Did I hear that right?

The Candidate Forum Greatest Hits - March 2, 2009
On the question about whether or not the city staff should regularly audit contractors who do business with the city to see if they are hiring illegal aliens.
Candidate Bruce Trego said: “No, I would not. In fact, Hell no, I would not. I would fight such a measure. It’s too divisive. This isn’t Germany 1939; it’s America 2009. It is extremely divisive for our community. So, no. No way.” (It is interesting to note that at this point Trego got a round of applause from a group of people in the audience wearing Emi Morales T-shirts.)

Now, keeping in mind that the city agreed to do this way back in January of 2008, the comments of incumbent John Walters are particularly interesting. Walters said: “In our contracts that we have with a lot of our contractors we do get a spot-check and we do find them. We do make them give us their lists and they do have to prove that they have been E-Verified. But to ask AT&T or ComCast or anybody like that, forget it; you’re not going to get it. So really I can’t say that you could do this with all employees and I don’t know who the employee would be that would have to do it, because we’ve had to let employees go in this budgetary crisis and everyone that’s working down there is working almost to the nth of their degree so I don’t know who we’d assign this job to. I don’t know that it can happen.”

We wish to thank Councilman Walters for confirming that the January 2008 city initiative was nothing more than window-dressing designed to calm people down rather than address the problem of illegal aliens.

When answering the question about the long delay in getting a response from Immigration on ICE ACCESS (enforcement support) and what we should do about it, Bruce Trego once again chimed in with: “War on drugs, war on terrorism, and now we are going to have a war on illegal aliens and criminal aliens. We wonder why our taxes are so high. It’s because we’re out there fighting everything and we’re expecting all sorts of services. The police department is basically doing what it can. ICE is overloaded at this point simply because other communities, such as ourselves, are putting the pressure on them. I think that we’re doing everything that we can at this point. We have other issues that are far more important that need our attention, than the illegal immigrant situation.”

About the overcrowding problem in Elgin housing, once again Mr. Trego says: “When we chased ‘those people’ out (of Casa Linda) we didn’t provide any alternative for where they were going to go, which to me is when overcrowding started. We basically haven’t allowed affordable housing to be built in this town for many, many years. We don’t need more affordable housing. We need the right, appropriate housing; the right size, in the right locations. We need to expand it and scatter it so it’s not ghetto-ized like it’s becoming at this point in time. So, we’ve kind of caused the problem to ourselves. Poor people don’t move out of town, they simply move in with each other. We’ve been chasing our tails on this issue. So until we start getting down to the affordable housing issue, and starting to build those, we’re going to continue to have these problems.”

The next question is about the rule of law. Here’s the question: “When a council member is sworn into office he takes the oath to uphold the laws. Illegals are breaking the laws by being here. Do you believe that anyone who supports or defends illegal immigration should sit on the Elgin council? Yes or no?”
Walters: “Yes.”
Dunne: “No. They should not sit on the council.”
Figueroa: “Yes.”
Khan: “No.”
Nowak: “No.”
Prigge: “No.”
Quezada: “No.”
Scruggs: “No.”
Trego: “Yes, anybody should be able to sit whether they support illegal or not.”

More to come. It takes time to transcribe the tape.