" People are trying to use this to make the law look bad"
said the mayor of Leeds, Alabama, responding to the arrests of a Mercedes Benz director and a Honda manager for having only international drivers licenses rather than their German or Japanese cards in their pockets.
Well people won't have to try very hard, because Alabama looks bad enough without any help.
The demand that anyone looking or sounding 'foreign' carry papers and produce them upon demand looks to me too much like those "racial origin" cards the Third Reich made people carry, but even if you disagree or think I'm being hyperbolic, it still looks paranoid, it looks stupid, it stinks of a very ugly past and it surely isn't going to help the state of Alabama attract the kind of foreign investment and employment opportunities it needs.
"We are the Show Me State, not the Show Me Your Papers State," writes the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
"You've got two choices. Either ask your executives to carry their immigration papers at all times, or move to a state that understands gemütlichkeit."
" We’re going to enforce the laws of state of Alabama”
says the mayor of Leeds, like a character from a Victor Hugo novel. Well you go ahead Javert. Crops are already rotting in the fields of Alabama because if you're of a racial or ethnic minority, it just ain't worth it and the construction industry is falling apart too. Other states would be happy to have those billions of dollars and thousands of jobs pack up and move elsewhere in Free America.
Even if these idiots ended up in a barren field scratching their angry sores with a dirt-caked potsherd, no trickle of wisdom would come to them as a result of their brainless acts. They learn nothing from experience -- not from their own or from the broader spectrum we term "history."
ReplyDeleteAs for me, I'd better stay out of "sweet home Alabama" since, as a dinosaur, I would have to insist that I don't have to show them any stinking papers. That could be trouble.
This is so very heinous in my mind.
ReplyDeleteAt the turn of the 20th century approximately 30% of the population of the great State of Wisconsin were born in Germany. Were they all legal? I don't know. All I know is that two of them were my maternal grandparents who came here, had eight kids, and achieved their dream of owning their own dairy farm which my cousin runs today and his sons will take over in time.
I spent several years working with the Hispanic community here and I don't think their dream is very different than my grandparents' except that it has a Spanish accent instead of a German one.
I joke that I am the perfect American being descended from recent immigrants on my mom's side and a Patriot (an immigrant from Scotland) who fought with General Washington) on my dad's side. I am proud of my family -- both sides came here chasing a dream and succeeded. Denying that opportunity to others would be, for me, an insult to their legacy and I think most of my many cousins would agree.
I descend from German immigrants as well, who came here before the Civil War and experienced a generation or so of ridicule and discrimination, particularly in the WW I era. There was no real question of legal or illegal at the time, but the Nativists have been here all along, hating the real natives and anyone else whose unwashed forbears didn't arrive on that pestilential scow, the Mayflower.
ReplyDeleteThat's the real objective, I think: ethnic "purity" and it's just Jim Crow redux, or at least it smells the same.
My wife is Chinese-American and it's common for her to be hassled and questioned all over the South by uniforms with shiny black boots and I'm sick to death of it. There are road blocks in Texas and New Mexico - miles from any border, where cars are stopped and non-Aryans questioned. I just went through that a week ago. It happens most times we return from abroad.
I'd love to see them try to handcuff a Theropod however - oh the horror, the carnage!
@Capt. Fogg: I am appalled at your wife's treatment. It just shows how immature we are as a nation.
ReplyDeleteIt gets better. Alabama all but fellated Mercedes to open up a plant there in the early 90s, and the auto industry has been one of the only consistent employers in the state.
ReplyDeleteIt's poetic justice, of a sort, but Daimler Benz should have known that if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
ReplyDeletebut yes, even in those Northern Blue States, one gets treated differently -- by shopkeepers, by the police and by bankers if one doesn't look like someone from a Norman Rockwell illustration.
"scratching their angry sores with a dirt-caked potsherd,"
ReplyDeleteAnd by the way, I'm still laughing at that one a day later.
By the way, did anyone notice that the Senate seems to have voted for a bill extending the right of the federal government to detain even American citizens indefinitely without trial? I am not in good health right now (back problem) and don't want to do a full post on it, but perhaps someone else will. It just seems like Congress' willingness to approve such things is a very ominous sign, and it is just as ominous that so few out there seem to care. The Obama administration has threatened to veto the bill if it passes both houses of Congress. Thank the dinosaur gods for that!
ReplyDeleteOne further note about that bill – just in case someone reading this (none of our contributors) gets the idea that concern over it is overblown, it's worth considering that if the federal government can simply sweep people off the street and imprison them for the rest of their lives without even bothering to tell them what they have supposedly done wrong, it is inconceivable that any other "right" could have any meaning. If you don't have the right to a fair and timely trial, you have no rights worth talking about, and you might as well be living in Big Brother's Oceania, not the United States of America.
ReplyDeleteCapt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteThanks – I suppose I was thinking of good old Job, after The Lord of Hosts ripped off his 401(k) plan, used his flocks as bowling pins, and a whole bunch of other things. At least Job uttered some wisdom in his time of tribulation, but the people we are talking about would never do that any more than a trillion monkeys typing for twelve eternities would reproduce even a single scene from a bad quarto of one of Shakespeare's plays.
When these clowns find that their crops are unharvested and their entire state is going to seed, they will just "blame the minorities" even more savagely.
For me, the only way to survive is to embrace the horror and give up on the notion that things will ever improve. Somewhere in the distance I can hear the dive klaxon and a still small voice calling "Open one and two Kingston valves - flood negative and dive, dive, dive"
ReplyDeleteExcepting Florida and southern Louisiana, the Deep South has been comparatively insular and provincial throughout its history. It's somewhat less so now than 25 years ago and prior, but it's still mostly true. Which means that famous Southern hospitality is much less likely to be extended to people who don't look, sound and act like the locals than to those who do.
ReplyDeleteThose Mercedes Benz and Honda executives should consider the inconvenience and display of backwater ignorance part of the cost of doing profitable business in a right-to-work-cheap state.
When AZ first began to beat the drum for people carrying papers to prove citizenship I had a debate with one of my siblings who asked what was wrong with this. My Dad was still alive then and I couldn't believe I had to point out the obvious: Our parents were foreign born and escaped to America under political asylum. They spoke with heavy accents and Dad being the rebel he was would certainly balk at being required to once again carry papers. I asked my sibling how often did they think we would have to go bail Daddy out of jail if he lived in AZ even though he had been a US citizen for years?
ReplyDeleteWe are either a free country or we are not. What AL is doing is what the communists and nazis did - I can't believe how that irony is lost on so many who would call this administration socialist/communist. These people don't have a clue.
"We are either a free country or we are not"
ReplyDeleteWe're not and it's our own damned fault. "9/11 changed everything" is the lie that turned the slow trend into a precipitous leap and yes, they're still howling about creeping socialism while our Senatorial traitors are considering allowing the president they think has too much power anyway to create a new class of political prisoners without the right to Habeas Corpus or a trial.
And what do we do? Not a goddamn thing. We're like demented, self-destructive idiots gurgling about that Obama and those far left liberal libtards -- zombies with maggot eaten brains lurching toward destruction with condescending smiles on our leprous lips, mumbling about gods and our special place in the world.
We've become everything I hate and if I believed there was a god and a just one, I would pray for another flood.
I keep toying with the idea of expatriating but would I be any better off? That is the question...
ReplyDelete