OK, I was in Europe for the last part of June so I missed the culmination of the Durham City Council’s wrongheaded jihad against Arizona. While I was gone the council voted 6-1 to suspend city-funded travel to Arizona because of that state’s new immigration law, the only voice of reason being Eugene Brown.
These six who voted to punish another state for a duly approved law give Know Nothings a bad name. Only ignorance and ideology can explain why these six elected officials got into such high dudgeon over Arizona’s law, when they ignored (or were ignorant of, more like) a similar law that has been in force in Rhode Island for two years.
The temptation to pander to Hispanics, even those who are illegal and (presumably, anyway) don’t vote, was just too great, apparently. Illegal, schmillegal, said Mayor Bill Bell:
But Bell underscored the local significance, noting that the Hispanic population has grown from constituting little more than 1 percent of Durham’s residents in 1990 to about 12.4 percent as of last year.
Someone tell Bill Bell and the rest of the Mariachi City Council that they were elected by citizens to represent citizens. They don’t represent, as elected officials, illegal immigrants in Durham any more than they represent tourists from France who might visit the city.
