HOPE and OUTRAGE for Today

HOPE: The New York Times reports more myth-busting information that confirms the positive impact of immigrants in America.

Under the headline "Immigrants’ Children Find Better Lives, Study Shows", Times reporter Sewell Chan showcased a 10-year study of the children of new immigrants in New York and found encouraging levels of achievement and social progress. Go to http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/nyregion/18immigrants.html) to read the story.

Here is one excerpt: "The study identified broad similarities among adult children of immigrants. They were overwhelmingly fluent in English; were less occupationally segregated than their parents; lived longer with their parents than native-born Americans; and were firmly rooted in the United States, with fewer personal and financial ties to their ancestral homeland than their parents."


Best of all, they are voters who will hopefully elect candidates who will stop the ongoing savagery of undocumented workers by federal agents of the Bush administration. Time and the tide of demographics in this nation are on our side.

A book is being written on the study by Philip Kasinitz, a sociologist at the City University of New York Graduate Center; John H. Mollenkopf, a political scientist at the Graduate Center; and Mary C. Waters, a sociologist at Harvard, Chan reported.

Here is one last excerpt from the story that should give us all hope, whether wer'e Hispanic or not: Most of the young people studied worked in white-collar clerical or service jobs in retail and major financial services and most had achieved “real, if modest, progress over their parents’ generation.

One important reason why, according to the authors, is that even poor, uneducated immigrants have often “shown that they have the drive, ambition, courage and strength to move from one nation to another,” and transmit their determination to their children. And the new second generation is able to take advantage of civil rights programs, including affirmative action policies, in applying to universities and for jobs.

Drive, ambition, courage and strength. A better and more just day is coming to America.

OUTRAGE: More than half the school children in Postville, Iowa, did not show up for classes the day after the Feds with two helicopters and 100 agents toting guns raided an agricproccesor there for undocumented workers.

That's one way for President Bush to meet the goals of his No Child Left Behind education reforms. If Hispanic children do not go to school out of fear, then they technically have not been left behind. They've just been outcast.

This country is risking much more than just violating the human rights of people without a political voice. The atrocities committed here are reverberating throughout Mexico and Latin America. The raids, deaths of immigrants in detention facilities, the tearing apart of families and putting fear in the minds of children are only reinforcing what President Hugo Chavez says about this country and its president. He can use this example of America's historical bigorty in dealing with Hispanics to broaden his influence in this hemisphere. Then, America will be much less safe with a more powerful Hugo Chavez and his oil reserves.

Think about it America. Is it really worth the risk?