01/07/2014
Here’s a typical sob story reportorial from the Boston Globe about how illegal aliens from Mexico have swamped a perfectly innocent town in central Washington State and are really, really hurt because the mean old GOP won’t let them have citizenship:
MATTAWA, Wash. — Eloy Cervantes, a cattle rancher and father of four, has staked his family’s future on this remote farming city in America’s apple country — a city riddled by troubles he wishes he could help fix. Teen pregnancy. Grating poverty. And violent gangs that shot bullet holes into his neighbors’ trailers.But Cervantes is not a US citizen, so he is powerless to change a thing. In fact, the majority of people in this American town hundreds of miles from the southern border are not American citizens. Mattawa’s longtime mayor, a white woman in a town of 4,400 mostly Latino residents, won the last election with a grand total of 37 votes.
Immigration puts small town on cultural divide| America’s immigration impasse is a daily, dispiriting fact of life in Mattawa, Wash., and many places where noncitizens abound, by Maria Sacchetti, Januart 5, 2014. Bolding added throughout.
A white woman! Can’t have that!
The Globe’s Sacchetti (email her) describes the hell that was Mattawa before the immivasion:
Thirty years ago, Mattawa was a fading town of 300 hardy white farmers on the banks of the Columbia River, which flows south through ocher-tinted gorges from the Canadian Rockies. City officials joked that Mattawa easily lived up to the meaning of its Native American name, “Where is it?”
Hardy white farmers! The horror!
Unusually, Ms. Sacchetti is naive (or subversive?) enough to say straight out what the political economy of this immigration disaster actually is:
… in the late 1990s, corporate farmers blanketed the brown hills with forests of apples, cherries, and grapes — with the government’s help. They tapped water from a federal irrigation project and some leased land from the state.
In other words, Big Ag corralled a bunch of government subsidies to engage in economic activities that a free market would not otherwise have supported.
As soon as the crops ripened, farmers were desperate for workers.
Workers at a price, that is. Needless to say, no thought of investing in mechanization. And certainly no thought that maybe these "apples, cherries, and grapes" should be imported.
Few Americans applied for the low-paying jobs, but Mexican immigrants from poor towns in Mexico and other US states poured into Mattawa. They camped along the river, rented crawl spaces under houses, and crammed into trailers until the septic tanks overflowed. Most crossed into the United States illegally, because they wanted to work.
The septic tanks overflowed? What happened to zoning?
What happened to zoning, of course, is what happened to Mattawa overall: tramped underfoot by corporate America’s stampede to privatize profits and socialize costs.
The impact of which is only just beginning to be felt. As "ajp77" noted shrewdly on the (hearteningly skeptical) Globe comment thread:
The article appears to be stating that 80% of the Mattawa population would qualify for EBT cards, phones, housing, healthcare, milk money,once they became citizens … Talk about future entitlement tsunami … .
Significantly, the federal govenment’s only reported intervention has been to further dispossess Americans:
City Hall did not hire interpreters until 2007, when the Department of Justice investigated Mattawa for failing to provide translators in a community where most people only speak Spanish.
(Note that this happened under the utterly appalling George W. Bush).
Mattawa now has a bilingual police chief but, Sacchetti laments, "he is the only one of four officers who speaks Spanish."
Their replacements will almost certainly be Hispanic. Job discrimination via creeping institutional bilingualism, of course, is yet another of the unspoken costs that immigration imposes on monolingual a.k.a. normal Americans.
… the town’s social hub is the Catholic church, where Spanish-language Mass is standing-room-only, even on a Thursday night …The pastor said he never lacks volunteers to sweep up or pray over the Virgen de Guadalupe. But over the fence, the dilapidated trailer parks and rutted roads are beyond his power, or his congregants’, to fix.
“It’s a third world in a first-world country,” said the Rev. Jorge Granados.
(Why? Don’t Mexicans maintain their homes?)
Father Granados is right. This is the Third World — not immigrating but invading and colonizing a First World country: America.
And everyone enabling it, from Brian McGrory, Editor of the Boston Globe , to the faceless executives of agribusiness, is guilty of treason.
Peter Brimelow is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, “Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster,” is now available in Kindle format.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.