Free Republic

<p>Some high-falutin' study by the University of Vanderbilt over there in Tennessee says Southerners just ain't what they used to be.</p> <p>Says the numbers of people living in the South who reckon they're actually "Southerners" is in decline, down to 70 percent, according to polls conducted on 17,600 people from 13 states, including Florida.</p>

<p>Like molasses oozing out of a Mason jar, Southern culture is slowly slipping away.</p> <p>The proportion of people living in the 13 Southern states who identified themselves as Southerners fell from 78 to 70 percent between 1991 and 2001 --- and it wasn't just because of so many Yankees moving in.</p>

<p>Like molasses oozing out of a Mason jar, Southern culture is slowly slipping away. The proportion of people living in the 13 Southern states who identified themselves as Southerners fell from 78 to 70 percent between 1991 and 2001 — and it wasn't just because of so many Yankees moving in.</p>

Suzette Vaquera-Constantine has pulled out all the stops to make sure her 8-year-old daughter can speak Spanish. First, the Dallas mother enrolled her child in a prekindergarten class of Spanish speakers, even though her child at the time spoke only English. Later, she hired a Spanish-language tutor. Now, Ms. Vaquera-Constantine sends Sofia to a traditional Mexican dance class, where instructors shout out directions mostly in Spanish. The exposure, says Ms. Vaquera-Constantine, is starting to yield results. "I can see it in her eyes," she says of her daughter. "I know she understands it. She's just getting to the point where...

<p>An enduring U.S. dilemma is hitting Europe as a wave of illegal immigrants from Latin America sweeps across the Atlantic.</p> <p>Europe's population of legal and illegal Latinos has surged in the past decade, especially since the Sept. 11 terror attacks. It could rise as high as three million this year -- half the number now in the U.S. The immigrants are pushed by poverty at home, pulled by demand for workers overseas, aided by porous borders and abetted by forged documents.</p>

And thus spake ZarathustraAugust 21, 2003 When speaking of his family’s immigration experience to America, 1976 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Saul Bellow noted that, “The country took us over.  It was a country then, not a collection of ‘cultures’”.  Such candor...it’s surprising that our little friends in Stockholm didn’t send him to The Hague for prosecution. Whether you like to think of yourself as a liberal or conservative, there is only one truth; America is dismembering itself into a collection of disparate cultural cells and the politicians of both political parties are playing into this nonsense.  This isn’t a question of...

The Atlantic Monthly | September 2003 The Agenda People Like Us We all pay lip service to the melting pot, but we really prefer the congealing pot by David Brooks ..... aybe it's time to admit the obvious. We don't really care about diversity all that much in America, even though we talk about it a great deal. Maybe somewhere in this country there is a truly diverse neighborhood in which a black Pentecostal minister lives next to a white anti-globalization activist, who lives next to an Asian short-order cook, who lives next to a professional golfer, who lives next...

Russian Postcard - House Beautiful By Vladimir Illyich Pulegzki Everything about wife and marriage good before I leave Army and come to America. Still good, I think. But I wonder, sometime I don't know. Let me tell you. We arrive, rent together in apartment in city. I work, she work. Have little because we come with nothing, only clothing and only little. Slowly, we get things, like everybody in America. Elena, she say, "Forget everything Russian. Let us be America Girl and American Boy." I think, Okay, Vladimir. But she did not forget Ivan the Terrible. You remember. First...

Americans have thrived in the melting pot. We haven't been a purebred strain since Captain John Smith married Pocahontas. Intermarriage and immigration make us a lumpy and colorful stew. We frequently ask each other about our origins. In the bad old days of segregation, origins abetted racism. Identification with the "old country" was a tool for discrimination, too. Today, curiosity about roots is rarely sought to elicit prejudice, but used (and now validated by the Supreme Court) to confer victimhood. That's too bad. Most Americans are a tolerant lot. We take pride in our mixed heritage. We celebrate all of...

Germans are America’s big ethnic secret. No people and no culture has contributed more to what the United States is and is becoming. In the nation’s ethnic tangle, no root runs deeper than German America. As a scattered community only fitfully conscious of its own existence, none has more successfully pursued wealth, power and intellectual influence. And as a philosophical force in US politics — a whole political mindset — none has greater potency. Germany as a European state may have lost her way, the German language may struggle to keep its world grip, but the German spirit is alive...

(CNSNews.com) - The recent decision by a school district in Georgia to hire translators for students who speak Spanish, Korean and Vietnamese and their parents is under attack by a group devoted to preserving the role of the English language in the United States. Gwinnett County School Board spokeswoman Sloan Roach defended the board's hiring of the three translators as necessary "to meet the growing needs of a diverse community [and] to enhance communication with limited-English proficient parents." The interpreters, Roach emphasized, "are not being used for instruction, but rather for communicating with parents about their children's schooling and to...

About once a week, Lucia Margarita Rios gets a telemarketing call or a mailing in Spanish. And she barely understands a word of it. "They think because of my name that I am Spanish, but I only understand a few words before I stop them and tell them I just don't understand what they are saying," said Rios, a 22-year-old graduate of Roosevelt University. She is among a growing number of young Hispanics who are the children of immigrant parents but never learned Spanish at home. Figures from the 2000 U.S. Census show a large number of adult Illinois residents...

<p>SOUTH OF BAGHDAD - The Marines were less than 48 hours into their invasion of Iraq when Pfc. Michael Lara of Raymondville, Texas., was first asked the question that he and some other Marines would get repeatedly from civilians.</p> <p>Lara, 19, was standing guard in the turret of his Humvee manning a machine gun along the Shatt Al-Basra bridge in southern Iraq when an old man and his two sons asked permission to pass across the strategic checkpoint.</p>

I received this and regardless of your patriotism, I think there is a message here. It's not my intention to offend but, if I did, too bad. God Bless America! After hearing that the state of Florida changed its opinion and let a Muslim woman have her picture on her driver's license with her face covered this is an editorial written by an American citizen, published in a Tampa newspaper. He did quite a job; didn't he? Read on, please! IMMIGRANTS, NOT AMERICANS, MUST ADAPT. I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individual or...

<p>TWENTY MILES SOUTH OF BAGHDAD, 7th MARINES - The Marines were less than 48 hours into their invasion of Iraq when Pfc. Michael Lara of Raymondville, Texas., was first asked the kind of question that he and some other Marines would hear repeatedly from civilians.</p>

HOW THE GRANDSON OF JEWISH IMMIGRANTS BECAME AN ANGLO-SAXON, NATIVIST, XENOPHOBE IN THREE EASY LESSONS A speech by Don Feder to the Federation for American Immigration Reform October 15, 1999 This speech is titled "How the Grandson of Jewish Immigrants became an Anglo-Saxon, Nativist, Xenophobe, in Three Easy Lessons." Let me read something really silly that was published in a political column on Aug. 30, 1990: "What is said about the new immigrant (Hispanics, Asians, Caribbean blacks) today, was said yesterday of the Irish, Jews, Slavs, and Italians. It was false then; it's equally false now...Immigrants do not come here...