businesses that hire illegal labor. And some local enforcement officials have decided to, well, enforce immigration law.
Panama City, FL, Sheriff Frank McKeithen, for one, has been targeting construction sites, and has arrested more than 500 illegal aliens and reported them to immigration officials since November. The Miami Herald reports:
The sheriff's department has developed a remarkably effective - and controversial - way of catching illegal immigrants: Deputies in patrol cars pull up to a construction site in force, and watch and see who runs.
Those who take off are chased down and arrested on charges such as trespassing, for cutting through someone else's property, or loitering, for hiding out in someone's yard, or reckless driving, for speeding off in a car.
U.S. immigration authorities are then given the names of those believed to be in this country illegally.
Immigrant advocates say the technique is repugnant, and the ACLU says its constitutionality is questionable. …
The sheriff said the raids are justified under a long-standing Florida law prohibiting employers from knowingly hiring illegal immigrants.
Such local initiatives are not going unnoticed by state legislatures, which are now going even further in attempting to curb illegal immigration, according to The WaPo:
By the time most legislatures adjourned in May, at least 1,100 immigration bills had been submitted by lawmakers, more than double last year's record total, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. This year's total is expected to grow as the issue continues to dominate debate in statehouses still in session.
These laws limit illegal immigrants' ability to obtain jobs, find housing, get driver's licenses and receive many government services. They also empower state law enforcement agencies to inquire into an immigrant's legal status and hold for deportation those deemed to be here illegally. The idea is to make life so difficult for illegal immigrants that they will leave the state -- if not the country. …
At least 18 states have enacted laws concerning illegal immigrants. Most of the legislation is seen as punitive, and it reflects legislators' anger at the federal government's inability to seal the southern border and at provisions in the Senate bill that would allow the 12 million illegal immigrants already here a path to citizenship. …
[M]any states are increasingly frustrated at having to provide expensive services for illegal immigrants.
In a repudiation of the "sanctuary city" trend, local police in OK now train with federal authorities to learn how to find and capture illegal immigrants, and AZ is considering allowing officers to ask people they arrest whether they are U.S. citizens and to seize them if they don’t have valid documents to prove it.
OK also bars illegal immigrants from receiving public assistance, VA approved a proposal to withhold state and local funding from any non-profit group that uses the money to provide services to illegal immigrants and MA rejected a proposal that would have allowed illegal immigrants to pay in-state college tuition.
The Masters Of The Universe and the business community might not like it, but when marshaled, the will of the people is a force to be reckoned with.
Three cheers for “Small Town America”.
That is just crazy! Its against the law for police to ask someone if they committed a crime!
These are my sentiments exactly. This is happening all over Georgia.
It has happened in Mississippi... which has the highest per capita illegal population in the Nation. They are everywhere, responsible for a huge increase in crimes... and responsible for 5 murders locally in the last week or so. They are parasites on our Society... and they do not like America... but they like our money fine.
LLS
Hip,hip, hooray!
Hip,hip, hooray!
Hip,hip, hooray!
And my little berg in Millington, TN...just 20 miles from Memphis.
Here in Michigan, some farming groups are running a spanish language “come to Michigan” campaign.
Whatever taxes they pay is counterbalanced against educating their kids in US schools (and taxpayers having to foot the bills to build more schools and hire more teachers as local schools suddenly become “overcrowded”), public assistance (food stamps at the least, welfare in some states), free medical care in ERs, etc. (that’s why those of us with health insurance have to pay $100 for an aspirin, Michael Moore!). And instead of propping up the local economy by spending money where they live, they send the money back home to Mexico. In addition to the foreign aid we give Mexico, this is a huge transfer of wealth from America to Mexico.
I live just outside Cumming, Georgia, which is very close to Gainesville, cited in the article. I avoid going to the Wal-mart for the very reason that it’s not only overrun by Hispanics, but they are employed there as well. If you ask an employee to help you find something, 99% of the time, they can’t understand you.
My local middle school teaches both French and Spanish as the foreign languages. My eighth-grade daughter recently took a ten day trip to France with the French club. The running joke was there wasn’t a trip to Spain for the spanish club because all they had to do was bus them to Cumming.
One of the last links in this post talks about the “selfishness” of the chambers of commerce throughout the US when it comes to illegal immigration (this also applies to farmers). They just want slave-wage labor, and what they are not paying in salary and benefits, we the taxpayers are paying. Also, it seems to me that our problem of 12-20 million illegals grew one unscrupulous employer and farmer at a time. People don’t realize that over time, individual actions collectively add up. Take Europe. Individual women made the choice to have one or no children for decades. During that time, Muslim immgrants started pouring into Europe and they were having 4, 5 and 6 children. By the end of the year, “Mohammad” will be the most common boy’s name in England. These major seismic societal shifts happen one person at a time.
One thing that just irks me is their sense of entitlement. They think America is a giant cookie jar and all the cookies are free. Not just in gov handouts, in everything else, too. Their kids will play with display toys and break them, and the parents won't stop them. Things like that. I can't explain it, its just a mentality I see in them. They have taken over so many things here. Like the public swimming pool, beaches, things like that. And yard sales! Man, they love them. The after Thanksgiving sale at WalMart used to be so much fun, but now the Mexicans get ahead of everybody else and buy up literally everything.Even the vending machines at work. When they are filled, the Mexicans will empty them out within a few hours. They are really having an affect on our small town. They buy up all the empty houses in a neighborhood, then proceed to turn it into a slum. They urinate in public and expose themselves to children, and generally make nuisances of themselves. Its just sad what is happening to our little city and America.
One more observation. They keep saying 12 million. I'd be willing to wager its closer to 30 million. Probably even more.
What they like is the cleanliness and organization which Americans’ tax revenue provides, along with all the freebies. At ‘home’ they lived in abject squalor. Even poverty here is not like poverty in Mexico, etc. There is a difference between poverty and squalor.
Perhaps now we need to put the same pressure used to kill this bill on theses jackals to ENFORCE the law!
These ivory tower types have no idea how frightened Americans are.
Illegals are coming into upscale residential areas-——strolling our streets like they owned them.
The illegals look at us with strange, hooded eyes, lusting after our cars, our property. Americans wonder if they are coming to rape or kill us.
Americans cannot ask what illegals are doing in our neighborhoods-—a NYC actress spoke up, and was strangled and hung in her shower. The murder was staged to look like a suicide by the 19-year old killer (an illegal). God knows how many other crimes he committed-—so practiced was he at staging his brutal murder of this young woman.
Americans want this to stop. We want our gov’t to do something about this. We want our government to act to protect us.
Illegals who broke the law sneaking into our country feel they have the right to takeover our streets and frighten, murder rob and rape law-abiding Americans?
This has to end.
They are bloodsucking opportunists. They will suck the life out of our country and turn it into another Mexico, then when they have destroyed it, they will move on to another pristine country. I wonder if Canada will be next.
---As reported in Grassfire's booklet, "The Truth About The Illegal Invasion," some 325,000 criminal illegal aliens will be incarcerated in state and federal prisons this fiscal year.
----Illegal aliens commit 12 murders every day in the U.S. and kill another 13 daily through drunk driving incidents. That's more than 9,000 people killed every year by illegal aliens.
---On average eight children are sexually abused by illegal aliens every day -- that's over 2,920 annually.
-------And that's just a small portion of the illegal alien crime wave.......some 4.1 million crimes by illegal aliens.
---More people are murdered by illegal aliens in one year than have been killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since their inception.
---A GAO study found that illegal aliens commit, on average, 12.6 criminal offenses. This means incarcerated illegal aliens have committed over 4.1 million crimes
---- and that does not include illegal alien criminals who are not incarcerated.
----According to Congressional sources thousands of illegals are coming from terrorist and suspect nations and they are bent on killing Americans.
AND GET THIS:
Illegal Alien Thugs Set Fires Along Mexican Border
Criminal invaders are setting fire to forests and fields along the border to distract U.S. Border Patrol Agents to make their crossing easier, throwing Molotov cocktails at US agents’ vehicles, and setting fire to their observation posts........
These "vulnerable and exploited" invaders should be thrown out of our country, subito.
And when they move on, they will leave their mess for us to clean up. Once we have cleaned up their mess and got our country back, they will come back and do it again.
I know I cannot live like this. We are saturated. One day you go to the store and you see a mexican family. The next week you go and shop and you see 5, the week after that it’s 10 and so on and so on. And with them comes the crime, the overcrowded schools and the deterioration of our neighborhoods.
Its small town America thats holding what’s left of this country, together.
And our good governor just raised taxes so he can give the extra money to the schools and emergency rooms that are over run with them.
One thing that just irks me is their sense of entitlement. They think America is a giant cookie jar and all the cookies are free.
We’ve had generations of people with that sense of entitlement. Soon the demand for reparations will come from the brown people.
I have never seen it as bad as it is with the Mexicans, though. In the past, immigrants were proud to become Americans and wanted to contribute and acclimatize. The Mexicans just want to take take take.
Chertoff was on Fox New Sunday complaining that the compromise bill had all these enforcement tools that he won’t be able to use now that it died an ignoble death. Chris Wallace responded that there are plenty of enforcement tools in the “broken” immigration legislation and will he use them now? Also, will he and Bush support a bill that just concentrates on border security and encforcement. He refused to answer Wallace’s questions. On another show or in a speech - I can’t remember now - he said something to the effect that now, ICE will be forced to do more workplace raids and tear more families apart. I’m thinking, “This is a BAD thing?” Having half your family sent back to Mexico while the half that was born here staying (actually, they CAN go back with the illegal, no one is forcing them not to) is the price you pay for coming here illegally. There are consequences. This is one of them. Boo hoo, Chertoff.
Every cop show I have seen and several times I have been stopped the question is "have you been drinking this evening" which is a question regarding a crime.
Thanks for this link. I will check it often.
But they seem to manage to transport both across the border with them.
I go to the mall here in Southaven MS, and you have them shouting in Spanish to their friends in other check out lines.
I asked the woman behind me if she wonders if sometimes they are talking about us? She laughed and said she thinks the same thing sometimes.
I am living in a luxury gated apartment complex in PHX. Unfortunately, when there is a vacancy during the time of year when the snowbirds are not about to rent (i.e., when it’s 115 in the shade - what shade?) the apartment managers used to be lax about the criminal and credit background checks. Well, one day this Mexican family moves in across the way from my apartment. Within days, the apartment was stuffed to the gills with young men (mostly) and a few women all sleeping on wall-to-wall matresses on the floor. They were coyotes who were stashing illegals inthe apartment until they could get jobs for them. They repeatedly parked their beaten-up car in my reserved space - and I complained to management each time. Other neighbors complained about the comings and goings at all hours. All of a sudden we did not feel safe in our own homes. Finally, the apt manager figured out what was what, got the sheriff over and evicted the whole lot of them (the entire ordeal took about 2 months). Now, no matter how many vacancies they have and no matter how few people come to look at them, they go through the complete background check. (And by the way, in case anyone wants to know, this apartment complex is far more integrated than any place I’ve ever lived in the Northeast.)
And what gets me is you get held up by the vanload of 10 illegals doing 10 under the speed limit all the way to work. Then, you see at lunch, women with four kids walking down the highway to the grocery store.
Unreal how many there are.
bttt
btttt
And not matter how many kids they have, the women are always pregnant.
Exactly!
It's not time for the voters to go back to sleep. We're a long way from concluding this issue.
you betcha we did, and we’ll do it again, if necessary
It really frosts me that these elites are out there piping the notion that somehow the US citizen taxpayer is supposed to keep Mexican families together and supplement their “steenking “wages off our backs.
The businesses that hire them make massive profit and the taxpayers have to pay the benefits to the people they hire.
The elites wipe away their guilt by giving preferences to illegals not extended to US citizens off the backs of those very citizens.
The elites are responsible for all the new disease and pestilence foisted upon this country and its people. They are responsible for the increases in drugs and violence that has caused localities all over this country to raise taxes to US citizens to combat it.
The elitists are the only ones to profit from the destruction. No average US citizen has any positive benefit. If we did we could see it. What we see is our wonderful country turning into a third world hellhole and destruction of our culture and loss of personal prosperity!
That's exactly what needs to happen. We need to continue e-mails, calls, faxes etc. until our borders are closed. Then maybe we can do something about those who are already here.
Carolyn
Sessions, 60, was first elected in 1996, and is still genuinely excited about holding a seat in the Senate. His rise to office came a decade after the chamber rejected his nomination by President Reagan to the federal bench, a circumstance that he acknowledges made his election that much sweeter for him.
His deep Southern roots are evident in his full name: Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, a family name handed down from his father and grandfather after the former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and General P.G.T. Beauregard, who fired on Fort Sumter in 1861 to open the Civil War.
Among the most conservative senators, Sessions says his political philosophy was borne of a rural upbringing that included earning the rank of Eagle Scout in 1964. A former federal prosecutor, he was elected as Alabama attorney general in 1995.
Sessions insists he’s not against immigrants, just those who break the law. And he said his passion for the issue is matched by his constituents in Alabama. Sessions doesn’t yet have any serious competition for next year’s election, but he has no doubt pleased many constituents with his hard-line performance on immigration.
I know and agree. Now I have to go to work mad! ;-)
LLS
The elites can cite statistic after statistic, tell us how wonderful and grateful the illegals are. They are absolutely blind to the fact that we LIVE IT every day. You take your kids to the doctor, you go food shopping, you go to work, you have to look out your window at home and see 15 cars parked on the front lawn across the street, the loitering. It directly effects us in EVERY aspect of our lives and for elitists to tell us what we are dealing with is not true is just astounding.
Yep... they like our money fine!
LLS
bump
I was once traveling through Arkansas two years ago on business and I came to a small town called Toad Suck, AR. Even that tiny cross-roads town was filled with illegal aliens crowding corner lots and in plain view with their armies of progeny.
The ruling elite who make up the government in Washington is isolated from the deadly effects of this massive invasion, but we see it every day.
Now, what do we do about Secretary of Home Security Chertoff saying that our “laws cannot be enforced.”
That's hilarious.
Remember when Georgia politics was something everybody wanted to sweep under the rug? Today it leads the nation.
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