Ye Olde Immigration Rant

January 13, 2006 (*Editions made January 18, 2006)

A few days ago, I was writing about how "illegal immigrants" sometimes vote in US elections. I rephrased "illegal immigrant" to a more "politically correct" phrase, "Immigrants" who do not yet have their "green card". (This isn't entirely accurate either.)

Maybe I don't know what I am talking about. (If I have any facts wrong in this piece please let me know about them. I'm trying to be as polite as I can with my terminology. If I don't use terms that are as politically correct as I ought, I am sorry for that.)

I just don't get it why people who are against "ILLEGAL" immigration are "racist" and or "xenophobic"? I have NOT, nor will I EVER forget that my ancestors came here from another country. My husband and I can count fairly recent immigrants as our ancestors. In Douglas' case his maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather were from Canada. In my case, if my adoption file is factual, then my paternal grandfather was Swiss, and my paternal grandmother was either German or Austrian. And my maternal ancestors came from Scotland and possibly Germany or England. In my adoptive family my paternal ancestors immigrated from England (eventually signing the Declaration of Independence). My adoptive maternal ancestors immigrated from England and from probably somewhere near the Bohemia/Germany area. According to The World Family Tree, on my adoptive maternal side, there are distant relatives who live in Mexico.

I am very proud of my immigrant ancestors. Without these ancestors, I wouldn't be here!!!! I like to study some German language, I like German/Swiss music and culture. I especially like German foods. Then there's my "Anglophile" hobby. I also celebrate my Scottish heritage by listening to bagpipes. (I haven't found a CD of anyone yodeling to the bagpipes yet. Anyone know where to find one?) I really don't care who comes to this country (to a point) so long as they come here legally. I am even trying to help my Chinese pen pal immigrate to Canada. I haven't tried haggis yet, and probably have a prejudice against them due to seeing a recipe for them once. Yet, I DO NOT consider myself to be suffering from "xenophobia"!!!! Maybe I am a bit "Eurocentric" at times. Writing to my pen pal in China, is changing some of that. I am a great fan of "Latin" music. (Music from South and Central America as opposed to music sung in Latin.) Perez Prado is one of my favorites. I really enjoy the likes of Osvaldo Fresedo as well.

One of my favorite things is to listen to immigrant stories. It is always inspiring to hear the great lengths that people go through to get to this country. I would imagine that a lot of LEGAL immigrants have an epic journey to write about.

We wouldn't be quite the country we are today, if it hadn't been for immigrants. My favorite foods are available because of immigrants. (Bagels, enchiladas, hotdogs, pasties, beer, knackwurst, braunschweiger/ smoked liverwurst, black eyed peas, okra, etc.) [The pasties we eat here are in the style of the ones from The Upper Peninsula of Michigan.]

I do not know why certain groups are trying so hard to make "ILLEGAL" immigration legal. This web site http://www.noinvaders.org/ has a list of companies that lobby for "guest worker" laws and such like. Some companies and business organizations lobby hard in favor of illegal immigrants. Or should I say, that these groups are in favor of "cheap labor"? From what little I looked at on the net, if you type in "immigration reform" you tend to get websites on the "right" of the political spectrum. But I think there is also "immigration reform" from the "left" too.

Here the "Left" in this country is manning the area near the Mexican border to hand out, water, food and blankets to these "immigrants". They are quick to call anyone "racist" who opposes ILLEGAL immigration. They say that the opposition is, "xenophobic" and that they forget that they too come from immigrant stock. Yet if they really thought about it, ILLEGAL immigration can be a form of slavery.

1. First off, there's the crossing. If someone crosses the Mexican border, they might have to travel through desert areas. A person can die doing this. I have seen news reports of Chinese people trying to cross the Canadian border by riding in freight cars. It is very dangerous to, "hop the rails" and ride in freight cars. There have been cases of authorities in Texas finding rail cars and or semi trucks full of people. Normally these people have not faired well in the Texas heat.

2. As far as I know it is not legal for a company to hire workers who are "undocumented". People who do not have their visas and other paperwork, they are not permitted to legally work in this country. It is not "freedom" if you are working while always glancing behind you to make sure that someone from the Federal Government might be coming after you as they round up "illegals".

3. If you are working here without papers, wouldn't you be being paid, "under the table"? In such cases the employer doesn't have to pay you minimum wage, WHICH IS THE LAW. I don't know the law on it today, but I once knew a farmer who hired illegal aliens at times. This would have been back in the 1970's maybe. They were hired to hoe the weeds between cotton plants. If I understand correctly, at that time farmers didn't have to pay minimum wage. They were exempt from this law? This farmer that I knew, didn't want to hire legal workers, because they wanted and could demand minimum wage. Oh! I almost forgot it, what about "Social Security". That is the "government" "old age pension" here in the U.S. If you are being paid "under the table" odds are, you and your employer are not paying what they used to call "FICA". If you aren't paying this "FICA" "tax" then you aren't paying into Social Security. If you don't pay in, you don't get a check when you reach retirement age. I think you have to be a person with a "green card" in order to receive Social Security. People might have a way around that. * I forgot to mention "health care" the other day. There is a problem with illegal immigrants not having any medical insurance. Emergency rooms fill up very quickly because people without insurance use them as their primary health care provider. Emergency rooms are the larges money looser for a hospital. They are building new hospitals without emergency rooms now. There are times when people with life threatening injuries, are denied fast medical treatment, because the hospital closest to them, has their emergency room closed due to being full. If you think it is inhumane to allow someone to NOT have medical insurance, then you will be against illegal immigration. People without medical insurance in the United States, get sub standard heath care. Sometimes it comes down to eating or going to a doctor. If you are an advocate of "universal health care" or "single payer health care", then you HOPEFULLY, won't want people getting that health care, who haven't paid into it via taxes. It wouldn't be fair to the rest of us if people who didn't pay into the health care system, benefited from it. I don't think they would allow me to get medical treatment in Canada (as if I were a Canadian) under the Canadian health care system. If I went to Canada specifically for medical treatment then I would probably have to pay for it. If I was visiting and had an emergency, maybe my insurance would pay. That is if my insurance did such things. (Another amendment is below.)

4. Some people who come across our borders illegally, are beholden to the person that got them across the border. There is a saying in Texas, "You gotta dance with them what brung you". If you go to a party, you have to dance with the person that took you to that party. You make your date angry if you dance with someone else. The same goes for "human traffickers". If they bring you across the border they might want a piece of your hide if you try to escape their grasp once they get you across. Having come from Texas, I don't know how many news reports I have seen where they find a "Mexican National" dead in a ditch along some lonely country road. Normally these are murders. If this sort of thing is NOT a form of enslavement, I don't know what is. It boggles my mind... the "Left" is so against the sweat shop and sex trafficking, yet they almost encourage people coming across the borders illegally. Very strange if you ask me.

*It is not entirely accurate when people say that illegal aliens come here to do work that "Americans" won't do. (like scrubbing toilets and picking fruit and vegetables)

Some of the people who come across the Mexican border, come here solely to commit crimes. One of the television news magazines a few years ago, had a story on this. People from South and Central America get shipped up here to the U.S. They either use stolen identity documents, or they steal them while they are here. The whole aim is to commit retail, and identity fraud. They also steal from retailers in other ways. When the immigration officers or police catch up to these criminals, they are sent back across the border. Then the person they work for, just sneaks them across again. I don't know what a solution to this problem is.

Some Related Notes:

I believe in "true multiculturalism" rather than what folks like the UN call "multiculturalism". What most people call, "multiculturalism" is in fact an "amalgamation" of cultures. We are loosing cultures and languages every day. Many more of them are threatened. In the Soviet Union, you could be Latvian all you wanted to. But your patriotism had to be to the Soviet Union. Russian was the official language on legal documents and signs. Not everyone learned Russian well. The Russian majority living in Latvia didn't bother to learn Latvian. Latvia became a "free" country again in the 1990's. One of the first things the government did, was make Latvian the official language. My friend there, said it was wonderful to be able to ask a policeman something in her native language. Of course the Russians living there complained that this was a "human rights" violation. (Ha! The "human rights" violation was when Stalin had the nerve to move Latvians off to Siberia and then replace those people with Russians!!!!) At one time you could not legally sing Latvian patriotic songs in Latvia.

I don't mind immigrants. They have given us so much. According to the "Left", "assimilation" of immigrants is wrong. To want people, who come to the US, to become "Americans", is racist. Not everyone gets along. We have issues with that where I live sometimes. There are always going to be "culture clashes". In Hamtramck, Michigan there was a clash between Muslims and non Muslims. The Muslims wanted these towers with loud speakers to announce the call to prayer in the "middle of the night". Local residents objected to this disturbance of their sleep. They countered with arguments similar to, we don't ring our church bells in the night to disturb you.

It seems to me (I could be wrong) that when we taught "assimilation", people got along better. People coming from some countries have needed to learn what a bath tub is, and what to do with a modern cooking stove. (I know, some of those type of lessons are also needed for people born and bred right here in the U.S. too.)

I really, really, think it is best if we work at keeping Latvia, for Latvians to have their culture there; India for Indians etc. We would be a very dull world indeed, if there was this one culture for the whole world. It seems to be coming to it though. I see this one "Western" culture that everyone embraces, what could be called the "Coca Cola Culture". If there wasn't a distinct Indian culture in India, where would we be? The Tibetan people are in a fight right now to preserve their culture and language. The Canadians fight very hard not to become the 51st state of the U.S. (And then they go and sign NAFTA!)

If the United Nations were really a good thing, then they would be genuinely trying to fix problems in other counties. Then people would want to live in their own country and enjoy their own culture. I know that as far as Teaching people the Bible, it is better if someone from a culture comes here and learns it and then goes back and teaches it. You see, I know very little about African culture. But an African knows it very well. What a better teacher to the Africans but an African? Why is it that organizations such as the UN don't try to fix things in countries so that people would want to stay there? Why is it that people don't stay and try to make their countries better? Maybe these things are not available.

The other "Related Note" that I have is this...

The BBC had a recent article saying yet again that the world was overpopulated. The world is NOT overpopulated!!!! http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=1033&catcode=13 Chronwatch "Wide Open Spaces: The Overpopulation Myth" by Jeremy Robb

The people who keep pushing onto us that the world is overpopulated tend to be "eugenicists". There is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement http://www.vhemt.org/ . If there were no humans left on earth, the planet would "right" itself. Ha! There are many problems when a country has a negative birth rate. Eventually there will be no young people that look after the old people. Then there's the problem of no workers for the work force.

There's a related idea that people are starving because we feed soybeans to cows. Cows are an inefficient way to get protein from soy. So we should instead be feeding the soy to humans. If we would feed humans soy, instead of feeding the soy to cows, (and then feeding the cows to humans,) there would be more food available and we could feed the world. Well, there are some flaws to that argument. See, "Why PETA's MilkSucks.Com Sucks" http://www.sumeria.net/health/petamilk.html in order to read what I am talking about. There are many reasons why this argument is flawed. The main reasons are the reasons that people are starving in the first place. The "Left" fails to recognize that there's wars and "despots" [I know I'm generalizing] who keep food from being distributed. Then there's the fact that in places like Africa they don't always grow their traditional food sources. At least I read that on the Weston A. Price site. If you don't grow what normally grows someplace, it is easy to have famines if the weather or other natural factors don't cooperate. If you live in a dry climate it is best to grow what grows there, rather than try to baby along plants that don't normally grow in dry climates. Really I don't know much about agriculture in Africa.

Population Control = Racism. Population Control for Racist Reasons = Eugenics!

What about Eugenics? Why is it that "they" want to reduce the birth rates most, in countries where people have brown or black skin? Here is an article "The Big Lie" by Kimberley Jane Wilson that goes into this a bit. http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21NVWilsonSanger499.html

Read this page, "The American Baby Code"--- http://learninc.org/articles/abc.html . This is an article written in 1934 by Margaret Sanger founder of what became Planned Parenthood. This is very scary stuff. http://learninc.org/articles/plan.html "A Plan For Peace" Summary of address before the New Historical Society, January 17th, New York City.

Ok, I think I am done with my rant now. So I will close this out and post it. If you have read this, "Thanks!".