State-sponsored NPR on the suffering of native-born Americans when their low-cost migrant laborers depart… “Reporter’s Notebook: He was my fruit vendor for years. I saw immigration agents take him”:
I love sliced fruit, and for seven years, my go-to vendor has been a man named Jesús. I could always find him under two large rainbow umbrellas next to a gas station in my Los Angeles neighborhood, Echo Park.
And that’s when I heard a scuffle. Two large, dark SUVs had rolled up, and I saw masked agents in Border Patrol vests chasing Jesús out from under his rainbow umbrella and across the gas station. He ran between the pumps. That’s where they grabbed and handcuffed him, while he was still wearing his black apron.
Despite sophisticated communications and IT infrastructure, the progressive insurgency couldn’t save this migrant from the Gestapo 2.0:
Within minutes, several activists showed up. They were with a group that tracks Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Echo Park, and they told me a witness had reported it to a rapid-response phone number. As word spread, customers and friends of Jesús started showing up too.
Jorge Mejía, a longtime customer, told me he rushed over when he heard. He told me things I already knew — that Jesús cared about his customers and about quality, and that’s why people loved him.
“I feel helpless,” Mejía said, his eyes filling with tears, his voice breaking. “It angers me that this is happening to people just working and trying to get ahead.”
Undocumented migrants are such a high percentage of the Los Angeles population that small businesses can’t survive without them:
Ariel Padilla met Jesús on the day Padilla moved into the neighborhood a decade ago. It was a hot day and the cold fruit hit just right. Last summer, Padilla organized a fundraiser for Jesús when sales were slow because many of his immigrant customers were too afraid to go outside.
“He was a landmark of this part of the neighborhood,” Padilla told me after he rushed over when he heard the news. “Now I’m trying to think about: How can I help him?”
The neighborhood will never be the same now that people have to slice their own fruit (or pay a higher price to have fruit sliced for them by authorized immigrants; plainly paying for a native-born fruit slicer is not an option):
The next morning I learned, from Padilla, that Jesús had already been removed to Tijuana, Mexico. He had agreed to be deported because he feared languishing for months in LA’s notorious immigration detention center.
Since his arrest, I’ve driven by his corner and struggled to make sense of the fact that someone who brought so much simple joy to my neighborhood for almost 20 years had been whisked away before my eyes. That every time I pass I’ll picture that scene. And that that corner will never be the same.
The reporter won’t do the 2.5-hour drive to Tijuana to meet Jesús and find out if it is possible for a Mexican to live in Mexico (population 133 million)?
In other immigration news, folks on Martha’s Vineyard are reminding everyone that “All are welcome here”:
One initiative on the Island is a newly formed group called Martha’s Vineyard Fourth Amendment (MV 4A). It has created signage for local businesses to put on windows, is conducting constitutional rights training, and has amassed more than 60 volunteers in the past couple of months.
The signs are a neon green color, with bold black lettering, and can be seen in storefront windows at Cronig’s Market, Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, and Tisbury Printer, among others. The signs are available through their website. “All are welcome here,” the posters read. “We know our Fourth Amendment rights.” The Fourth Amendment is a part of the U.S. Bill of Rights that prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.
“Putting up signage is a way for our community to come together. It’s a way to send a message to each other that we care about each other. It says what kind of a community we want to be,” Ladd said. “It also says that we know our Fourth Amendment rights, which in some ways can be a deterrent for somebody who wants to violate your Fourth Amendment rights.”
The MV Times article doesn’t mention that the 50 migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard in September 2022 (the off season when tons of housing was available) by the Deplorable Ron DeSantis were immediately moved “voluntarily” by 125 military soldiers (National Guard was called up) to a fenced military base.
> State-sponsored NPR
With the CPB now defunct, there isn’t any federal funding for public radio. Their claim to this day is that their news is “fair and impartial”. I think even Stallman called them out on that one.
> the 50 [noble] immigrants…immediately moved “voluntarily” by 125 military soldiers
One of my favorite NIMBY moments was when I lived in Colorado. A neighbor with a 4000 sq. ft. house heated and electrified with natural gas, plus a gas guzzling SUV in the drive, had a sign on the lawn declaring “No Fracking in CO”. I haven’t heard much from that movement recently. I suppose seismic event inducing energy extraction isn’t the source of outrage it once was.
OAG: I think that they can still tap into state tax dollars, which go first to member stations and then up to NPR as payments for programs. There are supposedly some federal funds still flowing as well, but maybe they’re on the way out.
‘Give a man sliced fruit, and you will feed him for a day. Give a man a paring knife and he will be able to slice his own fruit’. It is from some religious book I hear.
Or he’ll stab you and take your fruit.
Trump should, instead of cruelly deporting the enrichers, send them to places like Martha’s Vineyard and other D+50 95% white locations in Maskachusetts. He can federalize the national guard to prevent the misunderstanding that occurred when DeSantis tried it.
One (say, a Trump administration lawyer) could make the argument that the neon green “All Are Welcome” signs constitute a contract, waving 3rd Amendment rights and offering to house both the immigrants and the troops. Unfortunately, it’s not quite clear what would happen when the immovable object of entitled liberal NIMBYism met the unstoppable force of Trump’s immigrant policy.
In the New York Times no less, we read this opinion:
> …I’m struck by an unsettling thought: What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190601071146/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/opinion/california-housing-nimby.html
OAG: I don’t see how closing the border “keeps housing scarce and inaccessible”. Anything that reduces population, including closing the border, should make housing cheaper and more plentiful relative to demand for housing. Separately, the most effective way that Democrats keep low-skill migrants out of their states and cities is via high minimum wages. If the minimum wage is $21/hour, for example, that excludes most workers who don’t speak English, lack skills, etc. Those low-skill people won’t leave the U.S., but they’ll remove their unsightly persons from the progressive-dominated city or state (unless they’ve lucked into the full-ride public housing system).
@philg
I agree with what you are saying. I included the quote for the astonishing idea that the NYT would openly discuss/leak the hidden agenda of the liberal elite. (I suppose the editorial policy has changed in 7 years.) I wasn’t vouching for the quality of communication.
What I read is that wealthy Democrats and (a majority of?) Republicans want the same thing: to keep undesirables out. (At least, in the case of the wealthy Democrats, to not live among them.) The pachyderms want to take the direct approach and give them the boot out of the country. Elite “progressive” donkeys want them out of their neighborhood, but in the country, to drive up housing costs. They also want to maintain the ruse that they care about the noble underclass, like with the high minimum wage, since they can afford $200 sirloin steaks with asparagus tips as well as $7M homes in Cambridge.
“I respect whites in South Africa more than whites in America. In South Africa, they say they don’t like blacks, and they act accordingly. In America, whites say everyone is free and has equal rights, but in fact they do everything they can (like Jim Crow laws) to keep blacks down, live apart from them, and act like they aren’t.” — sometimes attributed to Malcom X
Ah yes, I think you’re certainly right on the Democrat side. Palm Beach per se is mostly Democrat. They want the open border so that they can pay $200,000 for a new tile roof instead of $400,000, but they would never want anyone who comes through that open border living even as close as West Palm Beach. There will never be an affordable housing project in Palm Beach. For rich Republicans it is a little unclear. I guess they’re happy that their real estate and S&P 500 holdings go up in value any time the population grows, even if it is with the lowest-skill immigrants, but they’d still rather give that up in order to try to get back to a socially cohesive society.
The context of the Third Amendment has to be the Dragonnades, a strategy that Louis XIV used to drive the Hugenots out of France. Subsequently, Britain copied that strategy against the colonists. The idea was to have young, rowdy soldiers annoying people. A hypothetical example of Trump adopting that strategy would be placing young enlisted infantry marines into the houses of federal judges for their protection. That would be unconstitutional, though I’m not sure how they’d remedy it. I don’t see how one could argue that immigrants are soldiers. Courts have already ruled that police are not soldiers. A third amendment challenge wouldn’t succeed based on the limited precedent.