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Highlands Today

Stay Or Go?

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Stephen Goodman

Published: September 8, 2008

"Should I stay or should I go." To quote the band "The Clash," illegal immigrants to Avon Park and its environs must be asking just that question. If they stay here, they risk arrest, deportation, exploitation or worse. If they go back to Mexico, they risk greater poverty, starvation, exploitation even murder by corrupt thugs, drug dealers and cops. Nice choice, eh?

I recently witnessed a demonstration against illegal immigration at the intersection of US 27 and SR 64 in Avon Park. Truck drivers were honking their air horns presumably in support of the demonstrators who proudly waved American flags next to a pickup truck with a sign against illegal immigration and for drilling domestic oil.

In attendance was the former mayor of Avon Park, a huge enemy of illegal immigration. I don't know him, never met him, but I've heard him speak. Nice to know paranoia is alive and well in America.

Also there was Bill Landes, Florida director of the Minutemen, an ardent, anti-illegal immigration organization that stations its members on the southwest U.S.-Mexican border to catch anyone illegally crossing.

His daughter died under a jackknifed semi driven by an illegal alien with a counterfeit license. That's what got him into this cause. It was a horrible tragedy and very emotionally charged. I feel a great deal of empathy for him. However, I've known of full-fledged who committed similar crimes. Corruption knows no borders.

Why don't you picket companies that hire illegal aliens I asked him? Surely, he can't believe poor Mexicans cross the border without help and sponsorship and direct knowledge of the companies that hire them. It just makes sense. How else would they know whose hiring how to get there and how to acquire the means to get there?

"Coyotes," he says. Drug dealers pay the bounty he says. Drug dealers! What could possibly be the motive of a drug dealer to pay thousands of dollars per person to get them a job picking oranges near Avon Park?

I contend that corrupt, connected multi national corporations that are too cheap to hire U.S. citizens and follow U.S. labor laws, pay thugs to smuggle impoverished Mexicans across the southern U.S. border. Then they transport them through intermediaries who have indirect connections to the companies on to labor camps run by sub contractors. (Deniability again).

They're then paid sub standard wages, live in sub standard conditions, are officially invisible with almost no rights or health care coverage and threatened with deportation or bodily harm if they dare speak out. That's how the deal goes down.

I also believe that unscrupulous politicians at the highest level of our government accept huge campaign contributions from these tainted companies, and a concocted lie about evil, illegal, criminal aliens is spread by shameless right-wing talk show ego maniacs who wouldn't know virtue if it crashed down upon their diabolical heads.

Stephen Goodman
Sebring

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