November 10, 2008 11:02 AM
For up to the minute info on the Lucero killing
The horrible murder of Marcelo Lucero is the latest and deadliest of a series of anti-immigrant attacks in Suffolk County. The seven young men charged in the attack come from an area a few miles south of the hamlet of Farmingville, the epicenter of anti-immigrant organizing on Long Island. Farmingville first gained national attention in 2000 when two young men abducted a pair of Mexican day laborers and tried to beat them to death. It was in the headlines again a few years later when five high school students burned down the house of a Latino family, whose sleeping occupants barely escaped with their lives.
Since then, human rights advocates have urged politicians in Suffolk to stop using the scapegoating of immigrants as a path to electoral victory. We have failed.
For example, after the beating of the two Farmingville day laborers, a member of the county legislature declared that if Mexicans moved to his town he, too, would greet them with a baseball bat. This year, as tensions mounted around immigration, the county legislature saw no less than five anti-immigrant bills proposed and a Congressional candidate ran for election in the district where the attackers were from on an anti-immigrant platform.
Suffolk's political class, led by the County Executive Steve Levyand the Presiding Officer of the Legislature, have done nothing to bring together the county's nearly 200,000 immigrants and 1.4 million native-born residents. Unlike other nearby suburban counties like Nassau and Westchester, Suffolk government has repeatedly missed opportunities to foster understanding and instead has depicted the hard-working immigrants of the county as a "problem" begging to be solved.
Should it surprise us that young men, hearing immigrants being described as criminals and invaders, would take it upon themselves to solve the problem with knives?
Visit our New Action Center for Justice for Marcelo Lucero
Contact author of anti-immigrant legislation
marcelo lucero tu eres un beno hombre y yo soy amy la iga de rosa
By amy November 17, 2008 09:15 PM