2007
Week 10
March 10, 2007

Hi

A bit of humor. Several weeks ago a representative of a group showed two of us senators a trade magazine article praising us for advocating for the “Underserved.” We were to expect an Underserved Award. These are gracious people and our pictures are there, but speed reading made it look like an “undeserved” award. Which of course is sometimes the case. At any rate, nothing happened, undeserved or otherwise.

I am deeply troubled with the heavy racist overtones of the Hispanic tension. There are death threats, assaults and of course angry rhetoric. Many persons with Latino appearance have been killed, and in retaliation, others are killed. The KKK is some parts of the south is growing as members restate the discredited White Supremacy claims. The whole challenge of Mexican and Guatemalan persons who cross the border illegally is laid on anyone who looks Latino.

I get many e-mails with unreasonable expressions of anger. Senator Aguilar, Grand Island, is one of hundreds of Nebraskans who have been angrily told to “Go back where you came from.” Ray smiles, says he really likes Grand Island, and is always glad to go back there. It is an uneducated attack, which causes great pain and carries genuine threat in our communities. I have been in South Omaha as persons waving American flags (!) shouted across the street that the Hispanics with whom I was standing were criminals by speaking with persons who were Spanish. All of us were U. S. citizens.

These racial attacks are not new. Irish, Germans, Swedes, Polish, Mormons, Italian Catholics -- have been told to go back to where they came from. In Omaha in 1909, citizens even rounded up Greeks and successfully drove all of them out of town. Or into hiding. For a while. Indians enjoy some humor by broadening the “Go back” command to all of us. There was a major move to apply this to Africans, even though it was the majority who had brought them. Where Blacks became the majority, fear increased, and with fear more mayhem.

I get too much e-mail in which writers accuse Hispanics of being criminals, of taking jobs, of overloading welfare and of sneaking into our educational system. Well, first, most Hispanics are citizens. Some have been here for generations. Second, we cannot ‘un-citizen’ a person born here, as some want us to do with babies. It is the U. S. constitution that declares them to be citizens, as it does for me. I was a baby here.

Third, those who entered illegally break no law by living here. Local officers can not arrest and charge them. If residents have not been judged in court they are not criminals. Fourth, the Nebraska constitution requires us to educate every resident. It does not say “except those who do not speak English” (which would have blocked my Dad) or except those who are retarded, or whose parents broke the law, or who are disliked by their neighbors.

I hear the silliness that pioneers all wanted to learn English. My great grandparents were here for fifty years, were loyal Americans, and helped build the frontier. Granddad even laid tracks for that first transcontinental railroad. Neither spoke English, nor did they feel any need to, nor did their community or church feel they needed to. Whole towns were settled in Nebraska with the agreement that English was optional. Çurrently, we have sixty languages spoken by Omaha school children, who do want to learn English.

Angry people make all Hispanics the enemy, and all persons who are here illegally to be Hispanics. We have about 12 million residents in the U. S. who are not here legally. We assume about 5 million did NOT cross the border illegally. Most came to study and few are from Mexico. Many are guest workers who did not go home. We have 50,000 Irish here illegally, but we do not worry about that since we no longer can identify the Irish by their appearance. (Early settlers could.) It was and is a racial-type response to the confused situation created by our own laws.

Those who came to study can not get a Social Security number, so in Nebraska they cannot get a license to drive. They do drive, especially if they get a job after their time is out. We would like to offer driving certificates, which would allow us to check for English competency (street signs) and would put more pressure on them to drive responsibly. But that is labelled helping “Hispanic” criminals.

Strangely, the IRS will issue workers a number so their tax withholding can be sent in. With several years of records showing steady paying of taxes, the person here illegally can apply for a green card, which is permanent worker residency. Imagine! Back door, but legal. In Omaha, a legal resident applied for his wife to join him from Mexico. The application was approved, but she cannot come for six years. Huh? We deport parents and do not look for children, leaving kids to become wards of the state. We surround these persons with our craziness in law, and wonder why they look for a way around.

If you were a pregnant woman in a family desperately poor, in any country offering no hope of having enough food, and without hope for health for your baby, would you slip through customs at some port in order to get to a hospital where they, by law, must deliver your baby and thereby give it citizenship in a more hopeful country? I cannot imagine a mother who would not do that if she could.

We are approaching a racial war, fed partly by persons do not know who is who, what is being done and the large number of countries involved. They can spot a Latino person by looks and that is enough to get emotions going.

In none of this do I discount the huge problem we have and the strain on our taxes. I do not justify crossing a border illegally, though I certainly do understand why a parent would do so to get bread for his children. I am told the amount of money sent home to Mexico is greater than that country's entire income from oil production.

Quite simply, we must step back, take a deep breath, deal with our challenges, get our government to a rational worker program, and quit beating up persons who did not create our system.

Let Spring come!!!

Lowen