Why not? Everybody else is. Trump wants to deport them. Most liberals vow to fight. So what’s your position?
Whenever I think of “illegal immigrants” my mind flashes to the decades I spent in the California wine industry. I met literally thousands of vineyard workers, cellar employees and others who were of Central American, usually Mexican ancestry. Early on I developed an affection and deep respect for these devout, hard-working men and women who were so dedicated to their families. They had fled their homelands, where they had no future and had come to California looking for a new life. Beyond the wine industry many gravitated to jobs in construction or landscaping or other agricultural activities. They were fine, upstanding people, far superior in morality and diligence, IMO, than many “lawful” Americans, and although they may have lacked the proper papers (I certainly never asked nor did I care) I didn’t understand why there wasn’t some easy path for them to obtain citizenship and not have to constantly worry about a middle-of-the-night knock on the door.
And yet Donald Trump just got elected on the promise of deporting them. So I have to be fair to all the people who voted for him and wonder if there’s something I’m missing, some reason why it’s really impossible for these millions of undocumented workers to remain in this country.
If I lived in a border town in Arizona or Texas I might feel that the undocumented workers are a burden. I really have no idea how they impact the residents of those border towns. Trump calls them rapists and murderers. I don’t think that’s at all accurate; it’s just his nature to lie about such things. But I don’t know. Latino gangs are a huge problem here in Oakland. Do they have many members who are undocumented? Personally, I wouldn’t mind if all the criminally-inclined, violent undocumented immigrants were rounded up and deported. Hell, I’d like to deport all the legal citizens of the U.S. who are criminally-inclined and violent. The U.S. would be a far better, safer place without them. But there’s going to be a huge fight over these deportations. Already many blue state Attorneys-General are suing Trump to halt them. Now, closer to home, our very own Nikki Bas, who somehow got herself elected to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, is said to developing a committee to “Coordinate with community and governmental agencies to protect Alameda County communities and the programs that support them,” with plans to “create a fund to aid immigrants and refugees funded through philanthropy, local and state funding.”
Well, Bas is at least being consistent with her behavior when she was on the City Council. She always cared more about criminals, the homeless and illegal immigrants than she did about us hard-working schlubs, who pay our taxes and don’t ask government for much more than keeping us safe and fixing the potholes. With this recent move of hers on the Board, as well as others, Bas is clearly fixing to establish herself as “Madame Progressive,” with an eye toward some future election. I personally think she’s a sleazy, opportunistic con, but she saw an opening on the Board, which is comprised of nothingburgers, and moved quickly to fill a power void.
Why has Bas always cared more about lawbreakers than about decent people? Her entire political career has been spent attacking the police, trying to slash their budget, not getting tough on crime, and allowing encampments to destroy entire neighborhoods. There’s clearly some sort of psychological pathology there. But the public has supported her all the way, and it drives me crazy that she could be so incompetent and amoral and get away with it. In a very real sense, she shares with Donald Trump the same ability to commit egregious acts and not lose her base.
People like Bas are forcing people like me to take more extreme positions. I don’t want to be an anti-immigrant MAGA. I want to support our immigrants, documented or not. But my loathing for the phoniness and evil of Bas’s version of progressivism makes me oppose anything she’s for. So right now, I’m inclined to oppose her new committee, and to resist her efforts to take the taxpayer’s money and give it to illegal immigrants. Let’s take whatever money we can scrape up and give it instead to the Oakland Police Department.
Steve Heimoff