Pizza and politics - Si se puerde!

I was eating a slice of New York pizza at a local eatery yesterday afternoon. It was chicken and broccoli - not your average pizza chain fare. Were I not on a stringent budget, I would have ordered a glass of Chianti.

Adjacent to me sat a union man - retired. I asked him if I could share his table - hey - it's me - it's the way I do things! He looked a tad uncomfortable, so I set about cleaning off the next table, including the cheese crumbs used my hand sanitizer, set my stuff on the chair and sat next to him.


We talked about the need for unions, living for 7 years in a "right to work state." We talked briefly about the UAW issues in Detroit. He was blissfully unaware. Interesting for a union guy, I mused.



What he DID know what that American citizens have the right to stop "those" people from coming over the border, getting welfare, using our hospitals, etc. etc. etc.

According to Wikepedia - yes, I know, not the best oracle for truth, but it works sometimes.

The largest per-capita source of immigrants to the United States comes from El Salvador, for which up to a third of the population lives outside the country, mostly in the United States.[7] According to the Santa Clara County Office of Human Relations.
Despite the fact that the U.S. government’s role in the Salvadoran conflict was unique in sustaining the prolongation of the civil conflict, the government and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) extended little sympathy to the people affected by the war. In the 1980s, the INS granted only 2% of political asylum applications, claiming that democracy existed in El Salvador and that reports of U.S. and government-sponsored “death squads” were overblown. As a response to the U.S. government’s failure to address the situation of Salvadoran refugees in the U.S., American activists established a loose network to aid refugees. Operating in clear violation of U.S. immigration laws, these activists took refugees into their houses, aided their travel, hid them and helped them find work. This became known as the “sanctuary movement”.[8]
The United States will accept 70,000 refugees in FY 2007. President Bush stated that his eventual goal is a program that resettles 90,000 refugees in the United States each year. In 2006, the State Department officially re-opened the Vietnamese resettlement program. In recent years, the main refugee sending-region has been Africa (Somalia, Liberia, Sudan, Ethiopia).[9]

Additionally, for the edification of my lunch companion and those other misinformed "citizens":

Poverty
The chief cause of illegal immigration is considered to be economic. Illegal immigrants in the United States traditionally have been portrayed as seeking jobs and wages better than those available in their home countries. For example, the 1994 economic crisis in Mexico was associated with widespread poverty and a lower valuation for the peso relative to the dollar. The United States Department of Labor calculates that the Zone A (most industrialized) minimum wage in Mexico in 1999 was 34.45 pesos, or about US$3.50 per day. The Zone C (rural/agricultural) minimum wage was 29.70 Pesos a day, or roughly US$3.02 a day. By contrast, the U.S. minimum is set at $5.85 per hour under US federal law, and many States required rates higher than the federally mandated minimum.[14] Natural disasters and overpopulation[15] can amplify poverty-driven migration flows. According to CBS 60 Minutes, U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Jose Gutierrez, one of the first U.S. servicemen to die in combat in Iraq, a former street child in Guatemala having been orphaned at age 8, first entered the United States as an illegal immigrant in 1997 to escape poverty, and dreamed of being an architect.[16] Sometimes the person moves over the border because the wage-labor ratio is much higher in the neighboring country, as is the case with the illegal immigration to the United States from Mexico. Over 75% of illegal immigrants living inside the United States live below the poverty line.[

Call me crazy, but here is my view: My parents came from Jamaica to England. Before that, their parents were from Jamaica - before that, their parents were slaves in Africa.

Let's take all the "citizens" - "undocumenteds" and "aliens" out of the country and give the country back to the Native Americans - it is THEIR country and "we" - not me, but the American government has raped, pillaged and plundered their land.

Am I a tad frustrated over this issue? You had better believe it!

Si se puerde - yes, it is possible!

This is America, land of opportunity - the government - you know, the ones who fight wars, can't get the mail delivered on time, even with tracking numbers, threaten men to register for selective service so they can have bodies to fight untold numbers of wars, and my favorite - the FDA - they are supposed to be working for us - how can we fire them for incompetence?

I seem to recall an election is on the horizon.

Choose carefully, my friends.