Tuesday, March 28, 2006

2330 Illegal Immigrant Demonstrations

Does it strike you as odd that students who may be here illegally leave school illegally to demonstrate against a proposed amnesty program that might make them legal? I don't think this is impressing the general American public, even though we are all "children of immigrants" (mine came in the 1600s and 1700s). Body Parts, a blogger from California who is much closer to this than we are (although there were demonstrations here in Columbus, too) had this to say:

Why do they think that non-Mexican Americans will be persuaded of the rightness of their cause when they wave Mexican flags?

If they want immigration from Mexico to be unrestricted so that their relatives and others in Mexico can come to the US to obtain better lives, why do they also carry banners calling for return of the Southwestern US to Mexico? Imposition of the social and economic structure of Mexico on the US would simply reproduce the kind of misery that 40% of Mexicans say they want to escape by moving to the US. Mexico is a de facto caste society, with racially based exclusion of native Americans, ownership of the majority of property and income and control of the government in the hands of a ethnic Spanish-legacy minority, and a nearly impoverished Mestizo middle class living off state bureaucracies. Mexico is a morally, ideologically, and socially failed society. If American students of Mexican descent are so eager to live in such a society, they should go sneak across the border into Mexico and live there.

I dare say.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Norma - My son is learning about immigration in school, we watch this story with interest.

Harrison said...

If your family arrived in the 1600's and 1700's they were not immigrants. They might have been explorers, adventurers, servants, slaves (of a number of colors, btw), but not immigrants. They most probably came to a colony or settlement of the English king as English citizens. Ergo, they could not immigrants any more than moving from OH to CA makes you an "immigrant." (Yet.)

Only those whose forefathers arrived after the Revolution, after the time the U.S. became an independent country, would be "children of immigrants."

Oh, and just in case someone wants to go there--this landmass we call the United States was not "united" by Native Americans. They themselves were a host of various "nations."

Renee Nefe said...

The attitudes were similar when I lived in FL. The Cuban immigrants flooded the state and expected it to be their "New Cuba". What gives them the right?

Norma said...

OK. Can we be "children of emigrants?" They left home and family and came to a new place. They were not, for the most part English, but German and Irish. Germans had to swear allegiance to the King, so there's a record. I think if you came from England there was no such record. The Irish were very eager to sign on to fight in the Revolutionary War.