Hispanic Fanatic

As always, I appreciate the comments, so let me thank Steven, Ike, and everyone else who posts here.

Now, let me tell you about one evening when I was in college. After a particularly egregious party, I accidently laced up a friend’s shoes, thinking they were mine. She had big feet, and they were the same brand as my own. In any case, I walked around for a day or so before she pointed out that we had unintentionally switched footwear.

“But now we truly know each other,” I said. “Because we have walked many miles in each other’s shoes.”

She was just annoyed that I had stretched out her Nikes.

Of course, my literal embrace of the ancient saying didn’t help me to see the world from her perspective. All of us process events and concepts through our own cultural filters, and even the most open-minded individual has occasional trouble understanding someone else’s point of view.

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All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The Fourteenth Amendment

U.S. Constitution

It’s probably not a shocker that I’m a liberal person. Still, I always had a healthy respect for the libertarian viewpoint. I thought it was based on principles (e.g., less government, fewer regulations, control of one’s reproductive choices, etc) rather than the virulent fear and hatred that fuels so much of the modern Republican Party.

I even tried to give Senate candidate Rand Paul the benefit of the doubt for his truly idiotic and potentially dangerous statement that private businesses can discriminate based on race.

“He’s just being a hardcore libertarian,” I thought. “He can’t be that racist.”

Then Paul let loose with his latest conservative broadside. He said that the children of illegal immigrants who are born in the United States should not be granted citizenship.

With that comment, it’s difficult to ignore Paul’s implication that, in his opinion, the United States has way too many Latinos. There is no principle here.

Paul, and anyone who agrees with him, has to be willing to ignore the Constitution’s unambiguous statement that everyone born here is a citizen. They also have to be eager to overturn decades of court precedents, an action that would require a decision from a monumentally activist judge (one of those guys I thought conservatives hated).

Still, plenty of conservatives have championed the anti-birthright position in recent years, despite the right wing’s oft-stated love of the U.S. Constitution.

By the way, here’s a study question for all social conservatives: If forced to chose, do you revere the words of the Constitution or the Bible more? As a follow-up, have you read either one?

But back to the topic at hand, which is anchor babies.

Randy Terrill, a Republican state representative in Oklahoma who is trying to get an anti-birthright bill passed, says that in a worst-case scenario, “Children of invading armies would be considered citizens of the U.S.”

I must admit that I had never thought of this. In Terrill’s grim assessment of our future, invading armies (from some unknown or unnamed country) send brigade after brigade of pregnant soldiers to charge our front lines. Hesitant to fire upon the rampaging moms-to-be, our soldiers let them overrun the nation. Support troops, perhaps infantrywomen in their second trimester, manage to crawl under the barb wire or hop the fence without putting pressure on their swollen bellies.

Mere months later, the soldiers start giving birth. These pseudo-citizens are then granted citizenship, and the United States falls to the invading hordes. It’s truly evil genius.

Now, I’ve written before about the concept of revoking citizenship upon birth, and I expressed my support for amending the Constitution … as long as we really go for it. That is, let’s reject citizenship for everyone born here, whether the parent is an undocumented worker or a ninth-generation American. Every child is a legal resident, but can’t become a citizen until he or she passes a basic test – the way naturalized citizens do.

For some reason, this idea has never caught on.

The truth is that we just don’t want Maria from Mexico to give birth to a kid inside the California border, then have to call the offspring a citizen. So by all means, let’s ignore those sections of the Constitution that we don’t like.

But could we try not to pretend that there’s anything like principles or consistency on display? They are simply not present in this debate.

Big old thanks are coming to Joe, SK, Amigo Griego, and the always wonderful Ankhesen Mie for their recent comments.

Let me remind them and everyone else that in one of my first posts, I wrote that in the future “everyone will be at least part Hispanic.” While I still believe this is true, new information has convinced me that it’s not the whole story.

Yes, Hispanics are younger and have higher birth rates than other ethnic groups. These facts, along with the completely noncontroversial aspect of immigration, are chief reasons why Hispanics are the largest minority group in America.

Indeed, many media outlets have insisted that the Brown Invasion will soon overtake America, and we’ll all be speaking Spanish as a matter of course (if that happens, perhaps my grasp of the imperative subjunctive form will finally improve).

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Embracing my god-given Second Amendment rights, I plan to buy an armful of automatic weapons and stuff the closets in my house with every manner of shotgun, pistol, and blunderbuss if I have to.

You see, crime nationwide has skyrocketed due to the influx of illegal immigrants, and…

What’s that you say? Just about every statistic has shown that violent crime is actually down in America? Well, that’s not what I’ve heard on cable news networks, but ok.

Still, it must be true that crime is way up in places where illegal immigrants congregate. Just look at our friends in Arizona, where stories of murder, rape, carjacking, kidnapping, assault, and arson are plentiful – all at the hands of the undocumented.

Senator John McCain says crossover crime from Mexico has led to “violence—the worst I have ever seen” (and that guy was in the Vietnam War!). Meanwhile, Governor Jan Brewer insists that her state has “been inundated with criminal activity.”

But in truth, as I’ve written before, violent crime is down in Arizona. For that matter, violence is also down in such immigrant-heavy cities as Phoenix, El Paso, and New York City.

In fact, a new study implies that cities with lots of immigrants may actually be (wait for it)… safer than other places in America. How can this be?

Well, we’d have to listen to a Harvard professor who is, no doubt, a typical elitist with fancy book learnin’ on his resume. But let’s indulge him.

Professor Robert J. Sampson, in an interview with writer Christopher Dickey, says that “immigrants move into neighborhoods abandoned by locals and help prevent them from turning into urban wastelands. They often have tighter family structures and mutual support networks, all of which actually serve to stabilize urban environments.” Sampson adds that “if you want to be safe, move to an immigrant city.”

Could this be why several police chiefs from around the country recently met with Attorney General Eric Holder? The chiefs stated that Arizona’s new law, if enacted elsewhere, could backfire.

“We will be unable to do our jobs,” said Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck. “Laws like this will actually increase crime, not decrease crime.”

The primary reason, of course, is because the new law erodes any trust between immigrant communities and the police. Also, cops would be spending less time chasing down the truly bad guys and more time booking Latinos who tried to pick up a gig outside Home Depot.

These real-world problems with the law are in addition to such minor qualms as a potential increase in racial profiling and the fact the law may violate the U.S. Constitution. But let’s not quibble.

The funny thing is that there are plenty of legitimate concerns about illegal immigration that conservatives can bring up. But they have insisted on exaggerating fears of violence. Now that they’ve committed to this path, they don’t want to hear that passing laws such as SB 1070 could actually increase crime.

But then we hear about Abel Moreno, of Charlotte, North Carolina. He called 911 when he saw a man assaulting a woman in public. The guy was arrested and faces multiple charges.

But Moreno, who is an undocumented worker, is now in line to be deported. His attorney hopes he can get Moreno a temporary visa. In the meantime, Moreno has lost his job.

I’m sure the next immigrant who witnesses a crime will be only too happy to be thrust into a similar situation by calling the cops. He’ll feel a great surge of civic pride, even after the police slap the cuffs on him.

But that’s not my concern. I’ll just buy more guns.

Recently, President Obama declared that he was sending 1,200 additional National Guard troops to the Mexican border. It seems to be his way of saying, “This Arizona bullshit is getting out of hand.”

Now, on an intuitive level, sealing the border makes sense. One way to address the illegal-immigration problem is to prevent undocumented people from getting into the country in the first place.

However, I’ve never been clear on how more troops would help. Unless the National Guard is prepared to use lethal force, it seems to me that many illegal immigrants who have come that far are willing to take their chances. And if our troops are authorized to open fire on people, I doubt that all but the most hardened Minuteman will be indifferent to the inevitable sight of a gunned-down family.

Furthermore, as columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr has pointed out, “the U.S.-Mexico border has never been more fortified…. Agents apprehend people and deport them at a feverish clip.”

In fact, the United States has more border-patrol agents than FBI agents. And deportations over the last year are up, even as illegal immigration has declined. So we’ve got more guards, fewer people coming over, and more of them kicked out as fast as possible. And still the problem persists.

Could a path to citizenship and a temporary-worker program help? Would that allow agents to focus on those truly dangerous people who hop the border? Should we look into other creative ideas that are likely to piss off both liberals and conservatives, but are the most humane for people willing to risk everything for a better life?

Apparently, we should not. We’ll send people with guns to the border and talk about building a Great Wall of America to keep the hordes out.

Naturally, I’m curious where the funding for this military buildup is coming from. After all, most of the people who want to send a million troops to the border also insist that the U.S. government is incompetent and that federal spending is too high. It’s a bit of a contradiction.

Would they be willing to increase everyone’s taxes to seal the border? Now that would be an interesting debate to have.

A friend of mine really wants to get married. He’s at the stage of life where he feels like he has to settle down, have children, and do the whole domestic thing.

The reasons that people feel this societal pressure could fill up blog posts for years, but I’m going to sidestep that rich vein to concentrate on something he said that is more relevant to this blog.

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I’m hoping that my fellow blogger Macon D doesn’t sue me, but he had such an interesting post recently that I’m just going to steal his topic outright and run with it.

At his site, Stuff White People Do, Macon D asks if many whites believe that improvements for ethnic minorities come only at their expense.

Well, as a partial answer, let me say that as far as I can tell, America is the only country in the world where the most economically powerful take to the streets to protest that they are being oppressed.

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I want to thank Susan A for her recent comments on my post. I’ll also thank DSewell, even though his comment consisted of calling me “nothing but a racist” and launching into an angry diatribe about Los Angeles and Hispanics in general. Why so tense, Mr. DSewell?

Let’s all lighten up. I’ll return to a topic I’ve addressed in the past – namely, my fumbling attempts to relearn Spanish. As I’ve written before, I was semi-fluent at one point, but lack of practice has dropped me to intermediate level at best.

Like every language, Spanish has its fair share of untranslatable phrases and idioms. For example, a few years ago, my mom and my aunt were speaking in Spanish. My mother let loose with a comment that made them both laugh.

Naturally, I asked what she had said. My mother informed me that, strictly translated, the phrase translated into something like “Your stepbrother’s bus is driven by a rage-filled monkey with pneumonia. And he’s very punctual, if you know what I mean.”

Yes, it all makes sense now.

Of course, it’s not just the quirks and exceptions that are frustrating to learners. It’s the faulty translations that well-meaning individuals foist upon the rest of us.

To give you an egregious example, recently I saw a sign outside a nightclub. The sign read, “You must be twenty-one years old to enter.” The very helpful Spanish translation beneath it read, “Necesita tener veinte y uno anos para entrar.”

There was just one problem. The “n” in the word “anos” was missing a tilde, the punctuation mark better known to English speakers as “that wavy line thingy above the letter.” The absence of this diacritical mark altered the sentence’s meaning, just a little.

Instead of saying, “You must be twenty-one years old to enter,” the sign read, “You must possess twenty-one assholes to enter.”

I think we can all agree that even the most determined club-goer is unlikely to achieve this high standard. We can further agree that few doormen or bouncers would be eager to check patrons to verify their adherence to the club’s policy.

I propose a system. Before anyone is allowed to translate anything into Spanish, they must demonstrate their proficiency by repeating the following tongue-twister at a fast rate, and then explaining what it means:

R con R cigarro

R con R barril

rápido corren los carros

cargados de azúcar del ferrocarril

I heard this little ditty a lot growing up. My mother said it often, and then watched amused as I, and the other American-born members of the family, tried in vain to master it. I still can’t do it, but at least I know that it has something to with railroad cars filled with sugar travelling at a high rate of speed.

No, it doesn’t make sense. But then again, when was the last time you saw someone selling seashells by the seashore?

My point – exactly.

I’ve learned a lot of things by following the debate over illegal immigration. For example, I’ve found out that illegal immigrants routinely break into people’s homes and carjack Americans with impunity. I mean, there are scores of horror stories on internet message boards and cable tv news programs about what happened to good, God-loving (or do I mean God-fearing?) communities once a day-laborer moved in next door.

Apparently, it’s not a small percentage of troublemakers who commit these crimes either, but each and every undocumented worker. Therefore, we cannot consider a pathway to citizenship for any of them. They are all guilty. So let’s raze their neighborhoods to the ground.

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Thanks, as always, to Macon D and Ankhesen Mie for their support. And thanks to all of you who checked out my new gig at Change.org (although, as Ankhesen can attest to, there is more serious crazy among readers of that site than I assumed there would be).

In any case, let’s talk about our favorite people: the architects of Arizona’s anti-immigration law.

The law’s backers believed that their get-tough approach to illegal immigration would garner them nationwide praise and respect. Indeed, many states have proposed enacting a similar version of the law, proof of its effectiveness at riling up conservatives.

However, the law’s supporters must have thought that the only individuals who would object were illegal immigrants themselves and a few bleeding hearts. That hasn’t been the case.

First, the initial public outcry has already been effective in changing the most odious portion of the law. Under the revision, police cannot stop people for the sole reason of questioning their immigration status (in theory at least). The fact that the law’s backers thought everybody would be fine with a cop frisking people at random shows how invincible they believed their position to be.

However, that revision hasn’t prevented further protest. We’ve seen tens of thousands gather from Los Angeles to New York to demonstrate against the law.

More important, talk of boycotting Arizona and/or its corporations has intensified and cannot be dismissed as empty threats. About thirty organizations, and untold thousands of individuals, have pledged to avoid the state. In addition, more than twenty conventions, conferences, and meetings have relocated out of Arizona because of the law.

To get that many people to flee the area, one usually has to announce something truly horrific, like “We start filming Battlefield Earth 2 here tomorrow.” But all that it’s taken is one misguided law.

Recently, St. Paul jumped to the front of what might prove to be a long line of cities banning official travel to the state of Arizona.” Those crazy lefty towns of Los Angeles and San Francisco have also decided to skip sending anyone to Arizona for the foreseeable future.

The cities of Tucson and Flagstaff won’t be on that list (considering its rather difficult to boycott their own state) but their respective city councils plan to sue to get the law changed. Elsewhere in Arizona, people are starting to worry that Major League Baseball will pull the 2011 All-Star Game from Phoenix, as pressure increases on MLB to hold the game somewhere else. Commissioner Bud Selig has insisted that the game will take place in Arizona.

But speaking of the sports world, the Phoenix Suns recently played some games in jerseys altered to read Los Suns to, as player Amare Stoudemire put it, “let the Latin community know that we’re behind them 100 percent.”

Multiple MVP Steve Nash has endorsed the idea, as has former basketball great Charles Barkley. In fact, Barkley says that pro sports teams should actively boycott Arizona (and he lives there).

The funny thing is that Barkley is a well-known Republican. In rethinking his allegence to conservatives, Barkley is not alone. Apparently, even some Republicans don’t think the law is such a great idea.

This feeling is especially strong among conservative Latinos “who have become an increasingly important Republican constituency in a number of Southwestern states [and] are considering bucking their party.” It’s as if Republicans actively wanted to drive Latinos out of the GOP, and thereby verify the allegation that they care only about the well-being of Southern white people.

To be sure, most Americans – and certainly most Arizonians – favor the law. But if the law’s backers thought that only meek objections would greet their decision, they were seriously mistaken.

When you’ve managed to anger the country’s largest minority group, entire municipalities, members of your own political party, and a major sports franchise, you’ve really underestimated the opposition.