After Jay Ressler’s comment, I did write a long post explaining what I meant by that statement.

Here is a link, if you care to read it
http://codesmithy.wordpress.com/2007/08/11/xenophobia-robert-murray-and-motives-to-question/

As with all nuanced statements on the Internet, I fully expect it to fall on deaf ears.

I understand immigrants come to this country looking for a better life. Hell, my ancestors did so at one point also. I’m perfectly fine with that. Although, I also think that it is necessary to control the rate. But, one thing I don’t want to have happen is for people desperate for work to be taken advantage and to have their health and personal safety at risk. I feel this mine collapse was one of those cases were workers were taken advantage of.

Undocumented workers and foreign workers are put at huge disadvantages when it comes to their basic rights. They are can have their work visas revoked to being threatened with INS before they get a chance to get paid (this happened in some cases during Hurricane Katrina reconstruction). Democracy is about more than electing the person who gets put into office. It is about being empowered throughout the society, and that means having your health and safety looked after and treated like an equal. Economically, yes that does mean not giving someone a job if it is too dangerous, doesn’t pay enough, or similarly not up to the standards deemed fit by our society.

I saw this accident as a horrible and greedy man taking advantage of desperate people in order to make more money for himself. Then, when the accident happened, blamed it on everyone and everything except himself. I, in fact, called him a “sociopath.” It was especially insulting when he used the spectacle of accident he helped create to spew his political agenda. I empathized greatly with the family members who lost loved ones in this “accident” (I would call it homicide). If it were up to me, Robert Murray would be in jail right now.

But, I guess Betty, you are ok with people getting taken advantage of. Because, after all, they are doing jobs you don’t want to do. You enable their second-class status, and if any one spouts one word of criticism about the system that causes it to happen, well they must be racist and anti-Mexican. The real difference between Betty and myself is that I believe a person’s life is just important as anyone else‘s. Apparently, Betty doesn’t. So, who is the real racist here?

I find your comment disgusting and I hope none of the family or friends of those past Mexican workers read your article. To lose someone and read this trash about their lost ones… is horrible. You are a very disgusting sad racist person!!!

But I found your comments about Mexicans just as repulsive as many of Murray’s rantings which I’ve been paid to sit through.

Especially in Utah, Mexican coal miners have raised the bar in the fight for the rights of all labor. At a time when hardly anyone was doing anything to organize miners, in an industry that is more and more nonunion, Mexican mine workers at the Co-Op mine in Emery County Utah waged a heroic fight to organize the UMWA earlier in this decade.

The UMWA local I was a member of at Murray’s Maple Creek mine organized significant solidarity with those men and women.

Shame on you for your anti-worker xenophobia.