Immigration or amnesty

That 33% claim is total BS according to government statistics.

 

Is it still a fairly high percentage, though?

 

I'm not taking sides, here, specifically . . . just looking to make what seems a salient point:

The Italians were willing to assimilate -- especially in the language department.

The current Spanish-speaking wave doesn't seem to be blending in nearly so well, in this
area.

If you're not here legally, and utterly resist taking the steps needed to ease communications "issues", you're asking for quite a bit. And the jury's already in, on this topic . . . we're talking a two-decade buildup.

 

I can agree with virtually all of your statements.

Only one problem...we're talking about immigrants who came her ILLEGALLY. In your examples, everyone came her LEGALLY. Big difference.

 

excellent points, our grandparents wanted to be Americans and worked hard to assimilate.

It is possible to LEGALLY immigrate to the States ya know?

 

We have de facto amnesty now. And, anyway, that's not what the bill proposes. It's just the red-meat buzzword that The Base uses to attack it.
I would argue that we should NOT enforce the law if it's impossible to do so. (Which opens the question of whether you CAN enforce a law that's impossible to enforce. What say you, grasshopper?) We should work to control the effects of non-enforcement while we either change the laws, or let them wither away from disuse, which is what we've done with most of the old "blue laws" that were on the books. Not all laws are The Law. Some are changed by informal democratic practice before they are changed through formal democratic means.
That said, there's no way this bill flies because the xenophobic wingnut base will mobilize around it and paralyze any Republican inclined to support it. They're begging the monster they unleashed to come back to the lab.

 

But is it "impossible" to enforce the law?

It seems to me that whenever immigration becomes a big national issue, whoever's in the White House goes into a spasm of enforcement that's invariably popular with the majority of voters and never seems to put any businesses out of business.

So I ask again: Is it impossible to enforce the law?

 

Difficult but perhaps not impossible. Something called "Operation Wetback" (you can look it up) purged about a million of them back in the '50s.

 

In the 30s, they send a lot of Mexicans back from California.

The only trouble was a good portion of them were here legally.

 

Gotta disagree with you factually. There were Italians who had their own clubs, meat markets, and even Catholic churches which were designed to serve Italians who didn't feel welcome in Catholic Churches where most of the people were Irish. In New Jersey, there were a lot of churches which were ethnic by design or the way things happened with the neighborhood.

If you look at the history of immigration in the USA, first-generation ethnic immigrants seldom assimilate smoothly as a group. Things are usually better by the second generation, and by the third generation most of that group doesn't speak the language - like yours truly - most of the Italian words I know are curse words which relatives used so they wouldn't curse in English in front of us kids.

The only reason you see Spanish-language radio and television stations where you didn't see that before is that money can be made. My wife from Mexico speaks English well enough (although she can't understand why the "ch" in machine is pronounced "sh") but she will always understand things better in Spanish.

I have heard people get upset when they hear people talking in a foreign language on the bus or something. Well, if my wife is talking to her sisters, why shouldn't they talk in Spanish. If you were with your wife or brother or kids in Germany, would you talk in English or German?

 

There wasn't structuralized healthcare apparatus in 1846 or 1910. Big fucking difference.

An illegal alien clamoring for amnesty is the bank robber who believes not only should he not be prosecuted, but he deserves respect and rights because, after all, he wasn't caught right away and has a life here; he never committed any other crimes (that we know of) and even paid taxes on the money. Sure, he had to falsify the tax return (another crime) to hide the criminal way he got the money, just as a social security number is falsified for employment here, but hey, he did pay, right? That makes him the same as everyone who worked for money in legal ways, doesn't it? That makes him the same as our ancestors? Not even.

 

Gold: Understood. But virtually all of the younger Italians who showed up a century ago hunkered down and learned English.

It ain't necessarily so, now.

It's a horrid, torturous issue. The ideal W plan, of course, lets the cheap labor stay, and sticks the middle class with the bill . . . . the ideal solution, for Bush's chosen people. Our elected representatives would be hard-pressed to come up with anything worse.