Monday, November 14, 2005
Of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights, Project Minuteman, Demonizing Jim Oberweis, Excising “Illegal Alien” from the Language, Etc.
Sunday, Mike Bailey, the managing editor of Elgin’s Daily Courier-News, wrote another pithy column on Mexican immigrants. (On Oct. 9th he wrote about how Elgin’s Larkin High School had forced students to stand while the Mexican national anthem was sung on Mexico’s independence day. He thought that was a very bad idea.)
Sunday’s column takes on how allies of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights are trying to drive the work “illegal immigrant” out of our vocabulary. An ally who had written a letter to the editor wanted it headed, “Minutemen are racists,” accusing them of spreading “hate, fear and racism” in his letter.
Bailey reports that the Minuteman attendees were “well-behaved though passionate, curious but not combative, and unintimidated by protesters who taunted them in Spanish, the delicious irony of that apparently escaping them.”
Bailey notes that the discussion is “not about immigration…This about illegal immigration. They are not undocumented workers; they are not simple people who came here seeking a better life. They are illegal. We don’t need immigration reform as much as we need to enforce the immigration laws that we have.”
That sounds a lot like what Jim Oberweis was saying two years ago, after filtering out the campaign hyperbole.
But, besides trying to frame the terms of the debate, there is another side to the Saul Alinsky-trained Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
It is trying to organize Mexican American immigrants in the hope they will be citizens.
The organization conducts “Immigration Clinics,” in which the draw to recent immigrants is the word “amnesty.”
In “clinics” at Methodist Churches in Elgin and Crystal Lake, the attendees were urged to contact their local congressmen. In Elgin, there was a major emphasis on getting people to a march in Aurora (to which 1,000 showed up) to put heat on House Speaker Dennis Hastert to support the bill being promoted. The name of Congressman Melissa Bean popped out of the lecture in Crystal Lake.
Bailey’s description of the attendees is accurate. They are illegal aliens.
But, they are people, too. They have come north to improve their lives. It’s a more extreme variation of what most people alive today have done moving to a home in a better neighborhood, although probably not as extreme as what many grandparents did by crossing an ocean in a crowded ship.
It does seem unlikely that enough buses could be mustered to drive them all back to Mexico. And, clearly the political will for deportation does not exist, if the political will to secure the southern border does not exist, even in the face of terrorists using it to enter the country.
The Mexican immigrants are families. Probably first the husbands came, so desperate that they are willing to sleep 16 to an apartment—even in Crystal Lake—in order to earn money to send back to their families in Mexico and maybe bring them to the United States. To say they are hard workers is to repeat a cliché, but it is an accurate one.
The families that came to the two clinics were often led into the church by young and middle-aged mothers, kids and husbands in tow. Clearly, they want to be a legal part of American society.
As a group, Mexicans are family-oriented with conservative values. If not for the perceived or actual outright opposition of most conservatives, they could eventually follow the Eastern European “Reagan Democrats” and become allies of conservative Republicans.
But the Democrats, with the Immigration Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights doing the organizing, and the Democrats in Springfield having just committed all Illinois taxpayers to pay for medical care for illegal immigrants’ children, clearly have the political advantage.
To return to McHenry Coounty Blog, click here.
# posted by Cal Skinner : 10:28 AM 0 comments
Sunday’s column takes on how allies of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights are trying to drive the work “illegal immigrant” out of our vocabulary. An ally who had written a letter to the editor wanted it headed, “Minutemen are racists,” accusing them of spreading “hate, fear and racism” in his letter.
Bailey reports that the Minuteman attendees were “well-behaved though passionate, curious but not combative, and unintimidated by protesters who taunted them in Spanish, the delicious irony of that apparently escaping them.”
Bailey notes that the discussion is “not about immigration…This about illegal immigration. They are not undocumented workers; they are not simple people who came here seeking a better life. They are illegal. We don’t need immigration reform as much as we need to enforce the immigration laws that we have.”
That sounds a lot like what Jim Oberweis was saying two years ago, after filtering out the campaign hyperbole.
But, besides trying to frame the terms of the debate, there is another side to the Saul Alinsky-trained Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
It is trying to organize Mexican American immigrants in the hope they will be citizens.
The organization conducts “Immigration Clinics,” in which the draw to recent immigrants is the word “amnesty.”
In “clinics” at Methodist Churches in Elgin and Crystal Lake, the attendees were urged to contact their local congressmen. In Elgin, there was a major emphasis on getting people to a march in Aurora (to which 1,000 showed up) to put heat on House Speaker Dennis Hastert to support the bill being promoted. The name of Congressman Melissa Bean popped out of the lecture in Crystal Lake.
Bailey’s description of the attendees is accurate. They are illegal aliens.
But, they are people, too. They have come north to improve their lives. It’s a more extreme variation of what most people alive today have done moving to a home in a better neighborhood, although probably not as extreme as what many grandparents did by crossing an ocean in a crowded ship.
It does seem unlikely that enough buses could be mustered to drive them all back to Mexico. And, clearly the political will for deportation does not exist, if the political will to secure the southern border does not exist, even in the face of terrorists using it to enter the country.
The Mexican immigrants are families. Probably first the husbands came, so desperate that they are willing to sleep 16 to an apartment—even in Crystal Lake—in order to earn money to send back to their families in Mexico and maybe bring them to the United States. To say they are hard workers is to repeat a cliché, but it is an accurate one.
The families that came to the two clinics were often led into the church by young and middle-aged mothers, kids and husbands in tow. Clearly, they want to be a legal part of American society.
As a group, Mexicans are family-oriented with conservative values. If not for the perceived or actual outright opposition of most conservatives, they could eventually follow the Eastern European “Reagan Democrats” and become allies of conservative Republicans.
But the Democrats, with the Immigration Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights doing the organizing, and the Democrats in Springfield having just committed all Illinois taxpayers to pay for medical care for illegal immigrants’ children, clearly have the political advantage.
To return to McHenry Coounty Blog, click here.
# posted by Cal Skinner : 10:28 AM 0 comments
# posted by Cal Skinner : 8:40 AM
