Calblog

Dreams Of Aztlan Threatened By Racist San Bernardino Ordinance

This from the print edition of Tuesday’s Press-Enterprise, pages A1&11 (Text not available online):

[On Monday the San Bernardino City Council considered an ordinance that would] prohibit the city from operating day-laborer centers and require private centers to ensure that day laborers are authorized to work in the United States.

It would also empower police to seize the vehicles of employers soliciting illegal immigrants for day labor, would deny businesses that “aid and abet illegal aliens” and would require landlords to file copies of their lease agreements at City Hall so officials could bar them from renting to illegal immigrants.

Never mind that the City Council voted 4-3 against the Illegal Immigration Relief Act Ordinance, ordinance opponents are hopping mad that municipal law requires the proposal go before voters by September 22.

In this moment of crisis the ACLU—ever ready to step up to the plate—is deliberating their standard tactic, namely finding a helpful liberal judge to deep-six the democratic process by judicial fiat:

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union will decide in the next few days whether to challenge the measure in court before it gets on the ballot… .

It is comforting to know that at least the City Council is peopled by representatives that express themselves rationally, eschewing all hyperbole:

Councilman Rikki Van Johnson said [the proposed ordinance] reminded him of his youth in an Alabama dominated by the Ku Klux Klan.

That’s right, suspected illegal immigrants will be terrorized in their homes and lynched in the streets if this ordinance passes.

[Armando] Navarro, an ethnic studies professor at UC Riverside and longtime Chicano and immigration rights activist, describes Southern California as part of “occupied Aztlan,” the historic land of the indigenous people of Mexico and the Southwest United States.

[…]

“… This initiative is racist and it seeks to create a sense of ethnic cleansing of our migrant community in San Bernardino,” said Navarro.

This is the type of pabulum being fed to impressionable minds in our UC system.

“Racism” and “ethnic cleansing”?! Oh, please. The notion of “Aztlan” is—at its heart—the very epitome of racism. It’s all about race to these activists, yet they have the temerity to call those who support effectual immigration laws as “racist.” One might ask Mr. Navarro how an “occupied Aztlan” will ever be freed of its fancied oppressors except through “a sense of ethnic cleansing” far more severe than any sense of ethnic cleansing he claims is contemplated by the ordinance currently in question.

Here’s another jem, this one from another man addressing a crowd gathered to oppose the ordinance:

“We can’t allow little Hitlers like [the author of this ordinance] to do to our community what Hitler did to the Jews.”

Uh huh. If this ordinance passes, San Bernardino will soon be sending illegal immigrants back to Mexico via smoke stacks. Right.

Speakers such as those quoted here cannot be taking themselves seriously.

Posted by clark smith at May 17, 2006 05:53 PM | TrackBack