Dear Dave,

Let's play a game.

I'll take Sheriff Joe and a few of his deputies and you can take all of his fine, upstanding, hard working, undocumented, looking for a better life, just want to support their families, so what if they broke the law, rethugs want to put them in pink underwear, register these guys to vote as dems, who cares if they have fake id's, by the way did I say they were undocumented not "illegal" immigrants.

You choose the game- kickball, tetherball, water polo- whatever. Whoever loses has to return to their COUNTRY OF ORGIN where they are legal citizens. If perhaps someone on the team has a different country of orgin than the majority of his teammates, then he has to go with the majority of teammates to their country, who I'm sure will welcome him with open arms. Word has it Nation Magazine has an opening for a sports writer in Juarez.

So Dave- are you in?

Actually Dave, ILLEGAL immigrants on average cost the economy about $100,000 more than they put in, according to leading economists like George Borjas who have looked at the issue, through clogging emergency rooms, increasing crime, and overcrowding schools.

Black athletes should be particularly outraged, since blacks are the primary victims of flood-level immigration. Illegals drive up the labor supply and lower wages through breaking the rules, making them a population of scabs. That's why blacks completely missed the construction boom, including the opportunity to rebuild New Orleans.

If you are going to join Corporate America in their war against the working AMERICAN poor, then never again write about black struggles.

Poster #1, call him what he is now. A brain dead liberal, just where of man of "infinite" wisdom belongs:

Illegal aliens have cost billions of taxpayer-funded dollars for medical services. Dozens of hospitals in Texas, New Mexico Arizona, and California, have been forced to close or face bankruptcy because of federally-mandated programs requiring free emergency room services to illegal aliens. Taxpayers pay half-a-billion dollars per year incarcerating illegal alien criminals.

Immigration is a net drain on the economy; corporate interests reap the benefits of cheap labor, while taxpayers pay the infrastructural cost. FAIR research shows "the net annual cost of immigration has been estimated at between $67 and $87 billion a year. The National Academy of Sciences found that the net fiscal drain on American taxpayers is between $166 and $226 a year per native household. Even studies claiming some modest overall gain for the economy from immigration ($1 to $10 billion a year) have found that it is outweighed by the fiscal cost ($15 to $20 billion a year) to native taxpayers.

What does this have to do with sports? If you want to write about this subject then go to work for the New York Times.

... to see that both extremes exist in the ideological battleground that is immigration in this country...

You have the holier than thou, i knew the iraq war was bullshit since the beginning, progressive...

and the I'm not a bigot, but f$#k those dirty immigrants who are draining our economy, bigots..

ah.... america... lol.


To speak about immigration by folks from Latin America and not take into account the historical antecedents that have contributed to the influx of immigration to this country is shortsighted and disingenuous...

To not recognize the straight pillaging of Latin American countries' resources and the elites in Latin America pushing for an export-led "development in the mid 1800s to the early part of the 20th century is disingenuous at best...

But... i won't waste my analysis here on the whole immigration situation.... u folks go on and continue like this "issue" is something that is just starting now and came out of nowhere.

:sigh:

I am impressed Dave, you have managed to piss off not only myself with this piece. Three issues:

1. "...Undocumented workers actually put more back into the economy than they extract, since they pay into Social Security and payroll taxes without getting anything back." Prove this, Dave. If you want to be anecdotal about it, as opposed to Sparky and Robert who actually offered fact-based evidence, I can be equally anecdotal and state that I doubt the undocumented immigrants picking strawberries and mowing lawns in California "pay into Social Security and payroll taxes". If these corporations are so rapacious, wouldn't they want to HIDE their illegal maneuvering (re: illegal aliens).

2. "The politics of poverty are critical in the United States and that there is more to life than material gain". Well, how about ANY material gain -- or at least, a reversal of material losses -- to the LEGAL immigrants and citizens (many of whose working class are African American, as Robert astutely points out) who are now unemployed due to the recession but cannot get jobs in industries dominated by undocumented workers being lowballed in pay (but happy to have jobs in the promised land). I assume, Lefty that you are, you read the book and saw the film for Fast Food Nation, which details exactly such exploitation and how it harms LEGAL residents and citizens of the US who are pushed out of (even distasteful) jobs.

3. "Last summer Barkley said, "What do the Republicans run on? Against gay marriage and for a war that makes no sense". Oh really, Charles (and Dave), how about all the African American church-going voters in California voting BOTH for Obama AND for Prop 8, the anti-gay marriage amendment. And guess what, the LEGAL children of said Latino immigrants, are also overwhelmingly chauvinist and social conservatives, and voted heavily in favour of Prop 8. But I guess that goes against the boilerplate "white-conservative, bad, black or brown-regardless-of-political-persuation, good", that Liberals like Dave wrongly and facilely assume.

DanTanna, if the white people lose the game, does that mean all of you have to go back to Europe? Because, in case you didn't notice, all claims you might have to land in what is now known as "the Americas" are illegal.

Interesting to read the posts by some of the commenters. I think this article is well overdue. Sheriff Joe is so blatantly bigoted and yet the mass media treat him as a celebrity. A hearty thanks to Dave for bringing some daylight to this dark story.

This discussion has become dominated by the immigration aspect which is understandable given its "hot button issue" status in the American southwest and indeed the country at large, but I would like to bring more focus to the issue of how prisoners are treated in the United States. How a country treats its prisoners says alot about its values and to allow a man to degrade and fetishize his inmates (and lets be honest, we're all waiting for the photos of this sheriff in his own pink undies with a male prostiture to surface) is frankly baffling. These practices are beyond draconian and enter the realm of sadism. And to those who want to say "they are criminals and deserve not better" I would simply respond that unless everyone in this prison is locked up for life you will witness recidivism on such a scale that your tent city will become a tent nation. But of course there are vested interests in the United States that would be only to happy to reap the profits from yet more expansion of the prision-industrial complex.

I wanted to respond seriously to some of the anti-immigrant bile on this post, but then I saw that one of the posters used statistics from FAIR. This is kind of like citing a Phillip Morris study on smoking or McDonalds on heart disease and then I couldn't stop laughing. Sorry.

great piece as usual dave you 'left wing freak!!! :-) . And you are right, to save tour words for some of the posting nonsense... the type of restraint that i don't possess.

-- EJH, as for barkley... it is better to show up late to the side of right then not show up at all. he is far from the perfect spokesman for anything, but unfortunately, perfect spokepersons tend to get ignored all together.

-- Sheriff Joe is actually the symbol of three separate teerible movements in America. 1) anti-immigration as DZ points out; 2) prison-industrial complex as Dan points out; and 3) the hate movement where the # of hate groups have grown by 50% since 2000 largely fueled by the immigration debate. and these #'s precede the election of Obama.

Sheriff Joe must go.

Interesting how the rabid simpletons on the anti-human rights side of the issue (read: right-minded and good upstanding Amerikkkans) conveniently forget-overlook-aren't even aware that they will forever live on blood-soaked and stolen land - courtesy of Euro-American genocide and the spoils of Manifest Destiny - the glorious march of Empire that continues here and across the globe to this day.

Sheriff Joe is a dangerous cartoon character that represents the rotting corpse, er - the soul of America.

Good write-up. I'm not so much concerned with so-called illegal immigration as I am with Mexico's actual War on Drugs...where most of the consumers of said drug are north of the border...LOL!!!

I see this as more of an issue of human rights than immigration. Regardless of our level of support for illegal or undocumented immigrants in the United States, we owe every human being a certain level of respect. Forcing inmates to parade in pink underwear is such a gross violation of human dignity that it deserves Zirin's (and others') criticisms. I have my own opinions about the immigration issue, but frankly, they're not relevant in this context. We're talking about basic human rights, here, not whether or not the immigrants themselves are guilty.

To those of you talking about the cost of illegal immigration, if you're going to mention hospitals being closed in California, you also have to bring up the grossly failed war on drugs and all of the non violent prisoners we have to house due to it. Yes, illegal immigrants account for much of the spending, too. But to speak of California's budgetary problems without examining the cost of enforcing what have proven to be unenforceable drug laws is misinformed at best, disingenuous at worst. Legalizing marijuana for adults would probably put the state back above water by itself. If we're going to discuss spending, let's get everything on the table, and not just blame the Mexicans.

To tack on to my previous point. One of you mentioned illegal immigration being a threat to blacks. I ask you, what is more of a threat to blacks, our drug laws being used to warehouse poor blacks in prisons, or Mexicans competing with them for labor? Speaking for Los Angeles alone, blacks were hit hard in the work force before there was a great Mexican migration into America. Factories closing in South LA in the '60s and 70s were certainly party of a multi headed monster that spawned gang violence as we know it. The black factory workers weren't replaced with Mexicans. The factories were shut, and then suddenly the prisons were built. Do the math. If you ever get your hands on an old and unfortunately rare documentary film, "The Fire This Time; Why LA Burned", about the '92 riots, note the scene where an activist is looking out a window at what was once a Firestone factory, but is now an LA County jail extension. You guys think Arpaio is brazen, let us remember Darryl Gates.

I agree, trinachi. My comment was directed at Robert, who gave Zirin the ultimatum of either supporting illegal immigrants or supporting black causes. What bulls&^t. Either Robert is a t'd off right winger trying to get blacks to do his bidding in the immigration debate, or he's a black person who unfortunately has fallen victim ideologically to this myopic, black vs. brown ideological (and unfortunately, increasingly violent) war, that's been created and cultivated by people who are neither Mexican or black.

In response to the first comment, Barkley registered his opposition to the invasion of Iraq before the bombs fell. I happened to be watching at the time. He got his words in edgewise before Ernie Johnson hurriedly drowned out his words and went to commercial.

This guy's power is enormous. Napolitano does not say a word. McCain neithe Sherff Joe is now the big maven in immigration law. Glad its so easy for him to know when people violate federal civil immigration laws - It often takes a judge to make that determination - those of you throwing the term around - sorry you have no cred. as you don't know this stuff - and neither do the racist groups like FAIR.


Barkley has been pretty good at calling Bullshit to power and Dave is right that the dots should not be hard to connect here.

You write english real good.