Burning Atlanta

I'm against this, for now. Maybe later. Depends. For right now I'd like to see the laws given a chance to work and the employers raising wages to attract legal workers. Interesting that the pro-illegal group would, also, oppose this but they have some legitimate reasons.

No new guest-worker program.

Randy Parraz likened a proposed guest-worker program for Arizona to handcuffing employees to their boss. Jon Garrido sees the idea as a return to the bad old days of the bracero program.

In the first organized response to state legislation introduced last month, some Hispanic leaders on Thursday gathered outside the Capitol and condemned the bills seeking federal permission to allow Mexicans temporary work visas for jobs going unfilled by Americans. The legislation would not be limited to any type of industry, but would require workers to stay with the same sponsoring employer.

"I'd like to think they are stupidly naïve about this issue," said Garrido, a businessman and community activist who wants to run for Congress. "It goes against the grains of everything Cesar Chavez fought for."  A little known FACT is that Chavez and company reported illegals to INS. Some accounts say that was one of the nicer things they'd do.

Parraz, who heads organizing efforts in Arizona for the Laborers International Union of North America, said the legislation would unfairly build on an atmosphere of terror for immigrants created by the state's employer-sanctions law and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has made crackdowns on those here illegally a priority. "Terror for immigrants?" My ass.

The sanctions law, which went into effect Jan. 1, threatens to pull licenses from businesses that knowingly employ illegal immigrants.

Fewer than a dozen people turned out for Thursday's gathering at the Capitol. The protest was held by the group We Are America, which helped organize a 2006 immigration-policy demonstration in Phoenix that attracted up to 200,000.