Gov. Jerry Brown announced Tuesday he’d like to build shelters for the thousands of young immigrants from Central America, currently illegally flooding California’s southern borders.
However, this is the same Jerry Brown who in 1975 complained vociferously about the Federal government plan to “dump Vietnamese on” California after the fall of Saigon.
This week Brown said, “Certainly I’d do everything I could to make sure California will do its part to shelter any young children that are in need of protection,” Brown told reporters.
However, in 1975, Brown had a very different view on large groups of homeless, foreign refugees; “We can’t be looking 5,000 miles away and at the same time neglecting people who live here,” Brown said about Vietnamese refugees, Breitbart’s Kerry Picket recently reported.
The Vietnamese people were fleeing Saigon and a brutal, repressive, dictatorship, which often imprisoned and tortured its own people. President Ford allowed the former South Vietnamese to be allowed to immigrate to the US if they had suffered persecution by the communist regime after 1975.
I remember – I was headed toward high school at the time.
Julia Taft was the head of President Gerald Ford’s Inter-Agency Task Force on Indochinese Refugee resettlement. Taft did an interview with National Public Radio in 2007 about President Ford’s decision:
“He was really committed to making sure that these innocent victims and people who had been allies of the U.S., that we just didn’t abandon them,” Taft said in an interview with NPR host Debbie Elliott.
- TAFT: At first, it was politically difficult. Our biggest problem came from California.
ELLIOTT: Why?
- TAFT: Jerry Brown.
ELLIOTT: Then the governor.
- TAFT: Then the governor. And Mario Obledo, who was the – I guess he was called the secretary of welfare or something. They were very difficult. They didn’t want any of these refugees, because they had also unemployment. They had already a large number of foreign-born people there. They had – they said they had too many Hispanics, too many people on welfare, they didn’t want these people. And we spent a lot of effort trying to ease their concern and really established for the whole country programs where the federal government would compensate states.
Brown as a national figure?
There is much speculation about Jerry Brown considering another run for President – his fourth to be exact. But first Brown, 76, must win his fourth term as California Governor. If/when he wins, he could be an 80-year-old governor in four years.
I predicted in October 2013 that Jerry Brown would run again for President, following his presidential bids of 1976, 1980 and 1992.
My prediction stands — Brown was in Mexico this week negotiating a climate treaty, with an “international delegation” he put together to apparently boost his “foreign relations” experience.
Lucky number three… four
“Lucky number three” worked for Brown when he ran for a third term as governor of California in 2010 — nearly 30 years after completing his second term. But lucky number three didn’t work out for Brown in his presidential bids.
His 1976 slogan was, “The Man of the Future, Who Respects the Past.”
Four could be Brown’s favorite number. Today, at 76, Brown could be enjoying retirement as do most state employees of a certain age. But really, who thinks Brown will retire when there’s a reelection campaign to run, and maybe even a presidency awaiting him when he’s 78?
Current Brown Immigration Legislation
While in his third term as governor, Brown has signed into law legislation allowing illegal aliens to obtain California driver’s licenses.
Brown has also signed legislation which allows illegal immigrants to obtain a California license to practice law.
Brown signed the California Dream Act in 2011, which allow students who are in the country illegally to pay in-state tuition and apply for grants and private-college scholarships, competing with legal residents of the state.
The California Dream Act rewards illegal behavior while placing a new financial burden on California taxpayers.
Brown signed all of this legislation while slashing and cutting crucial state services in concurrent state budgets. Brown said budget cuts would be “vast and hurtful, but it’s better to take our medicine now.”
Legal California residents have been prescribed bitter medicine from Dr. Jerry Brown.