In case you thought the anti-immigrant fever of 2006 had broken, restrictionist think tanks are still promoting restriction, states are still passing immigrant crackdowns, and there are still plenty of hard-core cranks across the country. A story from CBS 13 in Sacramento, California featured one man ennobled by his passion for confronting day laborers with a trailer-mounted billboard saying “DEPORT THEM ALL.”
[Davi Rodriguez] drives the sign up and down the streets of Sacramento where day laborers wait for work, sometimes videotaping the reactions and uploading them to YouTube. Workers we talked to say they feel harassed, and they’re losing jobs.
(The CBS 13 site has video of the report.)
Harassment of day laborers is a common tactic of local anti-immigrant vigilantes. Rodriguez’s billboard directed viewers to go to the website of Save Our State, the group that wrote the blueprint for local immigration crackdowns in Hazleton, Pennsylvania and dozens of other cities. Two years ago, Save Our State founder Joseph Turner described his method of “saving” California from becoming a “Third World cesspool”:
“With as little as five people you can shut down a day-laborer center,” says Mr. Turner, because employers will be too intimidated to stop and hire them. Contractors have been deterred from hiring from these sites during the protests and in several days that followed. Home Depot declines to comment on Mr. Turner.
As Turner explained then in another interview, this is all a way of expressing himself as a “proud nationalist”:
“I believe this country is superior and I believe our culture is superior to all others,” he declared.
He sees illegal immigrants as the pre-eminent threat to that culture.
