Yes, it was a different time - under different rules. The rules we have now are stricter. One hundred years ago, the leaders of the U. S. perceived a need to fill a vast country that they had only recently wrested from it's native inhabitants. Well, we managed to fill that land mass. Overpopulation is a very real problem, yes, even here. Americans consume so much more per capita (not a good thing), that each additional inhabitant adds many times more waste and consumption to our World's problems. We cannot accommodate everyone who wants to come here. There has to be a way to limit immigration, and yes, those who come here against those rules are here ILLEGALLY.

Our immigration problem is a scam run on working class native-born and legal immigrants by multi-national corporations and corporate farmers to drive down wages for the middle and lower classes. There is NO job that an American won't do for a LIVING wage.

NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT and the WTO have been a disaster for the common people of most countries, especially our neighbors to the South. Repealing those measures, and pulling out of the WTO and helping the residents of neighboring countries to make a living at home is what we really need to do. This, along with Americans ceasing to be such piggish, wasteful consumers, and a massive program of family planning and population reduction in all countries is the only way we will survive as a species.

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You are all invited to the MVP Spring Action on Sunday, May 4th, 4-6 PM, in Lawrence, MA.

The Merrimack Valley is home to over 115,000 immigrants and refugees from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, including thousands of undocumented immigrants. This year, our Spring Action is focused on advancing concrete initiatives for immigrant justice. It should be a powerful event that will include personal testimonies from immigrants and accountability from public officials in the Valley

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More bullshit to whipe away your god given guilt! I can see the cowboys in thier white hats just wresting the land away from my peoples and the poor frigging eroupeeons whos only crime in this great big world was to come to my land so poor ahhhh its breaks my heart!
What a pile of bullshit you and yours were not wanted or needed in your own REAL HOMELANDS so you came to MY LAND AND your peoples MURDERED MINE to MAKE ROOM FOR YOUR WHITE ASSES PERIOD.
You brought the slave trade with you and then opened the doors to a COUNTRY that was not yours period. So please put away your rose colored glasses.

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I had to pay for my green card 16 years ago, why should they be any different. If getting a green card doesn't matter anymore, I want my fucking money back. Liberal twat.

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Hey if it wasn't for us amerriiccuuhhnnns you'd all be speaking cherokee or some shit. America is a lie built on murder, but shit....we got cheap TV's, everybody wins....how does that casino feel natives? Feel redeemed? White people suck. Lets all give ourselves a pat on the back...aren't we the greatest.

White people stole the land, killed the brown people (we have a habit of doing that) and took what we wanted. We then exploited the working class so a select few could own all the rest of us. What a great experiment. I am tired of people thinking this is the greatest place on earth. Unless you are rich, this country fucks you unapologetically and you suckle on a flag like it stands for something. If you have a debt, you are a slave to the few that own this plantation that you think is the American Dream.

You are suckers.

White people are too distracted to figure out that they are slaves. Good Job. Guess you didn't need all that useless cheap shit after all. Enjoy the bed you have made.

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|Continuation of Above|

American versus un-American became a more prominent idea in immigration politics through the 20th century. The USA Patriot Act is a clear example of the way politics uses the idea of being an American to pass more restrictive laws within the government’s immigration policy. The idea of being American however, has been used in arguments opposing racist and restrictive immigration legislation as well. In 1924, Republican Congressman Robert H. Clancy spoke against the nationality quota that was a part of the proposed Immigration Act of 1924. He spoke of the shared values of Jewish, Italian and Polish immigrants and those that had lived in the U.S. for multiple generations. In declaring that America was made of immigrants and that anti-immigration was un-American, Clancy stated, “To me real Americanism and the American flag are the product of the blood of men and of the tears of women and children of a different type than the rampant “Americanizers” of to-day” (Speech by Robert H. Clancy, http://historymatters.gmu.ed/d/5079). Clancy said that the values of America were built through those of many different immigrant groups, and thus it is un-American to create laws based on race and nationality, as we, the insiders, were created from the outsiders. America was built from settlers and immigrants and it is this that makes defining American so difficult, what makes having a unified nationality impossible, and makes our immigration policies so highly debated.
It seems that perhaps our politicians will have to use trial-and-error in order to construct a smart and widely approved immigration policy. The USA Patriot Act was an error in terms of immigration, as increasing the physical border around the country will not decrease the number of people wanting to live within the U.S. What the U.S. should do in terms of immigration is help the countries from which people are emigrating at vast numbers, and create a guest-worker program, so that the workers who annually commute to the U.S. illegally can do the same legally. However, the primary concern of our government in terms of immigration should be to improve the immigration process, as waiting 10-20 years for an acceptance or denial is simply too much, and prompts desperate individuals to travel illegally into the country.
Those of you who say, “My Grandparents came here legally…” need to see that the immigration debate has been evolving since legal borders and citizenship became concrete. The debate will continue to evolve as U.S. politics and world relations change, and thus, the arguments for and against will be evolving as well. For now, see that the argument of “My Grandparents…” is outdated and unrelated to the current immigration debate.

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| NOTE: above is continuation of this post. This is not a continuation of the post above. READ THIS FIRST, then continue above.|

The argument against illegal immigration based on one’s legal immigrant ancestors is unrelated to the current immigration debate. The immigration situation within this country has evolved dramatically within the past 133 years. Our country’s first immigration policy allowed everyone to work and live within the border, when the country began to fill in 1875, however, the nation turned inward and began to shut its doors. But the flow of immigrants has never stopped.
The concept of illegal immigration did not emerge in U.S. immigration policy until The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Before 1882, the only individuals officially barred from immigrating to the U.S. were convicts, prostitutes, “idiots,” “lunatics,” people requiring public care, and those that were not capable of paying a head tax of 50¢ (“Who May Enter?” Tracing History and Ourselves). A steady influx of Chinese immigrants willing to do the cheap labor that unions were working against, stirred much animosity against the Chinese race. The Chinese Exclusion Act was in order from 1882 to 1943 and declares that the government could deport all Chinese who were illegally within the U.S. Never before had deportation been a part of U.S. immigration policy: the government had previously approached the immigration situation by slightly restricting the individuals allowed to enter the country and by then figuring out how to deal with different immigrant groups once they were here. After 1882, the government controlled immigration by deporting illegal Chinese and limiting the rights of most immigrant groups. In the 1922 Supreme Court case of Ozawa v. United States the Supreme Court ruled that Japanese were ineligible for citizenship because they were not white in the way that white was defined by common knowledge. The Supreme Court case of United States v. Thind, in 1923, declared that Asian Indians were ineligible for citizenship as well, and prompted the withdrawal of Asian Indians citizenship and the confiscation of their land (“White By Law,” www.youtube.com). While the government legally limited immigrants in this way, the U.S. society displayed their dislike of and racism towards certain immigrant groups by limiting the availability of jobs to those of a specific race. The introduction of deportation and illegal status changed U.S. immigration in that it more concretely made an outside and an inside, an “us” and “them,” the foreigners. When deportation became a legal action of the government, self-identification as American became distinct, Americans were those legally within the U.S., and legally were citizens. It is from this stem of American identification that people today define “American,” at least partially, as being within the laws of immigration. Thus many U.S. citizens have such a strong view against illegal immigrants, because to citizens, they, the illegal immigrants, are fundamentally un-American.

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