Paul Mulshine writes in the New Jersey Star-Ledger

Morristown's mayor was right on immigration

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Well, I won't say I told you so.

But I will say Don Cresitello told you so.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about a rally in Morristown at which Cresitello, who is the mayor, spoke on the question of illegal immigration. [Bush stands on the wrong side of the street - NJ.com July 31, 2007]His main objective is simply the attainment of 287(g) status for the local cops. That status deputizes them as agents of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement service. This entitles them to hand over any illegal aliens they encounter to the federal government.

"We're not going to go after jay walkers," he told me when we spoke in his office after the rally. The mayor, who is in all other respects a liberal Democrat, said he intended to target gangs like MS- 13, which ran a drug and prostitution ring in town. He also hoped to avoid a repeat of a 2001 case in which an illegal immigrant was ar rested in the slaying of a 10-year-old Morristown boy. That suspect had been arrested twice in 1998 for incidents involving knives, but after his release from jail, he was permitted to stay in the United States despite being an illegal alien.

This is a familiar pattern and one that was repeated in the recent slayings of those three college kids from Newark. The alleged ringleader of the gang charged in the murders, Jose Lachira Carranza, is an illegal alien from Peru who had prior arrests for such crimes as aggravated assault.

You can read more about the Carranza case here,and Chris Roach wrote us an impassioned letter about Carranza being one of Bush's "willing workers." By the way, you should know that workers and criminals are not mutually exclusive—many criminals have some sort of job. When the Wall Street Journal asks why the we "nativists" want to harass "busboys," they forget that busboy is a job that doesn't pay much, and some busboys supplement their income by committing crimes.

Mulshine goes on:

So these days Cresitello is looking like a prophet. Meanwhile, his critics are at a loss, most prominently U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie. In something of a master piece of bad timing, Christie was quoted in the Morris Daily Record lambasting the mayor's views on immigration on the same day that the first reports of the mass slayings hit the news. Christie attacked the mayor for saying that some of the counter-demonstrators at the Morristown rally were Marxists — which they indeed were — and also for saying that the federal government isn't doing enough to enforce immigration laws.[Christie: Cresitello 'grandstanding' at Morristown rally Calls anti-immigration rhetoric unproductive BY MICHAEL DAIGLE DAILY RECORD Friday, August 3, 2007 ]

"It is an enormous problem, and we're doing, I think, the best we can," Christie said in the interview.

If this is the best, I'd hate to see the worst. There are about 10 million people in this country illegally. The feds ignore the problem, leaving small-town mayors like Cresitello to sort out the mess.

Remember that small towns like Hazleton, Farmer's Branch, and Costa Mesa are only able to fight back because amnesty didn't pass. If Bush had been able to legalize Jose Carranza et al, they would have been causing exactly the same problems, but any attempt to do anything about it would bring the full weight of the Federal Government's Civil Rights machine on the town.

As for New Jersey, it's still having problems with gangs left over from the previous great wave of immigration, although I hear they got a hell of a TV series out of it.

When hundreds of day workers line up by the post office in Morristown every morning, they and the employers who pick them up are violating federal laws that are ignored by Christie. Meanwhile, the people in the more prosperous suburbs get cheap labor, he says.

"The people in Mendham, one of whom happens to be Chris Christie, have them doing their landscaping," [Mayor Cresitello]said.

I'm sure the U.S. attorney, who is a Republican, cuts his own lawn. But that "we're doing the best we can" attitude is typical of the elites of both parties.

Perhaps the U.S. attorney does mow his own lawn—after all, the President cuts brush on his Crawford ranch. But I'd like know for sure, since in 2003, the President was found to have had an illegal working on the White House lawn raising tents.

Read the rest of Mulshine's column here.