MelissaWV

I don't mind immigration at all, but when they are coming to leech off the failed system; that pisses the hell out of me. Get across the border, and never have to work again. Take me somewhere like that !!!!

You are somewhere like that, as the forums have mentioned repeatedly. Isn't this the place where it has been said over and over that it is more profitable to leech off the Government than to try to work and make something of yourself? The majority of people doing that were not born of foreign parents or born on foreign soil. They're your neighbors. This should be obvious to anyone who's had their eyes open for the past number of years, and points easily to the root problem NOT being the foreigners. It's the Government itself, and the system the nation's used to having in place to "help the poor" at the expense of everyone --- including the poor.

Allowing demographic displacement of the native population by a bunch of low IQ, big government supporting Mestizos is a suicidal policy.

Imagine, for a moment, that this person is in charge of immigration policy. What WOULD the requirements be to gain entry into the USA? An IQ test? A pledge administered by Big Government that tries to determine that the person being let in wouldn't support Big Government? There are a number of assumptions at play, here, and most of them are pretty negative. Maybe if the person crossing can demonstrate to the originator of the quote that their heritage is European enough, and not Mestizo, they could gain entry? Why even bring this up?

Immigration isn't the problem.... Illegal immigration is the problem. ... There are other concerns as well, but when you have an immigrant community who deliberately excludes you (by not speaking English during a conversation, as an example) and is at times, hostile toward you, it makes you wonder what the future holds. ... Or, when you go to lunch with your co-workers and no one speaks English during the conversation.

I agree that it's rude to speak in a way that excludes others when you're in a group, but am puzzled as to why people who speak another language are singled out. I've seen plenty of people whispering to one another (in what I assume is English) while in a group. I don't see calls to punish them legally or economically for it. I've gotten plenty of glares from people when I try to listen to what they're saying to each other in those situations. I will try, for my part, to speak up and translate what I say to my mother or grandmother so you can be sure to know that I'm asking whether or not she needs me to to help her to the bathroom for a new Depends. Your life can be complete and I can stop being rude by excluding you from that knowledge by asking her in Spanish (the language she's spoken since her birth as an American citizen in 1920).

By the way, if "immigration isn't the problem," then why the weird issue with language? Are you admitting that you're having lunch with a bunch of known illegals? Your co-workers are a bunch of illegals?

I do not have any real-world experience with treating them like the source of all my problems. I do not have real-world experience belonging to a group dedicated to driving them out or treating them like some sort of infestation.

I can't help but think that my "experience" with illegals is probably the reason I haven't run into any more of them who are hostile or unfriendly than I have whites who were hostile or unfriendly.

You don't say. This man right here deserves a medal, and I wish more of the screeching anti-immigrant posters would listen to it.

In fact, that's pretty profound right there. We have, at RPFs, a huge number of anti-immigrant posters. We have a smaller number that are actually anti-illegal immigration. Personally, I am all for restricting taxpayer-funded activities and benefits to those that pay taxes. I say this with a heavy heart, since I'd much rather just not have taxpayer-funded anything, but it's unrealistic to proceed as if taxes and "public" holdings will vanish overnight.

Individual liberty, Self-government, personal privacy, personal responsibility, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, heck, the entire Bill of Rights.

The right not to be genitally-mutilated or beheaded because I am a Christian. The right of gays not to be thrown off the top of buildings, because they are gay. The right of a woman not to be stoned to death because she is suspected of cheating on her husband.

Of course. Around the world, people would be after your genitals and your neck and they are flinging gays off of buildings. That part of this post reads like the most closeted crap ever, depending on stereotypes of other nations and cultures in a nauseatingly wholesale way. The entire point of that post, though, was to define American culture after it was asserted dozens of times that a mass migration of Mexicans was going to destroy American culture. The beheadings going on in Mexico (within sight of our gleaming, American border) are largely drug-related. Other than that, is it common for Mexicans to practice genital mutilation? To establish roving rape gangs? To throw gay people off of buildings?

There is a wonderful shine to the idea of learning the Constitution, which is why the path to legal citizenship needs to suck a whole lot less. A number of people on the forums probably could not pass the citizenship test without a little help from Google or a study guide. Many more in the US citizenry would fail.

The reality of legal immigration is ugly:

It is the case, for some categories of aspiring Americans from a few countries where hundreds of thousands want to settle here, that wait times just to get in are 20 years or more. Then it’s another 3 to 5 years to obtain citizenship.

Mexican nationals who are the adult children of U.S. citizens experience waits of 20 years before they can file for permanent-residence visas commonly known as green cards.

"The longest backlog -- for siblings of U.S. citizens coming from the Philippines -- is currently about 24 years. That means that people currently getting these green cards have waited 24 years for them."

My own story is inexorably linked to the entire argument, even though I'm not Mexican and no one in my family is. We were all born American citizens. My grandmother speaks very little English and is in the advanced stages of dementia. It's never been plausible to ask her to learn English.

My parents speak with accents, and my mother has trouble finding the right word sometimes. When we're in public, I often have to talk to her quietly in Spanish to let her know what's going on. I realize that's rude to many of you. I'm sure you'd rather my mom give the cashier a blank look for a few moments rather than for me to explain something simple to her. It's not that my mother is stupid, or lazy, or anything else you want to toss at her. It's that she is 64 years old, thinks in Spanish, and usually the combination of age, technology, and language barrier is just too much for her.

I have no accent in Spanish or English, and I believe my English is above average even among native speakers. I did learn, however, what it's like to live in a place where people try to pretend they're not biased... until they suddenly are. Driving home one night, sixteen years old, in my grocery store cashier uniform, in my shiny new blue Acura Integra (it was a beautiful car... I miss it). The headlights got close until I fell for the oldest trick in the book: I sped up, and the car behind me sped up, at which point I changed lanes without signaling to let the person pass.

That's when the lights came on and I got pulled over.

My immediate response, while the cop was doing whatever cops do right when they pull you over, was to call my mom. I'd never been pulled over, and it was dark and I had the overwhelming desire to let someone know what was happening. I rattled out the specifics to my mom over the phone, my window already down.

She stopped me and said "stop speaking Spanish."

What?

"Stop speaking Spanish if he can hear you. If he hear you in that car speaking Spanish it can get bad." I look over my shoulder out the window and, sure enough, he's now next to the car --- tense and listening. "You hang it up now and if you're not home in 10 minute I send your father over there. Don't make the cop mad. Sound white."

That was mom's advice, and she hung up. The moment I spoke to him in unaccented English, the tension went away. He still did what cops do, and I still got a ticket (dismissed later, though).

This gets repeated over and over in life, and it's astounding stuff. Go in for a job interview, and hear "oh I thought from your name you'd have an accent!" Start speaking Spanish as part of my job, and hear "you don't LOOK Mexican!" The constant conversation about what mooches latinos are. "The latino vote" being considered this easily-bought thing, based of course on how stupid and easily-led we are.

The assumption that, when I bring myself to give a talk about domestic violence, my husband must have been Hispanic, too. Sometimes people are very open-minded and assume he could also have been black. Certainly no one jumps to the conclusion he was lily white.

So while people are talking about the en masse groups of awful people coming across the border to destroy their communities, marry their daughters, mingle with their little junior geniuses, and destroy the current high tide of liberty votes (how's that going right now?), I'm just sitting here being alive and none of those things.