It is now 2007. Hot Santa Ana winds from the desert funnel through passes and canyons in the Southern California mountains, giving the menacing winds hurricane-like force. Couple these hot winds with dry brush and sparks – some accidental and some intentional – and the result are demonic fires that devour thousands of acres of land in a flash. The fires that still rage in parts of Southern California prompted the evacuation of over half a million people and burned nearly 2000 structures. Unlike Katrina, the response from firefighters and the communities has been swift and effective. Contrary to the disgrace of one-third of the police force in New Orleans abandoning their posts (and some participating in robberies), disaster responders and law enforcement in Southern California have been phenomenal and heroic. Leadership from California’s Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner was immediate. Contributions from individuals quickly began to pour in. KFI-640, a local radio station, was among the first to open their hearts and pocket books with a $100,000 donation. The Red Cross immediately set their personnel in high gear. What remains to be seen is what role the federal and state governments will play in the reconstruction efforts, and if we have learned anything since Katrina.

Will history repeat itself? Will tax-paid federal and state funds paid to companies for the rebuilding of property and lives be used to hire cheap illegal aliens instead of American workers?

A Katrina reconstruction analysis exposed massive corruption, fraud and political opportunism.

At the onset of the Katrina reconstruction, President Bush said that "as many jobs as possible should go to the men and women who live in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.'' Indeed, rebuilding the region -- its levees, roads, energy grids, and homes -- is to become the work of those affected by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath”.

However, the Bush Administration acted in ways that encouraged a different segment of the U.S. population to do this work – illegal aliens. On Sept. 8, Bush issued an executive order lifting the Davis-Bacon Act, which mandates that construction workers on federal contracts be paid at least the average wage in the region. At that time the prevailing average wage was about $9.00 per hour. Bush’s order effectively dropped wages to near minimum wage, acceptable almost exclusively to illegal aliens. Marcela Sanchez, writing for the Washington Post of September 22, wrote that the decision was followed days later by a Homeland Security Department announcement that it will not apply sanctions toward employers who hire people unable to provide proper documentation. Essentially, President Bush encouraged companies receiving tax paid federal funds (our money) to displace higher-paid American workers with illegal aliens and assured their crooked employers that they would not be prosecuted.

In recent years, the U.S. construction industry has replaced higher cost American workers with cheap Latino illegal aliens, much more than with any other racial or ethnic group in this country. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, foreign-born Latino workers accounted for 40 percent of the total growth of employment in the construction trades in 2004. The percentage has grown steadily since then. Before Katrina, Hispanics, ostensibly citizens or legal residents, represented only 2 percent of the labor force in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi but held 5 percent of construction jobs, according to the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

What's more, according to Pew, of the total Hispanic immigrants working in construction last year, nearly two-thirds were "unauthorized''. Labor specialists argue that these "unauthorized'' -- undocumented or illegal -- workers are the very ones willing to work for less than prevailing wages and worse than average conditions, particularly if they are not asked for documentation.

The effect of having a vast supply of cheap and docile illegal alien workers and assurances from Bush’s Department of Homeland Security that immigration laws would not be enforced, delivered a hard blow to American workers and their families, adding to the misery so many of them were already enduring having lost their own homes.

Ever since 2001, Bush has been talking on and off about the need for a temporary worker program to provide legal means to ``match willing workers with willing employers.'' In the aftermath of the Katrina disaster, we know what Bush meant. His words can be roughly translated as, “Let’s have open borders and ignore the enforcement of immigration laws so that employers can be matched with desperate Third World workers and teach American workers a lesson in humility”.

Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) dismissed the idea that Katrina victims would be hired for the reconstruction, which meant 400,000 to 500,000 jobs. Instead he argued correctly that immigrants, many of them illegal, played the largest role in the efforts to rebuild. These low paid illegal workers, in turn, placed extra burdens on state and local authorities and exacerbated poverty in this already depressed region. Given the demographics of New Orleans, the displaced workers and workers who refuse to work for illegal alien wages are Black Americans.

It has been six years since 9/11. Since then we have spent $800 billion defending Afghanistan’s and Iraq’s governments and sources quote a current deployment of 20,000 in Afghanistan and 150,000 in Iraq. The total number who have been deployed however hovers around one million. This massive level of commitment of resources has been done to protect us against terrorism.

In the same span of time, President Bush with a willing Congress and Senate have allowed up to 6 million illegal aliens to violate our borders (governmental and private data point at between 1 and 2.5 million illegal aliens per year). In a report obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the Cybercast News Service unearthed an Department of Homeland Security internal audit with chilling revelations. Between the beginning of Fiscal Year 2001 and the mid-way point of Fiscal Year 2005, the DHS audit revealed that 605,210 individuals from countries "other than Mexico" (OTMs), many hostile to the United States, were apprehended and 309,733 of that total were eventually released into the general population. The majority of those given a court date did not show up and are now somewhere in America, perhaps your neighborhood. Unconscionable elected officials, such as Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York, has issued an Executive Order mandating the New York Motor Vehicle Department to issue any one of these potential terrorist a driver’s license and a no-questions-asked voter registration. Don’t you feel secure now?

A total of 91,516 illegal aliens from State Sponsors of Terrorism countries were apprehended over the same time period and 45,008 were released, the audit showed. It only takes one of those illegal aliens, bearing a valid driver’s license for ease of movement, from one of 7 states in the Union that issue them to illegal aliens, to cause havoc and bring suffering to many Americans.

It should be abundantly clear, when it comes to spending money and resources fighting terrorism, our government will not flinch in doing whatever it takes, as long as it does not interfere with open borders. The President seems to care more about global free trade agreements, the portability of capital, goods, services and cheap Third-World labor that is craved by trans-nationals and huge corporate interests. Some Republican Congressmen and Senators come from states where the largest corporations, some in farming, rely on the steady flow of desperate illegal alien cheap labor. Senator Feinstein of California, a Democrat, is very fraternally attached with global corporate farming interests with assets in California. She is currently pushing for an AgJobs Bill to change the status of her corporate farm interest political contributors stoop laborers from illegal to legal through a crafty amnesty scheme. This amnesty will make about three million who are illegal aliens stealing education, health and social services to survive with their low wages, to legal workers consuming the same amount of tax paid services but legally at that point. Sweet. Democrats in general see the massive invasion of illegal aliens as a 30 million strong voting constituency if they one day manage to get an amnesty bill passed.

While our elected representatives of both parties are cutting and slicing among themselves the largesse directed their way by elitists and profiteers, the rest of us pick up the costs of deteriorating quality of life, loss of jobs, falling wages, congestion, environmental damage, crowded schools overrun with non-English speaking students (which only manage to graduate the 40% or so native America citizens that speak English), closing hospitals bankrupt from non-paying illegal aliens, surges in communicable diseases, neighborhoods overrun by drugs, gangs and crime and so much more. These ills are outside of the line of sight of the elitists and profiteers because they live in gated communities in other parts of town than you and I live in.

We are victims of open-borders, one-world free trade and massive intentional cheap labor portability made possible by large scale legal immigration, guest worker programs and illegal immigration.

The victims of this corruption and neglect of our security and laws are the American middle-class, American Blacks, first generation legal immigrants and lamentably the American worker.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who in recent times has been re-tuning his political profile to recast himself as a passionate and untiring political centrist, an arduous task for great leaders of conviction, has been quoted as saying that California will have Zero Tolerance for fraud and unlawfulness in the recovery effort. Let’s see if the Governor truly intends to flex his muscles against fraud and lawlessness.

Violation of our borders is a felony; aiding and abetting illegal aliens is a felony; hiring illegal aliens is a felony. Illegal aliens cannot legally possess a Social Security number and a Social Security number is required to pay state and federal income taxes. Illegal aliens and their unlawful, unethical employers have a number of choices if they are to commit this fraud against the state treasury and the taxpayers. For example, illegal aliens steal identities from innocent American citizens, many of them children (11 million identities are stolen annually), or they buy a false identification (document fraud is a felony), or they and their employers conspire not to declare the income (tax fraud is a felony).

A great many illegal aliens are paid so little that they cannot afford an apartment. When they pack 20 to an apartment they violate community and zoning ordinances. When they set up shanty towns on the outskirts of cities, as they do in McGonigle Canyon near Rancho Penasquitos, with the tacit consent of San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, they violate ordinances, statutes and the fire code. Mayor Sanders acknowledges that the shanty towns, filled with illegal aliens, serve as sanctuaries for crime, fraud, human trafficking and prostitution of young foreign women brought in to service the illegals. The North County Times and other local media have documented open fire pits in those camps, side by side with flammable dry brush. Yet Mayor Jerry Sanders turns a blind eye to this crime. Is Mayor Sanders also a centrist, like governor Schwarzenegger , who dreads the thought of offending illegal aliens and their unethical employers?

Is Governor Schwarzenegger being true to his word when he says that he will not tolerate lawlessness and fraud in the reconstruction of California? Will his political strategy of passionate centrism be compromised by a genuine Zero Tolerance policy against lawlessness to ensure that the American worker is protected?

The job of rebuilding California from the devastating fires MUST be guaranteed for the American Worker.

We cannot leave it to President Bush and a Congress and Senate that get barely an 11% approval rating from the public, and who have a proven track record of serving trans-national and domestic elitists and profiteers to deny protection to the American worker. We must see to it that not a penny of tax-paid federal and state funds is paid to any company that hires illegal aliens on the cheap instead of hiring American workers.

A coalition of concerned Americans, representing Liberals, Conservatives, members of various political parties, conscientious businesses, American citizens, naturalized citizens, legal immigrants, men and women, labor union members, all of them caring about the forgotten victim, the American worker, will see to it every brick is laid, and every nail is hammered by one of us, the American worker.

Turn your attention to the goals of this coalition. Visit the website, www.AmericanWorkers.us. There you will get the information you need to bring relief to the victims of the devastation of this fire and to the American workers who are prepared to rebuild this state.

For more information about this issue, read other articles from Tony Dolz:

NY Democrat Party and Bush Team Up to Save Spitzer, Hillary and Illegal Aliens


http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=41515

Gov. Spitzer, NY Driver’s Licenses for Illegal Aliens Are Now Needed More Than Ever


http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=40514

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer Would Give Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a New York Driver’s License


http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=38644

Tony Dolz for Congress


http://www.dolz.com