Comments on: Newcomers get Thanksgiving

By: R. Selecman

R. Selecman — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:01:59 +0000

When I think of “immigrants” I do not think,”How noble.” I think, great, one more person for hard-working Americans to support as the immigrants suck the system dry. Most of them do not come to this country to be assimilated into our culture. They continue to speak their original language while failing to learn ours. They do not pay taxes, do not have car insurance and take jobs away from Americans. They get free lunches for their kids at schoo, free medical treatment,and many other services that poor Americans do not. They money they do make “under-the-table” they send back to their “home” country” to get their other relatives to come here. They establish “mini-communities” within our communities that soon become another slum version of the life they say they so desperately wanted to leave behind. They feign ignorance of the law and get away with commiting crimes that the average American would be thrown in jail for. When they have manipulated the system to it’s straining point and they finally do go to jail, they complain about the food and the conditions in the jail. American is no longer the land of opportunity, it’s the land of free handout. Wonder what they’re going to do when the present generation of hard-working Americans are all dead and all that’s left is people like themselves?

By: Richard Aubrey

Richard Aubrey — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:01:45 +0000

I suppose the Pilgrims could consider the society they wanted to build “Better” than the one they left. They were hard people, in the sense that they would risk and suffer unimaginable hardship to get what they wanted. I don’t see that as not wanting a “better” life, unless the definition is restricted to the material. If that is the case, then the result would be that they came here seeking a worse life, but at least they’d feel better about it.

By: Bart

Bart — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:48:01 +0000

…“Chinese food, German car and American house,”…

With the U.S. and California tax codes subsidizing approximately 35% of mortgage costs, we’d better have the best houses.

By: BadaBing

BadaBing — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:18:21 +0000

Like the Pilgrims, most of the students at Newcomers say their families came here seeking better lives.

This is a facile and disingenuous statement, but one that most Americans have bought into. When they think of today’s innumerable immigrants, most Americans nod their heads dumbly and say to themselves, “For a better life. How noble.”

For one thing, comparing today’s immigrants with the Pilgrims is like comparing apples to artichokes. The Pilgrims were not immigrants. They were settlers. Although we’re stuck with the idiotic catchphrase “country of immigrants” for all eternity, the United States was never a “country of immigrants.” And even though it looks as if America soon will be a country of immigrants, settlers are not immigrants.

Furthermore, the Pilgrims did not come here for “a better life,” whatever that means. They came to establish a society built on Biblical principles and to advance the gospel in remote parts of the world. That’s according to William Bradford, who might know a thing or two on the subject.

When I taught ESL a few moons ago, Chinese students would tell me that the three best things in life were “Chinese food, German car and American house,” and that they had come here to get their American house. That’s one variation on the “better life” theme that we all find so ennobling, but it’s a far cry from anything Pilgrimesque.

By: Bart

Bart — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 17:19:14 +0000

No mention of the Pilgrims’ experiments with communal living?