And they are not even part of Ron Paul’s campaign. They’re just common fucking sense. Human ecology in action at the grassroots level.
Read the following article, please: Dayton, Ohio, welcomes immigrants as policy point.
Here’s a sample.
On the same afternoon thousands of Hispanics in Alabama took the day off to protest the state’s strict new immigration law, Mexican-born Francisco Mejia was ringing up diners’ bills and handing containers piled with carnitas to drive-thru customers on the east side of Dayton.
His family’s Taqueria Mixteca is thriving on a street pockmarked with rundown buildings and vacant storefronts. It gets packed with a diverse lunchtime clientele of Hispanic laborers, white men in suits and other customers, white and black. “Business is very good,” Mejia said, smiling broadly between orders.
It’s the kind of success story that leaders in Dayton think offers hope for an entire city. It has adopted a plan not only to encourage immigrants to come and feel welcome here, but also to use them to help pull out of an economic tailspin.
Dayton officials, who adopted the “Welcome Dayton” plan unanimously Oct. 5, say they aren’t condoning illegal immigration; those who come here illicitly will continue to be subject to U.S. laws.
While states including Alabama, Georgia and Arizona, as well as some cities, have passed laws in recent years cracking down on illegal immigrants, Dayton officials say they will leave that to federal authorities and focus instead on how to attract and assimilate those who come legally.
—snip—
Mayor Gary Leitzell told the city commission before the vote that immigrants bring “new ideas, new perspectives and new talent to our workforce. … To reverse the decades-long trend of economic decline in this city, we need to think globally.”
Hard-hit for years by the struggles of U.S. manufacturing, particularly in the auto industry, the recession pounded Dayton, which as the Wright Brother’s hometown calls itself “the birthplace of aviation.”
Thousands of jobs were lost with the crippling 2009 exodus to Georgia of NCR (formerly National Cash Register), one of Dayton’s signature corporations, after 125 years, and by the 2008 shutdown of a General Motors plant in suburban Moraine.
Dayton’s unemployment is nearly 11 percent, 2 percent higher than the national average, while population has fallen below 142,000, down 15 percent from 2000. Meanwhile, the city’s official foreign-born population rose 57 percent, to 5,102, from 2000 to 2010, according to census figures.
City leaders aiming to turn Dayton around started examining the immigrant population: Indian doctors in hospitals; foreign-born professors and graduate students at the region’s universities; and owners of new small businesses such as a Turkish family’s New York Pizzeria on the city’s east side and Hispanic-run car lots, repair shops and small markets. They say immigrants have revitalized some rundown housing, moving into and fixing up what had been vacant homes.
—snip—
Read it?
Good.
Now go read the colloquies between Booman, myself and a couple other posters under my recent article So Ron Paul is a racist, eh? A fascist too, I suppose? Get real.
More below the fold.
Ron Paul has been leftiness knee-jerk tarred and feathered as a “racist” because he thinks that the aims of the federal Civil Rights Act should have been left to the states to decide.
And here is funky little Dayton, Ohio (Believe it, been there. Even in so-called “good” times Dayton was more Bronx than it was Paris, to say the least.), free-marketing right on past the anti-immigration cities and states using simple common sense to do so. People want to work? People who come from a work-oriented culture…any work-oriented culture…people who have more than proven that all they need is an even chance to succeed? OK, let’s see what happens if we give them that chance. (I got news fer ya… it’s working. It’s working inna Bronx; it’s working in Dayton and…give it time…it’s working in cities like Buffalo, Detroit and Oakland too. And in smaller places like Bethlehem PA and White Plains, NY as well. I know. Been there, seen that.)
Meanwhile, the Alabamas and Arizonas of this country pass laws that will discourage a huge percentage of the real working classes of this country from even stepping foot over their borders. Nice work, fools.
Believe me, the “real working classes of this country” are and have historically been comprised of about 50+% 1st, 2nd and sometimes 3rd generation immigrants from other lands whether they were Jewish, Irish, Italian. Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, Ghanian or from anywhere else in the world. “Legal” or not so legal. The other 50%? Well more than half of it is made up of African-Americans who have been stuck in in the working classes by legally mandated or de facto racism for 300+ years.
What is it that Ron Paul is saying, again?
From the comments section of my above-linked article:
I repeat…in one state (or town or corporation) that enforced segregation and in another that did not today, the idea that (As Ron Paul has stated it):
In a free market, businesses that discriminate lose customers, goodwill, and valuable employees — while rational businesses flourish by choosing the most qualified employees and selling to all willing buyers.
would function quite well.
It functions quite well even now.
Take say Apple Corp…by far the most successful corporation in the U.S. over the past several years. Does that statement of Ron Paul’s not apply on every level to the running of that company? “…choosing the most qualified employees and selling to all willing buyers.”
That sounds about right.
Now say Apple had chosen not to hire the many Asian and Jewish people that work for the company. Or females. Or Hispanics and African-Americans. What then? What if the Apple stores had segregated Genius Bars or simply refused to sell to certain segments of the population? Not so “Platonic” now, is it? Sounds pretty damned practical to me.
Ron Paul seems to think that left to its own devices, the society would have ended segregation by purely economic means. We’ll never know now, but it makes sense to me. Those northern states that began to see the light and included the vast talents of non-European workforces into their systems at equal educational opportunity and equal pay would eventually have economically outstripped the states that did not do so, and the necessity of competition would have brought us…all of the states… perhaps even further in this regard than we have come so far. But…we’ll never know, because that did not happen.
Instead a top-heavy federal apparatus became even more top-heavy on its journey to the present day breakdown that we are now witnessing.
Ron Paul’s vision?
Strip that top-heavy apparatus down and let competition dictate what happens.
Could he be disastrously wrong?
Sure.
But another sort of disaster is already well upon us. Somebody come up with a better idea?
Anybody?
Please!!!???
And the silence of the sheeple ensues.
Baa baa baa.
So it goes.
Meanwhile, the equally “top-heavy apparatus” of the mass media…owned by precisely the same interests that own the federal government, bet on it, and operating in precisely the same clomp-clomp-clomping, clunkily mechanized manner as that federal government as well (It’s the only way something that big can operate. An assembly line culture. )…completely ignores the only candidate who is making any sense whatsoever out there in the political world and the left follows suit, swallowing whole the so-called “left wing” media’s accusations that Ron Paul is a racist, a reactionary and a libertarian flake job.
So it goes.
When the chickens truly come home to roost here…and they almost definitely will do so, eventually if not sooner…this little recession that we are now experiencing will come to be seen as only the beginning of our eventual “adjustment.” If we do not elect a president with some real vision instead of playing the good cop/bad cop, Demopublican/Republicrat game yet again, y’all will be able to look back on your ruined neighborhoods and the stark reality of your lost savings, say “Aw, snap!!! If we had only known!!!” and then sink right back into the same morass of sleepleness that got you there in the first place.
Or, of course…although I no longer hold much hope for the success of this second idea…you could:
WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!
Thank you and have a very nice day.
Station WTFU once again signing off.
(I got work to do, too!!!)
Later…
AG