Posted on 12/24/2006 5:26:08 AM PST by radar101
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.
John and Ken had Vicente Fox's first campaign manager on one day.
Among other things he said was that a close friend of Fox has a monopoly on communications.
On money wired to Mexico, the "Friend of Fox" takes FORTY PER CENT.
SO- the family gets $600.
Third World America....Believe it...it is happening HERE!
Good research on your part.
And your point is?
Hmmm..suspicious since airline pilots must retire at age 60...unless he has come into a great deal of money somehow I'd suspect that he is either fired or furloughed.
What claptrap and liberalspeak.
If the Catholic Church (or any other Christian denomination) is not in the business of judging, why are the Ten Commandments used as a judging criteria?
If nobody is ever judged, why do we need religions at all? And why would we have to "save souls" if the good and evil in all souls are never judged?
I could write a 5-page essay on the above oxymoronic statement. But it's a belief typical of New Age clerics who judge not, lest they be judged.
Clerics in search of causes should remember the Bible says render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's........like obeying laws.
In ministering to the illegals at that location the Church is making no such demands. The Church is doing its Business. The Church is not pecularly American nor is it Republican nor Democrat. The Church is there to save souls. Do you argue that the wetbacks forfeit their souls at the border?
The good and evil in men's souls is judged by the Lord. The Church judges that these people continue to be vessels of souls. Perhaps your judgment that they left their souls at the Rio Grande is better but I would not bet my own soul on it. People judge attitudes and actions and the Church seeks penance and conversion. The Church does not disdain souls because the bodies that house them have committed crimes. It is up to secular law enforcement to enforce laws. It is for the Church to save souls.Would your church, if you have one, refuse to allow these people in to worship? If so, than your church is all about social relations and only incidentally about saving souls.
I like your tag line. That goes for illegal alien invaders as well.
You are conflating two different issues. If you have determined that the Church must be expelled from the country because of its stand then you should say as much. The position on illegal immigration has nothing to do with the Church's mission to the canyon. I disagree heartily with the hierarchy's notion that charity requires that we welcome the barbarians but I do not deign to instruct the Church which souls are worthy of saving. Charity is not a national responsibility. It is personal. The state has no business granting charity to others because they use resources that belong to others. The state has a duty to secure the borders and to remove the barbarians. The Church's responsibility is to save souls and that is what that mission is engaged in doing. The wetbacks should be rounded up by the authorities and deported. And the Church should not cease ministering to their souls all the while.
They can't afford pencils for children, but they can pay a smuggler two grand to get them across the border. I stopped reading right there.
Illegals should be all be rounded up and removed. That is not practical and would be incredibley expensive what with all the ACLU requirements that would pertain these days. More practical is, while rounding up some illegals, to fine and jail some who employ them, knowingly or not, in a regular and continuing process . The opportunities for which backs are wet would very quickly dry up and they would self deport. Then, if fairness is the main issue trumping national survival, the employers can all be released and their fines returned after the border is fenced and secure and the border jumpers have jumped back south. In the meantime it is the business of the Church to minister to souls wherever it finds them.
Illegals should be all be rounded up and removed. That is not practical and would be incredibley expensive what with all the ACLU requirements that would pertain these days. More practical is, while rounding up some illegals, to fine and jail some who employ them, knowingly or not, in a regular and continuing process . The opportunities for which backs are wet would very quickly dry up and they would self deport. Then, if fairness is the main issue trumping national survival, the employers can all be released and their fines returned after the border is fenced and secure and the border jumpers have jumped back south. In the meantime it is the business of the Church to minister to souls wherever it finds them.
*arf arf*--snort--(chuckle) wheeze,eyes watering. .
If, as you seem to surmise, the Church is primarily a political party, then the country probably should ban churches altogether.
Well, then, let's stop all earthly judgment and we can all do what we want until the Day of Reckoning when the Lord will judge us all.
"The Church does not disdain souls because the bodies that house them have committed crimes."
I never inferred that. But it's also up to the Church to advise lawbreakers that while their souls are never disdained their bodies better shape up and obey the laws of the land because their souls will be all the better for it.
"Would your church, if you have one, refuse to allow these people in to worship? If so, then your church is all about social relations and only incidentally about saving souls."
Yes, I do have a church, Missouri Synod Lutheran. If my pastor packed the congregation every Sunday with illegals, displacers of American workers and poachers who along with their greedy employers are in violation of federal, state and local laws, I'd wish them all well, and attend somewhere else.
It's virtually useless to debate with you as you are a spinmeister and I don't have the time today to unspin as I would wish. Also, it's just too easy.
Leni
Tough, Father. You're encouraging people to sin. You should be counseling them to go back home and come back here legally, like all other immigrants have to do.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.