http://nctimes.com/articles/2006/08/..._338_29_06.txt

Past immigration differs from present

By: Nicholas E. Roberti - Commentary:

It is with a certain humor that I find myself linked with those whose "pervasive bigotry, dehumanization, racism and xenophobia" cause our patron saint to hide ("Repeating the mistakes of the past," Community Forum, Aug. 25). Such is the language that substitutes for reasoned discourse that I have come to expect from academia and purported scholars.

On Sept. 1, we leave to visit my campesino relatives in southern Italy. Each time I return, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for my illiterate grandparents who courageously left home and loved ones to find a decent life in America. They escaped a culture characterized by woefully inept and corrupt governance that condemned them and their industrious fellows to a life of poverty and ignorance.

America was a rapidly growing nation, hungry for new citizens and labor. Not simply greedy corporations hungry for cheap labor, as now. In a nation conceived of and founded by devout Enlightenment Anglo-Protestants, they made a new life that enabled them to quickly rise from poverty and end the illiteracy, which was still prevalent among my mother#'s generation only 40 years ago. Hence, I warmly embrace that Anglo-Protestant culture, which has been so successful, and, because of enlightenment, has been made available to all ethnicities and religions.


I find it quite bizarre that academics like Arcela Nunez-Alvarez, although their families and millions like them continue to, at peril to their lives, do what my family did ρρ vote with their feet to flee a culture that persists in being an unmitigated disaster for them ρρ and yet they sneer with such haughty contempt at the culture that made our nation such an astonishing success, and is indeed the force that nourishes them.

Such so-called "scholars" also appear to be detached and indifferent to the fate of the individuals who live by the thousands in abysmal squalor here in the bushes of North County alone. Judging from the numbers still waiting for work during midafternoon at the Home Depot in Encinitas alone, the unemployment rate among them must be astronomical. On this there is silence from those same secure moralizers who are oh-so-terribly, terribly concerned for the masses.

Unlimited immigration of the desperately poor from failed cultures along with the folly of "diversity" threatens to destroy my culture and the well-being of future generations including, of course, the descendants of the very people who are so bitterly dismissive of that culture. That would be just as true today if the current large numbers of immigrants were Italians, like my family, rather than Mexicans.

I would like to see progress toward defining what numbers and types of immigrants, if any, that we, a mature and prosperous nation need; not the inflamed polemics that emanate from both sides of this conflict. Certainly we need a return to the policy of imbuing each American, new or old, with the common sense that the origins of their family are irrelevant, that their success or failure depends largely on their own personal merit.

-- Nicholas E. Roberti lives in Oceanside.