The Pink Flamingo :: Racism, Immigration & Manipulation

This is another messy post. There is a method in my madness today. All three of these posts work in conjunction with one another on some level, but are separate topics. This one perhaps ties both of the previous posts, racism, and sources in – maybe. The bottom line is the fact that vested interests, both liberal and conservative are manipulating the agenda. They are exposing the worst in many people. How long are good, decent people going to allow themselves to be manipulated?

At Polipundit “Ace” went too far. I have a problem with anyone who throws hate bombs and doesn’t have the courage to use their own name.

“…Waiting for something to give? Waiting? How about this, get the hell out of my country and stop taking up classroom space intented citizens. Give that, you selfish leech!...”

Strata-sphere on how the debate is changing, to the point where “Ace” at Polipundit may be left in the dark. He references that excellent essay The Anchoress did the other day.

Oricus has the dirt on what happens to a community when hard-liners take control. Riverside, NJ is ground zero. It is also now suffering, financially. We hear anti-immigration hard-liners talk about taking their business elsewhere to prove a point, well, this happened in Riverside. A point was proven, but is it the one hard liners wanted? Look what has happened to one community in just a year.

From the NYTimes

“…Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated. The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well.

With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.

Meanwhile, the town was hit with two lawsuits challenging the law. Legal bills began to pile up, straining the town’s already tight budget. Suddenly, many people — including some who originally favored the law — started having second thoughts.

So last week, the town rescinded the ordinance, joining a small but growing list of municipalities nationwide that have begun rethinking such laws as their legal and economic consequences have become clearer.

“I don’t think people knew there would be such an economic burden,” said Mayor George Conard, who voted for the original ordinance. “A lot of people did not look three years out.”

In the past two years, more than 30 towns nationwide have enacted laws intended to address problems attributed to illegal immigration, from overcrowded housing and schools to overextended police forces. Most of those laws, like Riverside’s, called for fines and even jail sentences for people who knowingly rented apartments to illegal immigrants or who gave them jobs….“It changed the face of Riverside a little bit,” said Charles Hilton, the former mayor who pushed for the ordinance. (He was voted out of office last fall but said it was not because he had supported the law.)

“The business district is fairly vacant now, but it’s not the legitimate businesses that are gone,” he said. “It’s all the ones that were supporting the illegal immigrants, or, as I like to call them, the criminal aliens.”…

….Numerous storefronts on Scott Street are boarded up or are empty, with For Sale by Owner signs in the windows. Business is down by half at Luis Ordonez’s River Dance Music Store, which sells Western Union wire transfers, cellphones and perfume. Next door, his restaurant, the Scott Street Family Cafe, which has a multiethnic menu in English, Spanish and Portuguese, was empty at lunchtime.“I came here looking for an opportunity to open a business and I found it, and the people also needed the service,” said Mr. Ordonez, who is from Ecuador. “It was crowded and everybody was trying to do their best to support their families.” Some have adapted better than others. Bruce Behmke opened the R & B Laundromat in 2003 after he saw immigrants hauling trash bags full of clothing to a laundry a mile away. Sales took off at his small shop, where want ads in Portuguese are pinned to a corkboard and copies of the Brazilian Voice sit near the door.
When sales plummeted last year, Mr. Behmke started a wash-and-fold delivery service for young professionals. “It became a ghost town here,” he said.Immigration is not new to Riverside. Once a summer resort for Philadelphians, the town became a magnet a century ago for European immigrants drawn to its factories, including the Philadelphia Watch Case Company, whose empty hulk still looms over town. Until the 1930s, the minutes of the school board meetings were recorded in German and English…..”

The problem with immigration today is highlighted by this blog entry by George Archibald, formerly of the WTimes, a conservative and a good Episcopalian.

“…The problem with illegal immigration is building a growing national animus, mainly on the political right -- and efforts of racially-motivated people and groups to promote a cutting of our country’s present birth rate for racial reasons.
There’s a growing nexus between left-wing environmentalists on the one hand, anti-life advocates, and right-wing anti-immigration proponents.

The historic guru of this movement is Garrett James Hardin, professor of human ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1963 to 1978, a major proponent of cutting population through any means and author of the phrase “nice guys finish last," in summing up his idea of a "selfish gene" concept of life and evolution.

Another guru of the anti-lifers and anti-immigrant cabal is William A. White of Roanoke, Virginia, a self-proclaimed anti-semite white-supremacist whose web site is titled overthrow.com:

George R. McDaniel of Raleigh, North Carolina, is another member of the white-sheet cabal. McDaniel was a close friend of the late Samuel Francis, an editorial writer at The Washington Times who was fired after he attended a neo-nazi white-supremacist meeting and promoted it in his syndicated column….”