"These people haven't served time for their crimes, and they're getting amnesty. We're being pushed aside. The ex-offenders should have got amnesty before any illegal aliens. Are there certain laws that certain people can break?" - ex-con Mark CarterThis might be an extreme example, but.... I'm not going to take a side on this one, although the argument made is what is legal and what is not. Mark Carter, the person quoted above did time for drugs, so it isn't a question of getting his right to vote back. It does go a step in the direction of the seriousness that people feel when they see our nations laws ignored as though they don't mean anything.
"there is keen resentment of efforts to characterize immigration rights as a "civil rights" issue."Gee, I wonder why?
From the Chicago Sun-Times:
**This was a production of The Coalition Against Illegal Immigration (CAII). If you would like to participate, please go to the above link to learn more. Afterwards, email the coalition and let me know at what level you would like to participate.**The group of 10 to 15 men who took up positions Tuesday outside the gate of a meat processing plant in Pullman see the world a little differently than the 400,000 people who marched one day earlier through the Loop.
"Illegal!" they shouted at any Latino-looking person who popped into view. "Illegal!"
For the handful of self-styled immigration enforcers from the Chicago Minuteman Project, this was old hat.
This time, though, they had some new comrades-in-arms: a contingent of African-American men, mostly ex-offenders involved with an organization that advocates finding jobs for individuals with criminal records.
Amnesty for ex-offenders?
"These people haven't served time for their crimes, and they're getting amnesty," complained Mark Carter, 32, of Lawndale, who says he went to prison on a drug offense. "We're being pushed aside. The ex-offenders should have got amnesty before any illegal aliens. Are there certain laws that certain people can break?"
Carter's friend from Roseland, Paul McKinley, a leader of the group, Voice of the Ex-Offender, later suggested a solution with eerie echoes: "Send them back where they come from."
Illegal immigration is an extremely sensitive issue across the African-American community, and the problem of unemployed young men with criminal pasts is just one subset.
The economic competition from America's latest immigrant wave is felt most directly among African Americans, and there is keen resentment of efforts to characterize immigration rights as a "civil rights" issue.
That's part of why Rick Biesada, 66, a white trucking company owner from Lindenhurst who co-founded the Chicago Minuteman Project, reached out to the Rev. Anthony Williams, pastor of an Englewood church, to organize Tuesday's joint protest.
Biesada said Williams, with whom he had worked on Alan Keyes' campaign for the U.S. Senate, had alerted him to the meat processing company's employing illegal immigrants at the expense of American citizens from the neighboring community. MORE......
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