For Lesko, lives aren’t essential but labor is
Yet another Arizona public official has distinguished herself in the last few days.
No, not the state legislator who last week worried that people who identify as nonbinary may someday see themselves as a barnyard animal. (Don’t ask.)
Today, it’s the remarkably compassionate Rep. Debbie Lesko, who apparently believes it’s just fine if undocumented workers want to pick the lettuce in her Caesar salad and trim the bushes in her Glendale yard.
Just don’t put those “very good workers” in line to be vaccinated against a potentially fatal virus that has disproportionately attacked Latinos and other minority populations.
Lesko last week argued in support of a proposed amendment to President Joe Biden’s COVID-relief bill — one that would bar undocumented residents from being vaccinated until the protection is offered to anybody else who wants the shots.
“I worked with people that are Hispanic,” she said, during a Feb. 11 meeting of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “I mean, they’re very good workers. You know, we’re compassionate people, but for goodness’ sakes, we have to take care of American citizens or people that are here legally first.”
The very compassionate Lesko went on to say she would be unable to explain seniors who live in her congressional district that we are “giving away” vaccines to people who are in the country illegally.
I mean, really. How crazy would you have to be to protect the people who harvest our crops and stock our grocery shelves and sanitize ours businesses and help our sick and infirm and generally have played a key role in keeping America going over the last year?
She’s a regular Mother Teresa, with faint traces of the genius that is Einstein.
Because, of course, it’s a wellknown fact that someone who is living among us without benefit of legal status cannot possibly transmit the virus to the rest of us. This virus, it seems, is not only deadly, but discriminating.
No need to listen to the infectious disease experts, people like, Dr. Anthony Fauci who would prioritize public health over the political payoff that comes with sticking it to immigrants who are here illegally.
“It doesn’t matter who they are,” Fauci said recently. “If you’re in the country, you’re a threat of getting infected yourself and of transmitting the infection. So there’s no room for any withholding of vaccines for people because they’re part of the population that we’re dealing with.”
No need to give in to logic and allow undocumented workers to get immu
nized when the vaccine becomes available for essential workers.
Better, it seems, for Lesko to bow not to logic but to her voter base. And so she tells them that immigrants want to cut in line ahead of granny. That’s ratings gold. And her base loves her for it.
“To place them in front of one single American that wants a vaccine is just off the mark,” a reader named Lance wrote, in response to my online column on Lesko’s comments.
“They are not a part of our population, they are criminal illegals that should be deported, as the laws on the books demand, and it is not the obligation of the taxpayers of the united states to pay everybody’s way,” Doug wrote. “They have a responsibility to the legal citizens, not illegals.”
“Illegals should not be here thus should not be getting the vaccine, let alone welfare, medicad, or any breaks they are illegal!” Craig wrote. “What don’t you understand?”
To answer your question, Craig: Any notion that it makes sense to use immigration status to withhold the vaccine from hundreds of thousands of Arizonans who work and live among us. That’s the part I don’t understand.
Arizona, by the way, is closing in on 15,000 dead. According to the state Department of Health Services, just 8% of the vaccine has so far found its way into the arms of Latino residents.
Possibly because the state’s appointments system favors those who have high-speed internet access and the luxury of time at a computer to snag a vaccine.
“Very good workers” often are out there, you know, working.
Essential to our country, just not important enough to protect.
Those pesky voters. Always getting in the way of our Republican legislators. So how do they solve that problem? Ignore the voters’ will!
Two years ago, voters defeated a Republican plan to expand private school vouchers by a margin of 65% to 35%. Pretty clear message?
Nope. Now Republicans are ramming an even larger voucher expansion through the Legislature. And in doing so, they’re doubling down on ignoring voters.
They are corrupting the voter-approved Proposition 301 funds — earmarked, according to the Republic, for “class size reduction, teacher salary increases and dropout prevention programs” — by diverting them to paying for kids to attend private schools.