| Illegal Immigration? rev. 06.18.2010 | Back to Lessons |
"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 person's becoming in every facet 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... 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."
---Theodore Roosevelt 1907
--- Quoted by Congressman Tom McClintock, (R, CA) in May, 2010
Now, I'm not a wall-builder. I'm not an isolationist. I like inclusion. If the right walls had been built and the right people excluded from the United States, I might not even have been born.
But this immigration thing with cards, licenses, and border walls has, in my not-so-humble-opinion [imnsho] gone 'way too far.
Today, people across the United States are marching and picketing for rights for illegal immigrants.
Hey, you morons out there: what part of "illegal" escapes comprehension by your brains?
If the people are here illegally, they're here illegally, and the first thing on anyone's menu should be to get them either back to the country they immigrated from, or figure out how to make them legal citizens!
Statistics show from the headlines of 'most any newspaper or TV news program that Illegals are very likely to drink and drive. They're likely to have no auto insurance, let alone liability insurance if they're in an accident.... a very bad combination.
But until they're LEGAL in this country, it really looks pretty stupid to me to argue what kind of card they should be carrying.
I'm a natural-born citizen of the USA, and pretty much all the ID card I need is a driver's license for virtually anything that requires personal identification. Sure, there are more secure ways of proving that I'm me, but they haven't been implemented yet.
If you can't speak English, learn English. If I travel or were to want to move to Mexico for example, I would not be demanding that the US flag be flown, nor that newspapers and voting material be printed in English.
Vincente Fox has done a lot for the wonderful, struggling people of Mexico. But has he changed national and state and city laws that restrict property-ownership or limit the ease with which one of his countrymen can create a company or own property? I think not. Work on him for that!
But please don't picket for rights which should only accrue to legal residents and citizens. That's not "our way." And please notice that we became the kind of country that you're trying to get into by behaving that way. If you try to push us back to that "Stone Age" mentality, we'll all be the worse for it. And you'll get opposition and no support from me.