The Opinion Blog

A Look in the Mirror



Sunday’s editorial offers a warm welcome to all of the region’s new Hispanic residents who showed up in the 2010 census.

If you could have put all of Myrtle Beach’s residents inside the city’s convention center in 2000, you would have noticed that about four out of five seats were filled with white residents. If you did the same thing today, that number would be closer to two out of three. While the city’s population grew 19 percent in the last decade, to more than 27,000, the city’s white population grew at a fraction of that pace, rising only 2 percent.

So who made up the difference? The city’s black population grew 30 percent, but it was the Hispanic population that skyrocketed, more than tripling in 10 years, so that now nearly 1 in 7 of the residents of Myrtle Beach are Hispanic. It’s a remarkable change for the city, but one that is hardly surprising. The area’s warm climate and relaxed nature attracts new residents, and while the region has been struggling recently with unemployment, the city’s hospitality industry still provides many jobs for newcomers.

Dream Deferred



Friday’s editorial laments the political gymnastics to which the DREAM Act has been subjected:

 

The rapid resurrection and subsequent defeat of the DREAM Act over the last two weeks stirs up, for us, strongly mixed emotions.

The well-worn bill provides a path to citizenship for children brought to this country by illegally immigrating parents, if those children attend college or join the military, and has been voted on in a number of different congressional sessions. This time, it was an obvious partisan political ploy, anticipated and rightly decried months in advance by U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and others.

Congress dithers as Mexico drug war rages

In an editorial last week, the Chicago Tribune scolds Congress for failing to act on the president's proposal to fuel the Mexican government's crackdown on drug cartels:

Within weeks of being sworn in as Mexico's president in December 2006, Felipe Calderon launched a scorched-earth assault on the drug cartels that infest the Sierra Madre Occidental.

Thousands of federal troops and army soldiers were dispatched to the mountainous region that stretches through northwestern Mexico into southern Arizona. Cocaine shipments were seized; marijuana fields were burned. Local police suspected of protecting or abetting the cartels were disarmed. Imprisoned drug kingpins who made a mockery of the judicial system by running their operations from behind bars were extradited to the United States to stand trial for trafficking.