Editorial - Xenos, Refugees and the Price of Liberty

[Croft]

The Liberty Livewire - 824 AS

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Life or Liberty?

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So I couldn’t help but notice that we’ve had a lot of refugees coming into Liberty this past year. Thousands of them, tens of thousands even. Flooding in from every system and colony threatened by those Gallic psychos. All looking to escape the invasion that’s now resting on our doorstep.
But what about the other invasion? The one most people don’t seem to notice, the one that’s been going on before the Gallics ever put a toe towards Liberty. The invasion of the job stealers.

Sure, this is probably the biggest wave of foreigners we’ve had so far but they’ve been trickling into our homes and our work for years without anyone batting an eye. I tell you this year not a week has past that I haven’t seen some johnny-come-lately waltz by my diner without a glance, why? Because I serve the unsung heroes, the hard working Joes who keep Liberty running. The same men and women their kind are pushing out of work.
I honestly don’t care where you came from, so long as you do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay you’ll be welcome at my joint. Like the regular bunch of Rheinland guys I see every morning. They may be garbage men but I’ll be damned if they aren’t always smiling and laughing. Those are the kind of people who make Liberty great.

Problem is the scales have tipped and there’s more refugees coming in than jobs to fill which is bad news all round. Especially for the Boron Miners Union. These guys have been trying to get better conditions and a decent wage out of DSE for years until finally they decided to strike. Now Pittsburgh is mined by a scab workforce of desperate and barely paid refugees who were plucked right off the welfare line by Deep Space Engineering, because why fix something when you can hire people who won’t complain?
You can’t blame a poor sap for wanting to live a little better but you try explaining that to a guy who's just lost his livelihood and his job. Can you imagine what it’s like to have everything ripped away from you, your home, your job, your very means of living. All that taken by someone who shouldn’t even be here?

It’s no wonder the Xenos have been getting popular. Every year the government outsources more jobs and imports more goods. It’s got to a point where Liberty produces almost nothing for itself and mining boron out of Pittsburgh is about the only honest day’s labor a guy can do. Now even that’s being overrun.
Right now the Xenos are the only ones looking out for the regular Joes. Congress wants to keep their power, corporations want their money and the LPI wants more prison labor. If something doesn’t change soon it won’t matter if we win against the Gallics, we’ll be at war with ourselves and that’s a fight no one's going to win■

Signed, Charlie G.

Tags: Liberty, Refugees, Xenos, DSE, Boron Miners Union, Unemployment.

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