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.
As far as my children go, I can't answer that, for I don't have any at this stage in my life. However, when I do have children, they can play with anyone they choose. I do not discriminate, and I wouldn't teach my kids to, either. What I would most worry about is if some liberal is trying to brainwash them, or if people are trying to tell them that homosexuality is okay and that we evolved from apes.
Eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet my man, Sigma.
Lib'rals are merely a coalition of indiviual specialty *groups*; who're, often polarized amoung themselves.
Lib-rals then are a sum of their parts.
...& this is one very, large part, in the making.
The expression on his face was priceless! His jaw could've been used for a dustpan. A Spanish speaking Gringo! I'm sure he was taught that there was no such thing.
Anybody who will come onto a public forum and say something like this to total strangers about his own father is an imbecile. Why don't you take your dimwitted liberal ideas back to DU where you came from?
If you had left this part out, someone might have believed your little work of fiction.
Then you aren't a "first generation American", Einstein.
Guess what - unless you are American-Indian, your kin-folk probably came off some boat on our shores within the last couple of hundred years. I worry more about people who are anti-immigration that I do about hard-working immigrants.
Guess what - that isn't the subject under discussion here. If you can't keep up, keep quiet. Sheesh.
That stupid Columbus. Look at him on that boat with the Tin Foil Hat on.
You disrespect the illegals because in your system, immigrants are automatically bottom rung strawberry pickers. You disrespect native born teenagers and others by demeaning hard labor. One of the reasons the teenagers of this countries' "white" people are so soft and lazy and morally lost is that they haven't had to do any type of this hard labor. It is "beneath them" to work hard for $5.75 an hour.
You disrespect the laws of this country by allowing that if an immigrant can simply break the law for 10 years or more, then they will have "earned" thier freedom from indentured servitude and recieve an "amnesty". Cynical and hypocritical.
It is the American culture and value system that is being displaced and forgotten. That is what this issue is about. Not how much a company's profit can be increased in order to make wall street happy, and thereby funding all the hippies' 401k plans. But I digress.
Twodees...You little pansy. You need to stop your whining and crying if you're going to accuse others of being liberal DUhhhhhh members.
Strangers or not....My own father or not.....He's been my most extensive experience with a racist. I use his examples quite often. Deal with it.
Please ponder what you, as an individual can do,(even in a small way) to stop this from happening.
Rhetorically, I'd like you to tell me why I can speak better Spanish after 6 months of casual study than a co-worker of mine speaks English after having lived in this country for 15 years. The answer is they don't have to.
Your comments of "tin foil hat" portray nothing more than individual who is unwilling to look at the events of the day and see that, for the most part, our government has become and is becoming more illegitimate every day.
However, I hope you don't share the same type of view that FEMA portrays. That is, they call Christians and Constitutionalists terrorists.
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