Santa Barbara’s city council has declared this week the Week of the Immigrant - and so Jennifer and I went out and participated in last night’s Procesíon por la Dignidad Y La Esperanza de Los Imnmigrantes. Unfortunately, it was not as well attended as last year’s march, where nearly 15,000 Santa Barbarians came out against H.R. 4437 - but fortunately, that congressional bill is no longer being proposed. Now that’s a mission accomplished.
Still, a respectable crowd was present for last nights procession.
I’m still perplexed at some of the anti-immigration rhetoric that continues to happen. My favorite criticism is how when they come here they don’t bother to learn our language… because it was proven long ago that Americans are only capable of speaking one language (and, thanks to Alabama, even that one language is a bit iffy).
According to some, immigrants also fail to assimilate to our culture. I was thinking about this assimilation issue as I was driving down the Santa Ana Freeway to Mission Viejo, stopping at Taco Bell to grab a burrito. Of course, I’m reminded of my high school alma mater, the Vaqueros. Anyway, I came back to Santa Barbara for Fiesta, which beats my college days in Isla Vista partying on Del Playa. Hey, why can’t these immigrants assimilate to our culture?
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Week of the Immigrant without poking fun at the Minutemen Project. What’s great about organizations like the Minutemen Project is that they inevitably turn on themselves. The L.A. Times reported last January that the Minutemen Project’s founder, Jim Gilchrist, was removed by the board as President of the Minutemen Project:
There were public accusations of secret bank accounts, missing funds, sloppy accounting and donations that had been collected without the full board’s knowledge. None of the claims were made in court and proof wasn’t offered. But the seriousness of the charges drove the former allies further apart.
Coe, Stewart and Courtney said in interviews with The Times that they finally concluded that there was as much as $750,000 missing from Minuteman accounts. They said they filed a theft report with the FBI and asked for an investigation.
According to the article, everyone started channeling Donald Trump by yelling “You’re fired” at each other.
I’m not the only one taking their potshots at these idiots. Frank Mickadeit who writes for the Orange County Register (28 March 2007, The wheels are coming off, Jimmy):
I heard from a variety of folks who think I was too hard on the Minutemen last week when I wrote they are, essentially, a bunch of hypocritical, racist vigilantes and we’d be better off if our courts refused to save them from themselves.
Founder Jim Gilchrist played the classic some-of-my-best-friends-are-(fill in the appropriate minority) card, leaving me an angry phone message that included the sentence: “My son-in-law is Mexican.” Therein followed, within a 24-hour period, a rambling screed of six e-mails from Gilchrist that including name-calling (”Mickadork,” “the I.Q. of a houseplant”) and sundry instructional advice on the “professional canons of journalism” because of my “literal-based propaganda.” (I think he meant “liberal,” being as “literal” would, uh, kind of defeat his argument.) He even went so far as to praise, and I’m not making this up, the L.A. Times. This is all part of the other card he frequently plays, the I-went-to-journalism-school-too card, as he apparently is a graduate of that communications powerhouse, the University of Rhode Island.
