Posted on 08/15/2002 11:23:35 AM PDT by gubamyster
August 15, 2002
As more information from the 2000 Census is released, it's increasingly clear that this is not our parents' country. Ethically, it stopped being their country in the 1960s. Ethnically, it now resembles not a united nation, but a United Nations, with divisions along class, racial, religious, language and ideological lines. Our national motto, E pluribus unum ("out of many, one,") no longer applies.
Census figures show that one out of every nine residents is now foreign-born. The response from politicians? Many are signing up for Spanish lessons. They should be telling immigrants to sign up for English lessons.
Yes, we are a nation of immigrants. There is a difference, however, between the way immigrants were treated a century ago during the Great Wave, and how they are treated today.
Then, they were expected to become part of America, which included speaking our language, knowing our history and respecting our traditions. Now, they are allowed -- indeed, encouraged -- to remain who they are and not bother to learn English or care about American history. Then, we sought to make Americans of immigrants. Today, we hyphenate their citizenship and tell them they may continue to bear allegiance to other countries and causes.
Here are only a few examples of how bad the situation has become: The safety video on the Delta Shuttle between Washington and New York is delivered in both Spanish and English; this November, Denver and several other Colorado counties designated as bilingual counties must print election ballots in English and Spanish; the Department of Justice has ordered Harris County, Texas (which encompasses Houston) to start providing ballots and voting materials in Vietnamese.
Part of the reason for this forming of a less perfect union is that we are no longer sure of ourselves. Embarrassed by our success and riches, we think we're doing the world a favor by engaging in self-flagellation, refusing to repeat for the next generation what was handed to us by the previous one.
A Texas schoolteacher wrote to express his frustration:
"We were raised with 'ultimate consequences' which would dictate punishment when there was no discipline ('When your father gets home...,' 'Your mother wouldn't approve of this...')," he noted. "Now, it's a question of how people can beat the law, rather than uphold it." This especially applies to those immigrants who have seen that if they can get to America illegally, their chances are good of winning amnesty and remaining in this country.
King Solomon warned: "Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint" (Proverbs 29:18). The casting off of restraint is what characterizes us now, from corporate boardrooms to private bedrooms. If immigrants know only how to get here and do not learn what made America so attractive to them, they will live by their own standards, just as we who were born here are doing in increasing numbers, further undermining our strength and cohesiveness.
In his 1992 book, "The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era: 1890-1920," John Whiteclay Chambers wrote of the great immigration wave of a century ago, noting that a majority of arrivals in this country never intended to stay. Many hoped that "after a few years of work, they could save enough money to return home to an improved position for themselves and their families."
"Although the majority of new immigrants permanently settled in America, a significant number left (with a departure rate of 35 percent for Croatians, Poles, Serbs and Slovenes; 40 percent for Greeks; and more than 50 percent for Hungarians, Slovaks and Italians; the rate among Asian immigrants was much higher, more than two-thirds)," Chambers wrote. Today the departure rate is only about 15 percent and anyone who gets here, even illegally, can now expect his or relatives to legally follow.
Many of those who stayed a century ago had poor skills and became part of large ghettos in major urban areas, where poverty continues to drain human and financial resources. The 1990 Census indicated that ethnic enclaves were huge and growing. In the city of Miami today, about half of the population speaks English poorly or not at all, new census figures show, and 74 percent of residents speak a language other than English at home.
A source for additional facts about how we have failed to assimilate immigrants can be found on the Web page of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (www.fairus.org/).
It would help if we would re-discover what once was considered "self-evident" truths about America, disdaining relativity. If we can't do that for those already here, we will be of no use to current and future immigrants and cannot sustain ourselves as the United States.
For a start, how about pride in history? Do you really think that a school that has a 30% Mexican minority--or anything close to it, given the current dispensation to be "politically correct" among "educators,"
It's not the Mexicans' fault. It's the PC dipsh!ts. Don't blame the Mexicans for something they're not doing. As I've said repeatedly, the Mexicans were instrumental in getting EASL vaquished in AZ, they hated it. They wanted their kids to be treated like American kids. They didn't want any kind of Mexican oriented history classes, they didn't want them to learn English in a slowed down course, they just plain didn't want anything special. So yes. I do think... no I know with absolute certainty that we can have schools that are 30% Mexican and not give up anything. I went to a school that was 40% Jewish and the only thing we "gave up" was teachers scheduled tests around Jewish holidays. If there are moron PC dipsticks trying to screw up the curriculum "for the Mexicans" shut them down. Blame the PC dipstick, not the Mexicans. If you actually read what I said I noted that we would have to direct people on where to live. It was a hypothetical situation to outline the fact that there is plenty of room in this country and it is physically possible (though psychologically unlikely) to give everyone huge lots with no neighbors and not give up any food supply or make people live in untenable areas (though if you note where people do live the definition of untenable area gets pretty miniscule, there's a couple that lives at the bottom of Grand Canyon, groceries are two day trip involving a 12 mile hike and a helicopter trip). Just because people are drawn to a particular area doesn't mean the nation is overcrowded. That area of the nation might be, but the nation as a whole isn't. And anybody living in one of these areas and bitching about the overcrowding needs to shut up. If you live in one of America's major metro-complexes, especially the ones back east where they still built the European way, you're going to be living in a crowd. Major metro-complex= crowd. I knew that when I was 8. If you don't want to live in a crowd don't live in a major metro-complex. In a major metro-complex learn to love crowds. One of the great guessing games coming up to census 2000 was would Wyoming maintain statehood, the numbers were showing they could have a low enough population to be downgraded to a territory (which has the added bonus of making the residents immune to federal taxation). They stayed above the line though. But there's still a whole lot of nothing out there to live in for people that want wide open spaces.
I didn't know that a state had to have a certain number of people. This would seem odd, given that many of the states out West were much more sparsely populated a few decades ago, or even a century ago, than they are now. Do you have a reference I can look at? Thanks much.
If you have further information to contradict this, I'd like to see it.. the very idea of Wyoming losing statehood amuses me too :)
If they did the bilingual classrooms would be empty. A very few do fight having their kids placed in these programs but at the school my kids attend it's already one-to-one English versus Spanish classrooms. Bilingual means they will be taught all subjects in Spanish. One third of the population here doesn't speak English.
What is alarming is that this dumbing down is now even in our national policies and civic duties. It is no more mere information stuffed in kids' heads, it's the freaking law you and I are liable to know. It seems these things were not citizens' priorities in congresses, but politicians and elites shoved up their own bills and challenged the citizens to make a decision on it. Citizens do not write bills anymore, and if they did, they are killed even before the vote.
It used to be that AMerica was founded on Christian humility, i.e., you admited your sins before asking something from someone, now, when you admit your sins or speak up, you are called a hater, and when you need something from someone, you have to aggressively demand it and dare the other person refusing, holding this refusal against that person.
Bush pretends to be a compassionate liberal conservative, but he only is an abeter of this hatred, as if we had to cave in to teaching in spanish demands because we are all born a$$ holes, guilty until proven innocent.
No more nice Mr little Christian polite guy, the enemy needs a lesson for its own good.
A lot of them know their government is squeezing them out, their irrigation water was cut off so their farms dried up, the laws keep them in dire poverty, the government ----including Fox's doesn't change a thing to improve conditions. The elites want to rid the country of anyone who might cause them problems because they keep all the wealth. They are resisting the formation of a middle class.
That's what I'm afraid of ---all along the border you see fastly increasing poverty levels and falling wages in many areas. Doctors are leaving, the middle class is leaving, the third world keeps moving in. They'll elect governors like Tony Sanchez in Texas and bring the rest of the state down. Even Dan Morales said Sanchez was just like a Mexican politician buying himself an election and the voters don't see through it.
Someone on here said we need to probably take Mexico by force and build that country up, there's probably no other way to get those laws changed down there that make things so bad for so many but so great for a very few.
I'm not the one who said that if our culture can't handle immigrants it deserves to be destroyed.
Also, I've never said we should stop or even limit immigration. What I'm against is any for of limiting immigration that picks who comes in based on some foolish idea of "cultural compatibility". A few folks on this thread have proposed that our immigration should be 80% from Europe. Given that Europe only account for about 1/6 of the world's population that has levels of patent silliness that shows the people in question have unreasonable issues with certain cultures.
Why should we make sure that our immigrants look like the world?
All this paranoia about La Raza and La Reconquista is stupid. These groups are primarily drunk college kids looking for sex with other drunk college kids. How pathetic would a culture have to be to be overthrown by them? Don't confuse NCLR with La Raza, they aren't the same group. MECHA is an offshoot of the real La Raza (as real as that ever was). NCLR is an obnoxious mouthpiece organization. Niether is a threat, but it's two very different kind of shmucks.
I've seen what Chicano groups do on campus. They have almost succeded at getting rid of Columbus day at Columbia. Small item, yes, but they are indoctrinating our future elite to hate America. Their influence is far more than their numbers as they have free hand in bullying "Anglo" students.
Marx was right about the problem but wrong about the solution. At the time Marx was around the workers of the world (not just here but Europe as well) were treated worse than dogs. And no immigration didn't play into this, you can tell because the places people were emigrating from had the problem just a bad as we did. What Marx didn't understand was that this "system" wasn't a result of capitalism, it was a result of classism. Hence why his solution can never work, he's trying to get rid of capitalism to fix the problems of classism, that's like emptying your toilet to fix a clogged sink.
Population mattered in Europe. From the 1820's to the 1920's Europe's population exploded. That helped crate a large number of uneducated urban workers.
The Mexican immigrants in AZ aren't calling for socialist BS. They were the group leading the charge to get rid of English as a Second Language. All the "trouble" seems to be coming from the ones in CA, gee what a surprise. They aren't the only socialists in CA. There are immigration "watch dog" groups (mostly seriously misguided religious groups) that call for all kinds of socialist BS, but when you see their rallies the whiteness of the groups is blinding.
Untill the left reved up their smear campaign most Hispanics supported prop 209 in CA. However, the Mexicanas fell in line with their leaders rather quickly.
A country, a people, a person, proves it's worth by standing up to the strain. I have a firm belief in my ability to rise to any challenge, and if I fail I take all the blame. I have a firm belief in America's ability to rise to any challenge, and if we fail WE should take all the blame.
1. If America fails the whole world loses. If you fail, it is of no great general importance.
2. We are to blame to a large degree. We need to fix our cultural problems. Immigration prevents this.
Whining aobut indading brown people is doing nothing more than setting us for failure. If you want to shut down all immigration for a while great, I do think we could do with a few years to absorb and adjust. If you just want to stop Mexican immigration, well that's playing fast and lose with paranoic fantasies and I'm not signing up because I know they're fantasies.
I want to suspend or greatly reduce immigration for a decade. I also want to expell all illegals. As for Mexico, we would be better off helping the Mexicans in Mexico rather than acting as thier release valve.
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