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ARTICLE EXERPT:
QUOTE
Immigrants and the rule of law
August 4, 2006
Suppose that more than 100 people gathered in each of several back yards in your quiet residential neighborhood for volleyball games that run well into the night.
That the back yards' owners sell beer at 50 cents a can and beef at $5 a plate.
That they erect 20-foot nets over the fences to keep the ball in the yard and bury extension cords to power klieg lights.
That players and spectators park their cars on the neighbors' lawns.
Because Danbury, Conn., residents didn't like this turn of events, their local officials started enforcing local codes on noise, height and light restrictions, on selling alcohol without a license, on turning a home into a fast-food restaurant, on cramming several families into dwellings zoned single-family.
Because the property owners were Ecuadoran immigrants, Danbury was summarily pounded as nativist.
Santa Ana resident Tim Rush has been calling the code cops on neighbors who “sell cars, refrigerators and corn on the cob, plus people playing ranchera music at all hours of the day.”
He has called authorities about inoperable cars parked in yards, unpermitted garage conversions and driveways.
Most of his neighbors, mostly Latino, don't like him.
“He bought a house here,” one told the Los Angeles Times. “That doesn't give him the right to boss people around and tell them how to live.”
Costa Mesa is training its police (as federal law allows) to help the feds find illegal immigrant felons, as opposed to Maywood. That Los Angeles County city dissolved its traffic police unit because it arrested too many Latinos driving without a license, the penalty for which is impounding their cars.
Then there's Vista, roundly criticized as racist for enforcing a longtime law that prohibits setting up a mobile restaurant in a public street, then moving against the illegal employment and exploitation of illegal immigrants by making employers of day laborers register themselves, the work and the pay. If scores of clerks mobbed a mall looking for work, they'd be dispersed, but not day laborers congregating at (private) service stations.
And there's McGonigle Canyon, where mostly illegal immigrants still live in a squalor that wouldn't be tolerated if located in La Jolla or inhabited by runaway teens.
In these examples and more lies a worry not limited to Anglo-Americans: that the rule of law – civil and criminal, ordinance and statute – to which Americans generally are viscerally attached may collapse under a multicultural punch: A punch from immigrants whose native culture doesn't recognize private property, noise/zoning/health ordinances, and cops who go by the rule-of-law book; a punch that considers such law enforcement racist.
Every immigrant group
...
August 4, 2006
Suppose that more than 100 people gathered in each of several back yards in your quiet residential neighborhood for volleyball games that run well into the night.
That the back yards' owners sell beer at 50 cents a can and beef at $5 a plate.
That they erect 20-foot nets over the fences to keep the ball in the yard and bury extension cords to power klieg lights.
That players and spectators park their cars on the neighbors' lawns.
Because Danbury, Conn., residents didn't like this turn of events, their local officials started enforcing local codes on noise, height and light restrictions, on selling alcohol without a license, on turning a home into a fast-food restaurant, on cramming several families into dwellings zoned single-family.
Because the property owners were Ecuadoran immigrants, Danbury was summarily pounded as nativist.
Santa Ana resident Tim Rush has been calling the code cops on neighbors who “sell cars, refrigerators and corn on the cob, plus people playing ranchera music at all hours of the day.”
He has called authorities about inoperable cars parked in yards, unpermitted garage conversions and driveways.
Most of his neighbors, mostly Latino, don't like him.
“He bought a house here,” one told the Los Angeles Times. “That doesn't give him the right to boss people around and tell them how to live.”
Costa Mesa is training its police (as federal law allows) to help the feds find illegal immigrant felons, as opposed to Maywood. That Los Angeles County city dissolved its traffic police unit because it arrested too many Latinos driving without a license, the penalty for which is impounding their cars.
Then there's Vista, roundly criticized as racist for enforcing a longtime law that prohibits setting up a mobile restaurant in a public street, then moving against the illegal employment and exploitation of illegal immigrants by making employers of day laborers register themselves, the work and the pay. If scores of clerks mobbed a mall looking for work, they'd be dispersed, but not day laborers congregating at (private) service stations.
And there's McGonigle Canyon, where mostly illegal immigrants still live in a squalor that wouldn't be tolerated if located in La Jolla or inhabited by runaway teens.
In these examples and more lies a worry not limited to Anglo-Americans: that the rule of law – civil and criminal, ordinance and statute – to which Americans generally are viscerally attached may collapse under a multicultural punch: A punch from immigrants whose native culture doesn't recognize private property, noise/zoning/health ordinances, and cops who go by the rule-of-law book; a punch that considers such law enforcement racist.
Every immigrant group
...