Vice President Kamala Harris visited San Francisco on Sunday to hold a fundraising event at an elitist venue in one of its richest neighborhoods.
Her event was at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill.
If you visit that hotel's website, you will see that its cheapest room on a weeknight this time of year is $264. However, it also offers a three-bedroom suite for $15,432 a night.
Going to the Harris fundraiser there, however, could have cost you far more than that.
The San Francisco Chronicle posted a story on Sunday with this headline: "700 at Kamala Harris' S.F. fundraiser, with tickets up to $500,000."
"Kamala Harris held a San Francisco fundraiser Sunday where attendance cost as much as $500,000, according to an invitation obtained by the Chronicle," the newspaper reported.
"Donors needed to spend at least $3,300 to enter the fundraiser; tickets costing less than $250,000 were sold out as of Thursday morning," it said.
"The top ticket was $500,000," said another story by the Chronicle.
The Nob Hill neighborhood where Harris held this fundraiser is sometimes called Snob Hill. A description of it posted on the website of a local tour company provides some sense of why this is the case. "One of the oldest and most illustrious of San Francisco's neighborhoods sits on Nob Hill," says Real San Francisco Tours. "It's also one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the whole world, in terms of per capita income (and real estate value), which isn't that surprising when you consider how expensive the Bay Area generally is in every way."
In fact, as this column has noted before, the seven wealthiest counties in this country -- when measured by median household income from 2018 through 2022 -- were all suburbs of San Francisco and Washington, D.C. San Francisco itself was the 11th wealthiest county -- with a median household income of $136,689.
So, what did Harris tell these individuals who paid up to $500,000 to meet with her on Snob Hill?
"Harris promised Sunday to 'put middle-class families and working-class families first. ... When the middle class is strong, our whole nation is strong," the Chronicle reported.
Seven years before this Nob Hill fundraiser, Harris gave her first speech on the Senate floor -- and it was not about working-class and middle-class Americans. It was about then-President Donald Trump's actions aimed at stemming illegal immigration.
"By fiat, we have seen the president stick taxpayers with a bill for a multi-billion-dollar border wall, without regard for the role of the U.S. Congress under Article 1 of the Constitution," she said. "By fiat, we have seen a president mandate the detention of immigrants, both documented and undocumented, creating a dragnet that could ensnare 8 million people.
"By fiat, the president has ordered the creation of what essentially will be a 15,000-member deportation force," she said.
"But the truth is," she said, "the vast majority of the immigrants in this country are hard-working people who deserve a pathway to citizenship."
Legal immigrants, of course, already have a pathway to citizenship. It is only those who have come here illegally or who have overstayed their visas, who do not.
What is the impact of illegal immigration on the working-class families that Harris told the crowd on Nob Hill she would put first?
On April 26, 1979, United Farm Workers of America President Cesar Chavez testified in a hearing at the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee held in Salinas, California. Chavez argued that illegal alien workers hurt the efforts of legal workers to earn better wages.
"For so many years we have been involved in agricultural strikes; organizing almost 30 years as a worker, as an organizer, and as president of the union -- and for all these almost 30 years it is apparent that when the farm workers strike and their strike is successful, the employers go to Mexico and have unlimited, unrestricted use of illegal alien strikebreakers to break the strike," Chavez told the committee.
"Lawbreaking begets more lawbreaking, and when these illegal aliens come in to break a strike they have to be harbored; they have to be transported; and labor contractors have to be used to direct them and supervise them," said Chavez.
"What about other laws?" asked Chavez. "What about the contributions the employers have to make to Social Security and unemployment insurance? How are those contributions made? These men do not have Social Security numbers."
How would Vice President Kamala Harris have answered Cesar Chavez?
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