Occassional Rambling: Los Angeles's Day Without an Immigrant

May Day has long been a focal point for demonstrations by various socialists, communist, and anarchist groups, including the Day Without an Immigrant march yesterday. Web sites abound with images and the media has done a good job of covering it. Hell, I even got a half-day out of work because of it as I work on Wilshire, near Fairfax. But I had to comment on how striking it was that the "Day Without an Immigrant" happened to fall on May 1st, which is globally known as May Day.

The ideas and arguments seem to mirror those of big labor and it's efforts to mobilize and sign-up members so as to have a bigger saber to wield at big government. But is doing this, an about face, a real the way to enforce laws? Do we cheapen our American laws by suddenly allowing millions of trespassers, solely on the premise that they have been here, to become citizens. Do they deserve it just because they were here? It sound slike a squaters arguement, "its mine because I was here".

We have laws for a reason, and they have a process for change. But as a citizen, born and raised here, I don't want to give away something so precious. I am neither racist nor Anti-immigrant, but if you’re going to be here, be here legally. Blanket amnesty would be a mistake in the long run, but then so would walling up our borders. If we allow people into this country, to have them break the law and stay illegally, and then flaunt it and expect a say in OUR Democracy, then I feel they are mistaken. The signs of the protestors are true, we were all immigrants, but American Freedom came at the barrel of a gun, not a presumed entitlement.

Circling back to the May Day celebration, just in my humble opinion, the day dedicated for this march is too coincidental to be happenstance. The veiled image of a socialist march is unacceptable. I wonder how many of those marching got the connection. Did they know they were being used as tools to promote the Communist or Socialist agenda?

For those unfamiliar with Communism, here are but a few of the quotes:
Marx wrote of the stage of communist society before the total disappearance of scarcity,

Freedom in this field can consist only in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature.

The point is made most clearly by Engels:

With the seizure of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and with it the dominion of the product over the producers. Anarchy of social production is replaced by conscious organization according to plan. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which surround men, which ruled men up until now comes under the dominion and conscious control of men, who become for the first time the real, conscious lords of nature, because and in that they become master of their own social organization. The laws of their own social activity, which confronted them until this point as alien laws of nature, controlling them, then are applied by men with full understanding, and so mastered by them. Only from then on will men make their history themselves in full consciousness; only from then on will the social causes they set in motion have in the main and in constantly increasing proportion, also the results intended by them. It is the leap of mankind from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

Or in other words, a Dictatorship.

My own experience, it was a slow work day, traffic was light. And it seemed less crowded on the streets. That's a good thing in Los Angeles standards. Someone told me it only took them 22 minutes to do a drive that typically takes an hour plus. Maybe more days without immigrants would be beneficial.

Happy May Day, I'm sure Castro, Chavez, Marx, Engels, Stalin and Lenin would be proud.

Just for reference, this is what May day looks like in other places...the Soviet Union in 1959 and Switzerland in the 2000's