FW: [Vision2020] Dear President Bush

[Ted Moffett]

Andreas wrote:

Because an American is something you can become, unlike a Frenchman or a
Briton
or a German, I'm an American today -- and I don't believe that now
that I've got mine, we should lock down the borders.
----
France, Britain and Germany sometimes allow immigrants to become citizens of
those countries, just as well as the USA does.  I must have missed your
meaning.  Could you clarify?

Some thoughts on this issue:

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/i7203.html

In sum, this book explores the state's capacity to negotiate identities. The
"negotiation of identities" provides a model of development common to all
democratic countries no matter what their definition of the nation and their
principles of citizenship. For democratic states, negotiations are a way to
deal with the unexpected consequences of immigration. In Germany the guest
workers (*Gastarbeiter*) are now there to stay, and they claim the right of
citizenship. In France, although most of the young generation of North
African origin do have French citizenship, they now also express their
allegiance to a state of origin. This has led Germany to policies of
integration (*Integrationspolitik*) rather than policies for foreigners (*
Ausländerpolitik*). France has fashioned new targeted measures and a new
vocabulary addressing integration rather than assimilation. Therefore,
unlike republic, unity, and equality--the ideas that made the European
nation-states and engendered the construction of national models--the
general tendency now is to maintain identities by managing them: immigrants'
identities and national identities. Guided by pragmatism, such an approach
helps manage the contradictions between myth and reality, discourse and
action, ideas and facts.1
Ted Moffett



On 5/2/06, Andreas Schou <ophite at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > But why...oh why.....do so many liberals defend illegal aliens' "right"
> to
> > work in the U.S. (illegaly, mind you), yet condemn businesses for hiring
> > them?
>
> Simple: when American businesses hire illegal immigrants, they do so
> because they don't want to pay minimum wage to an American. They do so
> because if the immigrants try to organize, they can call Homeland
> Security and send htem back home. And they know that they won't get
> punished for wage and safety violations, because they can punish their
> immigrant laborers for reporting them. Letting employers who employ
> undocumented immigrants off the hook creates perverse incentives, the
> effects of which ripple throughout our entire economy.
>
> There is nothing more American than immigration: people coming to this
> country because they want the opportunity to do better for themselves
> and their families; because they want to become Americans themselves.
> Hell, I wouldn't be here if it weren't for my Irish illegal immigrant
> great-great-grandfather, who stole the silverware from his master's
> house and hocked it to book passage to the United States. Because an
> American is something you can become, unlike a Frenchman or a Briton
> or a German, I'm an American today -- and I don't believe that now
> that I've got mine, we should lock down the borders.
>
> I don't believe the American dream -- the idea that success should be
> determined by ambition and hard work -- has failed entirely. But I do
> believe that there is nothing more antithetical to that ideal than
> allowing the rich to steal all the benefits of the poor's hard work.
> Nowhere is this more the case than amongst exploitative employers of
> immigrant labor.
>
> There's no contradiction there. All I want is for people -- Americans,
> foreigners, and foreigners who want to become Americans -- to reap the
> benefits of their own hard work.
>
> -- ACS
>
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