Those of us who go through the immigration process and comply with the US immigration laws must endure putting our lives on hold, while we must wait a decision that will grant us our green cards. Yet, those who even when they can will not abide by the rules, have champions like Illinois congressman Luis Gutierrez who said, "There's an implication that somehow you did something wrong and you need to be be forgiven." (The Immigration Solutions P. 93). Well, for those of us who went through the motions, that is exactly what it means.
What our elected officials don't realize (and only God knows why) is that they are "protecting" those who cannot vote for them and in turn they are neglecting the opinions of those, who in a few short years will become citizens and WILL vote them out of office.
Nut job Joaquin Avila (UCLA Chicano studies professor) believes that denying voting rights to non-citizens is a form of apartheid. The Africanencyclopedia.com states the following:
The implementation of the policy, later referred to as "separate development," was made possible by the Population Registration Act of 1950, which put all South Africans into three racial categories: Bantu (black African), white, or Coloured (of mixed race). A fourth category, Asian (Indians and Pakistanis), was added later. The system of apartheid was enforced by a series of laws passed in the 1950s: the Group Areas Act of 1950 assigned races to different residential and business sections in urban areas, and the Land Acts of 1954 and 1955 restricted nonwhite residence to specific areas. These laws further restricted the already limited right of black Africans to own land, entrenching the white minority's control of over 80 percent of South African land. In addition, other laws prohibited most social contacts between the races; enforced the segregation of public facilities and the separation of educational standards; created race-specific job categories; restricted the powers of nonwhite unions; and curbed nonwhite participation in government.
Mr. Avila, are you aware that illegal immigrants can actually own property, may join a union and are not forced to work in any specific field (although our limited or non existent education forces us to take the low paying jobs). On the contrary, as illegal immigrants we stay within our comfort zones where a sub-culture of sub-citizens is created. Its really a shame that you were forced to take a job at UCLA as a professor because of apartheid. Also, don't forget that because we (Mexicans) for some reason refuse to learn English, we keep ourselves out of the competition for better paying jobs, which inevitably will lead to more income which than leads to progress.
What do you know about La Raza? Do you live or did you come from the barrios? If you are from the barrio and you made in on your own through hard work and perseverance, than you know what it takes to make it. It takes will, hard work and the use of our own resources, not activists and their cheap talk about human rights and Aztlan. All these activist accomplish is to perpetuate our sense of entitlement and help us "take advantage" of government social programs which undoubtedly make us lazy and why work when the government will provide? Keep in mind that a government big enough to give you all that you need, is also big enough to take everything you've got (Ronald Reagan).
Activists like you demand human rights, I propose this. Go to a country like Mexico, and demand all those things Mexicans demand from a foreign government. First of all, if you are illegally in Mexico, you will go to jail or you will have to pay a "mordida" to stay out of jail. Now lets say that teachers gather in their state's capital and they demand a rightfully earned wage increase. The result? 4 dead teachers after the state governor sent police to evacuate the teachers from the zocalo and an ongoing social-economic-political crisis that has caused many deaths, loss of jobs, loss of safety and loss of oaxaquenos that have migrated to the US. We should consider ourselves lucky that the US and its politicos allow us to come, go to school for free (yet we have the highest drop out rates of any minority) and to use all the social services that the government may provide.
Mr. Avila, If you are not from the barrio, than your parents must have had the resources to educate you. Perhaps you should ask them how it was that they manage to achieve and use those resources. Did an activist provide those, were they given to them? Probably not.
I grew up in Riverside, CA where crime is no where near as bad as it is in cities like Los Angeles, Santa Ana just to name a few. I grew up on the "e side" where I of course associated with Mexicans only and i witnessed first hand what Mexicans come for to the United States.
First case: A 15 year old girl gets pregnant and she gives birth to a beautiful boy whom I baptized and I take the moral and religious responsibility to help raise (a responsibility on which I have miserably failed). By the time she was 21 she has had 4 children with 3 different fathers and was living in a motel. On one of my occasional visits to my God Child he told me that he saw his mommy with 2 "cholos" kissing in her room. I was outraged, but not even Child Social Services could do anything and to date they haven't. by the time she was 23 she had bored 2 more children and added another father to this family. By this time her brother, whom I use to play video games with, was in jail and his girlfriend lived with her parents with a fatherless child. Also, by this time she appeared in a local video about recovering meth addicts. All this by the time she was 23. Who pays for her housing? Section 8. Who pays for their food and possibly her drugs? WIC, Medical and any other social service she might find. How much does she pay in the way of taxes? ZERO. Her cousin was pregnant by 16.
Second Case: A family of 4 siblings and their unemployed mother and disabled father. Third oldest was a female pregnant by 15. All 3 of the high school aged siblings dropped out of High School. I hate to make this prediction but I think the youngest will follow the elder's footsteps. Every weekend we would gather and these brothers would always talk about a certain drug dealer, idolizing him while getting drunk. I don't know whats become of them, because I made the choice to move out of California.
Third Case: A friend in High school, more like an acquantence, we hung around a few times a month, he played video games and studied more than most of us. He only lived only a few blocks from the second case family. What I know is that he is a "bitch" because he no longer hung around with his old friends (out of all his friends, a group of about 15, he was the only one that went to and finish college). What are the statistics so far? out of the 30 people mentioned here, only one has gone and completed a college education.
The fourth case is about me. Why? because I want to let people know that I have all the right, knowledge and first hand experience to have an opinion on this topic. As I grew up as an illegal immigrant I wanted to be like the cool Mexicans, the cholos. So I dressed like them, I hated blacks like them and of course, I harrased girls like them.
I was known in Middle School because I once yelled the F word to the N word, I was loved by certain circles for doing that, I felt good. One day when walking to school I found a knife so I sold it to a friend, who happily paid me a dollar only to later rat me out after he pulled it on a teacher. So I was suspended. When my mom went to pick me up form school, she was crying. When my father came home he gave me a beating that I don't care to remember. I remember one of my hands was numb. Is this child abuse, I think not because right after that I told myself, that shit ain't happening again (but in Spanish because I did not speak English at that time). So I went on to High school where I struggle in all my classes and hung around in TJ (Tijuana) with all the border brothers.
I managed to graduate and I went on to a community college. It was there that I was forced to study because I was not going to pay to repeat any of my courses (which I did because since I had to work 2 jobs to pay for school, my grades of course suffered) this wasn't free and I wasn't going to take it for granted. I finally and barely was accepted into a four year university where my performance was much less than stellar. At about that time I got married and had my first child and naturally I had to drop out of college. For years later I'm going back to school to finish what I started, except now I have a wife, a son, a girl on the way, a mortgage, car payments and a Green Card. Making it isn't easy and only our families can support us so that we can make things happen. If we let others tell us that we are entitled to an education, trust me that we will fail because anything that is free and comes easy, we humans don't know how to appreciate.
I went off on a tangent and now I don't know how to continue this entry. Please forgive me for going into several topics, but this blog entry, as most of my other entries, was not planned, all these thoughts came as a read page 93 in book The Immigration Solution.
What do you know about La Raza? Do you live or did you come from the barrios? If you are from the barrio and you made in on your own through hard work and perseverance, than you know what it takes to make it. It takes will, hard work and the use of our own resources, not activists and their cheap talk about human rights and Aztlan. All these activist accomplish is to perpetuate our sense of entitlement and help us "take advantage" of government social programs which undoubtedly make us lazy and why work when the government will provide? Keep in mind that a government big enough to give you all that you need, is also big enough to take everything you've got (Ronald Reagan).
Activists like you demand human rights, I propose this. Go to a country like Mexico, and demand all those things Mexicans demand from a foreign government. First of all, if you are illegally in Mexico, you will go to jail or you will have to pay a "mordida" to stay out of jail. Now lets say that teachers gather in their state's capital and they demand a rightfully earned wage increase. The result? 4 dead teachers after the state governor sent police to evacuate the teachers from the zocalo and an ongoing social-economic-political crisis that has caused many deaths, loss of jobs, loss of safety and loss of oaxaquenos that have migrated to the US. We should consider ourselves lucky that the US and its politicos allow us to come, go to school for free (yet we have the highest drop out rates of any minority) and to use all the social services that the government may provide.
Mr. Avila, If you are not from the barrio, than your parents must have had the resources to educate you. Perhaps you should ask them how it was that they manage to achieve and use those resources. Did an activist provide those, were they given to them? Probably not.
I grew up in Riverside, CA where crime is no where near as bad as it is in cities like Los Angeles, Santa Ana just to name a few. I grew up on the "e side" where I of course associated with Mexicans only and i witnessed first hand what Mexicans come for to the United States.
First case: A 15 year old girl gets pregnant and she gives birth to a beautiful boy whom I baptized and I take the moral and religious responsibility to help raise (a responsibility on which I have miserably failed). By the time she was 21 she has had 4 children with 3 different fathers and was living in a motel. On one of my occasional visits to my God Child he told me that he saw his mommy with 2 "cholos" kissing in her room. I was outraged, but not even Child Social Services could do anything and to date they haven't. by the time she was 23 she had bored 2 more children and added another father to this family. By this time her brother, whom I use to play video games with, was in jail and his girlfriend lived with her parents with a fatherless child. Also, by this time she appeared in a local video about recovering meth addicts. All this by the time she was 23. Who pays for her housing? Section 8. Who pays for their food and possibly her drugs? WIC, Medical and any other social service she might find. How much does she pay in the way of taxes? ZERO. Her cousin was pregnant by 16.
Second Case: A family of 4 siblings and their unemployed mother and disabled father. Third oldest was a female pregnant by 15. All 3 of the high school aged siblings dropped out of High School. I hate to make this prediction but I think the youngest will follow the elder's footsteps. Every weekend we would gather and these brothers would always talk about a certain drug dealer, idolizing him while getting drunk. I don't know whats become of them, because I made the choice to move out of California.
Third Case: A friend in High school, more like an acquantence, we hung around a few times a month, he played video games and studied more than most of us. He only lived only a few blocks from the second case family. What I know is that he is a "bitch" because he no longer hung around with his old friends (out of all his friends, a group of about 15, he was the only one that went to and finish college). What are the statistics so far? out of the 30 people mentioned here, only one has gone and completed a college education.
The fourth case is about me. Why? because I want to let people know that I have all the right, knowledge and first hand experience to have an opinion on this topic. As I grew up as an illegal immigrant I wanted to be like the cool Mexicans, the cholos. So I dressed like them, I hated blacks like them and of course, I harrased girls like them.
I was known in Middle School because I once yelled the F word to the N word, I was loved by certain circles for doing that, I felt good. One day when walking to school I found a knife so I sold it to a friend, who happily paid me a dollar only to later rat me out after he pulled it on a teacher. So I was suspended. When my mom went to pick me up form school, she was crying. When my father came home he gave me a beating that I don't care to remember. I remember one of my hands was numb. Is this child abuse, I think not because right after that I told myself, that shit ain't happening again (but in Spanish because I did not speak English at that time). So I went on to High school where I struggle in all my classes and hung around in TJ (Tijuana) with all the border brothers.
I managed to graduate and I went on to a community college. It was there that I was forced to study because I was not going to pay to repeat any of my courses (which I did because since I had to work 2 jobs to pay for school, my grades of course suffered) this wasn't free and I wasn't going to take it for granted. I finally and barely was accepted into a four year university where my performance was much less than stellar. At about that time I got married and had my first child and naturally I had to drop out of college. For years later I'm going back to school to finish what I started, except now I have a wife, a son, a girl on the way, a mortgage, car payments and a Green Card. Making it isn't easy and only our families can support us so that we can make things happen. If we let others tell us that we are entitled to an education, trust me that we will fail because anything that is free and comes easy, we humans don't know how to appreciate.
I went off on a tangent and now I don't know how to continue this entry. Please forgive me for going into several topics, but this blog entry, as most of my other entries, was not planned, all these thoughts came as a read page 93 in book The Immigration Solution.
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