Housing codes: Is equal protection for everyone?


By D.A. King, Marietta Daily Journal, July 14, 2005

This column was written in response to the Marietta Daily Journal article Man gets new hearing for dwelling, July 7, 2005.

As someone who suffered for seven years living across the street from a house full (and I mean "full") of "migrants," I have been closely following news concerning the new Cobb County law regulating multi-family housing.

Let me say this about that ordinance: It was about time.

On our typical middle-class east Cobb street, the "migrants" moved out two years ago - but the memories remain.

Picture a 1980s cedar-sided three bedroom, two- bath home painted pink, with lime green trim. As many as 12 dilapidated vans and autos leaking oil parked in the driveway, on the grass and in the street, with two Mexican flags flying from the porch.

Imagine a regular view of as many as 15 men urinating in the yard; and late, loud parties with many of the same men leaping out of windows and running for the trees when the police would answer another complaint call from one of the neighbors

I don't think they realized there was nothing to fear from immigration enforcement.

Picture sitting at your home office window in the morning when contractors in pick-ups drive up, honk and watching as some of the 20 or so occupants stroll out for low-paying day labor.

If only these "willing workers" had mowed the grass in front of their own residence.

Ah, the American Dream.

At risk of seeming "intolerant" or "xenophobic," I point out [again] that most of the "migrants" in Georgia and Cobb County are in fact illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America.

They come here because President Bush allows it and are illegally hired because they will work for less than a legal resident or citizen.

Most do not earn enough to send money home and pay the mortgage or rent on houses or apartments without pooling their incomes and living in large groups, often in little more than a dwelling full of mattresses and hot plates. The effect is that it is no longer unusual to see formerly well-kept neighborhoods of houses purchased as single-family homes transformed into boarding houses or de facto apartments in what can be described as America's - and Cobb County's - "new barrios."

Here it should be noted that according to the Inter-Development Bank, last year $947 million was sent back to Latin America from Georgia. I leave it to the reader to imagine how those millions could have been spent here.

It is fashionable for those who present themselves as enlightened, sophisticated and "progressive" to regard any one who speaks up against the changes in American communities brought by illegal immigration as less than fair and open-minded - and unacquainted with the history of U.S. immigration.

I ask them to remember this: We are not a nation of illegal immigrants. We are a nation of laws.

Like all crimes, illegal immigration has consequences. Few of those consequences regarding housing affect the gated-community crowd who profit from the over-supply of labor that illegal immigration creates.

By illegally importing the poverty of the Third World and lowering American wages, we are beginning to see the foundation here of many of the same conditions of that Third World.

Maybe Americans live too well?

In an MDJ story last week, Dr. Melvyn Fein, a professor of sociology at Kennesaw State University, said, "Making arbitrary judgments about the lifestyles of one race or group of people is unfair. - You have people who don't have a lot of money or limited resources, so for them it is the only solution."

If I understand Fein's reasoning, because illegal aliens are allowed to lower American wages and then do not earn enough to live by our housing codes, it is somehow unfair of us to enforce the regulations that are meant to preserve the way of life for which we ourselves work.

In our own country.

I am guessing Fein lives in a neighborhood that has not yet enjoyed the rich cultural diversity and transformation that illegal immigration may eventually bring it.

Let's not continue to allow the loss of equal protection under the law to be another consequence of our un-secured borders. That is not "fair."

Enforce the laws - even for "migrants." That is the "only solution."