Reply #207: Correct, the situation is now...

[LeftHander]

See post #152...

I have some suggestions to find some sort of way of being welcoming without criminalization and punishment of people.

You must hate where you live. Sad for you, maybe instead of all the energy you put into maintaing your animosity for undocumented immigrants you should start packing and move to South Dakota....they are really welcoming there. As long as you are White and male.

That is a white bread as it gets.

My OP was intended to gather lots of emotional responses..

there have been lots of emotional response and people have real strong feelings in this matter...but I hope that we can still remember that for every young angry latino gang banger drug dealer...there are ten folds of families silently getting up everyday to go to work, send the kids to school, going to church, building new communities, opening new businesses. It is these people that matter to us all. Every ethnic group has "bad people". And luckily many times more that number are simply good, loving people.

We have a tendency to paint everyone with a broad brush. Myself included. It is our nature. Yet as the numerous posts have shown here is that there is a true division in this nation. I used to think it was political, then ideological but now I think it is personal.

People expect the "American Dream" and anything that threatens that dream is to be attacked, belittled, dehumanized and removed.

So effective is the logic of exclusion. The orginal core message of caring and compassion is what has gathered the strong responses. It is the fear that we are losing something. When in reality we are gaining so much more.

I welcome our friends to the south. I am glad they came and I want them to stay. Our towns and cities across the country were abandoned by white middle class America. We chose to build strip-malls and McMansion and hid in "Elm Grove Vista" subdivisions.

Our developers enabled the decay and destruction of our micro-economies. We went big. Well we left the door open and left everything in place. All that was needed was someone to step in and reoccupy our abandoned nieghboorhoods.

I've seen it. Right here in white bread Wisconsin. In my own town of Waukesha. Our downtown, once domintated by Penny's, Sears and a host of other small retailors was abandoned. And "bad" white people moved in. Hookers, drug dealers, porno and sleezy bars that cater to the chronic abusers and wayward homeless.

Well...the latino community came in and started opening old store fronts. Now the only grocery store left in downtown Waukesha is a lation grocery. the only clothing stores are latino...The most popular resturants are you, guessed it...Mexican.

Because of thier pioneering spirit other businesses came. Now we have a multi-cultural thriving downtown with art galleries, pubs, resturants, coffee houses and much of that development is because of the initial investments by people from across the border are they all documented...I highly doubt it. Are they part of our community....you bet. Are there some bad people too...yes there are. Not 8 years ago many of these store fronts were empty and people were afraid to go downtown.

America needs this. Micro-economic development.

So I still see people who would like to see all the "brown-skinned" people leave and take their buisnesses and language with them. But what good does that do...really?