Posted on 10/21/2006 6:52:00 AM PDT by El Oviedo
News media converged on Tan Nguyen's Garden Grove campaign office Friday expecting to hear from the Republican congressional candidate about a mailer sent out this week warning immigrants against voting in the November election.
Instead, the media horde got a front-row seat to a half-dozen agents from the state Attorney General's Office serving search warrants and combing through Nguyen's office.
Officers confiscated three computer hard drives, checked for fingerprints, leafed through files and interviewed Nguyen's attorney. Agents also searched Nguyen's Santa Ana home and a campaign worker's Anaheim home.
Despite burgeoning state and federal probes into the flier, Nguyen's attorney said Nguyen has no plans to withdraw as the Republican nominee for the 47th Congressional District race against incumbent Democrat Loretta Sanchez.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
While there's a connotative canard used by the Rats that plays word games with terms like "immigrant" or "alien" or "illegals" or other immigration terms, they love to blur the lines to include all immigrants regardless of legal status.
An immigrant is not yet a citizen. They may be a resident alien (e.g. a legal immigrant) but only citizens (naturalized or native-born) can legally register for voting in CA.
If the intent of letter was truly harmless and only to warn off voter fraud, we have to assume the controversial portion was sloppily worded but likely accurately worded just the same.
This "raid" (which is a bit extreme) will be a witch-hunt to find out if the intent of the letter was intimidation of legal voters.
Since Tan emigrated from Vietnam and is a naturalized U.S. Citizen, this could be an interesting case. We should not overlook, however, that he was very recently a Democrat candidate against Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R), 46th District.
and the whole thing must be investigated....it was brought to court and the decision was, "Yes, there were illegal votes cast, but there weren't enough to overturn the result." They took a representative number of ballots and predicted what the total of illegal MAY have been.
Before she was elected,....she had an Anglo name. What it was, I don't remember. She changed it to pander to the Hispanic vote.
You're exactly right that "emigrado" is a noun ("emigrant"), rather than a participial adjective, and refers to the reader. The confusion comes with the second "es," which also refers to the reader (this time meaning "you are" rather than "it is").
The Spanish use of the formal third-person pronoun "usted" (abbreviated "ud.") to address the reader requires the matching third-person singular form ("es") of the verb "ser" ("to be"). As a result, it's easy to correlate "es" with "ilegal" in the first instance and to miscorrelate it with "emigrado" in the second.
The Spanish writer could have eliminated any chance of misunderstanding simply by repeating "usted": "Se le avisa que si su residencia en este país es ilegal o si ud. es emigrado..." ("You are advised that if your residence in this country is illegal or if you are an emigrant...").
Just a pair-o'-pennies from someone who does this stuff for a living.
"Informing a "citizens of the United States who is otherwise qualified by law to vote" who happens to be an immigrant."........... Polybius
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Webster Dictionary:
Immigrate: To come into a country of which one is not a NATIVE, for the purpose of permanent residence.
Immigrant: One who immigrates; one who comes to a country for the purpose of permanent residence; -- correlative of emigrant. Syn. -- See Emigrant.
Emigrate: To remove from one country or State to another, for the purpose of residence
Emigrant: One who emigrates, or quits one country or region to settle in another
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Thesaurus - Houghton, Miflin Company:
Native : person BORN in that country. Antonyms: immigrant.
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What stumps me is that after all the hard work exhibited by the reply and, hopefully, some education along the way, Amerigomag can't grasp the concept that "citizen" defines your civic rights within a country and "immigrant" (as oppossed to "native born") defines how you ended up in that country once upon a time.
Let's repeat that.
The word "citizen" defines your civic rights within a country.
The word "immigrant" defines how you ended up in that country once upon a time.
Now, class, let's use these words we have learned in a question and answer session.
Is Arnold Schwartzenager an immigrant to the United States?
Yes, Arnold Schwartzenager (straight out of Webster's Dictionary) came "into a country of which one is not a NATIVE, for the purpose of permanent residence". Arnold Schwartzenager is and will always be "an immigrant from Austria".
Is Arnold Schwartzenager a U.S. citizen?
Yes, he is a naturalized citizen.
Is Arnold Schwartzenager eligible to be elected President of the United States?
No. Arnold Schwartzenager is an immigrant from Austria, he is therefore not native born and the Constitution specifically states that only native born citizens can be President.
So Arnold Schwartzenager is a U.S. citizen but can not be President because he is an immigrant from a foreign country?
Correct.
But a U.S. citizen that is native born and not an immigrant from another country can be President?
Correct.
So, being a citizen and being an an immigrant from another country are two separate issues?
Correct.
So, like, in The Terminator, if Arnolds travels back in time and brings his own pregnant mother to the U.S. to give birth and he then is native born instead of an immigrant from a foreign country, can he then be President of the United States?
Well,....ummm.... yes, but that is making things way more complicated than they need to be.
Where the author of the letter screwed the pooch is in the addition of the text I have put in boldface in the English translation below:
"You are advised that if your residence in this country is illegal or you are an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime...."
In the English version, you would only need to delete "or you are an immigrant".
In the Spanish version, you would only need to delete "o si es emigrado".
Thank you.
Thanks.
Actually, since we are no longer governed by the literal Constitution but rather by a built up list of things we have gotten away with in the past ...
I agree. That is why I feel that words have to have meaning or else the law means whatever the chicken entrails diviner in black robes wants it to means.
Also, have you considered that once one is a "citizen" they are no longer a legal immigrant? That the status of "citizen" trumps and overrules "immigrant" ...
However, as I pointed out before, the term "immigrant" is so extremely vague that the U.S. Government avoids the term as a legal status and, instead, uses the precise terms of "Illegal Alien", "Resident Alien", "Non-Resident Alien" and "Naturalized Citizen" for all individuals that are not native-born citizens.
"Immigrant" refers to "how you got here" as does such terms such as "Mayflower Pilgrim" or "Forty-Niner" or "Settler".
Even 50 years after a pioneer settler had unhitched his covered wagon and had first broken sod on virgin land and after a metropolis had grown around him, an "Original Settler" was still an "Original Settler" in that community.
Likewise, Arnold Schwarzenegger will always be an "immigrant from Austria" as opposed to "native born".
The original text in Spanish used the term "emmigrant" which is even more confusing.
You can not "immigrate" to Place X without also "emmigrating" from Place Y. So you can say that the terms, for most practical purposes, are interchangable.
However, in this paritcular case, it creates even more confusion in the mind of the recipient because, even if that American Polybius is arguing with other Americans on Free Republic about what the word "immigrant" means in America, there is no doubt that, in the rest of the World, the words "emmigrant" means that you left the land of your birth to live in another country.
Regardless of how Americans butcher their own language, a person that left Mexico to live in another country will always be an "emmigrant" as far as Mexicans are concerned and Arnold Schwarzenegger will always be an "emmigrant" as far as Austrians are concerned.
When the Mexican-born naturalized American citizen reads the phrase "o si es emigrado" ("or if you are an emmigrant"), that Mexican-born naturalized citizen thinks, "Yep. That's me. I emmigrated from Mexico on July 27, 1993."
The letter, in effect, is equivalent to that joke letter that makes e-mail rounds before every election that you are supposed to send to your friends in the opposite party telling them that, this year, the elections have been changed from Tuesday to Wednesday.
In this case, however, the letter was actually sent and the Attorney General of California is not amused.
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