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To: raulgomez05
Marco Rubio says he would come to the U.S. illegally if he had to

So would I!! This is the greatest country on earth. I'm an American only by the Grace of God and for that I'm eternally grateful but if I'd been born in some third world hell hole and had an opportunity to bring my family here...legally or illegally..I would do so without hesitation!

14 posted on 06/19/2012 6:03:46 AM PDT by pgkdan (ANYBODY BUT OBAMA!)
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To: pgkdan

Then you’d be a criminal and a drain on our resources also.


17 posted on 06/19/2012 6:06:22 AM PDT by goseminoles
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To: pgkdan
From Peter Schramm either

http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/onprin/special/schramm.html

or

http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.873/article_detail.asp

On October 23, 1956, students gathered at the foot of Sandor Petofi's statue in Budapest and read his poem "Rise, Magyar!" made famous in the democratic revolution of 1848. Workers, and even soldiers, soon joined the students. The demonstrators took over the state-run radio station and the Communist Party offices and toppled a huge statue of Stalin, dragging it through the streets. Rebellion spread throughout the country. The demonstrators—now Freedom Fighters—held Soviet occupation forces at bay for several days.

On November 1, the Hungarian Prime Minister announced that Hungary would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. At dawn, November 4, the Soviets launched a major invasion of Hungary, in an offensive involving tens of thousands of additional troops, air and artillery assaults, and 6,000 tanks. A heroic resistance was crushed in less than a week.

The last free Hungarian radio broadcast spent its final hours repeating the Gettysburg Address in seven languages, followed by an S.O.S. Over 20,000 Hungarians were tried and sentenced for participation in the uprising, hundreds receiving the death sentence. An estimated 200,000 Hungarians—of a population of nine million—became refugees. Forty-seven thousand came to the United States. Hungary became a member of NATO on March 12, 1999.

In October 1956, my parents, my four-year-old sister, and I shared a small apartment with my father's parents and his brother on the plaza near the eastern railroad station in Budapest. I was two months shy of my tenth birthday when the Hungarian Revolution began.

Because the revolutionaries had taken over the railroad station, the Soviets positioned several tanks in our neighborhood, and we could not leave our apartment. There was heavy fighting, and bodies were strewn everywhere; one lay just outside our window for several days. After a week and a half, the action moved elsewhere and we could once again venture outdoors—carefully. Walking around one day, I came upon a Russian personnel carrier that was stacked with skeletons. It seemed that each was covered with about two inches of black velvet. I later learned that these poor souls had been burned alive by a Molotov cocktail.

It soon became clear that though the Soviets had pulled out of our immediate area, they were winning. The Revolution was going to be defeated, and they would be back. Things were going to get more unpleasant than ever, and Hungary had not been a pleasant place for the Schramms for quite a long time.

My father, William, was born in 1922, into a politically tumultuous Hungary produced by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I. His father, an active participant in the 1919 Communist revolution, was hounded by the Fascists then ruling Hungary. By the time my father reached his teens, the Depression hit, followed by another world war. My father was placed in the air artillery. He liked it there, he said, because they could pretend to shoot down American planes, knowing that the B-17s were flying well out of range. They couldn't hurt the good guys, yet they did their duty. That was as good as life got in those days.

The war's end brought little relief. When the Communists took control of the country in 1949, they "expropriated" my parents' little textile shop (about half the size of my current living room) and everything in it. Under this new tyranny, my parents were considered part of the dangerous "bourgeoisie." In that same year, the Communists sentenced my father's father to ten years hard labor for having a small American flag in his possession (by that time he had been a leader of the social democrats for some years). At his "trial" he was asked why he had the flag. Was he a spy? He replied that it represented freedom better than any other symbol he knew, and that he had a right to have it. My father tried then, for the first time, to persuade my mother, Rose, to leave the country. But ties to family and friends were too strong, and she could not bear to do it. Soon, my father himself was sentenced to a year of prison for "rumor mongering" (someone claimed he had called a Communist a tyrant, which he had). When he got out, he washed windows for a while and made illegal whiskey to make ends meet as best he could.

My grandfather got an early release from the labor camp in 1956 and came back to us looking like a victim of the Holocaust. Still, the first thing he wanted to know was whether we still had the flag. Of course, we did not. It had long ago been confiscated. But my father didn't want to break his father's heart and had somehow managed to secure another one. We took it out of its hiding place and, at that tender age, I learned the very adult lesson of the complexity of telling the truth. Seeing that flag somehow erased much of the pain and torment of my grandfather's years of imprisonment; it seemed to give him hope.

Now, with the revolution failing, everyone expected that the Communist boot was going to come down harder than ever. But before we had more opportunities to experience it, an odd accident set us on the path to a very different future. On one of his trips out to secure some bread, a hand grenade landed next to my father but, miraculously, did not go off. That was the last straw. He came home and announced to my mother that he was going to leave the country whether she would come or not. Mom said, "O.K., William. We will come if Peter agrees. Ask Peter."

"But where are we going?" I asked.

"We are going to America," he said.&

"Why America?" I prodded.

"Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place."

To this I would add the words of Abraham Lincoln:

We have besides these men---descended by blood from our ancestors---among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe---German, Irish, French and Scandinavian---men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,'' and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world

44 posted on 06/19/2012 6:42:51 AM PDT by ALPAPilot
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To: pgkdan
"...if I'd been born in some third world hell hole and had an opportunity to bring my family here...legally or illegally..I would do so without hesitation!"

This is the most profound paradox of the illegal immigration issue. Third world hell holes are the product of a blatant disregard for the rule of law. Those that come here illegally generally do so precisely because we are (or at least have been) a nation of laws, but they expect us to blatantly disregard the ones that govern their behavior.

76 posted on 06/19/2012 7:18:14 AM PDT by Joe 6-pack (Que me amat, amet et canem meum)
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To: pgkdan

absolutely agree!


85 posted on 06/19/2012 7:51:34 AM PDT by BillGunn (Bill Gunn for Congress district one rep. Massachusetts)
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To: pgkdan

So what? If we excuse everyone who would do that, then we’d have a population of 7 billion in the US and we’d be the worst 3rd world hell hole on the planet.


188 posted on 06/19/2012 11:09:38 PM PDT by Boogieman
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