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Health & Fitness

Legal While Latin...The New Scapegoat

A few words on the current controversy of "breathing while Latin".

You don't have took far these days to encounter extensive articles and discussions on "illegal immigrants". Last year, Arizona tried to pass a law that would allow the police to demand "papers" of anyone they believed to be in this country illegally. The problem is...they were not merely looking for illegals, they were looking for illegal Latinos...illegals from the UK, Sweden, France? Not so much.

I grew up in North Jersey, so I have always had people in my world who came from the various Latino communities, and cultures. One of my bridesmaids hailed from San Juan, and was fiercely proud to be an American citizen. She was equally proud to be Puerto Rican, which she considered her cultural heritage, rather like i count myself as an American of Polish/Czech descent. Under the Arizona law, Carmelita would have been required to carry "papers", to prove her citizenship.

A good friend of mine who is a retired Air Force veteran ,who served in the first Gulf War is also from a different culture, but became a citizen as a child. Like Carmelita, Lino also has a trace of an accent, but is a US citizen, as well as a veteran. Under the Arizona law, he too would have to "prove" he belonged.

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I have a vast problem with Americans being harassed because someone thinks they "look" illegal...or "sound" illegal. My grandparents came here in the teens and 20's of the last century. They became citizens---but never acquired english comfortably. When I hear the ballyhoo about "illegals", I cringe. The concept that you might be illegal because of how you look reminds me way too much of the Nisei, and the Internment Camps of World War Two.

In a less than proud moment in our history, people were rounded up and put in camps. based on little more than the public horror at the attack on Pearl Harbor. Many had their property seized, and their lives were nearly destroyed. Most were American citizens, and to my knowledge, not a single one had a connection to any attacks. We did not round up Italians Americans, or German Americans...just the Japanese.

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So I have to be uncomfortable with the new rhetoric, and the thought that today, someone can be stopped and questioned for the "crime" of looking too much someone who doesn't "belong". I have to be disgusted with the term "anchor babies", which could have applied to anyone who had a child while waiting for their citizenship papers to come through. That would be you, or I...because unless you are Native American, your people came from somewhere else, at some point.

So for the Carmelitas, the Linos, and all the others who are as American as any of us, have a care how you pursue "illegals". Our Latino population has deep roots, and assuming someone "doesn't belong" because of what they look like, or how they speak? All kinds of wrong. Perhaps we should honor our grandparents, or great grandparents more. When they arrived, there were groups known as "Nativists" who loathed them completely, and did not believe they had the right to be here. They argued that the "newcomers" were not "real" Americans, and took the jobs from those who were.

Sounds all too familair, doesn't it?

If someone is on the path to citizenship, they deserve our respect. But broad suspicion, and persecution will not serve us as people, nor unite us as citizens. Racial hatred can be very nicely dressed as patriotism...but it is still racism.  We need to be better than that.

 

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