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Steve Levy lashes out—-At me!

Posted December 3, 2008 by Patrick Young, Esq.

Newsday has a rather funny blog about Steve Levy’s response to yesterday’s Speak Out for Justice for Marcelo Lucero at the Suffolk Legislature. When the paper’s Reid Epstein kindly called me for a response last night, I thought the piece was so good that it spoke for itself.
Of course, as you might have guessed, after a night’s sleep, I thought of a few brief things to say about it. Here is the Newsday blog in its entirety:
Steve Levy’s Kumbaya lasts less than two weeks
One of the more impressive lines in Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy’s Nov. 18 televised address on the Marcelo Lucero killing was his offer to engage in civil debates.
“Let’s continue to have policy debates,” said the hard-charging Levy, “yet stop questioning each others’ motives.”
So it came as some surprise tonight when Levy’s chief spokesman, Dan Aug, e-mailed us this comment about Patrick Young, the program director of the Central American Refugee Center, who spoke at a Tuesday morning rally calling for an investigation into Suffolk’s hate crime statistics.
“Pat Young, who is an advocate for illegal immigration, has consistently distorted policy initiatives in Suffolk, so it is no surprise that he is doing it again.”
Young never mentioned Levy at the morning rally, but asked legislators and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to examine how the number of reported anti-Hispanic hate crimes fell 93 percent from 2004 to 2007.
Aug declined to comment on whether his statement questioned Young’s motives.
Since a lot of you don’t know me, I thought I’d just clear a few things up. I don’t advocate illegal immigration, and I’m not sure I know anyone who does. I’m not even sure how I would go about doing so. Would I have to discourage my clients who are trying to immigrate legally to abandon that path and slip across the border covertly instead?
As my students at Hofstra will tell you, I am a strong supporter of legal immigration, and I am a strong supporter of better border controls, including better and more timely background checks on persons coming into the United States.
I do support a comprehensive immigration reform that would allow some undocumented immigrants to become legal permanent residents over a prolonged period of time, but so does Barak Obama and John McCain. In fact, so does Hillary Clinton. Steve Levy was an official in the the New York senator’s presidential campaign. If my backing of the same legislation she supported make me an illegal immigration supporter, then what does Levy’s support of Clinton make him?
—Don’t answer that.