March 23, 2009 4:05 PM
Greg Ball is an Assemblyman whose district is in Westchester and Putnam counties. He is tryings to "revive" the Republican Party in the Hudson Valley by going after immigrants.
Greg Ball issued a press release Friday in which he dramatically announces that he toured the “tragic, abject squalor” of day labor encampments around Brewster, N.Y. While he describes the conditions of the camp sites as a “human tragedy” and says that the living and working conditions of the day laborers whom he says sleep in the campsites “exploits illegal aliens”. Ball asks “Where is the humanity?”. Where indeed.
While Ball assumes a Dickensian pose of exposing the presumed exploitation of immigrants, his only solution to their precarious situation is to remove their meager possessions and deport them.
But of course, Assemblyman Ball’s purpose is not to help the downtrodden, but to join in their exploitation, not for financial gain but for political advantage.
Ball holds out the promise to voters that going after these marginalized day laborers will somehow provide economic opportunities for workers facing economic dislocation in today’s poor economy. In apparent support of this proposition, he cites a report from the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) as saying that “wages and employment grew for legal workers after a series of raids” last year. What he does not note is that the raids were not conducted against employment sectors traditionally filled by day laborers such as those he asserts were living around Brewster. Instead, the raids described by CIS were all on massive Swift meatpacking plants. The CIS report provides little other than anecdotal evidence that wages increased at all following the raids and it notes that jobs formerly held by Latinos displaced by the raids were now taken by African and Burmese immigrants who had to be hired out-of-state and brought to the processing plants. Those raises which could be documented amounted to little more than 3% cost of living increases.
Ball’s political exploitation of what he describes as a “human tragedy” for those living at the campsite continues in his “reform measures” for the “tragedy”.
Ball’s listing of “state legislative remedies” to “deal with” the problem of the encampments seems ill-suited to the problem. For example, he touts A7052 which, he says, “requires anyone admitted to SUNY be a citizen legally admitted to the United States”. While his description of his bill appears to make even the legal permanent resident ineligible for a SUNY education, let us assume he just did a poor job of describing his own bill. In fact, the bill would prevent young immigrants freshly graduated from high school from attending SUNY if, while they were children, their parents brought them to the United States illegally. The notion that such a bill will encourage the obviously non-college bound Brewster campers to return to their homelands is laughable and its intention of punishing young people for what their parents did is cowardly.
Apart from the Assemblyman’s poor use of even anti-immigrant generated research, and his lack of familiarity with his own legislation, the press release he issued contains a further troubling aspect which raises questions about the reliability of anything Assemblyman Ball says about this subject.
The press release notes that photos of “the tour” of the encampment are available online. The pictures it refers to show a series of campsites in a woods. Interestingly, the woods are a dark green with deciduous trees in full leaf, odd for pictures of a camp Ball claims was “discovered Tuesday”, March 17. The fact that men depicted in the pictures are shirtless is also unusual for pictures of a campsite allegedly found in the waning days of winter.
But perhaps the political hot air was enough to warm all concerned.