Dear Ms. Hayek.
It is not that I would see you go. I would not mind if you stayed.
The thing is, if you're going to be here and if you're going to stay I ask that you join the family.
Become part of us.
The United States doesn't need an enclave of Mexican nationals bent on remaining Mexican regardless.
The United States needs Americans who've found themselves unlucky enough to have been born in a foreign land.
That has always been the case. A person who moves to another country and remains a foreigner is not an immigrant, they are an expatriate. If they form communities of fellow expatriates, it is called an enclave.
You should be familiar with this. There are a lot of American expatriates living in enclaves in Mexico, aren't there?
Did you think that we gringo would not hear what you Mexicans say about them? I'd say your typical migrant farm worker is one hell of a lot more welcome here in Los Estados Unidos de América del Norte. And I get it! I live in a state chock full of people who don't assimilate to local conditions.
We have Cubans who are just waiting for Batista to rise again. We have Puerto Ricans. We have all manner of Yankee who can't wait to tell us how much everything down here sucks and how great it is "back home" yet stay here anyway. So I get it about expatriates.
Why don't you, Ms Hayek? Multi-millionaire, Ms Hayek. Multi-Millionaire, Mexican-expatriate, Ms Hayek...
Become an American or head back to the Old Country. I won't even demand you become a citizen, but you should become one of us if you're going to stay.
You may notice I am not in Mexico telling Mexicans how they need to accept me.
I would also like to point out how fucked Mexico is if WE all went home. How many American companies are rocking the NAFTA and running factories down there? They move back north, we have to pay more for those products. What happens to the Mexicans who lose those jobs?
You might want to crack a history book, Ms Hayek. Since we started exporting jobs Mexico has enjoyed a remarkable period of political stability. Even the cartels aren't rocking that boat too hard.
When I was in Taiwan, I avoided other Americans; I didn't go to their hangouts, and if I hadn't had to see my fellow-students on the Term in China, I could have gone the whole time there without seeing a single American. My take was that if I wanted to hang around with Americans, I could do it better, and cheaper, in America. I also found that my Chinese improved by leaps and bounds from having to use it all day, every day.
ReplyDeleteIf we could stem the hordes from Latin America, they'd assimilate. My Spanish-speaking sources tell me that Spanish-language TV here in the US is thick with ads for English-language schools, and that second-generation Hispanics often speak poor Spanish...and the third generation almost none.
The local Puerto Rican population puts lie to that assumption. And the gigantic enclave in New Jersey. They're not moving from the island to here in significant numbers, yet an extremely large proportion don't speak any english or have clue one about how to live outside their cultural enclaves. Down to great grand-kids.
ReplyDeleteThat assumption is correct for a decent sized hunk of Cubans though. Off the boat, almost no english. Their kids, fully bilingual. Grand kids, english is their first language and they know "family spanish". Great grand kids don't speak any spanish at all. And the Cuban contingent is the hispanic sub-group that bugs me least. Because of the circumstances of their arrival here, many of them are AMERICAN to the stops despite having enclaves where english is not spoken.