Comments on: Securing The Homeland

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 06:24:14 +0000

All this crap has done is trap millions of agricultural workers in this country who used to come up, doing the picking and then go home with their wages. Now it cost so much to get back in that they stay in this country, living rough between jobs, and catching all kinds of things from a lack of sanitation in their camps.

They don’t want to be here, they just want to do the migratory picking jobs for the cash they need to build a house and start a little farm. That’s the way the system worked for generations. People don’t want the growers to build decent housing, because a couple of them tried when I lived in SoCal and got buried under land use ordinances for trying to put up barracks buildings with real plumbing for their pickers to speed up the harvest.

The wages wouldn’t be bad if you didn’t have to live in SoCal, but local people can’t afford to do it with the cost of living and lack of affordable housing.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 06:04:45 +0000

but yeah, let them pick strawberries.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 06:03:14 +0000

🙂

well, i’m assuming that i was supposed to read that b-i-i-i-i-g number and be afraid, very afraid. but 21,000 is 0.005% of the total of 400 million border crossings that they [finally!] tell us about at the very end of the article. >40,000 traffic deaths in the country every year and nobody bats an eye, but i’m supposed to be scared of possibly as many 21,000 furriners.

although, we might ought to catch that guy who keeps bringing his tb germs back into the country and just toss him into the hospital.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 05:31:36 +0000

Since we don’t have 4400 airliners I guess they are going to have to build them first, or pick strawberries. 😈

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 04:47:07 +0000

21,000 terrorists?! that's enough hijackers to crash 4400 planes!! omg!! that's enough planes to kill, like, 3 million people!! we're all gonna die!!!1!1111!!!

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 03:25:25 +0000

The problem is that half the GOP want the cheap labor and the other half is panicked by an increase melanin in the general population. Having done some work with the border guys, this problem has been going on forever. Stop the “bad guys” but don’t slow commerce, which can be interpreted as “the crops will rot without pickers so don’t be so picky at the border”.

I have come back over the border from picking up a relative who was stranded down in Baja driving a van I would have pulled over in a second as a drug vehicle, and got waved right through, and then ended up at secondary inspection while taking my parents on a trip to Tijuana in a car with military parking stickers on it. There is no rhyme or reason.

You hire people from the wingnut “colleges” and you get the haters. I love the part of the article where she says she didn’t notice he was wearing “make-up” to darken his skin. Yeah, right, because blackface is such a subtle effect.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 02:57:29 +0000

Oh, regarding the party — sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if the Bush Administration wasn’t staffed with crazy racist people. On the other hand, might as well wonder what the world would be like if cotton candy grew on trees…

– Badtux the Snarky Penguin

By: Badtux

Badtux — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 02:56:29 +0000

Thing is, there’s so many names on that inadmissable list that if they strictly enforced it, they’d have days-long delays at the border trying to sort out the people with the same name as others on the list from the people who are really the people they’re trying to stop from entering the country. It’s like that “no fly list” — the Feds are so scared that they might leave off someone’s name, they put almost *everyone’s* name on the damned thing, making it pretty much useless.

– Badtux the Named Penguin