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Benjamin Melançon's Reporter's Notebook

 

First They Came for the Latinos

Posted by Benjamin Melançon - August 2, 2007 at 12:23 pm
The Moment of Truth with Jeff Dorchen: First They Came for the Latinos
About a mile or so west and a little south of my house on the south side of Chicago, there's a mall called the Discount Mall in Little Village.  [...]   Nearly everyone who patronizes the mall is of Latino heritage. I guess that makes it a good place to look for illegal immigrants. You would also find a lot of legal ones, and many just plain U.S. citizens.

However, you could just as easily find the same percentage of illegal immigrants to legal immigrants to just plain U.S. citizens at lunchtime in what residents of Chicago call The Loop, the downtown business district. So, let's say you threw a Gestapo-style cordon of Federal Agents carrying high-powered rifles and wearing bullet-proof armor around a block of lunch places and storefront businesses on Wabash between Madison and Monroe and didn't let anybody in or out of that cordoned area while you checked everyone's “papers.”  [...]

What? Why not? Oh, I see—because totalitarian police state-style behavior tends to upset people who work for banks, law firms, city, county and state offices, foreign consulates, and stylish department stores. [...] Yes. It's a little out of place in an open society, a democratic republic such as the United States of America, to cordon off a section of the public thoroughfare as if it were a block of apartments in the Warsaw Ghetto.

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About Benjamin Melançon

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Student-on-hold, ex-stocker and failed union agitator, ex-white-collar consultant and now co-founder and developer at Agaric Design Collective, making web sites with open source free software.

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If It Quacks Like a Nazi

Submitted August 2, 2007 - 4:40 pm by Benjamin Melançon
Dorchen followed up in his next Moment of Truth:

living so close to, and being familiar with, Little Village, it's hard not to get angry at the kind of massive assault brought down upon the people in that mall in broad daylight. The armed agents piled out of a half-dozen vans and locked the mall down. No one could get in or out. It's not a little bitty strip mall. It's a large area, taking up a city block; there were at least 150 people, older people, children. Every way in or out of the mall was blocked by armed agents—and I mean agents with guns at the ready.

Mothers were separated from their children—and prevented from going to comfort their crying children. I'm not making this up for dramatic effect. It's very unpleasant, and I don't think it would have been tolerated in a higher-income or lighter-complexioned neighborhood.

If It Quacks Like a Nazi.

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