hilos

a couple of days ago i heard the news about a town where business had fallen so much that many shops and restaurants had to close. There is an article in the new york times that covers this story.

as i was reading the story i was struck by the mayor (well, past mayor) saying the the ‘legitimate’ businesses had stayed and the other businesses were the ones that ‘were supporting the illegal inmigrants”  (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/nyregion/26riverside.html is the link to the article)

i think the slowing down of the economy proves what an integral part of each community immigrants are. Now the town had to remove the laws. i don’t think you can deny how important immigration is, the problem some people have is when people come into the country with out the permission of the u.s. government. 

but the thing is, hurting any person results in hurting the population as a whole. The measure in the town was not even enforced but people still left. i probably would have left too, i mean is it really worth living somewhere were there are so many resources cut off from you? on the other hand no place is perfect and maybe i would rather stay and fight to gain access to those resources abd be like you can’t exclude me. ha.

i wanna highlight the importance of fighting for our rights as people. no matter what religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexual orientation, class, age or migratory status we have.  it really makes no sense to have open borders to product and capital and close them to people, specially when there are policies in place that make it really hard for people to develop themselves.

point of this short note is, by hurting one we hurt all, yes, an injury to one is an injury to all. and also immigrant, of every kind, are super important to the vitality and economy of a city, like the developments in new jersey have proven.

i remember earlie this year freaking out about all the anti-immigrat laws being passed or looked at in a variety of places like carpentersville and waukegan. now we have an example to say look at what these types of legislation did. the immigrant rights movement has a long way to go but we have to keep going and defending everyone’s rights to create citites were human potential is not wasted on dead end jobs that you can’t pay everything you need with, so you need another one. As communities we need to take control of our resources. so let’s start.