Mexican Consulate to illegal aliens:
Know your rights!
Saturday, August 29, 2009
By Carl Braun
Examiner.com
Mexican Consulate holds training sessions for illegal aliens
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For some time now the Mexican Government has actively educated illegal border crossers on their rights and on how to “game” the American system. We’ve seen it in everything from coloring books, to maps, pamphlets and even advertisements. In fact If you walk down some of the more foot-worn people smuggling trails in east county San Diego, you’re likely to come across a stash of fresh water and booties for the next group of illegal invaders coming through. Attached to these plastic water containers are handy wallet cards that tell the “migrant worker” what he/she should and should not say if apprehended by Border Patrol. Know your rights! The cards proclaim and go on to describe what the reader should do if they are caught illegally invading the US.
According to Mexico City’s newspaper El Financiero, the Mexican Consulate, disturbed by recent ICE raids, is holding training sessions in 10 different US Cities from August 31 to September 4th to educate Mexican workers illegally in the US on their individual rights as workers. Among these, is the right to join labor unions, to earn minimum hourly wages and to overtime pay. Chief among those rights they claim is their right to be protected from employers “denouncing” them to US Immigration Agencies.
The Mexican Consulate is actually quite active in the US in protecting the “rights” of the “undocumented.” In fact, for all practical purposes they have become a de facto agency in Los Angeles where they have formed partnerships with the courts, government officials and numerous non profit agencies to provide healthcare, counseling, to fight alleged labor violations and hold literacy classes. Of course they do not teach them the English they will need to be productive in America but instead teach them proper Spanish along with other important things like essential child rearing skills.
I don’t know why we should be surprised at people illegally in our country receiving special treatment and benefits from our government and theirs, especially in California where the population of illegal aliens is the highest in the land at more than two million people. Things here in this State are so out of control as it is. But we should be angry that a foreign government has near free reign within our own system, that they can manipulate the bureaucracy as efficiently as if it were their own. That they can openly engage in educating people who are not even supposed to be here on how best to scam our system and do it with the blessing of those agencies who are supposed to be here to protect and help us.
About two years ago a woman called me to complain about treatment she received at a State Social Services office in Long Beach. She was in a desperate position and for the first time in her fifty-eight years needed assistance from the State. When she arrived at the office she was rudely turned away. “THIS,” the government worker shouted at her, “is a Spanish ONLY office. We don’t speak English here! I cannot help you. Now leave.”
How is it that in a State where the official language in our constitution is English and by law ALL business MUST be conducted in English, that State agencies can be “Spanish Only”?
Maybe it is time we had a consulate of sorts to help us learn what rights we have left in our own country. Perhaps we can reverse engineer the Mexican Consulate system and figure out how to get our state government back. Maybe it’s too late.
Carl Braun is an analyst for the Homeland Security Policy Institute Group and he's logged 5,000-plus hours on the border. He has written several books including his most recent on Border Insecurity, “Above All Else”
. Contact Carl at Carl.Braun@BPAUX.org.
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