Illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America, unable to find work, are camping out in the woods in Long Island’s super-tony East End.
No longer able to find work, Hispanic day laborers have forged a hidden network of about 20 cleared wooded campgrounds in the shadow of million-dollar Southampton homes, The Post has learned.
In one area, just blocks from Saks Fifth Avenue and Intermix stores, a butchered deer carcass rots near beds made of stacked Budweiser boxes. Tattered blankets and plastic vodka bottles are piled near charred campfire remains — a scene repeated throughout the sprawling area …
I don’t believe this started with the current recession. When my son first played football with the local PAL league three years ago, practices and home games were played at Manor Field here in Huntington, in a way-less tony part of Long Island. The neighborhood around the field has a big population of illegals. Most of course lived in rented rooms and apartments; but while I was there watching my son practice, in idle moments I’d stroll in some woods nearby. There were distinct signs of human habitation in there. Asking around, I heard: “Oh yeah, the day laborers camp there in summer.”
Meanwhile, back in the East End:
A hamlet that boasts world-class estates and famed residents like author Tom Wolfe and designer Calvin Klein is suddenly debating unglamorous issues like the establishment of a free-food program for day laborers.
Since our federal government is resolutely unwilling to send these illegals back to their home countries, perhaps there is a private-enterprise solution. Instead of shelling out money, either individually through charitable contributions or collectively through local taxes, to feed and house the woodland campers, why don’t these well-heeled East Enders start a fund to just pay their fares back home, perhaps with a sweetener bribe added in to encourage them? I’m sure a lot of them would accept.
When the area’s booming real-estate market collapsed, demand for labor all but vanished. Workers who used to earn enough money to rent homes in the area now find themselves penniless.
Of course, nobody could possibly have foreseen this! Real-estate booms go on for ever, don’t you know? And still the open-borders crowd is urging the government to enact amnesty — legal residence — for these people. But if all those East End woodkerns were to become legal residents tomorrow, there would still be no work for them. So what’s the plan here? Are they to be made eligible for unemployment relief? For welfare? Or what?
[I speak with some feeling here. Mrs. Derb — a legal immigrant who waited ten years for her Green Card, then three more for citizenship — entered the ranks of the unemployed last Saturday. Unemployment benefit will be part of our household income for the near future.]
News stories like this always include some statement or quote illustrative of the utter collapse of our national will after years of undermining by the multicultural ideologues. Sure enough:
Southampton Police Chief William Wilson said his officers check on the area periodically and that several arrests have been made. “There really isn’t much we can do,” he said. “Our hands are tied on this.”
Well, Chief there’s something you could do. You could call ICE. They wouldn’t take any action, of course — too busy building a fence along the Canadian border — but you could still call them.
Footnote: Something about this story struck me as a bit creepy, though I couldn’t at first figure out why. There’s a sort of mythic quality to it, something Grimm-like. Woodkerns … forest murmurs … gypsies … mysterious people lurking just out of sight … I mean no insult to the illegals, who I am sure are just trying to put food on their families, and who I hope will soon be comfortably back among their own people in the countries of their origin. Still there’s that mythic quality. I was reminded of this passage from Paul Fussell’s classic The Great War and Modern Memory, page 123:
The finest legend of the war, the most brilliant in literary invention and execution as well as the richest in symbolic suggestion, has something of this fantastic quality. It is a masterpiece. The rumor was that somewhere between the lines [i.e. of trenches on the Western Front — JD] a battalion-sized (some said regiment-sized) group of half-crazed deserters from all the armies, friend and enemy alike, harbored underground in abandoned trenches and dugouts and caves, living in amity and emerging at night to pillage corpses and gather food and drink …