During my travels through the SoCal area I have walked many neighborhoods, taken many buses and spent many hours on the streets of LA area. I am here to tell you that the best citizens are the illegal immigrants. They ride bicycles and the bus everywhere (the bus system would be in trouble without them) and are the ones walking to school with their kids. They do real work and do not create derivatives, real estate bubbles or credit default swaps. Instead they grow our food, prepare our food and care for our homes, gardens and children. My favorite restaurants are run by them (try the Jalisco’s birria on Gaffey in San Pedro…or the Pronto on Pacific’s caldo de res) and I would miss them!
That being said, having worked as a professional gardener, construction laborer and framer, I am aware that employers have used them to freeze wages for many trades and that in a time of high employment this is a powerful populist issue that white supremacists masquerading as Tea Party Patriots are using. By not having a real solution to the problem, progressives have let the racists take the issue. Having lived in El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, I know how the progressives in those countries feel about immigration.
I was an international election observer with a Veterans For Peace mission in El Salvador from December to March 2009. I lived with the FMLN supporters and studied election process, culture and Spanish for three months. I learned that El Salvador has the largest percentage of its population living as immigrants in the USA of any country. The FMLN considered immigration to the US as extremely destructive to their goals. It affected them in several ways:
The most activist and energetic among the poor leave, leaving that community poorer yet. When they come from the FMLN’s cooperatives, the remittances sent home often cause the entire family to move out and into the suburbs since they become among the privileged and don’t want to share the remittances.
Between a quarter and a fifth of the population are unable to vote since they have no absentee ballots and they are from the poorest sector of society and most likely to vote for a leftist party
Violent gangs were unknown in El Salvador until MS 13 and M18 were deported from the immigrant communities in Los Angeles (the second largest Salvadoran community in the world). The FMLN considers immigration a cause of gang formation, since the immigrant becomes estranged from his or her family and culture and forms a surrogate culture/family.
One of Mauricio Funes’ pledges was to repatriate some of the immigrants to make his society stronger. Land reform is part of the plan.
What I would propose as a progressive agenda is to assist the immigrants in repatriating by hooking them up with a microloan and transport home. You likely know that more are leaving the us now in the economic hard times.
This would be the beginning of restoring decent wages in the labor industries….construction, restaurant work, gardening and landscape etc. Employers have used the twelve million illegal immigrants to hold wages down for decades now. It would do little good to offer amnesty to them as they already hold jobs at reduced wages and unemployment is at record levels.
A rational and sober look would have us, the progressives, finding a real progressive solution that restores democracy in Honduras and Mexico and restores wages here!
Lane Anderson, Cabrillo Marina E 29 43, San Pedro Harbor, Los Angeles
(805) 564-2698
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