They’re coming by the carload! Immigrants from Newport Beach, California, who cross our Costa Mesa, California, border with impunity, take our jobs, eat our food, drink our liquor, and marry our women.
Every day I see it. Mercedeses, Acuras, Rollses, BMWs, and Lexus crossing the border into Costa Mesa where they come to do jobs that our own citizens could do. They’re managers, mechanics, computer technicians, and college professors. Some of them actually own the businesses they manage. Yet they’re allowed to come here with no checks or challenges to their right to be here.
I see truck drivers, traveling salesmen, engineers boldly walking into our restaurants and delis, where they eat our food and drink our liquor with no thought of the deprivation they may cause. I see them going about their business as if they belonged here, and nobody even thinks to ask for their ID.
And here is the most vulgar act of all: These undocumented immigrants from Newport Beach steal our women. They take our virtuous ladies to fancy restaurants to ply them with gourmet food and drink for the selfish purpose of eventually marrying them. In fact, this intermarriage between Newport Beach and Costa Mesa citizdns has been going on so long now that they’re actually beginning to look like us . It is now impossible to discern on sight an alien from Newport Beach, or Rancho Cucamonga, or Beverly Hills.
The immigration situation obviously is at a crisis point and something must be done.
Here is what I propose:
First we’ll build a wall around Costa Mesa, with customs checkpoints at each freeway off-ramp. (The on ramps don’t need checkpoints, because it’s perfectly acceptable for us to travel outside Costa Mesa. It is they who don’t belong here .)
o Next, we’ll pass a law that Costa Mesa citizens may buy only products and services that originate in Costa Mesa so we can keep our money at home. This way, we’ll keep our money circulating in Costa Mesa and maintain a strong currency. We will finally be able to eliminate our trade deficit with Fashion Island. Of course, the downside is that it would mean no more new car purchases. But why should we want to send our money to Detroit, Bowling Green, Kentucky, or Marysville, Ohio, when we can patronize our own Costa Mesa repair shops?
o Next, we’ll pass a law that we may eat only food grown within the Costa Mesa city limits. Again, why should we send our money to Gilroy, Fresno, Dodge City, Kansas, or Plains, Georgia, when we have a fully operational agricultural industry right here?
Yes, this would mean our diet would be heavy on strawberries and oranges, but strawberries and oranges are healthy foods and should be consumed in greater quantities, anyway. Besides, our medical clinics and skin doctors could use the extra business generated by the strawberries.
o Last, we’ll pass another law that would require us to wear clothes made only in Costa Mesa. This would mean we’d forego those decadent designer labels to favor our own network of manufacturers of T-shirts with dirty slogans. But it would be great for our tailors and alteration specialists who can restore last year’s wardrobe at a fraction of the costs of buying new.
Here are just a few of the potential benefits of my proposals:
o Our spirituality would improve as we each moved closer to the soil, learning to commune with dust bunnies and crab grass as we clean our own houses and mow our own lawns.
o Our inventors would become more inventive, especially our chemists, as they search tor ways to make faux steak and lobster from the DNA of strawberries and oranges.
o The Wall would create jobs for hundreds of contractors, bricklayers, painters, hod carriers, antigraffiti specialists, and reconstruction engineers (to replace sections dynamited by opponents).
o Furthermore, hundreds of security personnel and immigrant-sniffing dogs would be needed to man the check-points, not to mention the installation of floodlights and antipersonnel mines. It would also mean work for computer consultants and undercover spies to sniff out the phony documents that are bound to appear.
o It would create prestigious white-collar jobs as well. Just because we’d be divided by the Wall doesn’t mean we’d be unfriendly with other cities. We would still want good relations with Newport Beach, as well as Santa Ana, Riverside, and even Tustin, so we would appoint ambassadors to these cities. Our ambassador would visit each city regularly to have dinner and play golf with their ambassador. Those other cities, in turn, would need to establish consulates in Costa Mesa, where their ambassadors could have dinner and play golf with our ambassador. Being an ambassador is a prestigious job with high pay and a good pension.
Now some may consider my proposals unduly harsh on immigrants from Newprort Beach. After all, we’re a nation of immigrants from somewhere. And why shouldn’t immigrants from Newport Beach be given equal treatment with immigrants from, say, Anaheim? Nevertheless, there comes a time when we must stop and take a stand to NIMBY-ize Costa Mesa.
Immigration is a problem that can only be solved right here at home. We just need the will to do it. I’ll do my part by eating more strawberries, wearing more T-shirts with dirty slogans, fixing my own car, and by refusing to allow my daughter to marry an immigrant — unless he has his own money, of course.
This article appeared in the November 16, 1995, issue of The Orange County Register. Reprinted by permission. © 1995 The Orange County Register.