Mexican Immigrants
Mood:  loud
Topic: Amnesty
In the past, every heavy immigration to the USA felt like a huge threat to our culture and our preferred language, English, but we have always "recovered" from each one and adopted words from each of "their" languages and called them our own. Other cultures enrich ours, and what we call American is actually mixture of all those cultures. We were proud for a while to call ourselves the melting pot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States

During the potato famine in Ireland, the "Micks" as they were called came here in the droves. They settled in New York and Boston. Without them, we wouldn't have had the Kennedys in Boston and the proud police and firemen of New York. The Norwegians and Swedes settled in Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, and Minnesota. Without them, we wouldn't have the wonderful cheeses and yogurt and the area called the Nation's Breadbasket. Few other immigrants would have seen the potential of such barren prairies and soggy wetlands. The Chinese were lured to the United States to work in mines and the railroads, to do the work that no one else wanted to do. At the turn of the 20th Century, the Chicago meatpackers employed thousands of men and women and children from Eastern European countries by luring them here with promises of great jobs, cottages with white picket fences, and schools for their children. See this website for more:

http://www.encyclopedia.Chicagohistory.org/pages/757.html

Almost every one of these mass immigrations have had one thing in common: The owners of large companies, Andrew Carnegie, the Rockefellers, Vanderbilt and Ford lured these immigrants to this country so they could exploit their lack of knowledge of our laws and the English language to overwork and underpay them. Read about the Robber Barons:

http://www.socialstudieshelp.com/Lesson_44_Notes.htm

This is what has happened again in our time. Over the past twenty years, the arrest and prosecution of employers for luring and hiring Mexicans has become so lax that big owners of companies have become brazen in breaking the law. The real lawbreakers are the business owners. Blame them.

So, now we come to the reality of what we as Americans have allowed to pass once more, a great influx of people from another country to serve our decadent, fat ass society with cheap labor. We are to blame. We must own up to our mistake, just like we did when we enslaved millions of black Africans and then "freed" them into a society that no longer wanted their labor at a fair price. As long as these Mexicans were working out of sight in menial jobs, no one was complaining much, but the employers have become more and more brazen and have crowded out American citizens from jobs that once paid very good wages. The law looked the other way as long as we could buy cheaply at Wal-Mart and fill our grocery carts with out of season fruits and vegetables

The right thing to do is what we have always done in the past with those immigrants who have shown they love this country more than their own safety: We allow them to become citizens of the country they love so much, that they have helped to build and thrive. We owe them that chance.
-Carol