ASS-imiliation!

I orginally posted this entry on Myspace – several months before the demonstrations in Kalee-fornia. Here is it again.

 There seems to be an issue here in the US with immigration, mostly Mexican and other hispanic immigrants (Brazilians and Portuguese are not overwhelming us). We also have lots of Vietnamese in my area.

 The liberals bend over backwards to placate the newcomers and put Mexican up - sorry, Spanish - up everywhere. The conservatives would rather throw everyone back, even though 99% are whites - meaning that THEIR ancestors came from Europe at some point. The reality has to be somewhere in between.

 Fleeing persecution seems like a good reason to come to the US, even illegally. But what is "persecution"? Threatened to be killed or torture? Hmm, OK. What about "if I return to my home country, I won't have a job!" Hmm... that doesn't fly, but my immigration lawyer friends told me that they've heard that argument made with a straight face (not from them, though). But seeking a better life? I'm not sure that's a bad thing, per se. That's why most of our ancestors came here.

 The larger issue is what they do when they get here - regardless of why they came here. Do they adopt the language and culture, and assimilate? Or refuse to speak English, to pay taxes, and otherwise maintain a separate culture ...even to look down on American culture. I've seen Viets here long enough to be naturalized (!) who don't speak English; and many who view taxes as something us stupid white Americans should have to pay but not them, or who view American culture as inferior to their own. Clearly the amigos feel they've reached a critical mass where trading their Spanish in for English is no longer deemed necessary - certainly if enough Americans are going to cave in and post everything in Spanish too. It's sad and disturbing, that there are people living in foreign countries who have never even been to the US or UK who speak better English than some people who actually live here.

 If you're just here visiting - a tourist or diplomat - fine. But if you moved here to live permanently, you should learn the native language - and that's English, not Spanish or Vietnamese. If I wasn't inclined to learn any foreign language, my immigration choices would be limited to Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. If I move to Brazil, damn well I'll polish up my Portuguese and watch the novelas like everyone else, and follow the Brasileirão (national futebol championships) as well as the Seleção and the campeonatos estaduais (well, I do that anyway here in the US). That many Brazilians speak English helps, but it would be my job to learn Portuguese, not theirs to learn English.

 Germans are famous for busting their bundas off to learn the local language if they move overseas - their most popular immgration targets, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, being the US and Brazil (as well as 1945, but that’s a different story...)

 Maybe American tourists are clueless and only speak English, but expatriates - permanent residents - pride themselves on learning the local language and adopting the native culture, even to the point of looking down at their own culture (!).

 The sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein ("Stranger in a Strange Land", "Starship Troopers") argued that when a segment of the population leaves the mother country to establish a colony, the colonists are the top tier of intelligence and ambition and the ones who stayed back in the mother country are the lazy idiots. Certainly the US outstripped the UK, and Brazil is a far stronger and larger nation than Portugal, now a backwater. Sociologists decry the "brain drain" syndrome, that the best and brightest abroad are the ones coming to the US, which would appear to support Heinlein's thesis. Some do return to their own countries, though many other choose to stay. Even among the ones from Mexico and Central America, certainly as unskilled as you can imagine, they are taking low-paying menial jobs (day laboring, lawnmowing, maid work) which the rest of us don't want to do anyway. Under this, if you thought the Mexicans here now were lazy, at least they got off their asses and got themselves here somehow; imagine how lazy the ones still in Mexico are.

 Again, much of the opposition on this topic is not to immigration or immigrants per se, it’s against immigrants who refuse to assimilate to our culture.

 Imagine a house: several Americans live there together and get along with each other. One day some guy, Pedro, moves in. He doesn’t pay rent, doesn’t speak English, watches Mexican league soccer and not football, baseball or hockey; leaves the water running during showers or the lights or A/C on, and doesn’t pay for his share of the utilities; eats the food in the kitchen and fridge and never contributes any; and racks up phone bills calling Mexico or wherever the hell he’s from. He doesn’t talk to the other housemates and keeps to himself. You can imagine Pedro would NOT be very popular in this house.

 Now change the scenario: he pays his share of the rent and utilities; he stocks up the fridge; he speaks English; and he watches games with his housemates, high-fiving them and basically fitting in. NOW Pedro is probably much more welcome in the house. Nobody really had a problem with him so long as he made an effort to fit in and pay his fair share. And the analogy works whether Pedro is Mexican, Vietnamese, Iraqi, or any other nationality.

 Perhaps they need a reality TV show set in the desert of New Mexico or Arizona - an obstacle course of hostile Minutemen, rattlesnakes and scorpions, and the challenge of thirst and heat. Something like "Survivor" - "Who Wants to Be a US Citizen?" The lucky winners get green cards, the losers deported. Hell, they already have an immigration "lottery". This would actually be more merit-based, though it seems to reflect reality now anyway (which is what we should expect from a "reality show"). Or more George Carlinesque: dig trenches from Texas to Tijuana, complete with barbed wire, sandbags, machine gun nests, etc. – WWI style. Man the trenches with WWI re-enactors, British, French, German (complete with pickelhaubes) with the appropriate weapons, including machine guns and poison gas. This would probably be more effective (assuming you could find enough men to man the trenches) but would probably also cause an outcry (you think???).

 The way to sum it up is this: if I encounter an amigo at the 7-11 who speaks English and wears an Oakland Raiders jersey, I'm more relieved and impressed that he speaks English and is following US sports, than upset that he probably came here illegally.