All four of my grandparents were immigrants. One, my maternal grandfather, entered the US “illegally.” Both my first and present wives are immigrants. My first wife left the Philippines during the final years of the Marcos dictatorship, at a time when conditions in that country were rapidly deteriorating.
The decree Pre*ident trump issued this past Friday, blocking all Muslims of seven nations from entering America, deeply and personally offends me.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
This past week President Obama went live on prime-time television (with some notable exceptions) and announced he was directing his cabinets to make some minor changes in the way people who crossed over into our part of planet earth were treated. Notable was that we, a culture that boasts about being a nation of immigrants, would no longer gratuitously tear apart families and deport parents of legal American citizens back to the countries they originated from.
Which leads me to share some thoughts on immigration.
Awhile back, I submitted a column to our local newspaper, now named “InsideNoVa.com,” formerly “The Potomac News.” My column submission was triggered by a report that about 80 percent of Prince William County were “OK” with the way our police department were handling the anti-Hispanic immigration resolution passed by our Board of County Supervisors back in 2007.
I was deeply offended by this information, and submitted my column.
I’ve made a point of getting a Letter to the Editor (LTE) of our local newspaper published at least once each month since last summer. Over these past months my writing has evolved from simple rebutting of our local Conservative columnists to writing on original topics. Part of the change from rebutting columnists is that the newspaper has introduced commenting in their on-line version. This on-line commenting is moderated but apparently only filtered for obvious spam, as evidenced by the range of opinions that actually gets posted.
A comments thread I participated in became extremely amusing to me extremely fast today. Unfortunately, it is also a sad example of what now-a-days passes for “educated discussion” on immigration in this Virginia county of Prince William.
I’ve just had another of my continuing series of Letters to the Editor published in yesterday’s “The Potomac News. This letter was another in my recent series of taking on the anti-Hispanic-immigration crowd that is running wild here in Prince William County.
“Everyone who comes to America should learn to speak English.” If I only had a nickel for every time I heard this idealistic statement. This statement might work in a perfect world, but our world is far from perfect.
A few weeks ago I had another of my letters to the Local Newspaper “The Potomac News” published. This letter expressed my lack of sympathy towards one of our most out-spoken racists complaining about being listed in the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a “nativist.”
My letter received a direct letter to the editor rebuttal only two days later. My follow-up was never published by “The Potomac News,” so I’m publishing it here.
I’ve written recently about the issues of immigration here and the attitudes of far too many residents in Prince William County. The attitude can be summed up in the statement “There’re against it.” At least, they’re against Hispanic immigrants who have the temerity to actually expect to be treated as human beings in exchange for doing a large portion of the manual labor around these parts.
Last night, I was privileged to be among a large group of Hispanic people who respected me, just having a good time celebrating their achievements.
Last week I submitted another of my on-going series of Letters to the Editor of our local newspaper “The Potomac News.” This time, I took on a local wing-nut who is key in whipping up anti-immigration hysteria in this area. It seems that after a few years of diligently and successfully working to build his reputation as a local racist, this individual was unhappy about being labeled a “nativist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center and local newspapers.
Trump’s Shithole Country
So a couple of days ago our Pres*dent expressed his knowledge of world geography by referring to all African nations, the Central American nation of El Salvador, and the island nation of Haiti, as “shitholes.” This presumably also referred to the people native to those countries, as trump used his “shithole” comment to prove why those people should not be allowed to emigrant to the United States of America.
I have something to say about this.
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