Shari, Britain and France are both dealing with the consequences of once being colonizers. The chickens are coming home to roost, so to speak.

I won't even get into the language thing.

We are dealing with the consequences of living next to a nation with a lot of poverty. We are also dealing with the consequences of a very failed (and stupid) "war on drugs". Think Mexico is a mess? We helped create it.

the riots around Paris, the burning cars, the slums - those were the result of poor handling of immigration.

Interesting. I think some people might choose to phrase that as "poor treatment of immigrants."

Shari- I don't know what to do about immigration. I mean, isn't one of our American Ideals "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free". On my father's side, I am only second generation Italian, and while I do not know my father's family, I feel that although the Italians, Irish, German, etc immigrants faced a lot of prejudices, they didn't have to worry so much about getting in. I mean, it was tough getting through through, but there were a lot more openings. And we are, of course, a country founded on immigration as every last one of us is an immigrant, except the Native Americans/First Nations/Indigenous people.

And I think the illegal immigrants are here with much the same ideals as my family-- they want to be assimilated while maintaining their culture. They want their children to learn English. it is just the methods of doing this have changed from a sink or swim to helping people along, perhaps in their native language. They want their children to do better than they, and their children's children even better. One of the problems is that we seem to have little enough decent paying low education work to satisfy the naturalized citizens in that bracket, and little enough work even if people were educated. So the problem, perhaps, s fixing the economy so that there is actual work here. SOmetimes, with all the outsourcing to other countries, it feels like our whole economy basically rests on just transferring service from person to the next and on buying things. It almost feels like my work at the university, where different departments "pay" each other for things through account transfers, and we end up buying things from outside vendors rather than the internal vendors who do the same thing, to save money. But there is no money saved, because we just gave all the money outside. So one department looks like, on paper, it spent less money, but the money left the university as a whole.

don't want to live in a linguistically Balkanized country. Sorry. Speak whatever you want at home, but English should be the lingua franca.

People have been warning about this for over a century. Hasn't happened yet. It's just that the masses speaking Yiddish and German and Polish and Italian have been replaced by masses speaking Spanish and Arabic and various Asian languages.

Interesting. I think some people might choose to phrase that as "poor treatment of immigrants."

Many people in fact.

And France is actually a far greater (recent) immigrant nation than the US is. In the early 90s when I was studying such things, I think the stat was something like 1 in 4 people had at least 1 grandparent that wasn't born in France.

Also, I would trade the violence and poverty levels in France for the ones here any day.

People have been warning about this for over a century. Hasn't happened yet. It's just that the masses speaking Yiddish and German and Polish and Italian have been replaced by masses speaking Spanish and Arabic and various Asian languages.

Exactly.

Two of my four grandparents were born in the US. One of my eight great-grandparents was.

I know that it's different in different parts of the country, but I remember, when I was in fifth grade, we were learning about immigration, and we had an assignment to interview an immigrant. At least half the class interviewed a grandparent, and a few people interviewed their parents. At least five kids of the 25 or so in the class were immigrants themselves, maybe a few more.

(I interviewed my grandfather for that project. He said that he was very disappointed when his ship docked, because he looked out and thought, "This is the New York City that's so famous? This place isn't anything special." Turned out, the ship had actually docked in Hoboken.)

All the talk about making the border walls higher and adding more patrol, etc, just makes me shake my head. People will still try and succeed in coming here. They're leaving situations where they've got nothing to lose; they're desperate. Bigger walls? More patrols? It's like teaching abstinence instead of comprehensive sex education; it's not being realistic and it's grounded more in fear than in hope.

All the talk about making the border walls higher and adding more patrol, etc, just makes me shake my head.

As a 1st generation American, with no grandparents who were born here, I realized I just can't process anti-immigrant sentiment at all, legal or not.

As a 1st generation American, with no grandparents who were born here, I realized I just can't process anti-immigrant sentiment at all, legal or not.

Cosigned.