..Jon Simonds..
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What Happened to the Dream?
The Basically Brooklyn Series

We know they're here and they come from places with names like Yemen and Iraq, Somali and Haiti; Vietnam and Cambodia and Costa Rica and Mexico.

We see them in places like Los Angeles and Chicago and Portland and New York where Trump is from and disliked, not because he is President of the United States, but because he is from New York and people in New York have watched him, for decades, con sub-contractors with his genius intellect and burn businesses all for the greater glory of Trump.

We've met them in bodegas throughout the Borough of Brooklyn and seen them in the Counties of York and Cumberland, behind counters; serving the public; these DACA dreamers Trump is so determined to rid the country of and one who truly looks at what they are doing, can only wonder about the obsession of this Administrations drive to rid us of our diversity?

I've been to the homes of some of these illegal aliens over the years and I can assure you there are no mansions lining the streets of places with names like Harlem or Bed Stuy. The store owners all share names like Sami and Chu. They also share apartments with coworkers and their wives and kids who all go off to school together. Those very apartments lack things like coffee tables, big screen TVs and floor space because the floors are covered with mattresses where three or four families sleep.

Rentals in places with names like New York and Boston and Portland aren't priced for common folk working eight-dollar an hour jobs, but the money they make goes back into the economy in which they live.

It goes to the grocer and the landlord and stationary store where they purchase school supplies for the kids too young to understand things like deportation. They spend much of this hard-earned money at clothing stores and gas stations to fuel the beat-up vehicles purchased on the worst of used car lots across the cities in which they reside. And they work, 18 to 20 hours a day, seven days a week. They don't have time to keep up with the latest Marvel movies, or wait on lines for the newest Iphone.

The Trump Police descended upon 7-11 stores across the nation a while back, shutting them down and checking the immigration status of many of their employees. If you happened to pull into the parking lot of one targeted store, you were told to leave. You might have looked for cameras thinking Hollywood was busy making another film about Nazi, Germany. One beer delivery guy in Los Angeles was told to shut off his truck and prove his citizenship. I wonder if he was hit with the popular SS phrase, "Your Papers, Please."

7-11, an immigrant corporation out of a place with a name like Tokyo in a country called Japan, as of this writing, had no comment for the AP, which picked up the story and ran it in newspapers in places with names that make up America.

I'm sorry they didn't use a quote from Sami, a Turk who ran a Bodega on Ave. M in Brooklyn. "It's getting so hard to make ends meet in this country. What happened to your dream?"

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