Posted on 10/10/2011 5:39:48 AM PDT by upchuck
Foley, Ala. — Trailer by trailer, yard sale by yard sale, and pew by empty pew, a poor but tightknit immigrant community on Alabama’s breezy Gulf Coast is rapidly disintegrating.
This time it is not a tornado or hurricane uprooting families and scattering them to the winds. It is a new state law, largely upheld last week by a federal district judge, that seeks to drive illegal immigrants from the state by curtailing many of their rights, punishing anyone who knowingly employs, houses or assists them, and requiring schools and police to verify immigrants’ legal status.
Other states, including Arizona, Georgia and Colorado, have passed similar laws in the past several years in a growing trend by state legislatures to crack down on illegal immigration within their borders in the absence of comprehensive federal action. But Alabama’s new law is the toughest passed so far, and it is the only one to withstand federal lawsuits and other legal challenges, allowing it to take virtually full effect.
Across Alabama, news of the court ruling has swiftly spread panic and chaos among working-class areas where legal and illegal immigrant families from Mexico and Central America — as many as 150,000 people, by some estimates — live and work at jobs their bosses say local residents largely refuse to do.
In Foley, a sprawling seaside resort town where hundreds of Hispanic immigrants work in restaurants and seafood industries, many families last week were taking their children out of school, piling their furniture into trucks, offering baby clothes and bicycles on front lawns for sale and saying tearful goodbyes to neighbors and co-workers they might never see again.
“This is the saddest thing I have experienced in my 18 years as a priest,” said the Rev. Paul Zoghby,... "It is a human tragedy.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
“In Foley, a sprawling seaside resort town where hundreds of Hispanic immigrants work in restaurants and seafood industries, many families last week were taking their children out of school, piling their furniture into trucks, offering baby clothes and bicycles on front lawns for sale and saying tearful goodbyes to neighbors and co-workers they might never see again.”
Buh bye. Now unemployed Americans can take those jobs.
Maybe it’s coincidence but I never read words like tearful, frightful, devastating, etc. when it comes time to discuss the policies of the IRS, FDA, EPA, ATF, et al and their effect on American citizens.
Seems just a short five years ago the Home Depot and Lowe's stores outside of Seattle had no illegals waiting for work. Nowadays, rarely is there less than 12-15 of them standing around. You think there aren't American construction workers out of work that would be willing to do side jobs? These illegals ARE taking the jobs Americans want!
Good point.
I would add to that thought that if you are illegally hiding out in a foreign country its only natural that you would fee somewhat fearful at the thought of getting caught and being deported. Thats why its called illegal immigration.
Lucky you,Reverend, you never had to officiate at the funeral of a young child. That's a real human tragedy.
Not this.
I get so sick of politicians, employers and liberals saying illegals do the jobs Americans "won't" do. That is such crap. It's really the employers don't want to pay an American a decent wage for the job because they can get an illegal to do it for $3 an hour. Hire a brown, white or black person, I don't care, but pay them minimum wage and make sure they're legal. I blame the employers who keep using that tired old excuse "American's won't do it." I call BS. Plenty of Americans have been out of work long enough that they WILL do it.
Oh, boo hoo. Y'know, another Freeper made a real good point. Military families are always having to pick up and move, too. The kids have to leave their friends and their schools, and it's often difficult for them. Nobody says it's horrendous and unfair for American military families to have to move! But let illegals and their kids be inconvenienced, and we're all supposed to sob, wail and cry buckets of tears.
They certainly don't have all the rights of citizens (see the 14th Amendment speaking of the "privileges and immunities OF CITIZENS"), but it is not correct to say they have NO rights.
For example, if charged with murder, they would have a right to trial by Jury. The government could not simply seize all cash from an alien, legal or illegal, for no reaon at all, with no "due process of law." An alien asked to testify in court could not be drawn and quartered if he didn't testify, based on a claim that the 5th and 8th amendments didn't apply.
Many provisions say "no person" shall have certain things done to them -- not "no citizen." Other provisions apply to "the people" -- like the right to bear arms -- you can argue whether that includes aliens or not. Other provisions are simply stated as obligations on the government -- "debts shall be valid" -- that apply to whoever holds the debts -- in fact that provision was specifically put in to insure that British debt holders after the revolution would get paid.
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