Hate & Immigration
This from Ruben Navarrette, Jr. :
“The restrictionists and those pundits who have taken up their cause claim that race and ethnicity aren’t even part of the discussion and that those who oppose giving illegal immigrants a shot at legal status would feel the same way if the immigrants were coming from Canada instead of Mexico.
They say their concerns are limited to border security and the rule of law, and have nothing to do with nativism or xenophobia. And they reject any suggestion that the debate was hostile to Hispanics…
The people who buy into this demagoguery say the country is being colonized. That harkens back to what Benjamin Franklin said in the 1700s about German immigrants making up “a colony of aliens.”
A lot of what Franklin said about the Germans was rank bigotry. The same goes for what other generations of Americans would later say about Italians, Irish, Jews and other immigrants – even if they came legally.
What poison. Thank goodness we got that out of our system. “