On Immigration

Immigration as a serious concern impacting ...

millions of innocent American citizens.

This is primarily a propaganda effort akin to the Gingrich imagery prior to welfare reform in the 1990's that fed off citizen's imagination of welfare queens, lazy single mothers and deadbeat dads lurking on welfare rolls all over the country.

It was in fact a repuglican attempt to capitalize on the knee-jerk reaction back then when someone ahead of them in the check-out line started waving food assistance coupons (the easily discernible funny looking money) at the cashier.

No lie was bigger than the myth of massive welfare fraud that needed to be cleaned up. The reality was a reformation of a government system of handouts that enabled apathy and discouraged initiative on the part of welfare recipients.

The welfare budget impact on national GNP and budget has always been essentially less than the price of one aircraft carrier but the politicians, needing fodder on which to tread with their upwardly mobile inflammatory jack boots, taught us all to belittle and disrespect the poor single welfare mothers (or less frequent fathers.)

We were told to be indignant and the stampede was set off. ("of course MY child could never be one of those welfare addicts. How could that child ever humiliate ME? Of course I'm for Welfare Reform!)

For immigrants today we are left with the bad seed of an idea that because of the flow of illegal immigrants into this country, we are on the verge of economic and political collapse because we don't have a Berlin wall on our borders keeping the pestilance out.

We are left with a desparate President willing to deploy from 3000 to 10,000 Nation Guard troops to protect us from what he makes out to be a 21st-Century alein "Tet Offensive" from which comes his highest priority: the protection and well-being of the American people.

Yeah right!

For every Berlin wall-advocate I'd like to see an acknowledgement not of the criminality of businesses that hire illegals, but the political criminality of demonizing workers with families who pay taxes off their fake SS cards (thereby possibly benefitting some unaware American citizen who is getting credit for those tax payments) while at the same time claiming that tax revenue for self-interested Rethuglican priorities and advocating building a wall to keep the revenue source out ... they're fools and want us to join them in the fools club.

If one's political thinking never evolves to the kind of depth and complexity that the issue merits, one remains a political partisan making a fragile no-substance mountain out of a molehill of a problem.

The recent Latino protests in reality could have been proclaimed as a protest against political exaggeration and insult to an American electorate.

From my own experience in the welfare office it's mostly the laziest native born gringo/jingo Americans that whine about not being able to find a job because the Mexicans took them all.

You know, they act like certain political role models who claim one false thing to puruse another more dreadful false thing.

As a gringo myself who pays attention to demographics and the Hispanic culture in which I have family, part of me looks forward to the day when Hispanics outnumber jingoes - er, gringos.

Why?

Because for Hispanics, Asians and other American sub-cultures in which which more and more citizens are being born, there remains ample substance of CULTURE and a consistent value system that reflects cultural mores of behavior, responsibility and respect (especially respect for parents and senior citizens); a social value system that has been been rapidly fading for years from the consumption-prioritized white American citizenry that stops, looks and listens every time a nursing home advertises how easy it would be to buy your way out of taking care of your elders.

Another example of jingoism disgracing a nation is the notion that those who come here must speak English or die. In my experience, I've seen impending deaths of elderly immigrants and the children of immigratns averted only because they sought and found someone who could speak their language and listen to them talk about their child's or parent's health problem before it was too late.

That's a single example of how mass jingoistic stupidity turns the beneficiaries of the American dream into the Captain Hooks for whom the Crocodile waits.

There is nothing dumber than the statement that "My immigrant ancestors had to learn English and these are no better." Those ancestors learned English as a matter of expediency, need and genuine willingness to adapt and enter our society and not out of a need to make jingoist speeches.

They didn't do so because jingoes refused to talk to them or deal with them.

We don't have a mountain of a problem with immigration in this country. We have a mountain of a problem from the sons and daughters - both elected and unelected - who are descendants from immigrants.