Thank you to the person--evidently an attorney--who wrote to point out that the law (or ordinance) recently passed in Hazleton to curb illegal aliens will be used by xenophobes and bigots against people who might even seem to fall into the illegal alien categories. I don't want to distort what the writer wrote, but unfortunately I was unable to print it out. If I am right, you should be able to click a button somewhere on the blog and read his/her comments.
The writer kindly allowed that I myself may not be a bigot or xenophobe (Thank you for allowing that possibility!), but that it is naive to think the legislation will not be misused.
Well, I don't think of myself as a bigot or xenophobe--more of a Franklin Roosevelt type liberal, and actually almost old enough to have known FDR personally. (Just a little joke. I DID once correspond with his wife, Eleanor, who corresponded right back. I kept the letter for years.)
I don't think Mayor Barletta is any more of a bigot or xenophobe than I am, although I admit that here I am on shaky ground. I don't know the man personally, and what I am going on is his online letter--I hope it is still there; if it is, go and read it. He comes across as a dedicated public servant, trying hard to do his job for the people who elected him, and to do that job against increasing odds, with limited resources. (He also appointed a poet laureate for Hazleton, and I think that should count in his favor. After all, how many lovers of poetry do you know who are raving bigots? Or even mild ones, for that matter.)
I remember when, according to the news staff of WVIA-FM, a regional public radio station whose coverage area includes Hazleton, some Spanish-speaking newcomers came to him and asked him to hire Spanish-speaking police, presumably to protect them from other speakers of Spanish. (The language does not matter here; it could have been any language from Albanian to Vietnamese. It is the principle that matters; and that principle is that one should try not to impose extra burdens and expenses on the authorities of a place where one is living.)
Now, let us get to the whole matter of names like "bigots" and "xenophobes." I feel that these are tentacles of that great enemy of us all, Political Correctness. The fraudulent idea that no words that hurt anyone should ever be spoken (except, of course, about or to people who disagree with what pass for our own ideas) has done much to prevent the solution of America's problems. And do we have problems! What with war in the Middle East, global warming, and so forth, illegal immigration almost looks like the least of them. It isn't, really, because it is too easy to imagine this problem--or some combination of all of them--bringing down the fabric of society around our ears. That fabric already seems to me to be very frayed. Don't let's count people out of efforts to find solutions by calling them names.
(You are about to say, are you not? that I myself am still calling newcomers to the United States who happen to lack documentation by the "bad" name of illegal aliens. But I don't think of it as a "bad name;" I think of it as a descriptive phrase. That many of these people have suffered from various kinds of persecution in their homelands I also know, and regret very much. For these people the term "refugees" also applies.
But we cannot solve their problem unless we can solve our problem: in this case, what to do about the hordes of newcomers to our shores? Assimilate them, send them back, assimilate some and send the others back? Or what?
I believe Mayor Lou Barletta should be credited with taking action, and reasonable action in the face of his and his city's problems. He is not trying to deny any hard-working and teachable immigrant access to the American Dream. What he is trying to do is prevent that dream from becoming a nightmare for those who were born in this country. They, too, have human rights.