A clutch of Suffolk County legislators is opposing efforts to acquire land to preserve open space and safeguard the underground water table and to save farmland

—matters on which nearly all officeholders in Suffolk have agreed upon for decades. But citing the economic downturn, this grouping—oblivious to tourism and farming as mainstays of the Suffolk economy and dependent on a green environment—says Suffolk must call a halt to these preservation initiatives.

The view of a group of four and sometimes five members of the Suffolk Legislature—out of 18—prompted Legislator Edward Romaine to give an impassioned speech at the legislative meeting last week after, again, there was resistance to preservation measures.

 “I take a longer view,” said Mr. Romaine. The preservation efforts of Suffolk through the years have stopped the “suburban sprawl that has enveloped so much of our county.” Because of these initiatives “not every inch of the county has been developed” and “we saved our farmland.” There have been crises in the past, he noted, citing among them gas shortages and long lines at gas stations in the 1970s. But the county has consistently remained on a course of conservation. County government must not now “walk away from that,” said Mr. Romaine of Center Moriches.  As officials, he said, their prime responsibility is what “we will leave” for future generations.

A series of bills had just come up to preserve land and safeguard water on the East End and in Brookhaven Town, that part of Suffolk that has not been overtaken by  sprawl. As he has done at every legislative meeting for months, Legislator Cameron Alden, before each bill was to be voted upon, went on about tough economic times and how the county can no longer afford such expenditures. .

Mr. Alden of Islip and Thomas Barraga of West Islip are the most outspoken advocates of stopping preservation. They’re usually joined by Ricardo Montano of Central Islip and DuWayne Gregory of Amityville. About half the time, they’re also joined by William Lindsay, presiding officer of the legislature.

The tone is sometimes sarcastic. For instance, last week when the vote on one of the measures—to preserve seven acres in Sagaponack—was called, Mr. Lindsay quipped: “There’s a community, Sagaponack, really being paved out.”

Thanks to the efforts of community residents, environmentalists and enlightened officeholders, Sagaponack has not been paved over. It’s still the beautiful “Kansas with a sea breeze” that Truman Capote described when he lived there, an exquisite tapestry of farms and homes abutting the ocean.

Once I lived a few miles from Mr. Lindsay’s home in Holbrook. The area was beautiful and green back then in the 1960s. Then, suddenly, the bulldozers came and, in rapid order developments and shopping centers came to dominate the landscape. In the wake of this kind of thing, Suffolk officials—led by visionary County Executive John V. N. Klein, creator of a county farmland preservation program which has become a national model—began taking actions to not let this happen to everywhere in Suffolk.

Messrs. Alden, Barraga and company would end these efforts. If they succeed, destroyed would be what is central to Suffolk’s economy: a tourism industry that brings in $4.8 billion a year, along with farming that keeps Suffolk County the top agricultural county in the New York State in the value of its produce. The sprawled-over areas on Long Island no longer attract tourists and neither will what’s left—if it doesn’t stay green.

Moreover, the money used for preservation comes from funds set up by referenda—approved overwhelmingly time after time by county voters—which are not allowed to be used for any other purpose. Also, the amount spent annually represents “less than one percent of annual county expenditures,” notes Richard Amper, executive director of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society.

Interestingly, his organization has polled Suffolk residents in recent months and most say that despite the economic situation they still “strongly want” preservation, he said. The claims of Messrs. Alden, Barraga and the others “don’t ring true to the public.” People on Long Island also understand, said Mr. Amper, that taxes skyrocket with development because services and infrastructure must be provided for the growth. He  added that “now is the perfect time for preservation” with prices low and “more willing sellers than ever.”

Legislator Jay Schneiderman is concerned, meanwhile, that the preservation opponents “are getting more votes now. It’s getting closer and closer.”

 “Our economy,” says Mr. Schneiderman of Montauk, “is interconnected with our environment. If we are going to see strong growth economically, it’s precisely because we’ve preserved the natural beauty of the area.” 

By Marianna Levine

It was clear from the start that several audience members at a panel discussion last Thursday on immigration were not immigrants themselves. They were there as concerned residents who came with their own opinions on immigration they hoped to be able to air during the discussion. However, the event’s organizers, Organizacion Latino Americana’s (OLA), as well as the discussion’s moderator, Joachim Mendez created some ground rules he introduced with a joke to dispel the already apparent tensions, “If you have something you want to say we’ll have a beer later. If you have a question then raise your hand.” He stressed this was an informational meeting and not a debate.

Still the first person to speak was an woman from Southampton who expressed fear that people who were born and raised on Long Island were being treated like outsiders rather than insiders.

“We are American citizens, and we’ve welcomed an international community here for over 45 years. Can we be included in this dialogue please?” To which Mendez responded, “(the welcoming has occurred for) more like a couple hundred years. And we shouldn’t get into this now. I will not allow it. If you don’t have a question we’ll move on.”

From then on there were a plethora of questions from both local business owners as well as immigrants asked in both Spanish and English, and always translated for all to understand. Most questions concerned small business owners and the need for work visas and driver’s licenses for their workers, the actual naturalization process, and most urgently what was occurring with immigration reform in Washington D.C.

The panel, held at the Bridgehampton National Bank meeting room in Bridgehampton, included immigration attorneys Millicent Clarke and Allen Kaye (of the American Immigration Lawyers Association), as well as the Executive Director of the Long Island Immigration Alliance Luis Velenzuela, and Congressman Tim Bishop.

The immigration lawyers fielded the questions regarding the immigration process, often cautioning audience members to be wary of so-called lawyers who promise to put aside tax money for the future for undocumented workers or who make any easy promises about the naturalization process. Both Clarke and Kaye suggested waiting for immigration reform prior to starting any paperwork.

Kaye explained that there are basically only three ways to get a Green Card in the United States. You can either get one through an employer, or by marrying or being related to a citizen, or you can have resided here illegally for over ten years and take your chances before a judge in court. He then explained that trying to get a Green Card properly as an undocumented person almost always means, “You’re asking to be deported.”

Congressman Tim Bishop arrived soon after this discussion began, and addressed questions on comprehensive immigration reform. An audience member asked in frustration, “What is wrong with getting in line and waiting?” To which Congressman Bishop replied, “The fundamental problem is that the current system is a broken system that simply doesn’t work. I think we can all agree that it isn’t working. This discussion is a symptom of the fact that the system is broken. We don’t have a visa system that works. We have people who stand in line for 5 to 20 years and nothing happens.” He also added that, “No solutions can come from the vantage point of anger. I believe we should make a good faith effort to put our differences aside and try to bring people together.”

Bishop explained the new comprehensive immigration reform would come about in four parts in something referred to as the “Strive Act.” First the U.S. government would need to intensify border protection, and crack down on employers who hire undocumented workers. Thereafter the government would construct a visa program that actually worked and reflected the needs of our country and business owners. Bishop explained this would include a simplified agricultural work visa. He then noted that the fourth aspect of this plan is the most controversial, since it would create a path to legalization for those who are currently in the U.S. without proper documentation.

“Undocumented workers would be given a work visa as long as they have a clean record for about 11 or 12 years,” said Bishop. “They would have to pay a fine and back taxes on the money they earned off the books. They would have to learn English and civics and maintain a clean record for that period. After that they would be granted permanent residency.”

Asked when immigration reform would be passed, Bishop answered, “I believe it will be considered sometime in June or September. President Obama has made it very clear he supports comprehensive immigration reform.” He also said that he guessed the bill had a better than 50/50 chance of passing this year.

 

 

 

This week we found that many local community groups and village officials are discussing the newly enacted decision by Cablevision to withhold two local channels from the airwaves for those subscribers who only pay for their basic package. The two channels are 20 and 22 — a public access channel and a government channel. We find this — at the very least — disturbing. Cablevision is saying that basic subscribers can get the channels, but for a price. Though the company is willing to provide one free box to each home, residents with more than one television would have to purchase all others — as would schools and hospitals which have multiple sets in multiple rooms.

Are we missing something here? Public access means exactly that. In the case of a public access channel, the public should have the right to view it without the added expense of having to purchase a converter box to gain access to the channel. The other channel at issue is a government channel, one where those in the community can watch the goings-on at the local level through the broadcast of town board meetings and other programming.

Television programming is going digital in 2009, and we could better sympathize with Cablevision’s position if it were unable to provide channels 20 and 22 to basic subscribers because of technical reasons. But their reasoning isn’t technical. It’s financial. By eliminating those two channels, it frees up more bandwidth and allows Cablevision to carry other, more lucrative, offerings. But it is our position that Cablevision should provide access for all Cablevision subscribers — no matter what level package a subscriber pays for.

We like the idea that there are airwaves that belong to the “public” regardless of how much money you have and what you can afford. To restrict those who can’t afford digital television or worse, the elderly, who often cannot figure out how these digital converter boxes work, seems to us, discriminatory.

Nancy Graboski said, in addition, one of the things that is beneficial about the public access channel is that it helps those who may not be able to get to public meetings, feel that they are able to participate.

At it’s basic level, we feel that television has done well in its education and informative role, and when these two channels are taken away — what is left for those with basic packages remains some of the less educational and informational programming — infomercials and home shopping is what immediately comes to mind.

What we learned this week from a Cablevision representative is that only 10 percent of the viewing audience will be affected by this change. Is that all? Just 10 percent? Given the fact that 20 and 22 are the channels that residents are expected to tune to in times of emergencies — hurricanes, blizzards or even manmade disasters, do you think that 10 percent is acceptable? We feel that no one should be excluded and feel pressured into spending more money for this upgrade.

Many rely on public access to understand the immediate world around them, so Cablevision please give us back our channels. Otherwise, we may just have to make sure all those residents who don’t know how to program their TVs or those converter boxes have your phone number close at hand on the day the broadcast world goes digital.

The Sunday after Election Day I was asked to address a Suffolk League of Women Voters post-election gathering. Obviously, the victory of Barack Obama would be the most important thing to comment on—his historical win nationally and his also carrying Suffolk County.

The LWV brunch at which I spoke was held at a country club in Bellport. I said it was remarkable that we would be considering Mr. Obama’s 52 to 47 percent plurality in Suffolk—with its long history of bigotry—in a hamlet where the housing pattern  resembles a town in Alabama or Mississippi. In Bellport, black people live north and whites south of Montauk Highway. I also mentioned that as I entered the club.

I came upon LWV member Regina Seltzer of Bellport and asked her if the segregation continues—and she said it does, that “change comes slow.”

I talked about Suffolk as a whole: how it was a county where the Ku Klux Klan marched through the 1920s, where in Yaphank, several miles north, the Nazi Bund established a settlement in the 1930s with streets named for Hitler and Goebbels and where Nazis from throughout the New York area came to parade and spout hate. And I spoke of how through to the present day acts of racism have been numerous in Suffolk.

I spoke, too, about the place where I’ve taught for 30 years, SUNY College at Old Westbury, where since the 1960s a deliberate attempt has been made—as part of the educational experience—to mix white, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and others on student, faculty and administrative levels. In this place of diversity, the young people get to know each other and mix beautifully. Thus despite what my old friend Reggie Seltzer mentioned, I said at Old Westbury I see change happening quickly.

What I didn’t know when I gave the presentation was that only a few hours before, several miles west in Patchogue, one of the most horrific hate crimes in Long Island history had happened. Marcelo Lucero, an immigrant from Ecuador, had been killed by a gang of high school students looking for “a Mexican” to attack. Thereafter came confessions that this was not an isolated incident: they regularly hunted Latinos.

 “People in Suffolk County are hunting, attacking, killing Latinos for sport. What are we going to do about it?” testified Simeon Yanez of the The Workplace Project in Hempstead and Farmingville (a flash point for bigotry against Latinos a few years ago). “We’re all immigrants,” said Mr. Yanez. “We need to look at each other with love and understanding.”

He was among dozens who spoke. They told of widespread bias here, underreporting of hate crimes by Suffolk Police, East End town and village police not calling in the Suffolk Police Hate Crimes Unit to try to hide racism, and there were—notably from Legislators Ricardo Montano, a Latino, and DuWayne Gregory, an African American—calls for creating entities and initiatives to do something about hate in Suffolk.

“Let’s face it, racial tension seethes below the surface in Suffolk County,” said Cheryl Keshner relating the story of an Indian, “a local grocer who happened to be Hindu, being taunted with racial epithets” by two white men, one wielding a pipe, in her community of Lindenhurst.

“Let’s leave immigration reform to the federal government and use our legislature to work toward solutions which unite rather than divide our communities,” said Jane Lane of the Empire Justice Center at the Touro Law School in Central Islip. “Let’s use Marcelo’s death as an opportunity to increase dialogue, to decrease bigotry and to move forward.”

There was a fascinating report in The New York Times last month on “some new studies” in which “psychologists have been able to establish a close relationship between diverse pairs—black and white, Latino and Asian, black and Latino—in a matter of hours…This extended-contact effect, as it is called, travels like a benign virus through an entire peer group, counteracting subtle or not so subtle mistrust.” The headline: “Racial Tolerance Can Spread as Fast as Mistrust, Psychologists’ Studies Find.”

That’s what I’ve found at Old Westbury, an island of integration on a largely segregated island. People getting to know each as human beings is the key. This must spread.            

This coming Monday, November 24, the jig is up in New York State on zone pricing of gasoline—a scam that has especially impacted motorists on the East End.

Zone pricing is a marketing practice of the oil industry under which gas stations in various geographic areas are charged different wholesale prices. The oil industry figures that in certain zones, people have a lot of money—so it can hit them with gas at a higher price.

Although the new law is to take effect in days, the industry was sticking with its old trick last week. On Friday, driving past Medford, then through Riverhead and then Flanders, gas was $2.29 to $2.35 a gallon. But then, when I got to Shinnecock Hills, the cheapest was $2.69 a gallon.

The oil industry line through the years about prices on the East End was that they simply reflected the additional transportation costs of trucking gas east.

Typical oil industry baloney. The last $2.29-a-gallon station I passed in Flanders was 8.5 miles from the first $2.69-a-gallon station in Shinnecock Hills. Does 8.5 miles justify a 15 percent price differential?

Up in Connecticut a decade ago, the state’s Office of Legislative Research conducted an investigation into zone pricing of gas and got an oil industry admission that there were “46 such zones in Connecticut.” Repeatedly introduced in Connecticut has been a similar bill to the one passed in New York.  It’s been passing in the Connecticut Senate but not House. Last year, again “proponents said the ban could lower prices at the pump,” relates the website of the Advocate newspapers in Connecticut. “But opponents cited a $40,000 Quinnipiac University study, funded by oil industry lobbyists, which concluded the ban would hike prices.” Funded by oil industry lobbyists!

I called Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell’s office and was told she still wants a ban on zone pricing of gas—but the House roadblock remains a big problem.

How did such a bill pass in New York State?

State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr. of Sag Harbor who has championed a New York prohibition on zone pricing of gas for more than 10 years gives this explanation: “I don’t want to say that there was a silver lining to the dark cloud of high gas prices, but with gas over $4.50 a gallon this summer, the amount of leverage the oil industry had on the political parties was substantially reduced. People were upset over gas prices. And it was an election year. So the major oil companies this year were unable to stop it. The stars lined up.”

It’s no toothless statute: the penalty for violating the law and engaging in zone pricing of gas carries a hefty penalty. The gas wholesaler is subject to a fine of up to “$10,000 for each violation,” says the bill signed into law by Governor David Paterson.

Mr. Thiele says he expects New York’s active Attorney General Andrew Cuomo will be “vigorous in enforcement.” Also, he welcomes any person who as of Monday notices “disparities in gas prices” which smack of zone pricing to contact his office.

As to how the oil industry manipulates the New York State Legislature, Mr. Thiele said it operates “behind-the-scenes” with “campaign contributions” the key tool.

Another measure involving the oil industry recently passed by the New York State Legislature and signed into law by Governor Paterson—beating oil industry pressure with the same configuration of political stars, says Mr. Thiele—is one that ends a restriction on the owner of a gas station affiliated with a major oil company “from going out on the spot market and buying unbranded gasoline,” the assemblyman explains.

This bill, which hasn’t gotten much notice, thus allows the gas station owner to buy cheaper gas and separately sell it as long as it’s identified as “unbranded.” Mr. Thiele was a co-sponsor of this new law, too.

Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry—and What We Must Do to Stop It by Antonia Juhasz is a fine new book about the oil industry.  She writes about the destructive impacts of the oil industry including to the environment and democracy.

Zone pricing and limiting gas station owners on what they sell are among many shady oil industry devices—these, at long last, are being stopped in New York State.

By Richard Gambino

A major reason for today’s “immigration problem” is never discussed — never even mentioned. It lies in a few  simple economic facts. One, the American economy (as measured by the Gross Domestic Product) is  at  over 14 trillion dollars. This is three times what it was just twenty-five years ago. The rate of unemployment  as of December 2007, before the current economic downturn, was just five percent. Based on these facts, it isn’t hard to see that the phenomenal growth of our economy in the last twenty-five years required immigrants’ labor — including the labor of illegal immigrants — and could not have risen to the present level without them. Another way of putting it is that if we had deported all 12 million illegal immigrants, the first thing we would  have had to do is scramble to replace them with 12 million legal immigrants used to manual labor, impossible given our immigration laws, or face a massive economic problem.

Another set of important “secrets” about immigration follows directly from the above. The reason that our border with Mexico was not sealed during the last two decades is that powerful cores of each political party in Washington, Democrats and Republicans, did not want to seal it. Technology existed to do so, e.g., satellites and aircraft with daylight TV cameras good enough to read a newspaper on the ground, nighttime technology almost as good, and we could have mustered manpower on the ground to work in concert with this technology. We didn’t do so because enough politicians knew well about the essential economic need for, and value of, the cheap labor provided by illegal immigrants in our economy. Without them, our crops, from Eastern Long Island to California, would rot in the fields, our motels, hotels, office buildings and other buildings would go uncleaned and unmaintained, our lawns untended, our restaurants unstaffed, and innumerable other types of manual labor not done. And, now, of course, each political party fears, and hopes to gain, “the Hispanic vote.”

Still another “secret” is a bit better known: the government of Mexico facilitated and still facilitates the exodus of its citizens to the U.S. as a safety valve for its failure to remedy the unemployment and poverty there. Just as in the era from 1820 to 1924, the governments of Italy, the Czarist Empire, Germany, Scandinavia, the British government of Ireland, and many other nations pushed their poor, 33.5 million of them, to go to the U.S., or turned a blind eye as they left.

In summary, a good deal of the responsibility for 12 million  immigrants being here illegally lies with the U.S. and Mexican Governments.

Let’s separate the border question from the question of the presence of the illegal immigrants already here. In 2008, we are in an economic downturn not likely to end for a couple of years, according to experts. Thus, the political calculus is changing. With the unemployment rate up to 5.7% in the second quarter, and the GDP up only 1% in the first quarter and 1.9% in the second, both political parties walk on egg shells about the illegals in our midst, fearing increased hostility toward immigrants. All of which gives fuel to immigrant-bashers, who, as is well known, are — one and all — direct descendants of the earliest pre-Columbian peoples who inhabited the Western Hemisphere. 

If the next Congress and the next President truly will it, the border can be and will be sealed, using the technology already cited. The second question, quite independent from the border, is: how are we going to treat the 12 million illegals already here? The days are over when the U.S. government could deport people, including some who were U.S. citizens, without due process of law, as it did with 400,000 Mexicans from 1929 to 1934, and 2.2 million Mexicans, in “Operation Wetback” from 1953 to 1955. Today’s  U.S. legal standards and today’s courts would not allow it. Moreover, legal due process for 12 million people would mean most of them, and us, would  never see the end of the police and court logjams that would be produced.

Of course, we can make the lives of today’s immigrants as hard as possible, just as was experienced in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Ghastly slum-housing, poor or non-existent medical care, grueling or dangerous work for poor wages, inferior schools and high early drop-out rates, short shrift and being cheated by governments and employers. For a glimpse of these in the twentieth century read Pietro di Donato’s powerful 1939 novel, Christ In Concrete. And for a taste of the bitter farm life of earlier immigrants on the American plains, read Willa Cather’s great 1918 novel, My Antonia. Now, pressure is building to penalize employers who hire illegals, with the goal of forcing the immigrants back to their countries of origin. But it won’t work, just as the immigrants of a century and more ago were not driven to leave. They knew that hard times in the U.S. were preferable to hard times in “the old country.”

Immigrant-bashers like to point  out that our ancestors came here legally. Because, except for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (instigated by California bigots), there were no restrictions on immigration until the 1924 National Origins Act, which drastically limited the number of immigrants, especially those from southern and eastern Europe, whom nativists blamed for the nation’s problems.

Today, in expressing their anti-immigrant sentiment, many echo the same complaints of previous times. Now, immigrants, especially illegals, are said to be loyal to a foreign nation, and so will never make good U.S. citizens, just as, starting in the 1850s, the nativist Know Nothing Movement won elections by claiming that Catholic Irish immigrants were loyal to a “foreign potentate,” i.e., the Pope, who was aiming to use them to subvert and take over the U.S. Want ads in newspapers and in store windows carried the phrase, “No Irish Need Apply,” a bow to the charge that the Irish immigrants were suppressing the wage scales of native-born Americans.

In 2008, we are given also other warnings about immigrants that … well, that are exactly the same as what Benjamin Franklin in 1751 warned about German immigrants who were coming in large numbers to Pennsylvania: “This Pennsylvania will in a few years become a German colony; instead of learning our language, we must learn theirs, or live in a foreign country.” But the American-born children of the Germans did learn English, just as the second-generation children of all past immigrants learned English — and the American-born children of immigrants are doing so today. (Time magazine claims that 88% of them are already fluent in English.)

Immigrants do press institutions like hospitals and schools in some localities, but many politicians prefer demagogic immigrant-bashing rather than come up with  constructive policies to address this. History does not repeat itself. But we can learn from it. Or choose to ignore it, and mindlessly construct a new Know Nothingism for the twenty-first century.

 

RICHARD GAMBINO is professor emeritus at Queens College (CUNY), where for decades he taught courses in immigration history and the history of immigrants to the U.S.