“perhaps we can convert them”
Ha! Maybe a handful. How many Mexicans do you know personally in New Jersey? Did you ever notice that most countries south of the Rio Grande are 3rd world hell-holes? Ever wonder why? There is a cultural mentality down there that isn’t going to change any time soon. Even after generations living in the US, they still have a different concept of government. Study voting records if you don’t believe me.
The unique qualities of Americans reflect both the selection process that determined who came here, and the experiences that those settlers had, in building societies from the ground up. Here, ideology was grounded on experience--as opposed to that substituted for experience in all Leftist (Egalitarian/Collectivist or Socialist) regimes. In the latter, theory, not experience, has been applied.
To understand how Academic fantasy has been substituted for reality over the last century, see Myths & Myth Makers In American "Higher" Education.
Of course, the tactics of the Leftists in the Academies, as in the Media, is never really to debate the issues. The tactic is to try to discredit any challenge by hissing insult & nasty labels. We will either learn to weather this abuse, and persist in the pursuit of truth; or we can just abandon the promise that once was the sacred birth right of Americans.
William Flax
D’Oh. Felt the heat emanating from the computer and realized I didn’t put sarcasm tag on. My bad. Friendly fire well deserved. I walked into it.
In 1969, my South American history prof put what she called "the $64,000 question of Latin American history" to us. Simply put, except for the Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda, who'd won one of the great literature prizes mostly for being Communist, Latin America was bereft of Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, inventors and great scientists. They had a society that, in 1900, was in many ways as advanced as Europe's, particularly the Big Three or "ABC" countries of Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. Then everything turned to crap ..... but either before or after, Latin America never produced the high-achieving individuals who proliferated in North America and Europe. The question was, "why"? It's still valid, despite the distribution of a few politically-motivated attaboys like Neruda's.
Anyone care to take a crack at this one?
But what people addressing the immigration question don't get is that, add a ton of very different people to the original stock, and you get a big mess, and probably a lot of social grief, on your hands. We've very likely bought ourselves a civil war.