I don't mean to get in between you guys as you seem to be having so much fun, but I wrote something the other day in another thread about the illegal immigration issue and it has yet to be responded to, so I figured I'd repost it here since it applies:

I find it very interesting when people vehemently deny any illegal immigrant's right to work in this country. In fact, many towns that have enacted laws punishing businesses for hiring illegal immigrants are now repealing them after watching their economies crumble. The fact is, America's economy depends on cheap, uneducated labor.

Fear of people who are different has always been prevalent in American society. We often forget about the "Know-Nothing" party, also called The Native American Party, which is ironic considering that all of its members were white. Anyhow, this party was formed basically in reaction to fears of the masses of Irish immigrants, who were on the whole illiterate, poor, and uneducated. The main points of their platform?

* Severe limits on immigration, especially from Catholic countries
* Restricting political office to native-born Americans
* Mandating a wait of 21 years before an immigrant could gain citizenship
* Restricting public school teachers to Protestants
* Mandating daily Bible readings in public schools (from the Protestant version of the Bible)
* Restricting the sale of liquor

Sound like a crazy party with no real support? The "Know-nothings" won leadership in Boston, Salem, and Philadelphia, and then went on to carry the entire State of Massachusetts in 1854. However, we forget about this, because eventually Irish people assimilated, and thanks to that good 'ol Catholic libido, damn near every white guy in America is part Irish (myself included).

And yet we repeat the same mistakes with Hispanic immigrants. We color them as thieves, suckling greedily at the giving teat of the benevolent Lady Liberty. The facts, however, paint a different picture. Imagine, if you will, that in the early 1900's, a Latin American man named Zapata fought for and won the right for that country's citizens to own private mejidos on which to live and farm. And this was added to this country's constitution and upheld all the way until 1994, when on the first of the year, this particular part of the constitution was repealed to allow US-owned agro-business to move in and buy mass amounts of land. And the citizens, now without land they once called their own, were allowed to work the land, but at borderline unlivable wages and for a foreign master. That's Mexican history.

Yet today, we have a name for those who decide to take the chance of being killed by unsupervised, bloodthirsty border patrol agents to take on a life of secrecy and hard labor if only to improve the lives of their future children. We call them criminals and do our best to cast them out to the country they escaped. Could there be something more un-American?

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"Old Man Antonio smiles 'You've learned now that in order to know and walk you have to ask questions.' He coughs and lights another cigarette and out of his mouth come these words that fall like seeds on the ground."