Erick Salgado, the Brooklyn evangelical preacher and long-shot New York City mayoral candidate, thinks he got a raw deal at a debate between Democratic NYC mayoral candidates on Wednesday night. On Thursday, he wrote on Twitter that he hadn't been given the same amount of time - or afforded the same respect - as his fellow candidates. But he may have left his mark anyway, in a series of comments in which he said that undocumented immigrants in the city were living in modern-day slavery. "I want to be remembered as a mayor who fought for all the inhabitants of New York City, especially for those who are basically enslaved in this modern kind of slavery, which are the millions of Latinos who are undocumented, illegal." said Salgado in response to a question about what kind of legacy he wanted to leave behind as mayor.
"I believe that slavery is not abolished," he added. "Slavery has been transferred to my people. Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King fought for his people. I want to be remembered [as] the Latino guy who talked with an accent that stands for his people as well." Reverend Salgado, whose parents are from Puerto Rico and who grew up in the Bronx, is the only Latino candidate in this year's crop of candidates. According to his Facebook page, he worked for a year as a missionary in the Dominican Republic, distributing food and clothing to residents of the poorest parts of the country. In addition to running several churches in Brooklyn, he and his wife own a chain of religious bookstores in the Bronx, Staten Island and Queens as well as a network of Spanish-language evangelical broadcasts.
Salgado's churches belong to the Pentecostal evangelical sect, which is flourishing in New York City, especially in the city's most troubled neighborhoods. According to a series of articles published in the New York Times in 2007, one in every 10 New Yorkers is a member. The evangelical strain was conceived in Kansas about a century ago, and though it's typically associated with America's Bible Belt, its numbers are growing dramatically among Latinos in the United States and in Latin America.
After the debate, the reverend told the Huffington Post that his analogy was a "fair comparison". "If you study history, slavery is all about economic advantage of one group to the other," he told the site. "Slavery in North America was transferred from the native Indians to the African Americans, and now it's passed to this new generation of what they call alien."
Salgado doesn't just think the debate on Wednesday was stacked against him. According to Politicker, he has filed a lawsuit for no less than $1.5 million in damages against Quinnipiac University's polling firm for not including him in their poll of voter preferences for the NYC Democratic mayoral primary. The lawsuit would prohibit the firm from "conducting and/or releasing any voter preference poll for the New York City Democratic mayoral primary which does not include all candidates qualified to participate ... in the first primary election debate".
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