Skip to main content

Mother of Exiles (Immigration For Dummies)

So many people seem up in arms over the recent influx of immigrant children from Central America. WTF?

First off, they're CHILDREN!!!!! Sadly, there are a lot of them. Imagine their lives. To be sent, alone, across the miles, the desert, to a strange land...where certain people don't want them. We, as a society, should be ashamed of ourselves. 

The US has always welcomed immigrants. Why anyone would want to come to here anymore is beyond me. This country is a mess. I know it and you know it. So, just think how bad these kids' worlds are that this place seems like a better option.

I come from immigrants. Chances are, you do too. And before you pull that "My great great great grandmother was 1/16 Cherokee!" story, I'm going to call bullshit. You better be able to prove it...otherwise, shut the hell up. If your great great great grandmother was alive, not only would she be really old, she'd probably be disappointed in you. 

America, for all it's faults, is still a place of great potential. The rest of the world still sees us as a beacon of hope. The reality may be more bleak, but collectively we still show great promise...provided we ALL stop acting like assholes. 

We spend billions on foreign aid. Well, these kids are coming to us for aid. We should see it as not only our duty but our privilege to help them. They don't want freebies. They want a chance. Let's give them, and anyone else at our door, that chance. 

Before you complain about illegal immigrants, ask yourself this: "Who hires them?" Rich, often white, American people do. Otherwise, they wouldn't be coming here! We keep hiring them, so they keep on coming. And, they'll work harder for less...which, I think, is what pisses off most Americans. Check yourself.

The Statue of Liberty has long been a symbol of this country, it's freedoms, and it's potential. Inscribed on a plaque, at the base, is a poem titled The New Colossus. It goes like this:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"



Before you complain about immigrants, remember....we invited them. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Tsar of Back in My Day

Lately, he’d been thinking about his ex-father-in-law. Not the ex-wife - calm down. That road had enough potholes already. No, this was about Kolya. They had never been especially close. Between the language barrier, the cultural divide, and the lingering fog of the recently ended Cold War, “warm relationship” was never really on the menu. Still, Kolya had made an impression. Men like that tended to. He was somewhere in his mid-to-late sixties when they met. Picture the farmer from American Gothic if he’d been drafted by the Soviet Union, fed boiled cabbage, and taught to glare professionally. Bald as a cannonball, which somehow made his head seem even larger. Thick square plastic eyeglasses magnified his eyes until they looked like a permanent accusation. He dressed sharply, but in a way that suggested the tailor’s motto had been adequate for the State . Then there were his teeth. No expert on the subject, he could only assume cosmetic dentistry had been dismissed by the Soviets a...

Fags & Faggots

 It was late February 2002, and I was getting ready for my first trip overseas.  I had lucked into a handful of gigs, and I was thrilled by the chance. I grew up watching lots of Hammer horror films, and almost any British show I could find. Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Benny Hill Show, Dave Allen, and Tommy Cooper were regular viewing thanks to public television. I spent plenty of time reading British literature, especially Arthur Conan Doyle. My maternal grandfather’s family was British, so it’s fair to say I was an Anglophile. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of “the Queen’s English.” I was well acquainted with terms like spanner, lorry, telly, and most hilarious to twelve-year-old me, fags (or cigarettes, for those unaware). I was under the mistaken impression that “wanker” could be used as a term of endearment, not unlike jagoff. I later found this to be…not quite accurate. I was admittedly concerned about the food. While I occasionally consider myself ad...

THE BOOK I'LL NEVER WRITE

He sometimes said his greatest regret was not taking the old Trans-Siberian Railway eastward to Lake Baikal. Not because he cared much for bucket lists. He considered such catalogs as vanity with stationery, for those who had wasted decades suddenly writing down ten expensive ways to continue wasting time. No, what he regretted was more precise than that. He regretted never sitting in a dim canteen somewhere near Irkutsk while some broad-faced stranger lied to him magnificently over soup and vodka. He regretted never hearing the room laugh at a joke he only half understood. He regretted missing stories that would now likely never be told the same way again. His body had long since vetoed such ambitions. These days he was lucky if the month’s arithmetic ended with enough left over for prescriptions. If Melinda French Gates wished to finance a crippled Pennsylvanian’s global adventures, he remained open to discussion, but until then, conversations near Lake Baikal would have to survi...