Replies

ON THE TOWN
Juvenile, divisive and just plain wrong
STEVE SMITH

Thanks, Allan Mansoor. Thanks, Eric Bever, and thanks, Gary Monahan. Thanks to the Minuteman organization and all the other lonely, attention-starved blowhards who helped turn a stable situation into total chaos.

Thanks for ruining the balance our society enjoyed between our need for cheap labor and cheap labor's willingness to do it quietly.

Thanks for making Costa Mesa a sideshow in talk radio's never-ending quest to drive up the collective blood pressure of their listeners. (Note to all: Talk radio doesn't care about illegal immigration; it cares about ratings. As someone who has been there and done that, Mansoor and company, the biggest mistake you can make is believing that you matter to them. You don't -- you are just a pawn.)

You see, things were just fine before you decided to make illegal immigration your reason for getting up in the morning. The crops that were picked, the cars that were washed, the hotel rooms that were cleaned and the restaurant tables that were bussed were all done with the full knowledge of all of America that the people doing these jobs were here illegally.

Americans knew we imported this cheap labor, and we didn't care. You haven't told us anything we didn't already know.

We didn't care that they went to some of our schools, and we didn't care that they visited some of our hospital emergency rooms, even crowded some of them.

Even the Newport-Mesa Unified School District solved the problem by boxing the children of illegal immigrants into a few schools on the Westside.

We built that into the price we paid for their presence. It was a trade-off that we have willingly supported for decades.

Thanks to you, we're probably going to have to offer citizenship to those who are currently living here. Before you started whining, they were content to just be here eking out a living. Now they have a taste of democracy and they want more.

Thanks for nothing.

Oh, by the way, I highly recommend that you go back to the accounting drawing board. Once you stop jumping up and down and waving your arms, you will find that the cheap labor we have imported is actually helping our economy, not hurting it, even with the schooling, healthcare and other costs.

Now, thanks to your being sucked into the media machine, thanks to your myopic and juvenile economic positions, no one knows which end is up.

And all of that might not be so bad if you'd only come out and revealed what it is you truly want. But you can't do that because all of America would shun you.

So, I'll do it for you right here and now. Followed to its logical conclusion, there is only one solution for the illegal immigrants living and working in America.

It's simple, really. America has about 12 million illegal immigrants living here. (The hard-liners want you to believe that most of them are sponging off us, but that's flat out not true. Almost all of them are working at the menial jobs no native American should strive to do. These are not careers with futures, folks.)

So if they're all sponging and if, according to their warped math, the illegals are costing us money and sitting home watching TV and eating Bon-Bons all day, and if they should not be given a path to citizenship, there is only one action to advocate.

Unfortunately, that's the one thing that the big, bad talk radio hosts and the tough guys on the Costa Mesa City Council and the reckless Minuteman team can't advocate in public.

Why? Because that action is to round up all of the illegal immi- grants and ship them back home.

But they can't advocate that in public because they would be generating more laughs than "Larry the Cable Guy."

Now, readers, I want you to think carefully. In all of the shouting about how we're being ripped off, have you ever heard any of the hard-liners offer a sensible solution?

Oh sure, they'll tell you that we need to secure our borders but that's something we should all be advocating.

I'm talking about the illegal immigrants who are already here. These blowhards don't want them to be citizens, they don't want a guest-worker program, and they don't want them working here taking all of these really hot jobs they're performing. So what's left?

It's mass deportation, an idea so absurd, so twisted that even they know not to utter it.

Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of Californians have cool heads.

In a Los Angeles Times poll revealed last week, "Californians generally favor a carrot-and-stick approach to illegal immigration, mixing tougher border enforcement with a guest-worker program and a pathway to citizenship for people already in the United States." And they favor that approach by a ratio of more than 3 to 1.

That's 3 to 1, guys. Get it? We have spoken and we don't like your solution, even though you haven't got the guts to state it.

There is one bright side to all of this. Once the media moves on to the next shiny object, these hard-liners will disappear.

That also means that any attempt at higher office is all but a waste of time. You can count on one hand that num- ber of single-issue extremists who have been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate.

So, for those among us who are fed up with the divisiveness, the spectacles, the marches, the boycotts, the death threats and the mean-spirited talk, be patient. Come November, if you live in Costa Mesa, you'll have a chance to return things to normal by voting to replace the Three Scrooges who started all this nonsense.

And for the rest of you, we need some comic relief right now so write in Larry the Cable Guy.

* STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident. Leave a message for him on the Daily Pilot hotline at (714) 966-4664 or send story ideas to dailypilot@latimes.com.