Virtual Illusions

I recently received an offensive and wildly inaccurate email about immigration. I took the time to respond to it rather than ignore it and thought I’d share it with my close person friend the Internet.

The following email was forwarded to me (formatting was scrambled but this is my bet guess of its intended format):

This is a subject close to my heart. Do you know that we have adult students at the school where I teach who are not US citizens and who get the PELL grant, which is a federal grant (no pay back required) plus other federal grants to go to school? One student from the Dominican Republic told me that she didn’t want me to find a job for her after she finished my program, because she was getting housing from our housing
department and she was getting PELL grant which paid for her total tuition and books, plus money left over. She was looking into WAIT which gives students a CREDIT CARD for gas to come to school, and into CARIBE which is a special program for immigrants and it pays for child care and all sorts of needs while they go to school or training. The one student I just mentioned told me she was not going to be a US citizen because she plans to return to the Dominican Republic someday and that she “loves HER country.” I asked her if she felt guilty taking what the US is giving her and then not even bothering to become a citizen and she told me that it doesn’t bother her, because that is what the money is there for!

I asked the CARIBE administration about their program and if you ARE a US citizen, you don’t qualify for their program. And all the while, I am working a full day, my son-in-law works more than 60 hours a week, and everyone in my family works and pays for our education.

Something is wrong here. … Right?

I am sorry but after hearing they want to sing the National Anthem in Spanish - enough is enough. Nowhere did they sing it in Italian, Polish, Irish (Celtic), German or any other language because of immigration. It was written by Francis Scott Key and should be sung word for word the way it was written The news broadcasts even gave the translation — not even close.

Sorry if this offends anyone but this is MY COUNTRY - IF IT IS YOUR COUNTRY SPEAK UP — please pass this along.

I am not against immigration — just come through like everyone else. Get a sponsor; have a place to lay your head; have a job; pay your taxes and live by the rules –AND LEARN THE LANGUAGE as all other immigrants have in the past — and GOD BLESS AMERICA!

PART OF THE PROBLEM

Think about this: If you don’t want to forward this for fear of offending someone — YOU’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM! It is Time for America to Speak up

If you agree — pass this along, if you don’t agree — delete it!

Yep, I passed it on !

Since writing my response I also researched Pell grants and confirmed they require legal status, congruent with my belief that the immigrant in question has refugee status. Also keep in mind that the PELL grant caps out at about $5k/year so no one is really sitting pretty on a Pell grant. Also a Pell grant only applies to educational costs.

Although it probably needs more polish, this is my response (I feel like I need some phrases in all caps to scream back):

Someone who disagrees should not silently delete this, they should respond and enter into a dialog. Of course most of the facts of this idealogical screed are unverifiable by intent, but we can discover some things.

According to the Internet Caribe stands for Career Recruitment and Instruction in Basic English. So when the author (whoever that is) screams that immigrants should learn the language, this is a program to do exactly that. As it happens it is only available to immigrants who have been given refuge or asylum status. So it isn’t surprising that this person would like to return to their country if they could do so safely.

So to be clear this “horrible” person described in the screed is not an illegal immigrant but actually a legal immigrant here under refugee or asylum status. So when they say they are all for legal immigration they are lying.

The refugee status explains the access to the pell grants and all the other assistance granted a refugee to this country. Many of these programs trigger negative consequences for the recipient if they start
making money or are not sufficiently a full time student. I do not know if that applies in this case because I don’t think I can trust as unbiased most of the information provided.

Are you aware that as part of our foreign policy each year the federal government assists students from all over the world to come to the united states and become educated in American schools. We don’t do this out of the goodness of our heart. We do it so that they return to their country and spread our culture or at the very least a tolerance of American attitudes.

My sister-in-law is one of them and because of the program they can not return to the United States for any length of time for another six months despite the fact that she married my brother and now have a child who is a U.S. citizen.

As for singing the National Anthem in Spanish, I am proud of them. I am glad that someone believes that the anthem isn’t a hollow symbol but is meaningful enough in their lives that they would like to make it part of themselves.

For a symbol to have meaning it needs to periodically be reinvented. Jimi Hendrix reinvented that very same symbol while on acid in the ’60s. Someone is making the effort to make a symbol of America accessible to more people. They are doing America a boon, not a disservice.

By the way it was translated into German in 1861, Yiddish in the 1940’s as well as French, Samoan and Latin. Francis Scott Key wrote it as a poem and he had nothing to do with turning it into a song (the tune is a British drinking song). It wasn’t our national anthem until 1931 and can’t even be construed as a defacto anthem until 1916 at the earliest. Things change, that isn’t always bad.

Immigration is a complicated issue. Recent studies in Virginia indicated that immigrant entrepreneurship ended up generating millions of dollars of revenue in excess of the cost of services to immigrants.

Our immigration system is fundamentally broken, the defacto compromise that has been brokered over the years is that if you make it into the country and keep your head down and work low wage jobs we will turn out heads and provide opportunities to your children.

Recently it has been suggested that we need to normalize immigration. This includes expelling people who arrived in the United States before their first memory, kids who arrived here before their third birthday and are now graduating high school or college. This is their cultural home and they’ve never known anything else.

However even if it was just, expelling 12,000,000 people is logistically impossible in any reasonable time frame. If you did expel that many people we don’t have spare capable workforce to replace them. I don’t mean that business would have to pay more, I’m all for that, I mean the actual physical people with minimal physical and social skills (keep in mind they are replacing people who may not speak English, so I do mean minimal) do not exist.

I do take offense at the email, I don’t think it is anything more than undisguised bigotry. This may be your country but it is mine as well and I’d prefer a rational policy towards immigration that deals with the actual needs and pressures on this country rather than some idealogical kick out every one who isn’t a “real” American for some value of “American.”

Culture, Justice, Politics