Re: America's tradition of fear

On Mon, 09 Jul 2007 19:45:33 -0700, Ramon F Herrera
<ramon@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jul 9, 9:32 pm, Ramon F Herrera <r...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
America's tradition of fear

Ruben Navarrette Jr., San Diego Union-Tribune

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

(09-27) 04:00 PDT San Diego -- PAT BUCHANAN was nativist before most
of us had ever heard of the word.

According to his new book, "State of Emergency: The Third World
Invasion and Conquest of America," Buchanan was "the first national
leader to put the issue of America's broken and bleeding border and
the Third World invasion of the United States onto the national
agenda."

Well, yes and no.

It's true that Buchanan was one of the first public figures to sound
the alarm about illegal immigration from Mexico and the rest of Latin
America. In fact, while campaigning for president in 1996, he shared
with supporters in Iowa his message for those who violate U.S.
immigration laws: "Listen, Jose, we ain't gonna let you in again!"

But in the way that he links immigration to national identity, and in
his complaints that the immigrants are somehow defective, Buchanan is
not unique.

There was Benjamin Franklin, who in the mid-18th century was sounding
the alarm that German immigrants would "Germanize us instead of our
Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any
more than they can acquire our complexion."

Then there were the Californians who, in the mid-19th century,
insisted that Chinese immigrants were "unassimilable." The hysteria
spread to Congress and led to the unambiguously titled Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882. In 1943, the act was repealed and the Chinese
were assigned an annual quota of 105 immigrants.

Then there was President Calvin Coolidge, who embraced the Immigration
Act of 1924. That law limited the number of southern Europeans (read:
Italians) by setting quotas for each country in proportion to their
percentage of the U.S. population in 1890, when most immigrants came
from Northern and Western Europe. Upon signing the bill, Coolidge
declared: "America must remain American."

Now, Buchanan -- whose Scotch-Irish ancestors were not exactly
welcomed off the boat with a red carpet -- makes pretty much the same
argument in trying to keep out Latino immigrants.

In the world according to Buchanan, America is on life support, people
of color are crashing the gate and the nation's best days are history.
He kicks off his book by warning that Americans have entered "the
final act of our civilization."

That's Pat. He's always peddling fear. This is the guy who warned that
African Americans demanded "a new system of racial entitlements," that
Israel was running U.S. foreign policy through an "amen corner" of
American Jews, that America was undergoing a "cultural war" with gays
and lesbians and that China was closed to U.S. trade and needed to
open up or "it will have sold its last pair of chopsticks in any mall
in the United States of America."

Now, Buchanan is warning us that excessive immigration is wrecking the
United States. It's not just those who come illegally that worry him.
He also wants to limit legal immigration, especially from Mexico. His
complaints are as follows: There are too many Mexican immigrants
entering the United States -- so many that they're coloring the
landscape and changing the culture. These immigrants are refusing to
learn English or otherwise assimilate. They're an economic burden and
they depress wages for U.S. workers. They bring disease and lower the
standard of living. Last, but not least, they're part of some
elaborate conspiracy on the part of the Mexican government to reclaim
the American Southwest, which was lost in the Mexican War of 1846-48.

Much of that harks back to the one thing that concerns a lot of people
about Buchanan: his ugly obsession with race. While other immigration
restrictionists focus almost exclusively on Mexicans and other Latin
Americans, Buchanan also worries about the encroachment of Asians,
Africans and others from the "Third World."

Buchanan frets that the United States isn't as white as it used to be.
He prefers the way it was in 1950, when -- as he spelled out in a July
7, 1993, column -- 90 percent of the country was "of European stock."
By 2050, Buchanan writes, "whites may be near a minority in an America
of 81 million Hispanics, 62 million blacks and 41 million Asians."

In his new book, Buchanan continues to wring his hands about the
possibility that "the America our grandchildren will live in will
be ... a nation unrecognizable to our parents."

Let's just hope that most Americans recognize Buchanan for what he is:
a racist, a danger to the country, a throwback to an earlier time and
a hindrance to having a mature and rational debate about the urgent
issue of illegal immigration.

This article appeared on page B - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/200...http://tinyurl.com/2knuql


"Historical Presence | No other immigrant group in U.S. history has
asserted or could assert a historical claim to U.S. territory.
Mexicans and Mexican Americans can and do make that claim. Almost all
of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah was part
of Mexico until Mexico lost them as a result of the Texan War of
Independence in 1835-1836 and the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848.
Mexico is the only country that the United States has invaded,
occupied its capital-placing the Marines in the "halls of Montezuma"-
and then annexed half its territory. Mexicans do not forget these
events. Quite understandably, they feel that they have special rights
in these territories. "Unlike other immigrants," Boston College
political scientist Peter Skerry notes, "Mexicans arrive here from a
neighboring nation that has suffered military defeat at the hands of
the United States; and they settle predominantly in a region that was
once part of their homeland.... Mexican Americans enjoy a sense of being
on their own turf that is not"

Samuel Huntington (well known Economist)

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2495

I dare you to go down on the apache reservations and tell them
they are actually mecxicans. How about telling that to the comanches
in Texas.
The spanish conquistadors came first to the southwest and then
the missionarys from spain. If you want to take the time and get the
land back to it's rightful owners, give it back to the tribes living
there now and see what happens to Mexicans sneaking across the border.
???
Spain pacelled out the land and gave Spanish nobles and other
people the land in the SW, not the mexicans.
Records of these land grants can be found in the Archives in
Spain.
.

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