THREE ISSUES | From the bottom of the economic ladder, not much hope

I see a man sitting near a fountain filled with pigeons in the middle of a park downtown St. Paul, and ask him if I can interview him about the upcoming elections.  He’s not sure. “I don’t speak English very well,” he says. “¿Habla Español? I ask. His face immediately brightens up. “Yes, of course! What about you?” He agrees to an interview, but asks that I not use his name, so I'll call him Luis.

Luis tells me that he is a middle-aged day laborer from Cuba who has lived in Minnesota for the past 17 years. His wife and two grown daughters are still in Cuba and he hasn’t seen them at all since he arrived here. He is a resident of the United States, here with a work permit, currently living alone in East St. Paul. Currently, he is unemployed. He checks every day to see if there is any available work. He works for a day or two at a time, then can wait days, even weeks until something else comes up. His jobs vary—most often involving factory work or heavy manual labor. His last job was assembling tractors.

Luis doesn’t have much hope in politics—either here or in his native country. He believes that power is a corrupting force, “it's dirty,” he says. Even though he doesn’t believe in the upcoming elections, there are many issues he’d like to see change.

The economy is Luis’s primary concern, followed by immigration. When he arrived here in 1994, jobs were plentiful in the day labor market. Now he’s never sure. He links the poor economy directly to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. When the war started and jobs became scarcer, Luis saw racism increase. He remembers one day immigration officials came to the meat-packing plant in West St. Paul where he was working. They divided up the legal from the illegal workers. They took all undocumented workers away. Most of the workers were Latino, and he remembers everyone being treated with callous disrespect. “I know immigration has to do its job,” he says, “but sometimes it is how you do the job that matters.” Many of his co-workers have been deported, and, if their children are citizens, they often wind up in foster care. He’s sad to see families split up and children raised by strangers. “There’s way too many deportations,” he says. He continues, “It’s different for a white person. They see your skin—they give you a job. To me, no.”

Finally, Luis would like to see changes in the education system. He wants to learn more English, but doesn’t have the opportunity. He’s only been able to teach himself enough to get by. Also, he wants to be able to use the training he received in Cuba as a heating and refrigeration technician, but the training isn’t recognized as valid here.

Luis hopes to save up enough in the next four years to be able to return and live out the rest of his life in Cuba. He’s hopeful things will work out, “if that’s the way God wants it.”

• BROADCAST TO EVERY ILLEGAL ALIEN FROM ARIZONA AND EVERY OTHER STATE TO HEAD FOR CALIFORNIA? THE TAXPAYERS THERE WILL BE FINANCIALLY FORCED TO SUPPORT YOU, EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE A $16 BILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT. WHEN the mass departure begins from Arizona, other states will follow suit by enforcement policing of their borders to save themselves from giving uncompensated health care and other public assistance to the illegal alien invaders. Soon the States will be screaming blue murder that Arizona’s illegal alien families, will be expeditiously in Texas, Utah, Washington State, Oregon, Colorado and just spreading out. Yet the lobotomized idiots who run California assembly are going to pass an anti-Arizona law, so the police cannot question the estimated 9,859,027 foreign born population of California, with a total population of 36,756,666 persons as of 2006. How many are illegal aliens had settled there is unknown, but according to the Los Angeles Times, 40 percent of workers in Los Angeles County pay no taxes and are working under the table, because they are predominantly illegal aliens. It’s inevitable that unknown numbers of illegal alien refugee’s will arrive in the-Liberal-Socialist-Marxist state of California, where an already escalating $8.6 billion deficit is going to rise even more? With illegal aliens pouring in from Arizona looking for state free handouts, the state will have a real financial mess on its hands. CALIFORNIANS NEED TO REMOVE THE LIBERALS IN THEIR CAPITOL, WHO ARE DESTROYING THEIR STATE. THEY SHOULD DEMAND THAT EVERYBODY WHO VOTES HAS AN OFFICIAL PICTURE ID, BECAUSE THERE IS NO DOUBT IN MIND THAT ILLEGAL ALIENS WILL TAKE THE MINIMAL OF RISK VOTING IN LOCAL, STATE AND THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS IF DISPLAYING OF OFFICIAL ID IS ABSENT. OTHER states will soon follow Arizona's desperate measure, to protect their lawful population. Arizona will shortly be checking the immigration status of those settled there when they run afoul of the law. ALABAMA, GEORGIA is second on the list to be threatened by the Obama legions, pressed by the radical pro-illegal immigrant organizations and the Liberal mainstream news. Anybody who dares to overreach the federal authority of this uncontrollable government will be intimidated by the Dept of Justice. California will suffer from 'self-inflicted monetary wounds' caused by the Democratic indifference, to Californians taxpayers. California, the “Sanctuary State’ for illegal aliens and illegal alien criminals, such as the one that slaughtered the Bologna family members, husband and two kids in San Francisco are going to arrive in hordes in the welcoming cities. California, Nevada, Texas, New Mexico will be devastated by these parasites from throughout the world, who head there. Just like illegal immigration, ObamaCare is going to allow illegal aliens to pilfer the welfare system? It’s blatantly obvious that it’s going to encourage unknown numbers of desperate people across the border or otherwise overstay a visa? CALIFORNIA, with the rapidly deteriorating county of Los Angeles, has ignored the onslaught from South of our border. I hope that California residents realize there being cheated out of billions of dollars yearly? Just ask Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Andronovich of not just millions, but billions of dollars annually being collected by foreign nationals. It’s no real secret that Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services reported that over $53 million in welfare benefits, were issued to illegal alien parents for their native-born children this last March. The $53 million consist of $20 million in CalWORKs (welfare) and $33 million in food stamps — representing 21% of all CalWORKs and food stamp issuance's in the County. At this rate, the projected annual cost is over $625 million. “With the $550 million for public safety and nearly $500 million for healthcare, the total cost for illegal immigrants to County taxpayers exceeds $1.6 billion dollars a year,” said Antonovich. “These costs do not include the hundreds of millions of dollars for education.”. ARE there any records of what the cost would be currently, with the flood already here and the 500.000 projection of pregnant females that appear each year looking for their free handouts in child deliveries? WELFARE COSTS FOR CHILDREN OF ILLEGAL ALIENS EXCEEDS $646 MILLION IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY – CAN YOU EVEN COMPREHEND THAT FIGURE? That was the Year-end closing 2011 figures, but records of actual cost from Sacramento are probably under counted, suggesting that illegal aliens are the main contributors to the disgraceful deficit. ALREADY WE ARE SEEING CITIES IN CALIFORNIA AS STOCKTON FILING FOR BANKRUPTCY, WHICH IS JUST THE BEGINNING, thanks to clowns like Governors Jerry Brown and the Mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Join your local multi-million person TEA PARTY and save America from the Democrats, Liberals and even Republicans, by voting for the Constitutional Tea party leadership and vote them into Congress. E-Verify is still currently voluntary, but if it were made mandatory, illegal migrants and immigrants would be scrupulously locked out of the mainstream workforce, the same with the Birthright citizenship bill. If E-VERIFY were passed by Washington as permanent and an amendment to the BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP ACT, it would definitely stem the millions of foreign pregnant Mothers who come here draining states and federal treasuries. Without any contradiction there was massive fraud during the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986. The entire illegal recipient has to do in respect to the amnesty, was to prove that they had worked in the United States for a certain time period. There was widespread document fraud from the beginning by applicants. Predictably, the number of people applying for amnesty far exceeded the projections. And there proved to be a failure of political resolve in enforcing new laws against employers. IT WAS ONE GREAT BIG LIE THAT HAS CAUSED THE MESS WE HAVE NOW. Eventually, some 2.7 million people were granted amnesty, and many who remained, forming the focus of today's unauthorized population along with the millions of family members through CHAIN MIGRATION that taxpayers are forced by federal mandate to support. - by Dave Francis on Fri, 07/06/2012 - 7:51pm