While Thanksgiving is a good time to reflect on family and the positives in our lives it also serves as a reminder (at least for me) that the vast majority of us are immigrants to this country. Those folks who landed in Plymouth were immigrants escaping persecution and looking for a better life. As each wave of immigrants came to America’s shores there was resistance (being Irish I have a keen awareness of the old “No Irish need Apply” signs and that police vehicles were called “Paddy Wagons” as an ethnic slur against the Irish). Immigration remains a hot button issue today as the Republicans stall an immigration reform bill to please their Tea Party zealots. At the same time, after losing another national election and seeing Latino voters stand with Democrats, the GOP went through a series of internal reviews and decided on a plan to reach out to Latino voters for future elections.
So how is that working out with the GOP rank-and-file? RMG gives us a window into that (V3PN’s comment on a Karl Marx post) – –
While the progressives rally to demand free healthcare, college education, welfare and housing for Mexicans who came here to pick lettuce, I will be staging my first ever shoe giveaway!
We will leave behind old and worn shoes, empty of the persons who once filled them, as a symbol of those people whose presence has been taken away from us.”
While uneducated, disease carrying lettuce pickers from a drug-lord run country cast off their footwear in front of GOP headquarters – I am inviting Americans to come and take any pair of shoes they want – Free of charge! While the ‘real’ unemployment rate in the USA continues to hover around 15% we find most people can not afford shoes. If you can’t find jobs you can’t buy shoes. Yet somehow immigrants seem to be able to leave their footwear behind. Lettuce picking pays pretty well these days!
http://www.redmassgroup.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=17465
and this description of SEIU members who advocate for immigrants from RMG poster Scott Anderson – –
Is it any wonder our state government is tone deaf to the vast majority of us? It’s been taken hostage by the jackbooted thugs in purple shirts
To the folks at RMG – Happy Thanksgiving from the son of Irish Immigrants.
When you act like a smug asshole to large swaths of the voting public in a democracy it shouldn’t be a shock that the voters reject you.
Had a delicious thanksgiving feast in the home of an Indian family who are good friends and former parishoners of my fiancees parents. Next to the mutta paneer and nan were sweet potatoes with marshmellows, fried green bean casserole, and of course a delicious turkey with gravy. But I was discouraged to hear that Caterpillar had laid off Seneth along with thousands of engineers, and under current law the INS gave him very little time to retain his visa after losing his job. Bare in mind this feast was in their delightful new home that was recently purchased joined by the American born son. Fortunately he found a new job in time, one that also pays better than Caterpillar. But these are the hard working highly skilled immigrants we are trying to retain. They want to incorporate their traditions with American ones, and their son considers himself an American not an Indian (though he broke me hear when he asked why all the other ‘Americans’ in his school district were white while he was not). The INS gave them an incredibly hard time, imagine how hard a time it gives to the even harder working people that pick our lettuce.
Shame on RMG and all the other right wing assholes who routinely diminish the hard work immigrants do in our country, forget their own immigrant heritage, and demean people who actually are desperately trying to become part of our country. I have yet to meet an immigrant leeching off the system. According to Mother Jones there are more than enough rednecks in red states doing that for the rest of us. I am thankful he got to stay, and I pray the smug assholes stop their crusade and start looking in the mirror next time they bash a welfare queen.
This is the modern-day equivalent of the “native-born” Anglo-Saxon Protestants despising the immigrant Irish, then whining that the Democratic Party welcoming the immigrants won all the elections in Boston.
Of course it never occurred to these jokers that the crap economy is the result of three or four decades of their preferred economic theories holding sway in this nation. If SEIU are “jackbooted thugs” now, I wonder what they thought back when the unions had 1/3 of the U.S. workforce…and the economy was working for all sorts of people.
Why we educate so many doctors and engineers and then force them to leave the country is beyond me. If it is just to make Dollar State residents (as I think of much of the red states) happy, it’s just going to drag the rest of the country down to their level.