Fight to be free

Everybody's had to fight to be free
You see you don't have to live like a refugee

-Tom Petty

Jupiter Island, Florida is one of the wealthiest spots in the US but its exact status is difficult to determine since the people who live there are so low profile. I'm not sure there is a phone book. Residents include Old Money and political Old Money families and a few more recognizable folks like Tiger Woods and Celine Dion. There are no commercial establishments of any kind and the streets are lined with security cameras and cruising police cars. You would think it was the worst place in Florida at which to drop off illegal immigrants from Haiti and the Bahamas.

It is. A crew working on some umpteen million dollar house last Saturday observed a rickety boat and some people struggling in the water with a few coming ashore. Although someone in the water was calling for help, other boats were ignoring him.

"And at that point, we were going, 'All right, there has to be something wrong going on out here.' Because if it was a regular person, just yelling for help or something, somebody would have stopped for them" said one observer.

Apparently, black people are not regular people and under the circumstances can be presumed to be without papers. This is the churchgoing, Bible studying, God pledging south, but illegal is illegal so let the bastards drown even if the law requires you to lend assistance. It's happened before and US citizens have been left in the water to perish by bad Samaritans. A host of comments attached to the article in the paper today confirm the anti-immigrant sentiment with a degree of passion that would make Lou Dobbs blush.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan Crocker is chastising the Department of Homeland Security for dragging its feet as concerns the processing of some 10,000 Iraqis whose lives are now worth less than a Dinar since they assisted the US government and are approved by the UN for political refugee status.

There are at least 2 million homeless Iraqis who are victims of the ethnic cleansing that has allowed the government coyly to argue that sectarian violence is down. There are 2.2 million more who have fled to other countries that are bursting at the seams. 60,000 are fleeing their homes every month or being forced out and there is no place for them to go. We are willing to use these people to argue that we must stay there indefinitely to protect them, but we are not willing to take 10,000 of them in. There's no oil in it for us after all and besides, like Haitians and Bahamians and Mexicans, they're different than "regular" people.

Cross posted at The Impolitic