...And as Billbear pointed out, it's the illegal immigrants.
See, immigrating to the US is great, and we all wish you'd do more of it. But there are RULES, you see. LAWS governing the manner in which you may do so, and when you break those laws, you are a criminal.
A criminal, you see, is someone who breaks the laws of the society in which they find themselves. The government, in passing more stringent regulations for immigration, and more severe penalties for illegals, is not "criminalizing" illegal immigrants - they are already criminals - but merely changing the fashion in which those laws are to be enforced.
Theodore Roosevelt talked about immigration quite extensively throughout his later life. There is a fairly well-known speech of his about the topic, often emailed as spam, with the misattribution declaring that he said it when he was President, which is in fact not true; it was from a letter he wrote 3 days before his death in 1919. However, it's still true, so without further ado:
In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.Now, I can understand simple things.
I grit my teeth when I see someone, here, flying the El Salvadorean flag; you're not IN El Salvador, there, bud, and expecting you to act as though you wish to be a part of this society does not diminish your cultural heritage. Neither does expecting you to learn the lingo; I guarantee that if you move to Mexico, they will expect you to learn Spanish, and there aren't any foreign-language citizenship applications in Mexico.
But none of that approaches the sheer effrontery of "Nuestro Himno," the illegals' marching song - the United States' national anthem, translated into Spanish, with additional lyrics urging their people to "break the chains." This is an insult to OUR cultural heritage. We have one, you know - it's why you want to immigrate to the US in the first place.
But let's be logical for a minute, hmmmm? I know it's a bit of a challenge for some, but give it a try.
The US is not like Mexico. It's not like Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Colombia, or Panama; the US is pretty much unique.
It's also the biggest economy in the world.
The two are not separate things; the factors that make the US unique are the same ones that make it the biggest economy in the world.
Which is why anyone from a poor country wants to come here - not because they like us, because by and large, they don't, but because they want the money.
Fine.
The problem is, if you come here from somewhere else, and refuse to assimilate into our culture, you will wind up with exactly the same conditions as pertain in the huge majority of the poor countries of the world today: warring tribes, squabbling like dogs over a scrap.
In other words: come here from Mexico, refuse to learn English, demand that our government perform to your standards, require services that most of our citizens don't qualify for, and refuse to support the existing culture, and if you succeed, the US becomes Mexico, part II.
Then we can all be poor together, and won't that be nifty?
Instead, we should deport the illegals, and make a serious, concerted effort to keep them out, rather than the half-assed nod in that direction for political capital we have today. Make the process of attaining citizenship simpler, but with firm requirements of English language use, both written and verbal; a "good faith" period in which you must remain employed, or face visa revocation; and tolerance for others equal to their tolerance for you, by which I mean - we require a common tongue in order to form a society. That doesn't mean I hate Spanish, but English is the lingua franca of THIS society. We have a flag. We have a national anthem. Accepting these things as part and parcel of your new life as a US citizen does not in any way denigrate your heritage; but you must be an American, or not. There should not be any hyphens, because hyphens imply in their nature a separation between two things.
In other words, if you're calling yourself a Mexican-American, then first you're saying you're not an American at all, and second, you're a segregationist, and we all know how well that worked out last time, don't we?
