WPCNR IMMIGRANT POST-INTELLIGENCER. News Comment By John F. Bailey. April 11, 2006: The big protest is over. An estimated 125,000 persons crowded New York’s City Hall district to campaign for citizenship for an estimated 12,000,000 illegal aliens.
This reporter suggests the citizens who came here seeking freedom, slipping across borders and who work in our restaurants, on construction sites, on our lawns and in department stores, fast-food franchises across this land, clean our posh homes, and do so without medical benefits without vacation pay, at a pittance of what a union worker gets, often employed at the whim of their employers’ largesse are the slaves of 2006.
Many are well-educated, and have been here for fifteen to twenty years ago living 6 family members to a room, so they could make better lives for their children. However, when those children reach 17-18, they cannot participate in the American dream because they cannot accept government scholarhips, college scholarships or apply for tuition loans.
The Other Side of the story
Many immigrants' children are now grown and of college age. Because the children of illegal immigrants are not citizens, no matter how well they do in the United States public school systems, no matter how great their intellectual achievements, many cannot afford to go to today’s high tuition colleges even if accepted and qualify for scholarships. The best and the brightest Latino Jamaican, Hatian, and Asian immigrant children may even qualify for partial scholarships, but cannot get loans from banks, or the government to pay the rest of their tuition.
Students of immigrants are discovering that to continue their education, they have to take courses at night school, attempt getting a degree that way, while working three jobs. Even when scholarships are awarded to them, they cannot attend schools full-time because they cannot get loans for college without revealing their families are here illegally, making their family, themselves, subject to deportation.
These illegal immigrant children with the same achievement credentials of the children of U.S. citizens are a generation America is about to lose because the Republican Party and for that matter the Democratic Party does not want illegal immigrants to vote.
To learn about how illegal immigrant students are being affected, read this article about Texas students: http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i16/16a01901.htm.
The blind bunglers in Washington, D.C., cannot see the advantage to the country in granting amnesty and citizenship to these slaves of today. How big is the problerm, check the statistics on illegal aliens as of the 2000 census at http://www.juntosociety.com/factsheets/immigration.html
Did Abraham Lincoln ask the slaves to pay fines to become liberated? No.
Mr. Lincoln realized in his great wisdom and fairness that to set conditions of the slaves was just another form of slavery. They would not have a voice.
Had Lincoln not been assassinated reconstruction in the south would have been a lot different. No Poll Tests. No Jim Crow.
So what we have here is the bigoted Republican Party and the equally bigoted Democratic Senate agreeing to ridiculous conditions for citizenship for aliens to please their corporate contributors.
Not that the Democrats Citizenship bill is much better. Pay back taxes? Do military service? Wait years? These people cannot even afford the extortion money the Latin Kings and the MS-13 Gang are requiring from day laborers every week in this area, because the police won’t protect the illegals because the illegals cannot reveal their illegal status.
Congress expects the illegals to pay back taxes going back five years, I think. That is pathetic judgment.
How about the Hirers Paying the Back Taxes?
Believe me, Mr. and Mrs. and Ms. White Plains, the department stores, the chains, the fast food restaurants, the warehouses, the cab companies, the landscape companies, the ranches and farms, and grape growers in California, Texas and the Midwest save billions by employing illegal immigrants, paying them pennies, not paying them benefits, not paying social security. They make billions more in profit using illegal workers.
Why not have the legions U.S.-employers of the illegals pay the illegal immigrants’ back taxes? After all their employing the illegals in the first place created the illegal immigration wave. Just the way politicians caught using nannies and not paying payroll taxes on the nannies had to pay. Remember that? I do.
Why are the immigrants being denied amnesty by our “leaders?”
Well, make illegal immigrants citizens and they can vote, even may elect minority candidates. They may tilt the registration norms in districts. The political bosses may lose control. Politics is all about control. It’s not about you. It’s not about helping people. It’s not about making a better life for people who have suffered enough to be in this country. It’s all about doing favors for people that support them.
If a student who qualifies for a college wants to go, they are faced with going abroad to school, or returning to their country and wanting to come back, given the pathetic capabilities of the INS, once a student leaves this country, there's no guarantee they are coming back any time soon.
Colleges need to stand, too. Liberalism Has to Translate into Action.
Colleges accepting students of illegal immigrant students have to take the lead here. And it can start right in Westchester.
If students qualify for scholarships or even have academic credentials, but cannot afford the tuition, college leadership has to step up and help them. They literally cannot let a young minds go to waste whether they speak Spanish, Croatian, Haitian, or Swahili.
Colleges need to take a stand for academic freedom of opportunity by dipping into their endowments and making it possible for illegal immigrants to attend and get the college degrees they need to contribute to the country and make their lives better.
Colleges need to band together and resist government threats about withholding federal aid if they help illegal immigrant students. The academic community is great about talking about fighting injustice and inequality. Let’s see them take a stand on this issue.
Which will be the first school in Westchester County to stand up and say if you cannot pay to attend, you may enter on academic probation, tuition waved as long as you maintain passing grades of say 3.0 or better. This could be applied to American citizens, too -- to avoid the inevitable law suits from the freeloaders.
There have been several well publicized cases of immigrants who have come out and admitted they were illegal in order to attend college, and exceptions were made in their case.
It is time we made at least all these children of illegal immigrants exceptions. You know smart, serious children of illegal immigrants all over the county, but now you know the other side of their story. A story that has no future. For they are trapped in the chaste system our pathetic congress has agreed to perpetuate.
Westchester Could Set an Example.
Locally, the leadership is equally bereft of compassion and common sense. Look no further than the day laborer site controversy. If all those day laborers dressed in jackets and ties and carried attaché cases and spoke English and were white, I do not think Mamaroneck would be asking them to move.
In White Plains, I am often told by police they cannot force people to move on because of civil rights laws. What is Mamaroneck doing on their day laborer gathering site? They are asking them to disperse, move on. Who’s civil rights are they, anyway?
What is the difference between today’s illegal immigrants and the Cubans who came in 1960? None.
What is the difference between today’s illegal immigrants and the boat people of Vietnam? None.
What is the difference between being hauled aboard a slave ship in West Africa, or being promised a trip to America in the hold of a freighter or in a sweltering truck in 100 degree temperatures for an outrageous price?
I daresay very little.
America used to stand for freedom, fairness, hope. Now it stands for very little thanks to the failed "bought" leadership of this country. The disgrace of the Immigration legislation this last week is proof – nobody’s thinking or caring in Washington any more.
Abraham Lincoln thought a lot about slavery, he once said, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel….” And this: “Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
