Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses….no more.
Let’s talk about illegal immigration and the short term memory loss of those who are so vocal against it. It is one of the biggest campaign issues in this election and yet it is in no way a new issue. Many seem to feel this is the worst it has ever been and that it is contributing to the loss of our American identity.
Hello, are they native American? Were their grandparents, great grandparents indigenous to this country? Not many of us can claim that honor. America was once called The Melting Pot due to the mass immigration of people all over the world. The Statue of Liberty, remember her? She was given to us by the French and has welcomed millions of immigrants arriving by boat to these shores. She has long symbolized liberty and freedom from oppression.
Since the beginning of this country each new arriving ethnic group or nationality has had to endure the wrath and disdain of other groups who have come before them—the Italians, the Irish, the Germans and the Chinese were all perceived as threats to this nation until they became assimilated into the masses. Very few of them spoke “American” right off the boat. It was learned over time. Most large cities had enclaves of foreigners—“Little Italys”, “Little Germanies” “Chinatowns”. You hear outrage over and over again about “having to deal” with information given to the public in various languages besides English. Some of the loudest whiners seem to think this is the first time this has ever happened in our country and even that not speaking English is Anti-American.
"Bilingual education has been part of the immigrant experience in America since the Colonial periods, when native-language schooling was the rule rather than the exception, "Education Week”.
After 9/11, the heat has been turned up on illegal immigration (forget that many of the hijackers on that horrible day were here legally on various visas). If some politicians and pundits are to be believed, it is illegal immigrants who are gobbling up our tax paying dollars. You rarely see any hard data to back that up, however.
But are illegal immigrants responsible for our crumbling infrastructures? Are they to blame for gas prices and our recession? Are they the ones who forced our country to spend 3 trillion dollars, probably more, on the war in Iraq? That isn’t an error; it really is 3 trillion dollars. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Economist Linda Bilmes have recently published a book on the True Cost of the US Invasion and Occupation of Iraq.
It sure is easier to blame a lone Mexican than it is the current administration for our current financial woes. You can shout at someone you think maybe an illegal but how do you put down the government? Worse yet, how can you complain about the cost of the war and not look Un-American?
For the past five years the Bush administration has consciously underestimated the cost of the war to the American people. They aren’t giving us the full cost of the Iraqi war. We all understand the operational costs but we don’t know about the costs hidden in the defense budget.
There are a lot of hidden costs but let’s take the contractors to whom our government has outsourced the work formally done by service personnel from laundry duty to armed protection. Kellogg Brown & Root, by far the nation’s top Iraq war contractor, has an estimated $16 billion in contracts. But they’ve avoided paying millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security by hiring their American workers through off shore shell companies. The exact amount of money that the U.S. is spending on mercenary services is nearly impossible to obtain but at present the United States spends about $2 billion a week on its Iraq operations.
If we think ousting those illegal people, arriving here to work at jobs none of us want, could solve this nation’s issues, then maybe the clichés that Americans are both ignorant and arrogant are sadly true
A.M. Collins, astrologer, author and animal rights activist is a proud American and a World Traveler.