Sand Mountain Reporter

Perhaps, as an organizer of last week’s forum for Albertville City Council candidates, it is bad form for me to comment on them.

Perhaps, but there’s something I can’t let go.

It came at the end of an hour of questions and answers. Most of the answers were thoughtful. The last one wasn’t.

Place 1 candidate Donald Justice drew a question about whether Albertville should add personnel to the police and fire departments.

I won’t quibble with Justice saying no. He’s impressed with the job done by the departments now and says we have sufficient numbers. Fine.

What was not fine were Justice’s comments about immigration. He implied we must rid the city of all immigrants, not just those here illegally.

Has immigration presented problems for Albertville? It sure has, for 15 years now.

But stopping all immigration, and ridding our city of immigrants, is an ignorant and scary viewpoint.

And that’s just what Justice wants to do.

He made similar remarks to our paper earlier in the campaign, when he announced he was running. Our City Hall reporter made a prudent call back to Justice to see if he meant Hispanics illegally in the country or all Hispanics.

Justice assured us he did not want to restate his comments.

That’s wrong.

I want to hear candidates tell how they will clean up Albertville. I liked one response about being sure our ordinance officer could speak Spanish so he could communicate with our newest residents.

Others have spoken of law enforcement measures that would help the illegal immigration issue.

But, to follow the logic of the ironically named Justice, you’d have to assume Albertville does not need to attract new businesses. After all, a Target or Home Depot might bring in people from – gasp! – somewhere else.

Maybe even somebody who looks or speaks a little differently.

Could we survive it? You bet we could.

Albertville’s issues with immigration won’t be solved with a roundup of everybody who wasn’t born on this mountain. Instead, it’s going to take tough law enforcement. It’s going to take education. It’s going to take the expansion of Hispanics into the middle class, being integrated into the community.

It’s going to take time. And God knows it’s going to take more than a candidate who, in 2008, echoes the most painful strains of a dying resistance to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Surely we’ve moved beyond that. Haven’t we?

[David Clemons is managing editor of The Sand Mountain Reporter. His e-mail address is dclemons(at)sandmountainreporter.com.]

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Serving Albertville and the Sand Mountain region

Publisher: Ben Shurett

1603 Progress Drive
Albertville, Alabama 35950

Tel: 256-840-3000 | Email

A Southern Newspapers publication.