Mark Cromer:

WHAT’S the difference between an illegal immigrant on a job and a “scab” that crosses the picket line? After all, aren’t both merely seeking work where they can find it? Aren’t both willing to toil at a lower wage in an effort to feed their families?

The difference - at least in the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America - is Hollywood liberalism and the bicoastal 213/212 area code universes that ideologically feed it.

For what the strike by the WGA has revealed yet again is that outrage among the Los Angeles-Manhattan intelligentsia over corporate greed, unfair labor practices, stagnating wages and vanishing job security is directly related to the income and education level of those threatened.

Consider for a moment the hundreds of thousands of American workers in California alone who have been forced from jobs in construction, landscaping, auto-body repair, cable installation and a host of other jobs by an alliance of greed-driven employers and an ethnocentric lobby that’s hungry for demographic power.

These aren’t crop-picker or dishwasher jobs that Americans allegedly won’t do, but rather entire skilled and semi-skilled industries that have provided the butter and bread for the working class table.

Where is the outrage within Hollywood’s fabled “Thirty Mile Zone” for these displaced workers?