When I lived in Arizona many years ago, one summer between semesters I worked as a car salesman for a dealership in Phoenix. One afternoon I was in the process of selling a car to a Mexican couple who spoke English, but it was obvious that it not their language of choice. I was having a particularly hard time in closing the deal being that the couple were conversing in Spanish, which at the time I understood very little. I went and found my boss Herb who spoke the language fluently. As I sat with my boss who was also Mexican, but looked like George Clooney, the couple continued to speak to one another in Spanish. When they were done talking amongst themselves, Herb answered them back in Spanish (it was not unusual for Mexican customers to speak in Spanish in front of a Gringo like me hoping I didn’t understand the language) to the astonishment of my customers. The dialogue continued when the woman left the office and returned with a small suitcase. Inside the suitcase was cash; lots of cash. These people were in this country illegally, and had saved all that money over the years working in sub minimum wage jobs for over ten years. These were good people. Hard working people who were happy as hell to be in this country, even while working their asses off for sub par wages. On top of that, they weren’t financing the car — they had no credit — they were dumping their hard earned cash back into our economy. How can you send these people back to Mexico? What about their two children who were born here? If they were stopped for a traffic violation, what would happen to them if they were asked for documentation; they didn’t have any. How about if my boss was driving the car and the Mexican couple was sitting in the back seat? Are they going to ask him — who doesn’t look anything like the couple in the back — for his papers? This is a double edge sword that has to go away. If you want to stop the flow of illegal aliens across our borders, you have to do it at the border. You can’t just uproot a family who has worked here for ten years. We need to do something to make the process of being a citizen of our country easier to accomplish. ……….Talk about outsourcing local jobs. I got a call yesterday, and when I looked at the caller ID, I saw that it was coming from Ohio. The man on the other end was trying to sell me a subscription to the Troy Record. What’s a guy from Ohio doing selling subscriptions to the Troy record? When I think about it, the Times Union bill goes somewhere else to. Can’t we keep those jobs here? There has to be a better way.
And that is “The Daily Take”