Thread: The Greenbacks

http://magic-city-news.com/article_3892.shtml

The Greenbacks
By Paul Streitz
May 19, 2005, 15:55

A computer programmer in Hartford, Connecticut was complaining politely to an Indian programmer here on an H-1B visa that all the immigrants were taking American jobs and that it could ruin the American economy.

“That’s all right,� said the Indian programmer, “I will just go back to India.�

Somehow Americans have been convinced over the past few decades that immigration per se is a good thing and that Americans prosper every time an immigrant, legal or illegal, arrives by plane or crawls under the fence. Nothing could be further from the truth. Samuel Gompers, early president of the American Federation of Labor and himself an immigrant, recognized that immigration is a labor issue.

Generally, only the few immigrants fleeing persecution in a foreign country come to the United States seeking its freedom, liberty and justice. They often become citizens and often are more patriotic than native born Americans who take our freedoms granted. Those fleeing tyranny realized that freedom must be valiantly guarded.

The Statue of Liberty is named the Statue of “Liberty.� Not the Statue of Immigration. It was given to the United States by France and completed in 1884. Only twenty years later were the words of a poem engraved in a plaque at the base of the statue. “"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.� The statement celebrated freedom, not unlimited immigration into the United States.

The most massive immigration into the United States started with the Immigration Law of 1965. The backers of this law promised that the immigration quotas would remain the same, about 165,000. However, the provision that allowed those immigrants in the United States to be reunited with their families soon meant that millions of cousins, aunts and sisters-in-law were moving to the United States. Currently, about slightly over a million immigrants arrive legally, plus another million illegally. This is has been the largest mass migration in the world’s history, excluding a catastrophic war.

An illegal brought to this country when he was four gave this has his reason for wanting to stay in the United States and receive a low in-state tuition from Connecticut universities, “’I want to stay in the States. There is (sic) more opportunities here," said Sebastian, a Colombian native who has attended Stamford Public Schools since fourth grade.’� Nothing in the newspaper article says anything about him wanting to be part of the United States, that he values his life here or appreciates the country. There is nothing to indicate that he ever tried to gain citizenship. For him, as for the overwhelming number of immigrants, it is about money.

These are the Greenbacks. They are here for the money and that is it. If the money were greater in their home country, they would not have come here in the first place, or they would return if the wages were higher.

The United States and its citizens owe nothing to the Greenbacks and should not feel the slightest twinge of conscience returning them to their native countries. At best they are guest workers. At worst, they take the jobs that would be done by American workers. They make corporations more profitable for the owners, but they unemploy and lower wages for millions of Americans.

There are over three billion people on the planet. Probably a billion of them would move to the United States if they could. They would come for the greenbacks.

If we have any more migration to this country there will be NO greenbacks for ANYBODY.

No one seems to understand that.

RR