Alabama's Rapture

In the world of the New York Times, illegal aliens are being “raptured” from Alabama and are leaving behind a world of total economic devastation in their wake: “rotten crops,” “critical labor shortages,” devastated businesses, etc.

This happens to be one of the occasions when Mainstream Media bias directs intersects with my own personal experience. As always, the New York Times is lying to its readers about Alabama and telling the world a progressive story about illegal immigration that has little correspondence to reality.

Here are the facts:

1.) Fact #1: Illegal aliens started arriving in Alabama in large numbers about a decade ago to work in the construction industry. After the housing bubble burst and the construction industry crashed, illegals began leaving Alabama for more inviting destinations in Texas and hurricane ravaged Louisiana.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 10,000 illegal aliens left Alabama between 2007 and 2010, 50,000 illegal aliens left Georgia, and 15,000 illegal aliens left South Carolina. Here in Alabama, I noticed several years ago that illegal aliens were leaving my area for economic reasons.

2.) Fact #2: Illegal aliens uprooted themselves from Mexico and other Latin American countries to move to the United States to chase after the dollar.

The New York Times makes it sound like illegal aliens are Serbs being ethnically cleansed from Kosovo when they talk about illegal aliens in Alabama. In reality, illegals are always on the move between states and within states and were leaving Alabama before the immigration law was passed here earlier this year.

250,000 illegal aliens have left New York and New Jersey since 2007. 200,000 more illegal aliens left California in the same period.

3.) Fact #3: The New York Times exaggerates the importance of illegal aliens to Alabama’s economy.

Who would pick the crops? Who would build the houses? Who would do the landscaping? Who would rebuild Tuscaloosa? Alabama natives do these jobs all the time. I see white and black construction workers roofing and building houses all the time here.

A whopping 3.5 percent of Alabama’s population is foreign born. The vast majority of illegal aliens in Alabama are concentrated in a few cities. Somehow, there was a civilization here before illegal aliens arrived in Alabama, and this civilization seems to operate just fine in most parts of the state where there are no illegal aliens.

The idea that Alabamians would somehow fail to rebuild uptown Tuscaloosa from the tornado damage without the assistance of illegal alien construction workers – home of Nick Saban’s Alabama Crimson Tide, the capitol of college football in America – is so ridiculous on its face that no one should ever listen to the pro-amnesty lobby again after being told that story.

4.) Fact #4: Growing up in Alabama, I had the fortune to live close enough to one of these chicken processing plants that employ illegal aliens.

I’m quite sure that the majority of the workforce at that plant have always been black and white Alabama natives. In fact, I suspect a greater share of the workforce today consists of Alabama natives because illegal aliens have been moving out of the area for several years now.

See, illegal aliens don’t have deep roots in Alabama. They don’t consider cities like Albertville to be their home. These people are nomads.

Businesses that rely upon illegal aliens as construction workers, cheap labor, and as farm workers find themselves in a tight spot when these nomads pick up and move to states like Texas where the economy is better or where they can get a higher price for their labor.

5.) Fact #5: Food prices are rising across America – in every state, not just in Alabama – because the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are debasing our currency. This is also a sympton of the Obama administration’s failure to tackle America’s long term challenges in the energy sector.

Food inflation has nothing to do with Alabama’s new immigration law.

Quite honestly, I find myself gawking in disbelief when I read opinion columns like “Alabama’s Shame” in the Mainstream Media. We have a 10 percent unemployment rate in Alabama and illegal aliens are competing with Alabama natives for jobs which I see natives doing all the time here.

Cities and counties across Alabama are struggling with crippling budget shortfalls which are forcing them to slash public services. My own county is on the verge of bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the Mainstream Media is arguing that we need more Mexican illegal aliens to put an even greater burden on Alabama schools, hospitals, and prisons.

If we didn’t have enough poor unemployed people here to deal with already, progressives think we should be importing even more poor people from the Third World, even as the economy collapses into a depression. The Obama economy can’t produce enough “green jobs” to keep up with population growth … much less population growth, plus an unending tidal wave of legal and illegal immigration.

We can’t find jobs for teenagers, college graduates, or black people, but we are going to employ the whole Third World in the United States, and we even need to ramp up the legal immigration as the American economy collapses. What does this remarkable say about the American political class?

Do you get the sense we are passengers on the Titanic?