U.S. urged to apologize for 1930s deportations

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-04-1930s-deportees-cover_x.htm?POE=NEWISVA



Pina, then 6, at right front row, and siblings lived in Montana before they were deported.


His father and oldest sister were farming sugar beets in the fields of Hamilton, Mont., and his mother was cooking tortillas when 6-year-old Ignacio Piña saw plainclothes authorities burst into his home.

"They came in with guns and told us to get out," recalls Piña, 81, a retired railroad worker in Bakersfield, Calif., of the 1931 raid. "They didn't let us take anything," not even a trunk that held birth certificates proving that he and his five siblings were U.S.-born citizens.

The family was thrown into a jail for 10 days before being sent by train to Mexico. Piña says he spent 16 years of "pure hell" there before acquiring papers of his Utah birth and returning to the USA.

The deportation of Piña's family tells an almost-forgotten story of a 1930s anti-immigrant campaign. Tens of thousands, and possibly more than 400,000, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were pressured — through raids and job denials — to leave the USA during the Depression, according to a USA TODAY review of documents and interviews with historians and deportees. Many, mostly children, were U.S. citizens.

[DBoon]

1. Just wait

Michelle Malkin will soon write a book defending these deportations

[BlackHeart]

2. I'd give an apoology

if that made someone feel better. I just don't understand why anyone would want present day me, who had nothing to do with something that happened in 1930, to apologize for something I had nothing to do with.

[400Years]

3. nobody is asking you to apologize

[jedicord]

4. I get what you're saying, 'cause it would not be genuine. But...

maybe a better idea is for the US to promise, and make good on this promise, not to do that again. That would be genuine (and as likely as monkeys flying out my butt).

[gratuitous]

5. And yet we're gearing up for another round today

I hope this time around you're in the thick of the fight against it. So that 70 years from now your grandchild isn't complaining that what we did in 2006 doesn't have anything to do with him in 2077. But those stinkin' furriners have to go, according to our nation's great leaders.

[demosincebirth]

6. Thats funny, I never read that in our history books.