By Thomas Sowell
Ever wonder why? Part III
Thomas Sowell
July 6, 2004
Ever wonder why people who hate America live in America?
At a soccer match between Mexico and the United States a few years ago, the stands were full of Mexican flags. The fans booed when "The Star-Spangled Banner" was played and those few fans who raised American flags were pelted with debris, as were the American soccer players.
This would have been rotten behavior if it had taken place in Mexico City. But it took place in Los Angeles. So it's scary.
We already have enough homegrown America-haters in this country without importing any more, whether from Mexico or the Middle East. But neither political party has the guts to put a stop to it.
Politicians will not even enforce our existing immigration laws, much less pass new ones. If they did, they would not only lose minority voting blocs, they would be so vilified in the media as to lose the votes of those mainstream Americans who take the media seriously.
Many of those in the media, and among the intelligentsia in general, see themselves as citizens of the world, and they see the United States as just the country that happens to be lucky enough to be graced by their presence.
To these elites, immigration is just one more issue on which to engage in moral preening and attribute nasty motives to ordinary Americans who disagree with them. From the way many discussions of immigration are conducted, you might never dream that we are talking about the permanent alteration of the American people and the American culture.
Even drug addiction is not so permanent, for some people can give it up and, if they can't, maybe their children can. But a woman can cross the border from Mexico to have a baby in Texas or California and that baby's descendants will be American citizens long after all of today's American citizens are dead and gone.
Most of the people who come here, legally or illegally, undoubtedly do so just to better themselves, as immigrants have done for centuries. But people who crossed an ocean to get here came here to become Americans, not to remain foreigners, much less to become America haters.
The difference today is that organized activists and a multicultural ideology that has become dogma among educators and the media combine to keep foreigners foreign in language, culture and allegiance. What happened at the Los Angeles soccer match is just one of many indications of how well they have succeeded.
None of this is peculiar to people from Mexico. There are people here from the Middle East who demand rights that they never had in their native countries, but who take on no corresponding obligation of loyalty to America. Instead, many teach hatred of those Americans who were born here who happen to be Jewish.
Our tolerance has led to importing intolerance.
American citizenship is no longer prized as it once was. Indeed, it is no longer necessary for living permanently in the United States. In California, illegal immigrants not only go to the state universities, they pay lower tuition than American students who are from other states.
Both legal and illegal immigrants who don't feel like bothering to learn the language used by the American people will have government agencies and private institutions alike provide them with information in their own languages.
The argument that immigrants "take jobs that other Americans don't want" leaves out the crucial factor of pay. If legal or illegal immigrants came here and worked as journalists or college professors at half the pay that American journalists or college professors receive, the intelligentsia would probably have no trouble seeing the fallacy in what they are saying.
One of the reasons many Americans will not take many low-paying or arduous jobs is that the welfare state makes it unnecessary for them to do so. But get those Americans off the gravy train, and take away employers' supply of cheap foreign labor, and Americans would resume doing jobs that they did for centuries.
More important, we would no longer be importing so many people who don't want to be Americans.
