Yet another first for the City of Escondido, California.
In 2010, the city was the first in California (along with Costa Mesa) to pass a resolution to “Stand With Arizona” – in an overwhelming slap-down to La Raza activists who wanted to denounce and boycott Arizona for its passage of S.B. 1070. SWA’s founder John Hill was on hand for the raucous vote.
Escondido was also the first city in America to forge a special partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2010, under which ICE agents help Escondido police officers determine whether suspects of crimes are in the country illegally or are wanted for deportation. The program has resulted in several thousand illegal aliens to be deported – much to the rage of open-borders activists.
Escondido was also the first city to conduct special vehicle “checkpoints” to discover unlicensed illegal aliens – which the state legislature is trying to ban – and the first in San Diego County to enact E-Verify in 2011.
And now Escondido does it again, becoming the first city to volunteer for a Federal “immigration audit” - allowing federal immigration officials to audit its hiring records to make sure all city employees are eligible to work in the United States.
The program is called IMAGE, which stands for ICE Mutual Agreement between Government and Employer, Escondido will have ICE check whether veteran employees turned in fake documents or stole someone else’s identity when they were hired by the citys, and it goes well beyond E-Verify, which deals only with new hires. The new agreement allows ICE to scrutinize the employment documents of everyone on the city’s payroll, including elected officials.
Mayor Sam Abed, who has said he was born in Lebanon but became a U.S. citizen in 1990, also praised the program, saying the city needed to do everything possible to help local residents struggling to find work.
“Lots of people just lost their unemployment benefits,” said Abed, adding that Escondido has a higher jobless rate than neighboring cities. “We want every business in the private sector to do this.”
But not everyone is happy about Escondido joining the IMAGE program. The ACLU said it “encourages employers to discriminate against foreign-looking job applicants, especially Latinos who are citizens or legal immigrants.”
And of course, Olga Diaz was not pleased. Diaz, the only Latino on the council, the only council member to vote against joining the E-Verify, and the member who led the failed attempt to boycott Arizona in 2010, said she was disappointed her colleagues were continuing to pursue policies to “divide the community”. Diaz claims that the policies are all racist, because whites are afraid of becoming a minority…
“Since it’s the first time that the whites have been exceeded by another group, they feel threatened and the elected officials have devoted themselves to promoting fear. The inability to reason with the councilors was one of the reasons I entered politics,” said Diaz.
However, Diaz is at a loss to explain why, despite her touting how Hispanics outnumber non-Hispanics in Escondido 49-41% , the city has twice as many Republicans as Democrats. Either the local Latinos are bucking a national trend, or there are a heck of a lot of them who are not eligible to vote – and gee, I wonder why that might be the case.
Way to go, Escondido! We salute you for continuing to laugh at the race-baiters, take on the well-funded open borders fanatics and fight for the rule of law.
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