User Comments

gr8holmes on May 24, 2008 at 17:15:22 said:

Thank you again, my fellow American citizens. You should ask ask what our Ancesters would do, if their country were Invaded by any foriegn country. I believe my Ancesters would defend this, our country with their lives. Should we do less for our country? Illegal is illegal.. Defend With Honor.

Brittanicus on May 20, 2008 at 17:30:12 said:

There should not be any discrimination against anybody, who entered this nation in a positive way. It does not matter what county of origin or nationality, as long as you have an entry visa, passport or legitimate documentation, they should be welcome.
It is only the 12 to 30 million illegal immigrants, who thumbed their noses at the \\\\\\\'Rule of Law\\\\\\\' are not welcomed and should leave at their own accord. Do not think for one minute that people of Latino heritage, are not sick and tired of the illegal immigration occupation of this nation. They are very much aware of the criminal element, that has filtered in with the poor and unskilled. These people want the foreigners gone as much as citizens and legal residents of which they are part.

WHAT BIASED NEWS REPORTING WILL NOT REVEAL!

Read how Arizona was suffering from the illegal immigration, is now gaining economic prosperity? Less traffic on the highways is one great example! Even Georgia, Oklahoma, Rhode Island are showing signs of economic revitalization? Missouri has just joined these free-thinking states, who are obviously thinking of taxpayers and not the parasite employers.
www.intellectualconservative.com/2008/05/15 /striking-changes-in-arizona-as-illegal-immigrants -flee-the-state/

YOU DECIDE YOUR FUTURE, not tainted. Call and demand the SAVE ACT (H.R.4088) before the new president steps into office. (202-224-3121)

dudeabides on May 20, 2008 at 00:07:47 said:

CL: you have amassed a lot of historical data slanted to support your pro-illegal immigration position. You have a highly subjective doctrinaire pov.

It is 2008. You may have interest in joining a historical society and re-enact different outcomes that match your fantasies regarding Mexican/US/French/Indian and Spanish history. Your view is that Mexico and Mexicans are victims with few or little responsibilities for its historical or present day circumstances.

I could cite how the Mexicans marauded and murdered the Apaches and thus build an entire premise to its significance to an unrelated modern situation. BTW, most non-Latino people do not appreciate being referred to as: gringos. For God's sake this article cites how young Latinos are hurt by pejorative remarks made against them....Did you miss that? Some Gringos are racists; most are not, but not according to you.

C L on May 19, 2008 at 14:34:21 said:

After independence, the formerly Spanish territories were under Mexican control. Mexico forbid Anglo immigration. Whites consistently broke Mexican law when they illegally invaded California and the Southwest.


In Texas, the Mexican government had given permission for some whites to emigrate. But thousands more Anglo immigrants, or criminals, arrived illegally.


Prior to 1823, there were less than three thousand white people in Texas. At that time, the Mexican government had given Stephen Austin permission to live there along with a few hundred other Gringos, with the condition that they would become Mexican citizens, they would speak Spanish, and they would pledge allegiance to the Mexican government. But white colonists began to enter the territory illegally and brought their slaves with them. Within a decade, whites outnumbered the Hispanic inhabitants. Gringos were interested in the rich agricultural lands of the Texan territory. These were the illegal aliens of their day, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. By 1830, whites outnumbered Mexicans 25,000 to 4,000.


In 1835 Sam Houston, who had illegally crossed into Texas, argued against mixing with the Mexicans, no matter how long we may live among them. See Houston speech to Soldiers, January 15, 1836, in the Papers of the Texas Revolution, 1835-1836, gen. Ed. John J. Jenkins, 4:30. The Gringos eventually overwhelmed the original inhabitants of the territory and began to impose the English language on them.


According to Mexican Lieutenant Jose Maria Sanchez, the foreign intruders have taken possession of practically all the eastern part of Texas, in most cases without the permission of the authorities. They immigrate constantly, finding no one to prevent them, and take possession of the sitio (location) that best suits them without either asking leave or going through any formality other than that of building their homes.


During the Battle of the Alamo, the defenders were fighting for slavery, which Mexico had abolished in Texas in 1829. After the defeats at the Alamo and Goliad, on April 21, 1836, Sam Houston s army of less than 800 men defeated Santa Anna's army as it camped out on the San Jacinto River, east of present-day Houston. The next day, Houston's army captured Santa Anna himself and forced him to sign a treaty granting Texas its independence, a treaty that was never ratified by the Mexican government because it was acquired under duress.


Soon after, these Anglo aliens usurped Mexicans' land. They began to dishonor Mexican land claims. They passed new laws in English, a foreign language for those Mexicans whose border had moved. Often Mexican land was auctioned off for pennies an acre for failure to pay taxes. Mexicans were commonly lynched and whole communities were driven out of Texas towns.


Gringos carried out raids in which they murdered Mexicans and forcibly took their land and stocks. Historian A.B.J. Hammet states that Mexican families were driven from their homes, their cattle and horse and their lands, by an army of reckless, war-crazy people. In 1839 over a hundred Mexican families were forced to abandon their houses in the town of Nacogdoches by invading Gringos. The mayor of San Antonio in 1840, Juan Seguin, states in his Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguin , how Mexicans came to him repeatedly from protection of the invading whites. Eventually, he had to flee to Mexico because of personal threats against him.


Anglo outlaws raided Mexican ranches, killing the inhabitants, burning homes and stores. Mexican livestock was declared public property and the invaders forcefully took Mexicans property and their land. Mexicans were driven out of Austin in 1853 and again in 1855. They were expelled from Seguin in 1854, from Matagorda and Colorado Counties in 1856, and from Uvalde in 1857.





Rancher Faustino Morales recalls that how the Gringos came in and drove the Mexicans out and took over their ranches. See Frank H. Dugan, The 1850 Affairs of the Brownsfield Separatists . Southwestern Historical Quarterly 61,no.2.


Years later, whites would also use the Texas Rangers to officially carry out their deeds. Texas Rangers, in cooperation with land speculators, came into small Mexican villages in the border country, massacred hundreds of unarmed, peaceful Mexicans villagers and seized their lands. See The Mexican Question in the Southwest, Political Affairs March 1939.


Most of the illegal aliens were land speculators and criminals. William Barret Travis had escaped to Mexican territory after he had killed a man. Jim Bowie was a slave trader who had gone into Texas hoping to make some business; Sam Houston and Davy Crockett had participated in the massacre of the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend.


Abb Emanuel Domenech, a religious missionary in Southern Texas, states in Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico that The American of the Texan frontiers are, for the most part, the very scum of society-bankrupts, escaped criminals, old volunteers, who after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, came into a country protected by nothing that could be called a judicial authority, to seek adventure and illicit gains.


The Anglo invasion of Mexican territory was not confined to Texas. They arrived in droves and illegally occupied great parts of the Southwest and California.


California Governor Pio Pico warned of how we find ourselves threatened by hordes of Yankee immigrants who have already begun to flock into our country and whose progress we cannot arrest.


By the late 1800 s, Anglos had acquired four fifths of the Mexican land grants. See A History of Multicultural America, by Ronald Takaki. Six years after Texas independence, 1.3 million acres had been seized by 13 anglos. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas.


Believing in its racist ideology to wipe out other races by killing Indians and stretching to the Pacific Ocean, the United States had previously offered to purchase the Mexican territories of California, New Mexico, and Arizona for $15 milion. Mexico had indignantly refused the offer. Just as George Bush used the pretext of Weapons of Mass Destruction to attack Irak, US President James Polk then instigated war against Mexico in 1846 in hopes of acquiring Mexican territory. Most historians agree that this war was unjustified. Opponents of the war included Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Clay, Mark Twain and Daniel Webster.


One of the most interesting episodes of the Mexican War surrounded the St. Patrick's Battalion. Among the American troops was a contingent of Irish-born soldiers. After the war commenced, 200 of these soldiers concluded that they were fighting on the wrong side. They didn't like the fact that the United States was using its overwhelming might to invade and conquer a much weaker nation. They deserted the American army and began fighting for the Mexican army.


When U.S. Gen. Winfield Scott and his troops reached Mexico City, after invading at Veracruz, they captured the St. Patrick soldiers and hanged 50 of them.


The Mexican War ended with the surrender of Mexico and with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. With this treaty, Mexico lost one-half of its territory.


But this illegal and unjust war cannot be justified, just as I cannot go into your home, put a gun to your head, force you to sell me your house for $5, and then pretend that this transaction was just or legal.

C L on May 19, 2008 at 14:28:59 said:

llegal immigrants are paying taxes to Uncle Sam, just like any other worker. Immigrant Households and Businesses Generate Billions: In 2005, Immigrant households and businesses paid approximately $300 billion in federal, state, and local taxes: $165 billion in federal income taxes, $85 billion in state and local income taxes, and $50 billion in business taxes.
One rough estimate puts the amount of Social Security taxes alone at around $9 billion per year. Paycheck withholding collects much of the federal tax from illegal workers, just as it does for legal workers. Some illegal immigrants choose to file taxes and write checks come April 15, using an alternative to the Social Security number offered by the IRS so it can collect income tax from foreign workers

In addition, despite the fact that illegal immigrants have SS/Medicare taxes taken out from their payechecks, they're not eligible to participate in this program. Since the 1980s the Social Security Administration states the illegal immigrants have contributed about 350 billion to the SS Fund. The majority of immigrants come here in their younger years, and they're the ones who are keeping the SS program solvent. The SSA reports these immigrants contribute about 9billion a year to the fund. With 80 million baby boomers retiring in the next 20 years, these immigrants are the ones who have and will continue to pay for those retiring.

Moreover, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, according to all the researches who have investigated this topic, including a study released by a the Immigration Policy Center, based in Washington D.C.

Even as the undocumented population has doubled to 12 million since 1994, the violent crime rate in the United States has declined 34.2 percent and the property crime rate has fallen 26.4 percent," according to the report.

That crime drop was true even in cities with large immigrant populations such as Los Angeles or Miami, the report said.
According to the study, 3.5 percent of American-born men aged 18 to 39 were incarcerated in jails or prisons in 2000, compared to 0.7 percent of foreign-born men, five times higher.

The fact is the immigrants, especially illegal immigrants are more often the victims of crimes fueled by anti-immigrant propaganda.

C L on May 19, 2008 at 14:26:06 said:

Today's immigrants are not different from other immigrants who have arrived here in the past. Throughout the 1800s, there was a huge wave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Italians, Polish, Russsians, Jews, who arrived on our shores with no knowledge of English. These newcomers encountered the same racist nativist bullshit that is being heard today. It is estimated that four million Italians and three million Slavs arrived during that time. More than two million Jews also emigrated to the US. These people were poor and illiterate. They could not read or write in their own language, much less in English. Germans and English also arrived in the millions to escape political instability and food shortages in their countries. Newspapers of the day decried that arrival of these aliens and condemned the corrupt governments who sent these people to the shores of the United States.

Riots erupted in opposition to the presence of these immigrants. Just like in the previous century, when Germans were accused by Anglos of being the cause of all ills in society, immigrants were scapegoated.

The Irish fled Ireland starting in the 1840s to escape the deadly potato famine. Millions of Irish arrived to the American continent, almost a third of North America's immigrants. They were escaping political corruption and certain starvation in their country.

Most immigrants came for economic reasons and were part of extensive migratory systems that responded to changing demands in labor markets. The American economy had needed both unskilled and skilled workers through much of the nineteenth century. But after the 1880s, the demand was almost exclusively for unskilled workers to fill the growing number of factory jobs. More than five million immigrants came to the US during the 1880s alone. Southern and eastern Europeans, dislocated from their land and possessing few skills, were attracted to the burgeoning industries in the United States.

Like today’s Latino immigrants, Italian immigrants were particularly likely to take heavy construction jobs after arrival in the US. About half of all late 19th century Italian immigrants were manual laborers. Contracted out by a professional labor broker known as a “Padrone,” Italians dug tunnels, laid railroad tracks, constructed bridges and roads. They were mostly young, single, and had little money. The Irish immigrants had few technical skills, and their agricultural skills were limited to the spade-culture of potatoes and animal tending. They were half-starved, weak and destitute. A New York Times Editorial, June 2, 1874, urged the US government to turn a million Italian beggars into prosperous citizens.

Too poor to leave Ireland when the Potato famine began, families found passage on overcrowded, fever-ridden ships after unscrupulous businessmen discovered they could make money transporting desperate people to the US. On these "coffin ships," as they came to be known, many of them died during or just after the trip, but they had no choice but to leave for a better future or to starve to death in their own countries. These aliens had no skills, no tools, no education. Sometimes immigrant men had to be supported by their wives and daughters who worked as domestic servants in hotels and private homes, while they themselves worked sporadically sweeping streets, tending horses, cleaning stables, cutting fish, and performing any other menial work they could find.

The Italians immigrants were escaping poverty from their country, unemployment, high mortality, no medical care, little or no schooling, poor housing, semi-starvation, and exploitation. The majority of immigrants around the turn of the century were males who worked and saved money to send back to their families back home. Shipping companies made large profits by carrying immigrant aliens to the United States. They would bring cotton, wood, and crop cargoes to Europe and on the return trip bring immigrants to the US. There was hardly a city of any size in US that did not have a section designated as “Little Italy.” Italians would look to settle in these areas, for it was here that they felt free from the discrimination around them. This resulted in the formation of very definite ethnic communities: Irish, Polish and Jewish ethnic enclaves developed.

The majority of these European aliens entered the country illegally. For this reason, in 1891, Congress passed a law stating that those who had entered the country illegally could be expelled within one year. See Reports of the Immigration Commission (61 Cong., 3 Sess., Senate Doc. No. 758.) However, these aliens simply got off the boats, declared themselves to be American, and blended with the larger society.

By blaming immigrants for all the problems in their cities, politicians hoped to easily win election to office. In 1884 US congressmen decried that Italy and Hungary were shipping “as many cattle, large number of degraded, ignorant, brutal foreign serfs” to replace American citizens.

The racist media, which has always been the main conduct of anti-immigrant propaganda, proclaimed:

“These people are not Americans, but the very scum and offal of Europe…an invasion of venomous reptiles…long-haired, wild-eyes, bad-smelling, atheistic, reckless foreign wretches, who never did an honest hour’s work in their lives..crush such snakes…before they have time to bite.” See Public Opinion, I (1886), 82-86, iii (1887), 49 and V (1888), 432.

In 1882, the New York Tribune spoke against Jewish immigrants: “Numerous complaints have been made in regard to the Hebrew immigrants who lounge about Battery Park, obstructing the walks and sitting on the chains. Their filthy condition has caused many of the people who are accustomed to go to the park to seek a little recreation and fresh air to give up this practice. The immigrants also greatly annoy the persons who cross the park to take the boats to Coney Island, Staten Island and Brooklyn. The police have had many battles with these newcomers, who seem determined to have their own way.”

The Chinese immigrants also arrived, but they experienced more direct discrimination because of their non-European origins. There were numerous riots against Chinese miners in California in the mid 1800s. In 1885, the population of Eureka drove all the Chinese out of Humboldt county by threat of force. In 1885, there were anti-Chinese riots in Rock Springs, Wyoming. An Arizona newspaper editorialized against the Chinese immigrants who sent money back to their families: “The Chinese are the least desired immigrants who have ever sought the United States…the almond-eyed Mongolian with his pig-tail, his heathenism, his filthy habits, his thrift and careful accumulation of savings to be sent back to the flowery kingdom.”

The Montanian newspaper in 1873 editorialized against the Chinese: “We don’t mind hearing of a Chinaman being killed now and then, but it has been coming too thick of late…Don’t kill them unless they deserve it, but when they do--why kill’em lots.” In 1869, Montana governor James M. Ashley advocated” …Montana is better adopted to the hardy races of men and women from Great Britain and Northern Europe…” The Chinatowns that sprang up in cities like San Francisco and New York was a defense mechanism against the hatred and prejudice of the society around them. According to the racist newspaper editorials of the time, “The manners and habits of the Chinese are very repugnant to Americans in California. Of different language, blood, religion, and character, inferior in most mental and bodily qualities, the Chinaman is looked upon by some as only a little superior to the Negro, and by others as somewhat inferior. See Frank Soule, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Franciso (1966).

Anti-Chinese riots occurred in San Francisco in 1869, and in Los Angeles in Chinatown, when whites descended on the area and burned and looted businesses, beat the Chinese , and killed at least 19 Chinese during four hours. See “Chinese Massacre at Los Angeles in 1871,” Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California (Los Angeles, 1894), C.P. Dorland. In 1877, a similar even took place in San Francisco when whites attacked the Chinese ghetto in San Francisco. In the California Constitution, Article XIX was added in 1879, which forbade employment of any Chinese in any public work and allowed any city to expel its Chinese residents. In the 1850s, the California’s Supreme Court stated that Chinese were Indians, and similarly as with Mexicans, they could not testify in court against a white man.

Between 1820 and 1890, fifteen million people immigrated to the US, 2/3s of them from Germany, Ireland and Great Britain. The majority of the British immigrants were paupers.

It was during this period that the Know-Nothing organizations were created in response to the arrival of these new immigrants who were considered different from "true Americans". Immigrants were often lynched by mobs. Riots were common throughout the nation to protest the arrival of these undesirables. Irish immigrants were considered by nativists to be lazy drunks. Poles, Italians and Jews were considered to be racially inferior and to be detrimental to America society.

The Know Nothing Party feared the arrival of Catholic Irish. They advocated banning immigrants from holding office, and a 21-year wait for citizenship. They used criminal statistics to show that Irish were the group with the greatest number of arrest in cities like New York. Eugenicists like Edward Jarvis published studies that indicated that immigrants had higher rates of mental disorders.

In the early 1850s the anti-Catholic Native American Party was established to attack the foreign religious elements of the German and Irish. Convents were burned, priests were driven from their pulpits.

Nativists blamed Catholics for unemployment by stating that Papal agents had unleashed millions of Italians on American soil to take away the jobs from native Americans. They stated that Catholics had started a run on banks to prepare the way for the seizure of the US government by Italy’s Pope. They fabricated a document “Instructions to Catholics”, which detailed a conspiracy by Catholics to control the American workplace. See Washington Gladden, “The Anti-Catholic Crusade”, Century Magazine, XLVII (1894), 790.

In 1855, German immigrants, who were routinely persecuted, were involved in deadly riots against Know Nothings in Cincinnati, Columbus and Louisville.

These immigrants were accused by the larger society of refusing to assimilate. Little Italys and Irelands could be found in major cities like Hartford, New Haven, Waterbury, and New Britain, where they were sealed off from the wider American society. New Haven's Italian colony centered around Wooster Square. It was at first a neighborhood for the Irish. There were many large mansions in the area. However, after the Civil War, industry began flourishing and factories moved into the area. Landlords turned the remaining homes into multiple dwellings which became overcrowded and neglected.

In The Children of Columbus by Erik Amfitheatrof, he describes the worst of the padroni as "flesh peddlers" who recruited peasants from southern Italy, stuck dozens of people in disgusting tenements and took over 60% of their pay as their commission. Jacob Riis, an immigrant, described the horrors of these tenements in his book How The Other Half Lives. He reports "one room 12x12 with five families living in it, comprising twenty persons of both sexes and all ages, with only two beds, without partitions, screen, chair or table." In New Orleans in the 1800s, many Sicilians had settled in this area and were employed as fishermen or farmers. Italians were generally stereotyped as mafioso criminals. In 1891, the police chief had been investigating reports of what he considered to be mafia activity in the city. He was assassinated by unknown assailants and the backlash against the Italian community was hysterically racist. Suspicion fell on the Italians in the community and ten were arrested and put on trial for the crime. The mayor of the city had made an announcement to the press that "We must teach these people a lesson they will not forget for all time." All ten of the men were acquitted. However, after the verdict, a mob of 5,000 angry New Orleaneans stormed the jail and shot the men to death in their cells.

In "Restriction of Immigration"(Atlantic Monthly, June, 1896) Francis A. Walker warned that vast inpourings of southern European immigrants threatened to overwhelm and thereby degrade American culture and institutions.

According to Walker "for nearly two generations, great numbers of persons utterly unable to earn their living, by reason of one or another form of physical or mental disability, and others who were, from widely different causes, unfit to be members of any decent community, were admitted to our ports without challenge or question. It is a matter of official record that in many cases these persons had been directly shipped to us by states or municipalities desiring to rid themselves of a burden and a nuisance...while yet the patriotic American of to-day may properly shrink in terror from the contemplation of the vast hordes of ignorant and brutalized peasantry thronging to our shores...The arrival in the United States, between 1830 and 1840, and thereafter increasingly, of large numbers of degraded peasantry created for the first time in this country distinct social classes, and produced an alteration of economic relations which could not fail powerfully to affect population. The appearance of vast numbers of men, foreign in birth and often in language, with a poorer standard of living, with habits repellent to our native people, of an industrial grade suited only to the lowest kind of manual labor, was exactly such a cause as by any student of population would be expected to affect profoundly the growth of the native population. Americans shrank alike from the social contact and the economic competition thus created. They became increasingly unwilling to bring forth sons and daughters who should be obliged to compete in the market for labor and in the walks of life with those whom they did not recognize as of their own grade and condition. It has been said by some that during this time habits of luxury were entering, to reduce both the disposition and the ability to increase among our own population. In some small degree, in some restricted localities, this undoubtedly was the case; but prior to 1860 there was no such general growth of luxury in the United States as is competent to account for the effect seen. Indeed, I believe this was almost wholly due to the cause which has been indicated,--a cause recognized by every student of statistics and economics."

According to a 1911 study of the US Immigration Commission, the new immigrants "...has been largely a movement of unskilled laboring men who have come from the less progressive countries of Europe...They have...congregated together in sections apart from native Americans and the older immigrants to such an extent that assimilation has been slow." Citing from the racist book The Passing of the Great Race, a book by Madison Grant, the Commission stated: "The new immigration contained a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken, and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Meditarranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish ghettoes. Our jails, insane asylums, and almshouses are filled with human flotsam and the whole tone of American life, social, moral, and political, has been lowered and vulgarized by them."

European Immigration to the US:

1841-50: 1.6 million

1851-60: 2.5 million

1861-70: 2.1 million

1871-80: 2.3 million

1881-90: 4.7 million

1891-900: 3.6 million

1901-1910: 8.1 million

1911-20: 4.3 million

1921-30: 2.5 million


Dr. Larry Laughlin, appointed as consultant to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in 1922, provided support to the anti-immigrant propaganda, by stating in testimony to congress that Italians, Slovaks, Russian and Polish Jews had three times the insanity rate of American natives.

Today, about 11 percent of U.S. residents are foreign-born, far short of the 14.7 percent who were foreign-born in 1910.

Bruce Davis on May 19, 2008 at 06:03:19 said:

Notice the article tries to claim everyone who is against illegal immigration is a racist. They also try to link Hispanic with illegal. The article also does not use the words illegal aliens, illegals or illegal immigrant, but instead uses the word undocumented. It is so politically correct!

legalatina on May 18, 2008 at 16:17:35 said:

Try as he may, Rivera isn't going to fool anyone ...the negative effects on our society in many aspects due to rampant uncontrolled illegal immigration of masses of unskilled, and mostly uneducated people as well as the lack of enforcement of our laws can't be "spun" into something "positive". Importing poverty and a culture of lawlessness is never a positive for any society...Rivera is an ethno-centrist apologist for "La RAZA". The facts speak for themselves.

Save the SAVE Act....get the coward Democrats who co-sponsored the bill to SIGN the petition to get it on the floor for a vote...why are they so lacking in courage now? Could it be that Pelosi and the rest of the pro-open borders, pro-illegal alien advocacy cartel and the profiteers of illegal immigration have given their marching orders to the Democrats on this issue to the detriment and in direct contravention of the will of the overwhelming majority of the American public?