hehehe 
Posted on 08/09/2002 9:49:18 PM PDT by FreedomFriend
Are you concerned about our nation's porous borders? It's a fair question, and I think that it is one that nearly everyone can answer. Please provide your opinion and why you feel one way or the other?
It only gets worse. In this area, families are awarded free day care for the kids if they don't teach them English. People are actually being punished financially for being responsible and teaching English to their children: From the El Paso times 8-10-02:
Pre-k language rules unfair, parents say Whom to contact
David Peregrino
El Paso Times
Sylvia Saenz-Hernandez was appalled when her 4-year-old son, Ernesto, was turned away from a pre-kindergarten program at Omar Bradley Elementary School in the El Paso Independent School District because he speaks English.
"Imagine that -- being turned away because you speak English in America," Saenz-Hernandez, 38, said.
Saenz-Hernandez was stunned when she discovered that public pre-kindergarten and Head Start programs aren't open to everyone, and school officials said she is just one of hundreds of El Paso parents who have run into the problem this year.
Because pre-k programs are paid for by federal Title 1 funds, the law requires that the money be used only for students who come from poor families or who do not speak English, EPISD spokesman Luis Villalobos said. For example, a family of four can't make more than about $33,480 and still qualify for public pre-kindergarten programs.
About 6,000 students enroll in public pre-kindergarten programs across El Paso and Hudspeth counties each year.
But school districts don't have the money to pay for universal pre-k programs, Villalobos said.
"There's a certain dissatisfaction because it excludes students," Villalobos said. "The public needs to understand those funds are designated for those students who are at-risk."
School officials told the Saenz-Hernandez family to look into the state's Head Start program, which doesn't have a language requirement.
But Saenz-Hernandez learned that she and her husband Ernesto Saenz-Hernandez, a Marine Corps staff sergeant based at Fort Bliss, make too much money to qualify for Head Start.
"My next alternative was to pay for preschool," Sylvia Saenz-Hernandez said. "Unfortunately, I didn't have that dispensable income."
The rejections and financial obstacles made pro-education phrases so popular with politicians -- such as "Leave no child behind" and "Every child will have an equal place at the starting line" -- ring hollow for parents like her.
Sylvia Saenz-Hernandez ultimately enrolled Ernesto in a preschool program at the child-development center at Fort Bliss. By volunteering at the center a couple of days a week, the family can get a lower tuition rate, she said.
Still, Saenz-Hernandez is upset at what she sees as discrimination against English-speaking children.
"I do understand there's a purpose" to educating non-English speakers. "I don't have tunnel vision," Saenz-Hernandez said. "But I just wish that we wouldn't tailor so many programs -- paid for by taxpayers -- only for people who don't speak English."
Celia Salazar, principal of the Ysleta Pre-K Center on Ranchland Drive, said she often deals with parents who become irate when they learn their children can't enroll because they speak English.
She said she wishes more money -- free of federal and state restrictions -- were available to make such programs available to everyone.
"Universal pre-k is needed," Salazar said. "All children at 4 years old need to be in a school setting. It doesn't matter what language they speak."
She said the Ysleta district teaches about 1,500 pre-kindergarten students a year. But when kindergarten starts, "there's 3,000 students. So we're only reaching about half of them."
Spots are still available in area school district pre-k programs, and the classrooms are filling fast, officials said.
But El Paso-area Head Start programs already have a waiting list, said Uriel Posada, Region 19 Head Start spokesman.
"This year we have a full enrollment. By law, we are supposed to have a 10 percent waiting list," Posada said. "That way, if someone drops out of the program, we have someone who can go into the program."
Between 3,400 to 3,700 students enroll in the Region 19 Head Start program each year.
Posada said he encourages all families to apply. Income is a factor in accepting children into Head Start, but not the only factor, he said.
"You'll never know if you qualify for Head Start if you don't apply. Every family is a special case, and we treat it that way," Posada said.
Salazar said she hopes the state's lawmakers and leaders will understand that stricter educational requirements for grade-school and high-school students mean that the investment must start with pre-kindergarten.
"Everything takes money. So hopefully, whoever's the next governor, hopefully, they'll take a look at this issue," Salazar said.
hehehe
That was then, this is now. The "dead" still vote however. Many of them went for Green Al last election.
Oh, hey no problem.
The bottom line is that we can have endless debates, talk about the Irish, assimilation, La Raza, the Germans, we can run up and down memory lane for 200 years and back, but the bottom line is, THE FEDGOV HAS NO INTENTION OF STOPPING THIS INVASION OF AMERICA. LOL!
Very simple. We are no longer represented folks!........
That all may have been " then " ; however , it's also NOW. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Read " THE GANGS OF NEW YOUR ", " LOWLIFE " and any bios about Boss Tweed, histories about Chicago, etc., and then get back to me. :-)
The Sephardim came here MUCH earlier; pre Marx, pre Socialism, and certainly preCommunisn !
The Carabian blacks, such as Garvey, have spread / fomented racial unrest, no matter where they went, from the USA, to Bermuda ... in the mid 20th century.
It IS too late now. We can't deport them anymore, it is far too late in the game. There would be a revolution, a very disasterous revolution.
Cuban Americans don’t generally vote Republican? Oh, really?
Growing up in Miami in the 1960’s, finding a Cuban American that voted Democrat was as rare as finding a penguin at Miami Beach.
Look at the data in Roscoe’s Post #238. After almost 40 years, Slick Willie was able to smooth-talk himself to a whopping 35% of the Cuban American vote by wooing the younger Cuban American vote. That meant that the Cuban Americans still voted 65% Republican.
Elian changed the numbers from a 65% Republican vote back to an 80% Republican vote and got the younger generation a never to be forgotten “I told you so” from the older generation that has always been “broken glass Republican”.
If high 80% in the 1960’s, 65% at the nadir and now 80% does not qualify as “generally voting Republican” in your book, then what percentage does?
And there in lies the problem, you just stated it perfectly when you said "the Cuban community". I am totally against illegal immigration, and for now I'm against the amount of legal immigration we have. Legal immigration should be reduced to a trickle, until we stop using liberal/socialist phrases like, the "cuban community", the "hispanic community", the "asian community", the "black community", the "anglo community", the "arab community".
Are you also against using phrases like “the Christian community”, “the Southerner”, the “Conservative community”, the “Gay community” and “the Liberal community”?
Whether you like it or not, certain “communities” share certain cultural and political values. There is no such thing as a generic Heinz 57 “American culture” found from coast to coast. There never has been.
In front of me, I have the 1927 book “American Institutions and Their Preservation” by William Cook. Yes, the book described the different “communities” that made up immigrant America during that era: the Scandinavians, the Irish, the German, the Jew, the Italian, the Russian, the Pole.
However, the book also clearly differentiates between the traditional “communities” of the “Old American Stock”: the New Englander, the Southerner, the New Yorker, the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Scotch-Irish.
The idea of a single, coast to coast “American McCulture” that is diluted to the Politically Correct least common denominator was a completely alien concept to the pre-Interstate Highway, pre-Television American that fought World War II.
Today, in the year 2002, out here in my very Liberal town on the Pacific Northwest Left Coast, the predominant, so-called “American culture” is characterized by aging hippies and by “wymen” with hairy legs, hairy armpits and a tattoo or two on their breasts that proudly proclaim on their bumper stickers that every problem in the world is “Amerika’s” fault and that they support killing unborn Americans that are too inconvenient to carry to term. The children in such an “American” community think nothing of taking drugs like their “typical American” parents, losing their virginity at 15 or 16, permanently disfiguring their young bodies with rather large tattoos that will be “so Y2K” twenty years from now and going to their “typical American” public school where they are taught little to nothing about traditional American values and American institutions other than that Western Civilization in general and America in particular has a lot to apologize for.
How well do you fit into such an “American culture”?
If you lived here, would you “assimilate”?
That is why this County’s one-family “Cuban American community” has gotten together with others in the “Conservative community” and the “Christian community” in this County to form an eight student school co-op with our own certified Master teacher.
Our separate little “community” raises our children in a culture that is totally alien to the “typical Americans” in our town.
Our kids are raised in the way “typical Americans” used to be raised in the 1940’s with a love of God, a love of America, knowledge and a respect for the traditional Western values that made America great. Our kids are not taught that barely getting by is not O.K. and routinely score in the high 90th percentiles in the Stanford Achievement Test every year while the “typical American” local public schools wallow in Politically Correct mediocrity. Our kids are taught to respect their bodies.
Certain “communities” culturally buy into and preserve certain core values, traditions and beliefs. For some “communities” those values are the traditional American values that made America great but are now Politically Incorrect.
Such is the case with anyone who bothers to call himself a “Cuban American” or a “Southerner” or a “Christian” instead of just a generic “American”.
Being just “just an American” can mean anyone from Hillary Clinton to the “Amerika-hating” Luis Farrakhan to Yasser Esam Hamdi, the Al Qaeda terrorist that just happened to pop out of his mother’s vaginal canal in a hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but who grew up with his Saudi parents in Saudi Arabia being taught to hate America and all it stood for. Yasser Esam Hamdi is now loudly protesting that he is “an American”.
Ask anyone who bothers to call himself a “Southerner” or a “Cuban American” besides just “generic American” what should be done with generic American Yasser Esam Hamdi. The argument would boil down to whether to shoot or hang the SOB.
The “typical Americans” of my Left Coast town would be arguing that “Amerikan Imperialism” is to blame for making Hamdi what he is.
Why the difference?
The 1960’s wave of Cuban immigrants had been dealing with “Americans” since the mid 1800’s. They were “Americanized”. However, their “Americanization” was from contact with the pre-1960’s America. You know, the “Amerika” that is sooooooo Politically Incorrect nowadays.
Anyone who bothers to call himself a “Southerner” is also very likely to have preserved that now Politically Incorrect American culture.
If a World War One and a World War Two soldier were magically transported by time machine from the battlefields of 1918 and 1944 and transported to America in 2002, that American would fit right in and feel right at home in a community that bothered to call itself a “Cuban American community” or a “Southern community”.
However, if those two soldiers were transported to the “typical American culture” of my town on the Left Coast, he would be wondering what Planet he was on.
America has always, from the Colonial era until now, had different local cultural “communities”.
If you ever achieve the single, coast to coast “American McCulture” that is diluted to the Politically Correct least common denominator you will find that it will not be the America of past greatness. You will find that it will be Hillary Clinton’s Village.
Viva Dixie and all the other Politically Incorrect “communities” that remember and want to preserve what made America great.
In regards to slowing down or stopping immigration until those that are already here take a generation or two to become Amercanized like the Italians that Mr. Cook thought in 1927 would never be Americanized, that is a separate issue. Selective immigration may be a consideration.
I think I’ll take a break now and listen to a Beausoleil CD, unless, of course, you do not approve because Beausoleil is not “generic American” enough for you.
C’est ca l’esprit de ma famille cadienne
C’est ca l’esprit de ma famille
That’s the spirit of my Cajun family.
That’s the spirit of family.
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