Back from spending most of a week with a group of unwashed, smelly young people having fun on their parents’ dime.
What? Oh, no, I wasn’t Occupying Wall Street — I was at camp in the woods with Number 2 Son’s sixth-grade class. Frankly, the 11-year-olds probably have a more accurate view of reality than the hippie losers befouling our public spaces.
In any case, the Washington Post over the weekend ran its version of the Times story I linked to last week — illegal immigrants are leaving Alabama because of the tough new immigration law. From the Post story:
After evening Mass on Thursday, families mingled worriedly in the church lobby, asking how to get help and debating where to flee.
“I have a cousin in Nashville. Maybe we’ll try there,” said a muscular construction worker, holding a sleeping infant in his arms.
Others said they planned to head for Texas or Florida, where the laws are not as strict. None wanted to return to Mexico, where they said wages are pitifully low and violent crime is a constant threat.
For Alabama, it’s fine in the short term if the illegals go to Texas or Florida (“where the laws are not as strict”), but the ultimate goal obviously has to be federal measures to get the illegals to go back home, however much they’d prefer not to. Of course, many illegals in Arizona did return to their native land, as evidenced by the complaints from Sonora state officials that too many people were moving south, burdening their education and health systems! Why this should surprise anyone is beyond me — illegals are people like any other, and when the incentives they’re offered change, their behavior will change.
The success of measures like this has got to gall the open-borders folks — they’ve had to switch on a dime from saying enforcement can’t work to saying we shouldn’t do it. Not to get all Godwin’s Law on you, but it’s like open-borders crowd’s predecessors in the CPUSA who opposed war against Germany until June 22, 1941, when, sometimes in mid-sentence, they changed their tune.
Oh, and guess what? Americans are applying for the jobs illegals have abandoned:
Employers in Alabama’s Marshall County are hiring new workers following the stepped-up federal and state enforcement of immigration laws.
“It is amazing to see the effects” as undocumented workers leave town, said Chuck Ellis, a member of Albertville’s city council.
Immigration is a hot-button issue that is testing the skills of candidates as diverse as President Barack Obama and Texas Gov. Rick Perry. They’re being further tested by a wave of new state laws, and by some limited federal enforcement, which are giving voters real-world tests of rival policies.
On Monday, for example, the Wayne Farms chicken-processing plant in Marshall County held a jobs fair to fill slots that opened when many Hispanic workers left the county. The line “was probably equivalent to a couple of blocks … It was a largely Anglo and black group,” but also included Hispanics, said Ellis.