Originally Posted By: Captain Sammitch
 Originally Posted By: the G-man
Let's face it. If people want to come here, learn the language and work hard, I think we'd all welcome them. Hell, we'd probably all be in favor of amnesty and/or open borders.

But time and time again we hear that isn't what's happening.

I don't think it's xenophobic or racist for WB, or anyone else, to expect that the current wave of immigrants follow the same procedures as past waves from places like Italy, China or Germany.



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.


True.
This was the situation for 200 years. All national/racial groups have had their rough edges, before assimilating.
But...

The problem is, in the current (post-1965) liberal mindset, assimilation is now labelled as "racism". Which means assimilation that would have previously been encouraged, and immigrant populations absorbed, are now discouraged. Which leads to separatism and eventual balkanization. In this atmosphere, immigration becomes colonization and invasion.

 Originally Posted By: Capain Sammitch

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.


Okay, here you add not only the assimilation of legal immigrants, who are not pressured to assimilate, but the massive (estimated 20 million now) illegal immigrants, that hide among and are enabled by legal immigrants.

It is difficult to prevent illegal immigration even when there is pressure to assimilate. How much more difficult, when a liberal ideology undermines assimilation, and even questions the rightness of removing illegal immigrants?
It's insane.

 Originally Posted By: Captain Sammitch

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.


Exactly. There have never been more immigrants entering the country, and yet those who are pro-immigration, and even pro-illegal-immigration, fail to see the urgent need for a flow mechanism, and just expect things to magically work out, despite the clear explosion across our borders.
We have about 5,500 illegals crossing our borders every day. That's an invading army, crossing into our nation, every day. Among them thieves, murderers, gang-members, drug dealers, and increasingly, potential muslim terrorists (the number of "non-Mexicans" predominantly muslims, caught illegally crossing the mexican border, has gone from 50,000 before 9/11 to 150,000.)