Hazleton adopts immigration measure

[acmejack]

HAZLETON — The Hazleton City Council approved an ordinance Thursday that is intended to make life in the city impossible for illegal immigrants.

The ordinance, likely the first of its kind in the nation, drew national media attention and about 1,000 people to city hall.

Designed to strike out at illegal immigrants where they live and work on a local level, the ordinance has prompted copycat local laws. Unhappy with the federal government’s response to illegal immigration, local leaders are increasingly taking on immigration issues.

“We must draw the line and we are drawing it tonight,” Mayor Lou Barletta told city council in a prepared statement.

http://www.citizensvoice.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16921705&BRD=2259&PAG=461&dept_id=455154&rfi=6

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Sickening....like traveling back in time to when Irish were the 'goats'.

The Chicago Post wrote, "The Irish fill our prisons, our poor houses...Scratch a convict or a pauper, and the chances are that you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic. Putting them on a boat and sending them home would end crime in this country."

[pizzed]

2. stop blaming Mexican workers! stop the EMPLOYERS....

...but begin with stopping BUSHCO!! The PNAC's have outsourced our good paying jobs, and now they want to kill off our Unions - which is the ONLY protection we have against the corporations. It's NOT the mexican workers who threaten our jobs! It's BushCo! Now see THIS tricky little bit of secret war against American Workers...

Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway

http://infowars.com/articles/nwo/nafta_superhighway_bush_admin_secret_plan.htm

Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S. along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Tex., to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn.

Once complete, the new road will allow containers from the Far East to enter the United States through the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, bypassing the Longshoreman’s Union in the process. The Mexican trucks, without the involvement of the Teamsters Union, will drive on what will be the nation’s most modern highway straight into the heart of America. The Mexican trucks will cross border in FAST lanes, checked only electronically by the new “SENTRI” system. The first customs stop will be a Mexican customs office in Kansas City, their new Smart Port complex, a facility being built for Mexico at a cost of $3 million to the U.S. taxpayers in Kansas City.

As incredible as this plan may seem to some readers, the first Trans-Texas Corridor segment of the NAFTA Super Highway is ready to begin construction next year. Various U.S. government agencies, dozens of state agencies, and scores of private NGOs (non-governmental organizations) have been working behind the scenes to create the NAFTA Super Highway, despite the lack of comment on the plan by President Bush. The American public is largely asleep to this key piece of the coming “North American Union” that government planners in the new trilateral region of United States, Canada and Mexico are about to drive into reality.

Just examine the following websites to get a feel for the magnitude of NAFTA Super Highway planning that has been going on without any new congressional legislation directly authorizing the construction of the planned international corridor through the center of the country.

NASCO, the North America SuperCorridor Coalition Inc., is a “non-profit organization dedicated to developing the world’s first international, integrated and secure, multi-modal transportation system along the International Mid-Continent Trade and Transportation Corridor to improve both the trade competitiveness and quality of life in North America.” Where does that sentence say anything about the USA? Still, NASCO has received $2.5 million in earmarks from the U.S. Department of Transportation to plan the NAFTA Super Highway as a 10-lane limited-access road (five lanes in each direction) plus passenger and freight rail lines running alongside pipelines laid for oil and natural gas. One glance at the map of the NAFTA Super Highway on the front page of the NASCO website will make clear that the design is to connect Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. into one transportation system.


Kansas City SmartPort Inc. is an “investor based organization supported by the public and private sector” to create the key hub on the NAFTA Super Highway. At the Kansas City SmartPort, the containers from the Far East can be transferred to trucks going east and west, dramatically reducing the ground transportation time dropping the containers off in Los Angeles or Long Beach involves for most of the country. A brochure on the SmartPort website describes the plan in glowing terms: “For those who live in Kansas City, the idea of receiving containers nonstop from the Far East by way of Mexico may sound unlikely, but later this month that seemingly far-fetched notion will become a reality.”


The U.S. government has housed within the Department of Commerce (DOC) an “SPP office” that is dedicated to organizing the many working groups laboring within the executive branches of the U.S., Mexico and Canada to create the regulatory reality for the Security and Prosperity Partnership. The SPP agreement was signed by Bush, President Vicente Fox, and then-Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Tex., on March 23, 2005. According to the DOC website, a U.S.-Mexico Joint Working Committee on Transportation Planning has finalized a plan such that “(m)ethods for detecting bottlenecks on the U.S.-Mexico border will be developed and low cost/high impact projects identified in bottleneck studies will be constructed or implemented.” The report notes that new SENTRI travel lanes on the Mexican border will be constructed this year. The border at Laredo should be reduced to an electronic speed bump for the Mexican trucks containing goods from the Far East to enter the U.S. on their way to the Kansas City SmartPort.


The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is overseeing the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) as the first leg of the NAFTA Super Highway. A 4,000-page environmental impact statement has already been completed and public hearings are scheduled for five weeks, beginning next month, in July 2006. The billions involved will be provided by a foreign company, Cintra Concessions de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A. of Spain. As a consequence, the TTC will be privately operated, leased to the Cintra consortium to be operated as a toll-road.
The details of the NAFTA Super Highway are hidden in plan view. Still, Bush has not given speeches to bring the NAFTA Super Highway plans to the full attention of the American public. Missing in the move toward creating a North American Union is the robust public debate that preceded the decision to form the European Union. All this may be for calculated political reasons on the part of the Bush Administration.

A good reason Bush does not want to secure the border with Mexico may be that the administration is trying to create express lanes for Mexican trucks to bring containers with cheap Far East goods into the heart of the U.S., all without the involvement of any U.S. union workers on the docks or in the trucks. http://www.nascocorridor.com/

(also a good reason why Bush wants 'guest workers' - who can be used & abused, paid minimum or under minimum wages, no benefits, etc... and all to save the Bush/PNAC's Corporation-Support-Base a lot of payroll money!!)

[sinkingfeeling]

3. What? I'm not blaming Mexicans for anything. I was discussing the

OP's article about some podunk town in PA. making it illegal to sell anything to an 'illegal' or rent to them.

[KamaAina]

5. To *sell* anything to an undocumented person?

So the slacker behind the counter at Sheetz or Wawa (convenience stores up there) is supposed to ask for citizenship papers every time he sells a brown person a stick of gum?!

As I recall, that area has a large Eastern European population. Are we quite sure that each and every one of them, including those who may have arrived after the fall of the Berlin Wall, has their papers in order?

[unlawflcombatnt]

9. Hazelton's ordinance DOES go after employers who hire illegally

The Hazelton ordinance does go after employers for illegal hiring. From another news story from Hazelton, it states that the ordinance "suspends the licenses of businesses that employ them (illegal immigrants)."

The pro-amnesty advocates can't claim that Hazelton is "not going after employers" in this case. This ordinance goes directly after employers,
not the illegal immigrants themselves.

The article can be found at:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/nation/4048427.html

unlawflcombatnt

EconomicPopulistCommentary

EconomicPatriotForum

___________
The economy needs balance between the "means of production" & "means of consumption."

[High Plains]

4. These bozos just voted to pay out a lot of money in lawsuits.

It'll serve 'em right.

[sam the dawg]

6. what its about

it is about ILLEGALS -- legal mexican workers are great

if bushco builds the road and gives the action to mexico, within not much time,
the mexicans will organize and do the same things as labor north of the border.

with 10 dollar gas, it will be madness to lengthen the routes.

[KamaAina]

7. I've got it! Geno's Steaks can open up a branch there.

that's the South Philly landmark that now insists that customers order only in English.

Another DUer pointed out that, ironically, it was highly likely that Geno may have been waving the Italian flag after the World Cup...

[JerseygirlCT]

8. Hazelton PA?

I'm sorry, but all I could think was that my only experience there was so gray and gloomy I can't imagine anyone fighting to get there. PA's got so many prettier places!

(And apologies to those who love the place for some reason.)

But the other comments are on target, I think -- look to the employers, not the poor folk just looking to work.

[kskiska]

11. I had occasion to pass through there once myself

There was a sign on the highway for a gas station, so I pulled off into Hazleton. I never did find an open gas station, but the town itself was a wasteland. I was curious because my ex-husband's family was from there. I knew it was a coal town, but it was worse than I expected. It was very gray and gloomy.

[struggle4progress]

10. It won't help Hazelton. Small town America is getting screwed by ..

.. corporate internationalism, but doesn't have the working class consciousness and solidarity to fight back.

The grandparents and great-grandparents of these people knew better: in the 1890's, the UMW stopped playing the coal-bosses' divide-and-conquer game and started organizing immigrants, instead of excluding them. The immigrants were often eager to be organized, and they died like others too, at the Lattimer Massacre in 1897 for example. Conditions in Hazelton were as wretched as anywhere, and the region erupted in 1902, in a series of hard-fought strikes Mother Jones helped organize ...