A deputy attorney general and environmental activist whose comments about farmworkers sparked a protest rally Monday has resigned from the board of the California Water Impact Network.There's more at the link.
Mike Jackson, who serves on the same board, said Lloyd Carter submitted his resignation during a conference call among board members Monday morning.
"His statement is not us, and he was speaking for us," Jackson said. "We thought we had to take some steps."
Carter's comments were made to a KMPH (Channel 26) reporter before a debate on water policy at California State University, Fresno, on Wednesday.
Carter said farmworkers who would lose jobs if west-side Valley farmers don't receive water from the California Delta this year are "not even American citizens for starters. Do you think we should employ illegal aliens?"
He also said the children of farmworkers are among the least-educated people in the southwest corner of the Valley. "They turn to lives of crime. They go on welfare. They get into drug trafficking and they join gangs."
Carter said Monday afternoon, "I've apologized. I don't know what else people want from me. People who know me know I'm not a racist."
Carter issued a written apology on his Web site, www.lloydgcarter.com.
An apology also was broadcast on Channel 26.
"My comments were directed at the exploitation of farmworkers in the southwest corner of the Valley, which is the poorest place in America," Carter's apology reads in part.
"I now realize I made a terrible mistake in the way I expressed myself and I humbly apologize to all who were offended," he wrote.
The California Water Impact Network has issued apologies for Carter's comments, Jackson said. "We're very, very sorry and are busy apologizing -- as is Lloyd -- to everything that moves."
Jackson said he doesn't know why Carter made the comments.
"There is nothing in Lloyd Carter's career, background or experience that explains what he was trying to say. We don't believe he has any of those feelings," Jackson said.
Carter is a deputy attorney general in the criminal division of the California Attorney General's Office and is a former Fresno Bee reporter.
He serves on the boards of California Save Our Streams Council and Revive The San Joaquin, and he is a director of the Underground Gardens Conservancy, a preservation group for the Forestiere Underground Gardens in Fresno.
About 250 farmworkers, farmers, politicians and community activists attended the rally in front of Fresno City Hall. Some called for Carter's resignation.
Readers can read Lloyd's apology, posted at his blog, here.
I'm looking over the offending comments at the Fresno Bee piece again, and for the most part, Lloyd's crime is that his statements were raw, sweeping stereotypes posed off-the-cuff, rather than in a more appropriate context, like a scholarly panel debating the issues or in an article backed by evidence.
Certainly, it's unexceptional to suggest that children of farmworkers "turn to lives of crime." Quite a few do, as Heather MacDonald has shown in her research, "The Immigrant Gang Plague." Indeed, in another essay, MacDonald notes that:
Arizona and California lawmakers want to free taxpayers from the nearly $1 billion a year burden of detaining illegal criminals—and the even costlier burden of detaining those illegals’ children. In Fresno, now 45 percent Hispanic, 20 percent of the county jail inmates are illegal immigrants, as are about one-quarter of emergency-room patients. No wonder Fresno’s mayor called in November 2005 for securing the border.And here's Victor Davis Hanson, a Fresno farmer himself who knows a thing or two about these issues:
For many professors, politicians, and columnists, the gangs, increased crime, and crowded jails that often result from massive illegal immigration and open borders are not daily concerns, but rather stereotypes hysterically evoked by paranoid and unenlightened others in places like Bakersfield and Laredo.I'll update when I have more information.
So, what is the truth on illegal immigration?
Simple. Millions of fair-minded white, African-, Mexican- and Asian-Americans fear that we are not assimilating millions of aliens from south of the border as fast as they are crossing illegally from Mexico.
In the frontline American southwest, entire apartheid communities and enclaves within cities have sprung up whose distinct language, culture, and routines are beginning to resemble more the tense divides in the Balkans or Middle East than the traditional melting pot of multiracial America.
Concern over this inevitable slowdown in integration and assimilation is neither racist nor nativist. It grows out of real worry that when millions of impoverished arrive in mass without legality, education, and the ability to speak English, costly social problems follow that will not be offset by the transitory economic benefits cheap wages may provide.
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Photo Credit: "About 250 people attended a rally Monday in front of Fresno City Hall. Some called for the resignation of Lloyd Carter, a deputy state attorney general and environmental activist whose comments about farmworkers sparked the protest," Fresno Bee.
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