RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events In U.S. Name Count, Garcias Are Catching Up With Joneses

Heh. I'm watching Blazing Saddles as I read this thread.

Well, just to play devil's advocate for a moment, the history of legal immigrants hasn't been spotless (or bloodless) either. As I've said before, much of the history of this nation consists of recent arrivals coming into conflict with less recent arrivals. As a person of largely Irish descent myself, it'd be silly for me to gloss over the impact that the Irish had on the history of gang crime and organized crime in the United States. Since we're all human beings and we all like to hang onto our cultural peculiarities, we've all brought our collective cultural pros and cons to America with us. The Italians brought kickass food but also the Sicilian Black Hand, the Chinese brought bitchin' threads but also opium, the Germans elevated the production and consumption of both ground meat and beer to an art form but also brought lederhosen, and so on. All these people groups consisted of plenty of good, upstanding citizens, but they had their share of unsavory characters as well.

I think it'd be silly to suggest that one people group in particular is gonna have a disproportionately high percentage of shady characters. Almost all the groups mentioned above started out with elevated crime rates, not because of the sort of people they were, but because they were shoehorned into crapulent living conditions by the brillions. You can get all uppity and blame The Man™ for that if you want, but really it's just the ups and downs of Coming to America™. The difference is that legal immigration processes give Uncle Sam some control over those numbers, and to some extent those living conditions. Whenever you have an unmoderated flow of any people group into any region, it becomes next to impossible to prevent yes, demographic shifts, but also abrupt imbalances across innumerable little economic seesaws.

You can't balance an equation if the variables won't sit still. Except in calculus, but I haven't figured out how to get all those little symbol thingies to work with UBBCode. The issue I have with legal immigration has less than nothing to do with who's coming in. I mean come on, my brother's Guatemalan, half my mom's side of the family comes from either native Spanish-speaking places or native Portuguese-speaking places, and so on. My concern is that it's been so incredibly difficult over our nation's history for us all to find a balance, and the squabbles that have erupted have often been bloody in the extreme, that any time any group of people charges in with absolutely no mechanism to regulate their numbers or conduct, all hell is gonna break loose.