Mitt Romney: The Buck Stops With the Landscaper

Mitt "Patria o Muerte" Romney has fired his landscaper for hiring illegal immigrants to tend the grounds of his estate in suburban Boston, which Giuliani memorably referred to in a recent debate as "sanctuary manor." The landscaper, of course, was merely the middleman, whose job it was to hire and pay the workers. The boss, who paid both the landscaper and the workers, was Mitt Romney; but the buck stops with the landscaper (literally). Not very presidential, to say the least; but eminently patrician.

Of course, we believe Romney when he says that he didn't know for a fact that his lawn, hedges and trees, the mini forest in which he immures himself, was tended by undocumented workers. He didn't see the workers for the trees. He could have walked right pass them and he wouldn't have noticed them. He should have known, however, that no one in Boston works for $5.00 an hour except "illegals." If he can even find white or black landscapers in Boston, he had better be ready to pay them more than $5.00 per hour. He certainly can afford not to break the law or compromise his xenophobic principles.

It must be in the water that both Democrats and Republicans imbibe in Massachussetts. Political craveness, that is. The Kennedys have no monopoly on it, and it's a miracle they have been contaminated to the extent they have because water is not exactly their favorite drink. It is Romney's only drink and he takes it undiluted since not only alcohol but coffee, tea and soda are forbidden to Mormons.

This may explain why Romney is as hateful and warped as he is: not because he is a Mormon (the Latter-Day Saints, after all, consider the Mexican descendents of the Aztecs to be God's chosen people, to whom Christ supposedly appeared in North America after His Crucifixion with a new revelation contained in the Book of Mormon) but because he is the creature of a political culture which, whether on the right or left, is nativist and exclusionary, as Irish immigrants learned 150 years ago and as Hispanics are learning today. The Boston nabobs eventually accepted the Irish, who, after all, were white if Catholic. (The Ku Klux Klan, too, would eventually accept Catholics as white). But whether Hispanics will ever be tolerated, let alone embraced, by the establishment in Romney's neck of woods, remains to be seen. Of course, nothing is impossible. The Mormon Church banned blacks from its priesthood from the time of Brigham Young because it considered them the accursed children of Ham, condemned to labor as slaves. In 1978, the Prophet of the Mormon Church (yes, that's his official title), received a revelation that blacks were no longer cursed and could enter the Mormon priesthood (to which all male Mormons belong). I remember that The New York Times was actually able to find one black Mormon sympathizer who rejoiced at the prospect of being the first black sheep to be let into the fold.

Romney can still play the race card in Massachussetts with no backlash from his white constituents since they use undocumented Hispanic workers exactly as Romney did, because their labor is cheap and they are powerless. It is in their interest, as in Romney's, to keep them that way. If Mexican migrants were granted legal residency, not only would they be ill-disposed to accept slave's wages but they would support the only party that doesn't demonize them, and this is something that someone like Romney cannot allow. Republicans in Massachussetts are already a minority; it is doubtful how much more of a minority they can become and still remain viable after bogeyman Ted Kennedy passes from the scene. For Romney there is no compromise; he will not concede even an inch to common decency or humanity. He made that quite clear at the last presidential debate where he savaged Mike Hucklebee for granting merit scholarships to undocumented high school students in his state. This is not even Romney at his most draconian. He also favors excluding these students from public schools and, at the very least, denying them school lunch. What he really wants, of course, is a Constitutional amendment that would deprive the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants of their citizenship. With the exception of Hucklebee and Giuliani, the rest of the Republican candidates are just as xenophobic as Romney though somwhat more discreet (except Tancredo, without whom Romney would be the Ultima Thule of nativism in the Republican Party).

There are those who believe that Cuban-Americans receive a "free pass to white" from Republicans. This is simply not true. Republicans can't tell a Cuban from a Mexican, and, much worse, they regard Mexicans as the real threat to the stability of this country, not Castro and his South American disciples. Not that Democrats are any different. But Cuban exiles, of course, don't support Democrats.