Posted on 11/30/2001 7:47:46 AM PST by Stand Watch Listen
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, support for the United States has poured in from around the world, but the response from Mexico has been decidedly lukewarm. A Gallup poll reported that 78 percent of Mexicans oppose contributing troops to a multinational coalition, and we have seen no indication that Mexico will modify its oil policy of acting like a member of OPEC.
While there is no evidence that the 9/11 terrorists entered over the Mexican border, the trial in El Paso of an Iraqi smuggler produced evidence that he alone brought more than 1,000 Middle East illegals into the United States via that route, charging his clients $10,000 to $15,000 each. Border Patrol agents have confirmed the increase in illegal aliens coming from the Middle East across our southern border and the fact that Arabs pay up to $50,000 each for a "coyote" to smuggle them into the United States.
The 9/11 events have temporarily shelved the foolish proposals to grant amnesty to three million Mexicans illegally living in our country. Unfortunately, there is no indication that Mexico has retreated from its longtime goal of opening the U.S. border.
In Chicago on July 27, 1997, then Mexican President Ernesto Zedilla told the National Council of LaRaza, "I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders." He announced a Mexican constitutional amendment that purports to allow Mexicans to retain their Mexican nationality even though they become U.S. citizens (which is contrary to the U.S. naturalization oath).
When President Vicente Fox came to the United States this year, he reiterated this line, proclaiming that "the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders" and includes migrants living in the United States. He called for open borders and endorsed Mexico's new dual citizenship law.
Some Mexicans use the term "reconquista," which is Spanish for reconquest, to describe their desire to see California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas acquired by Mexico and named the new country of Aztlan. They are teaching their youth that the United States "stole" those areas from Mexico and that they should be "returned."
The United States acquired the Southwest a century and a half ago in three ways: part by the 1845 annexation agreement with Texas, which was then an independent republic, part ceded by Mexico in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after the Mexican-American War, and part by the 1852 Gadsden Purchase.
Mexico's claim to the Southwest originated with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which drew an imaginary line on the map to divide the Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal. Because geography had so many unknowns at that time, Portugal got only Brazil (which is why Brazilians speak Portuguese).
Other countries never recognized this treaty, and Americans consider it ridiculous even to talk about giving the Southwest to Mexico. Most national borders all over the world have come about as the result of war.
Mexicans obviously have no thought of invading the Southwest with troops, so their hope is reconquista by migration, both legal and illegal. According to Mario Obledo, founder of the Mexican American Legal Defense & Education Fund, "California is going to be a Hispanic state and anyone who doesn't like it should leave."
An amnesty rally in the Los Angeles Sports Arena on June 10, 2000 attracted 25,000 people. In demanding amnesty for illegal Mexican aliens, the speakers proudly announced the names of at least a dozen unions in Los Angeles that are now headed by Mexicans.
Vicente Fox presented Mexico's Congress with a five-year development plan to eliminate the U.S.-Mexican border. He said he plans to serve "the 100 million Mexicans who now live in Mexico and the more than 18 million who live abroad," and to "strengthen our ability to protect and defend the rights of all Mexicans abroad."
Juan Hernandez, appointed by Fox as special liaison to Mexicans abroad, lobbies to get U.S. driver's licenses issued to illegal aliens and defends the Mexican government's issuance of desert survival kits to those sneaking across the border. On ABC's Nightline on June 7, he boasted: "We are betting that the Mexican-American population in the United States ... will think Mexico first."
Fox's five-year plan calls for building a larger consular presence in the United States, and this is already in operation. In U.S. areas with large Hispanic (including illegal) populations, the Mexican consul donates to the local public schools the same textbooks that are used in every elementary school in Mexico, grades 1 through 6.
The books, written in Spanish and including all academic subjects, teach that America "stole" the southwest from Mexico and that Mexico is entitled to take it back. The Mexican government considers these textbooks a symbol of Mexican national pride, guarantees a set to every Mexican child, and makes it a crime for anyone to sell them.
The only reason we learned about this Mexican plan is that one school in Santa Ana, California, decided to sell the books at a book fair and the local Hispanics kicked up a fuss about it. The school apologized to the Hispanics for selling the books, but should have apologized to the students for accepting the books in the first place.
The question we should ask our Mexican immigrant friends is, are you assimilating or invading?
Yeah, right. I'm sure Mexico came up with this "plan" involving several million people and the only way we found out about it was through the "fortuitous" discovery of a book at a Santa Ana bookfair. What a load of complete unadulterated horsebleep.
Know-Nothing Movement, a nativist political movement in the United States in the 1850's. It was organized to oppose the great wave of immigrants who entered the United States after 1846. Know-Nothings claimed that the immigrants—who were principally Irish and Roman Catholic threatened to destroy the American experiment. The Roman Catholic church, they charged, was subservient to a foreign prince (the pope), it was growing in power, and it potentially could exert political control over a large group of people. Such nativist sentiments had long existed among many Americans, but they had never before been expressed in such powerful form.
In several Northern states as early as the 1840's there were local nativist parties that drew support from the DEMOCRATIC and WHIG parties. By the early 1850's there was a trend to organize nationally against the presumed immigrant threat. The old parties, the nativists said, had not confronted the danger. The Democrats, it was charged, were supported by the aliens; the party needed their votes and catered to their whims. The Whigs appeared helpless before them.
Originally, nativist party members had worked through a number of secret societies, clandestinely throwing their support on election day with powerful effect to sympathetic candidates. Saying that they knew nothing about such activities, the nativists wreaked havoc with their votes in 1854 in the existing party system. They won sweeping victories at the state and congressional levels. They attracted many Northern Whigs to their point of view along with an important number of Democrats. Southern Whigs also joined because of growing sectional tensions caused by the reintroduction of the slavery issue into national politics in 1854. For a time it seemed as if the Know-Nothings (officially the AMERICAN PARTY) would be the main opposition party in the United States. Publicly backing Millard FILLMORE as a presidential candidate in 1856, they won more than 21% of the popular vote and eight ELECTORAL votes.
The Know-Nothings wanted to use government power to preserve their vision of a particular kind of Anglo-Saxon Protestant society. Their state and national platforms demanded that immigration be limited, that politics be “purified” by limiting officeholding to native-born Americans, and that a 21-year wait be imposed before an immigrant could become a citizen and vote. They also sought to limit the sale of liquor, to restrict public-school teaching to Protestants, and to have the Protestant version of the Bible read daily in classrooms. Despite their strength and appeal, the Know-Nothings were already in decline as a national party by 1856. Beset by differences over the slavery issue, many members joined the REPUBLICAN PARTY, which seemed sympathetic to much of their nativism and offered additional appeals on other important issues. Know-Nothing parties remained strong in a number of Northern states in the late 1850's, but the party was spent as a national force before the election of 1860.
The Know-Nothing movement illustrated two things: a persistent ethnoreligious hostility in American life that often intruded into politics and the potentiality for political disruption when existing parties fail to deal adequately with volatile social and political tensions. Although the movement quickly lost out to the Republicans, its ideas did not, and they formed one aspect of the Republican appeal for more than a generation to come.
Joel H. Silbey Cornell University
You people were dead wrong in 1850 and you're still wrong 150 years later.
More accurately, they are colonizing territory they believe is theirs.
How long have you been planning that post?
Waiting for the right moment?
Actually, we DO have it right by your own quotation - given the flood tide of Mexican-ness (immigrants, legal and illegal, dragging all the baggage of their other citizenship with them) and the events of 9/11 Americans have every right to "deal adequately with the volatile social and political tensions" thus created.
And a hell of a lot of us want those tensions sent back from whence they came.
They can haul the books and the flags they so love to wave in place of the US flag along with them.
The Irish and European Catholics brought with them European culture and values.
Mexicans bring neither.
If you wish to persist with a politcal philosophy that was exposed and discredited over 100 years ago, be my guest. Anyone who can fire more than 3 brain cells at once is mocking you.
????....hmmmmmm...sounds like a start to profiling.
....when existing parties fail to deal adequately with volatile social and political tensions.
Hmmm... seems many 'illegals' contribute mightedly to a present 'volatile social and political tensions'.
My ancestors were immigrants. They worked, they saved, they cherished family. They learned the language, the laws, the customs. The learned the history of this great nation and the sacrifices of its citizens. They assimulated into the great American melting pot, while still celebrating their unique traditions (within their own communities and not on the community at large). Political correctness was not fostered on the general populace.
Welfare/government entitlements were not an option, therefore not an inticement to migrate. 'Uncle Sugar Daddy' did not exist as we know it today.
Freedom for one's destiny was their goal. Freedom to succeed, freedom to fail. The choice was theirs and their 'families'.
Oh really? I'm pretty sure they speak SPANISH and are CATHOLICS for the most part. I guess you probably wouldn't want facts to get in the way of an otherwise solidly racist screed, now would you?
Hmm. Really? I grew up in Tustin right next door to Santa Ana and I've been working in Santa Ana for over two years now and I've never had so much as a hint of a problem.
And yet another racist lie goes up in smoke. This is starting to get monotonous.
We don't need such foolishness.
If you don't like America, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. You would probably be more comfortable in North Korea or China.
What part of Santa Ana, O enlightened and non-racist one? And what do you consider a "problem"? Obviously not the fact that folks are speaking Spanish instead of English and flying Mexican flags instead of American ones, right? BTW, did you ever consider that you might be getting tiresome too, O politically correct one?
The government doesn't like Anglo-Saxon and European republicans as they tend to resent government. It's decided it needs a new citizenry-- competing groups of social democrats--so it has set about importing them.
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