They said illegal immigrants were hurting the local economy. They passed a law penalizing businessmen who hired illegals, and responding to an unfriendly work environment, the undocumented fled by the thousands. Now Riverside, New Jersey is a ghost town, and residents know the face of real economic depression. Businesses are boarded up and the city’s finances have been strained by two expensive lawsuits.
The law worked – but, caught up in a surge of anti-immigrant sentiment, no one considered the broader impact driving their source of cheap, exploitable labor away. As long as the alien Other was gone, they would be safe – from good food and money. Although Riverside recently reversed the hurtful law, some still think making a point about the Irish the Chinese the Japanese Hispanics is more important than putting food on the table, like former Mayor Charles Hilton:
“The business district is fairly vacant now, but it’s not the legitimate businesses that are gone,” he said. “It’s all the ones that were supporting the illegal immigrants, or, as I like to call them, the criminal aliens.”
Are the criminal aliens the ones who are now rebuilding New Orleans or the ones putting up the border fence?
