« Mr. President: No Publicity Stunts, Please | Main | Ward Churchill's House Of Cards Goes Tumbling »
May 16, 2006
Assimilation...Yes. Guest Workers...NO!
I missed the President's speech last night (I'll try to watch it online today), but one thing he mentioned bothers me greatly: the continued insistance on a guest worker program. As Victor Davis Hanson and others have pointed out, a clear example exists in Europe of the failure of such programs. From a roundup of reaction at The Corner:
But my own chief worry is that guest-workers will only perpetuate the problem by supplying a continual unassimilated, low-paid, and ultimately volatile underclass. And such a helot program (a cultural and social catastrophe in Europe) is, in fact, antithetical to many of the president's own proposals. Cheap labor will undermine the wages of the very illegal aliens that are granted residence while they apply for citizenship; it will continually provide the fuel for La Raza and Aztlan romance; and keep fresh the tired ethnic sloganeering and tribal activists who hate assimilation and would die on the vine without fresh victims of "exploitation"—while ensuring that Mexico gets its remittances and avoids reform by exporting its unwanted.Second, there was nothing specific offered to match the rhetoric of assimilation. Why not introduce court-proof, English-only legislation that would return our federal documents to one language? Or at least proposals in our schools to emphasize the melting pot? Or new patriotic citizenship applications that emphasize English and knowledge and appreciation of American culture?
And I imagine that the "federal documents" that VDH mentions would include English-only ballots.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thebernoullieffect.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/666
