"Greatness....reduced one Hazleton at a time"
Have you ever seen that Daily Show bit where Jon Stewart leans his head way back and blurts out, "Ooooh, snap!"? That's how I felt reading today's editorial in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:
I think Lou just got punk'd. Actually, unlike that show, what's happening in Hazleton is no practical joke, and it's sad to watch.
Andy in H-burg
Proving that every Main Street in America can have its own demagogue, Mayor Barletta has championed an ordinance that is all about punishing immigrants, ostensibly illegal ones, although inevitably all come under the same cloud of suspicion.
(snap, err, snip)
Hazleton is a million miles from the America that once welcomed the "poor and huddled masses" -- and profited hugely by their presence. Mr. Barletta, who appears to have greater political ambitions, is buoyed by the support he has received around the country, but then America has never been short of nativists. They know a friend when they see one.
For once such poison seeps out, there is no containing it to those who are illegal. As Post-Gazette writer Milan Simonich reported Sunday, a legal immigrant from the Dominican Republic, a U.S. citizen for 18 years, has endured taunts to "go back where you came from."
If that anti-foreigner attitude prevails, America can forget competing in the global market and its greatness will be reduced one Hazleton at a time.
I think Lou just got punk'd. Actually, unlike that show, what's happening in Hazleton is no practical joke, and it's sad to watch.
Andy in H-burg
posted by ACLU of Pennsylvania at 8/29/2006 04:01:00 PM
2 Comments:
Going back to the wonderful ignorance of these kinds of people, most of them probably can't even find any of the countries the immigrants are coming from on a map. I guess to them, if it's not from the U.S., they're all just "damned foreigners."
I wonder how many of them can identify even 25% of the states in the U.S. on a map?
It's sad that, once again, ignorance is gaining strength in numbers.
That's why it's so vital for all those people who say privately "we don't feel that way, but we don't want to say anything" to speak up. I truly don't believe the majority of Americans fall into the bigoted ignorant category, but you'd never know from listening to the people making the news.
Barletta is following the old axiom "If you don't like things the way they are, blame the other guy, especially if he's different."
In this vein a recent study by Robert Sampson, social science prof at Harvard, reports that recent Latino immigrants (the ones Barletta is targetting) are less prone to violent action than either blacks or whites with long standing in the US. Further "Sampson discovered that a person's immigrant status emerged as a stronger indicator of a dispropensity to violence than any other factor, including poverty, ethnic background and IQ."
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