Blue Crab Boulevard

Scratch A Politically Correct Government…..

….Find a deeply xenophobic one. I have long suspected that the most vociferous advocates of "diversity" and political correctness are overcompensating for what they , in fact, see in themselves. They routinely project those internal biases onto others and pretend that they are tolerant. In fact, it only takes a small push for the supposedly tolerant to show their true feelings. Don't believe it? Look how champions of tolerance in this country routinely refer to black conservatives. Some of the most vile, racist language and imagery is used. Or take a look at what is happening in Italy right now. Because of a rash of crimes committed by Romanian workers in Italy, full-fledged xenophobia has erupted.

ROME - Italy began deporting Romanians with criminal records in response to a streak of violent crime blamed on immigrants, authorities said Saturday. A knife-wielding mob attacked a group of Romanians in Rome.

Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu warned of rising xenophobia in Italy. Earlier this week, he backed the crackdown and came under criticism at home for apologizing for violence blamed on Romanian immigrants.

"We should fight against the wave of xenophobia that is manifesting itself in Italy and we must fight against the bad image that Romanians who are working in Italy have," Tariceanu said Saturday.

Up to 10 people wearing motorcycle helmets attacked a group of Romanians with knives, metal bars and sticks Friday night in the parking lot of a Rome supermarket, police said. Three Romanians were injured, one with serious head wounds. Police said they were looking for the attackers.

Authorities in Milan said that four Romanians with criminal records were put on a flight to Bucharest on Friday night, and that deportations for 12 other Romanians had been authorized.

They were the first reported expulsions since Premier Romano Prodi's center-left government approved a decree Wednesday night allowing the deportation of European Union citizens deemed dangerous.

The head of the Association of Romanians in Italy, Eugen Terteleac, said he welcomed the expulsions as long as government power "isn't abused. But he denounced the mob attack and accused the media of creating a "climate of uncertainty and alarm."

"The Romanian community is living through a nightmare," he said in a telephone interview.

Italy has long allowed foreign workers and has toed the European line on tolerance and political correctness. But they are only a few crimes away from outright xenophobia and mass thuggery against an ethnic group. That must not be allowed to happen in the United States. As Quilly Mammoth points out today, there are some pretty vile people over in Europe who are anti-immigrant.

Europe is faced with a compound problem. Not only do they have an illegal immigration problem, it is also one in the same as the spread of Radical Islam. On a continent where the communal ties that bind…religion, culture and nationhood…have been altered or abandoned in the post World War year’s Pan-Europe movement once despised neo-nazi groups are transformed and made over. Desperately people come to them as the last vestiges of what made Europe the birthplace of Western Civilization is seemingly being washed away.

As we here in America face some tough decisions about immigration reform and the growing influence of Radical Islam we have to make sure that we do so without playing into the hands of racists. They are out there hiding amongst legitimate groups where sometimes the rhetoric comes very close to intolerance.

I make a very clear distinction here at Blue Crab Boulevard on where I stand. I am very much pro-immigrant, regardless of where they are from or any physical characteristics they may possess. So long as they come here legally and want to become Americans. I am utterly opposed to illegal immigrants, regardless of where they are from or any physical characteristics they may possess. Because they should not be here taking the place of people who follow the rules. Anyone who tries to brand that as racism should examine their own soul.

A high fence, a wide gate and a hearty welcome for those who follow the rules. That simple, that powerful.

Immigration Reform, World news | Gaius Saturday, 3 November , 2007

By feeblemind, Saturday, 3 November , 2007 @ 6:10 pm

What about immigrants that come to the USA legally and DON’T want to become Americans?
By Gaius, Saturday, 3 November , 2007 @ 6:39 pm

Why would they want to? Seriously, I’m curious about your reasoning?
By Bithead, Saturday, 3 November , 2007 @ 7:14 pm

…and why on earth would I think their not wanting to be one of us after coming here is a valid mode for them to operate in?
By syn, Saturday, 3 November , 2007 @ 7:18 pm

“why would they want to?”

Most likely for the same reason immigrants who migrated into Europe haven’t adopted European culture and it’s morals, they were not asked to do so.
By feeblemind, Saturday, 3 November , 2007 @ 10:09 pm

Why would they come and not want to become Americans? I can’t see into those peoples’ minds, but there are a lot that do work here and never pursue citizenship. There are businessmen and people in academia that live here for years and don’t become American citizens. The question in my first comment was just a response to your support of immigration ‘So long as they come here legally and want to be Americans.’ There are bright people that come to the USA and contribute. For what ever reason, they don’t become citizens. Should they not be welcome as well?
By Quilly Mammoth, Sunday, 4 November , 2007 @ 1:50 am

I think the question is by “American” do we mean citizenship, or do we mean agreeing to live by that almost indescribable thing called “being an American”? Walter Russel Mead wrote an article many years back in the magazine The National Interest. A great deal of it speaks to the warrior culture of America. But the most interesting part of the article is where Mead speaks of an American sub-culture he calls “Jacksonian”.

A principal explanation of why Jacksonian politics are so poorly understood is that Jacksonianism is less an intellectual or political movement than an expression of the social, cultural and religious values of a large portion of the American public. And it is doubly obscure because it happens to be rooted in one of the portions of the public least represented in the media and the professoriat. Jacksonian America is a folk community with a strong sense of common values and common destiny; though periodically led by intellectually brilliant men–like Andrew Jackson himself–it is neither an ideology nor a self-conscious movement with a clear historical direction or political table of organization.

Originally an outgrowth of the Scots-Irish settlers and their particular socio-political inclinations (for example the most powerful government should be the one down the street(clan)) it has moved past that.

What has happened is that Jacksonian culture, values and self-identification have spread beyond their original ethnic limits. In the 1920s and 1930s the highland, border tradition in American life was widely thought to be dying out, ethnically, culturally and politically. Part of this was the economic and demographic collapse of the traditional home of Jacksonian America: the family farm. At the same time, mass immigration from southern and Eastern Europe tilted the ethnic balance of the American population ever farther from its colonial mix. New England Yankees were a vanishing species, limited to the hills of New Hampshire and Vermont, while the cities and plains of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island filled with Irishmen, Italians, Portuguese and Greeks. The great cities of the United States were increasingly filled with Catholics, members of the Orthodox churches and Jews–all professing in one way or another communitarian social values very much at odds with the individualism of traditional Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic culture.

As Hiram W. Evans, the surprisingly articulate Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote in 1926, “the old stock American of his time had become a stranger in large parts of the land his fathers gave him. Moreover, he is a most unwelcome stranger, one much spit upon, and one to whom even the right to have his own opinions and to work for his own interests is now denied with jeers and revilings. “We must Americanize the Americans,’ a distinguished immigrant said recently.”

Where do we hear that today?

We should remember that this period is when America really started restricting immigration. More so than at other times of stress when anti-immigration would come up. There was despair, even from “liberal” quarters that America would become something quite different from what it was. But, in reality, it didn;t happen.

WHAT CAME next surprised almost everyone. The tables turned, and Evans’ Americans “americanized” the immigrants rather than the other way around. In what is still a largely unheralded triumph of the melting pot, Northern immigrants gradually assimilated the values of Jacksonian individualism. Each generation of new Americans was less “social” and more individualistic than the preceding one. American Catholics, once among the world’s most orthodox, remained Catholic in religious allegiance but were increasingly individualistic in terms of psychology and behavior (”I respect the Pope, but I have to follow my own conscience”). Ties to the countries of emigration steadily weakened, and the tendency to marry outside the group strengthened.

Outwardly, most immigrant groups completed an apparent assimilation to American material culture within a couple of generations of their arrival. A second type of assimilation–an inward assimilation to and adaptation of the core cultural and psychological structure of the native population–took longer, but as third, fourth and fifth-generation immigrant families were exposed to the economic and social realities of American life, they were increasingly “americanized” on the inside as well as without.

It happens across ethnic and religious boundaries.

Having a dedicated underclass is the only way this process doesn’t happen in America. But that underclass which never gets “brought into the fold” is created by allowing illegal immigrants to work in sup-par conditions for sub-par wages, or worse, by entrapping them with a Byzantine process for maybe, one day, kinda becoming Americans.

Meads article is well worth the hour it takes to read it. Written long before 9-11 much of what we see happening today is almost foretold in it’s words. The growth of Jacksonian America to embrace those who aren’t white is interesting.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_1999_Winter/ai_58381618/pg_1

Becoming an American is clearly more than simply raising your right hand and swearing an oath.