Help to the poor

[Texsox]

Here's a scene. Crowded living conditions, poor or non existant sanitation conditions, no garbage pick up, no city water or sewer, people barely scrapping by in need of assistance. We see news reports of people all over South America, Central America, and Mexico.

 

If these foreign nationals are in Mexico or other points south we send foreign aid, volunteers, and try and make a difference. If these same people are living in colonias in the US we threaten to bulldoze their homes.

 

Why do we send billions in foreign aid over seas but not help those in our own backyard? Did Jesus teach us to just help those who happen to be in our own towns, cities, countries? We are all God's children. I see now that one of our political parties is making aid to colonias an election debate topic.

 

We allow Canadians to live in our country for 6 months, no questions asked. We make Mexicans leave in 30 days and they have to jump through major hurdles to even get those 30 days.

 

We blame Mexico for not doing enough to stop drug traffickers, but turn a blind eye to our demand for drugs, which really fuels the problem. If there is no demand, there is no need for Mexico to spend money stopping drugs from getting into our country.

 

We complain about Mexicans taking our jobs. Who else is going to spend months following the growing season picking vegetables? Local teenagers? Working long hours in the fields, travelling from town to town? Who else is going to labor cleaning dishes and busing tables?

[Soxy]

Not to mention all the "great jobs" that go to Mexico. Where they pay less than a living wage. When I lived in Mexico briefly. I worked a daycare/orphanage, and I heard some of the stories of the people there about men having to go to work in the states because there were no jobs in Mexico. Even at the "American" plants. If any of the workers complained their low wages were too low to support themselves and/or their families they were simply let go. It was really sickening...

 

Another big problem, especially in rural Mexico--and spreading to the area where I worked, San Miguel de Allende, was that men would go up north to work and sleep with prostitutes or just other women and get sti's and then go back and then give those to their families. So, you're gettign these small isolated communities with diseases and no resources to treat them. Or else the men leave, send money back for a while, and then stop because they either find it more lucrative to keep it--or worse, they've started a second family. That happened to one woman I worked with so she was 38 and supporting her 6 children on her own (no birth control usage because of the church down there).

 

I also spent a summer working in the Unemployment Office (NEVER EVER AGAIN) and the jobs that Mexicans are "taking away" from Americans are jobs that most middle class Americans would never want to work. They are such menial labor jobs that I would really hate doing them. And you really said it Tex. It just makes me mad--I've seen the kind of work that they have to do on both sides of hte border, and I think that, again, these kinds of feelings against latinos are said out of ignorance out instead of knowledge about what their actual living situations are...

[Mathew]

We allow Canadians to live in our country for 6 months, no questions asked. We make Mexicans leave in 30 days and they have to jump through major hurdles to even get those 30 days.

Canadians are way better at staeling jobs anyhow.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

http://maddox.xmission.com/hatemail.cgi?p=1#CLUETRAIN

 

I love Maddox...this is hate mail that he got for a column saying that Mexicans working in the States should be paid adequately.

 

http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=walmart is the article. I especially like the part that illegal immigrants are not "taking" jobs from Americans at all. It is American multinational corporations that are taking the jobs away and using illegal immigrants as a scapegoat.

 

And Tex, I really like your point about drugs. I dunno if you've heard about what's going down in Colombia but the government there is using weed killers dumped out of airplanes to get rid of the coca plant and the chemicals they are using are getting into the water supply, killing innocent peoples' crops etc. All because we can't stop doing blow...and of course, the illegal drug trade in cocaine has increased since they started this so it's having no real effect on the drug trade. Bill Maher actually has a pretty good piece on it in his book "When You Ride Alone, You Ride With bin Laden".