Posted on 10/28/2003 12:57:05 PM PST by quidnunc
There was a time, not so long ago, when we Americans understood that newcomers did not need to be taught in their own language in our schools. Even less did we believe that their children required special classes in ethnic pride or separate, race-based college graduation ceremonies. The very idea that a national lobbying group would call itself La Raza (The Race) — and have slogans such as: “For La Raza everything; for those outside La Raza, nothing” — would have seemed to us shocking, even chilling. We believed in American civic education for immigrants, which, combined with intermarriage, integration and popular culture, led to rapid parity for those immigrants’ children in terms of education, income and influence. Needless to say, in that earlier time, immigrants came to the U.S. from Mexico largely under legal auspices and in measured numbers that did not overwhelm our once formidable powers of assimilation.
What we see going on with Mexican immigration today is a tragedy, and it is not simply a result of the federal government abdicating its responsibility to control our borders (although the federal government has certainly done precisely that). The citizens of my state of California and others are also complicit in this tragedy. For instance, millions of us who used to cut our own lawns and clean our own houses now consider such tasks beneath us, as if America’s middle class has embraced as its birthright the culture and leisure once confined to an aristocratic elite. Suddenly our young people, our poor and our unskilled find jobs picking apples or laying tiles somehow demeaning. So-called dead-end jobs are no longer a rite of passage for our youth, but are deemed proper only for unskilled laborers from Mexico, whose toil, we are assured, keeps our produce, restaurants and hotels inexpensive.
Thus do we get in the habit of talking about illegal immigration in economic rather than in moral terms. But consider the situation from a moral perspective. Do we really expect hard-working youths from central Mexico to work 30 years in construction, hotels or the fields without marrying, having children, losing jobs or getting hurt? And how can such workers — without legal status, education or mastery of English — support a family on $10 an hour when most native Americans can’t do so on $20? Will we continue to shrug and say, “At least the money is better than in Mexico,” or, “None of our own people will do the work,” or, “They are going to drive anyway, so let’s give them driver’s licenses” — all the easy platitudes that justify the current chaos?
Unemployment is high and rising in California, but we are told that even more illegal workers from Mexico are needed. Can it really be the case that the free market can no longer operate to attract American workers through rising wages — even assuming an absence of a pool of unskilled labor? Meanwhile, many who ought to know better champion the employer’s right to hire whomever he chooses, and assure us that Mexican immigration poses no more of a problem for the U.S. than nineteenth century Italian immigration — as if they are unaware that multiculturalism did not exist in our schools in the nineteenth century, that we do not share an adjacent open border with Italy, and that Italian immigrants did not flood our country unlawfully as part of the national strategy of the Italian government.
Those who offer up these arguments are either blind to, or shy away from, the hard facts about the tragic cycle that is being perpetuated. The tragedy unfolds like this: Kids in their teens, at great peril, sneak into America from Oaxaca. They work hard for 30 years at roofing, picking, mowing, cleaning or cooking, and then often turn to state agencies when their backs give out or their jobs dry up. Meanwhile, their children too often grow up in the barrios, not with the stern family ethic of Mexico, but instead resentful that their poorly paid and uneducated parents won no security during their decades of hard work. Often these children grow accustomed to think better even of Mexico — which they have never visited — than of the U.S. In reaction, employers express disappointment that this second generation (which has mastered neither Spanish nor English) does not toil as hard and as cheaply as its parents. So at the same time that four out of ten U.S. resident students of Mexican heritage are not graduating from California high schools, and less than one in ten are graduating from college, employers welcome a new cohort of illegal teenagers.
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(Excerpt) Read more at hillsdale.edu ...
What the local Americans will do to such fools expousing "for those outside La Raza, nothing” will be chilling indeed!
If Hollywood got annexed and taken over by Mexicans, so what? It's already a cultural disaster area occupied by totalitarian anti-Christians hostile to America and Western culture. A culture given over to abortion and essentially a godless Sodom culture ought to start using its own language properly if it wants to survive. The anti-Christian secret societies backing America's post-Christian Kulturkampf might want to give that some consideration. Because of them we had to listen to EIGHT YEARS of Bill and Hillary's banal butchery of the English language.
"Anglo" Americans also need to stop aborting and "pilling" themselves out of existence. It may be too late for our fellow countrymen to awake from their diabolical slumber.
That's absurd in the extreme. America's (and Britain's) decline is direcly related to the abandoment of Christianity. This hollow secular humanist liberal empire of bade taste, mass vulgarity, and crass banality will be overrun by barbarians either from without or within. It's already happening. That stupid cultural relativism that let all those Muslim terrorists in is a case in point.
Good grief...
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