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.
Why I do not go the Mass anymore.
Canyons are wealthy. Who knew.
Oh well.
Nothing in the article about a plan to deport illegal aliens.
...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.
Oh boy, this article is a 'two-fer'........
And.......
oh well that wont be in the ASG (american secuirty group) report either.
It was and is amazing to me that the county tolerates these squater camps while at the same time enforcing expensive permits and rules on legal citizens. All this for cheap cabbage? Importing the worst of a third world country?
Talk radio and some TV finally put a stop to this camp..what about the others?
The Church is not in the business of judging these people. The Church is in the business of saving souls. Iam quite as anti-illegal as you and probably ready for more drastic steps against the problem than most other folks but the Church, in seeking out its children is not part of the problem. It is not in the political business.
Come on, Julie, say what you really mean. You don't unwashed hordes of illegals ruining your property nor do you want to run the risk of them attacking your or your children. It's okay to say it.
Captain, this is not immigration, this is an invasion.
Immigration involves a passport and an approved visa.
Boo hoo. Go back home and you won't be wandering anymore.
Can you iamgine the stench? They can't have any facilites there. It's got to be a huge health hazard. And I'll be the illegals are just the quietest neighbors you ever had, too.
"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.
...........
Studying to violate the U.S. border like dad did?
Let's say a legitimate citizen of this country set up camp and was enjoying the outdoors. He or she would be run out of there in a minute, likely with a costly citation.
"It is not in the political business."
Actually, the Church's demands we change or ignore our laws most certainly IS getting involved in "political business".
It is rather mind-numbing, isn't it. I don't remember if the city of San Diego ever razed this encampment in 2003 or not.
Migrant camps to be razed near Rancho Penasquitos
December 24, 2003Though many migrant workers did not know it this week, city workers are preparing to evict them and raze their makeshift camps at McGonigle Canyon near Rancho Penasquitos.
San Diego police Officer Boris Martinez, the department's migrant liaison officer, said Tuesday that there have been complaints from neighbors about people living in the canyon. Martinez said he has notified Mexican Consul officials about the forthcoming evictions.
Although the date has not been set, Martinez said the men would be notified in writing and will be given about a week to move out of the camps. The city will then have the camps razed and removed, he said.
SNIP
McGonigle Canyon, which falls within the jurisdiction of the city of San Diego, has been home to migrant workers over decades.
In the late 1980s, entire families lived in holes dug in the ground or shacks made out of wood and plastic tarp. In the mid-1990s, most of the families were moved out of the camps and into apartments by Community Housing Works, then called Community Housing of North County, an Escondido-based, nonprofit housing developer.
SNIP
Time to do the math ...
$6.75 (no taxes taken out) * 10 hours per day ($67.50) * 6 days per week ($405) * 4 weeks/month = $1620 or so per month.
His family gets 2/3rds or about $1000 per month, which in Mexico is a FORTUNE.
Assuming he worked 6 months so far, he has earned 6 * 1620 = $9720 with virtually no expenses other than food. That is a pretty good return on $2000 in smuggler expenses. He has already sent back as least $6,000 to his family.
If you read it, the story is exactly the same in all 400 outlets.
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