Primero de Mayo (Posted Tercero de Mayo)

Immigration and immigrants in the news this week... I was telling someone at work today that A Day Without a Mexican was a better concept than it was a movie, and that Monday's events did the movie better than the movie did.

A few years ago I got thinking and I realized that with the possible exception of about six months right after college, I have always had immigrants for neighbors. When I was a little kid in Detroit, we had a family from China right next door (and I think a lady from Italy on the opposite side?). When we moved to the burbs, we had great neighbors from Greece, Vietnam, Great Britain, and Egypt. Lots of the kids I went to high school were first-generation Americans, with parents from Iraq (before it was fashionable to be an Iraqi ex-pat), Lebanon, Albania, Jordan, and other majority-Muslim countries. On a side note, most were not Muslims themselves, but were Chaldeans or Copts (i.e. Christians) who fled those countries due to persecution, and/or for the greater opportunities in the United States. (There was a significantly lower Hispanic population in the Detroit area than in many other urban areas around the U.S., but Dearborn was/is home to the largest number of persons of Middle Eastern descent outside of the Middle East. Or something like that.)

In Illinois, most of my immigrant neighbors have been from Mexico (and I think there was one guy from Colombia). The guy that lives next door to me right now is a landscaper, and he always works so hard and takes such good care of his house, which, prior to his arrival, had been a run-down shitty dump (thanks to the U.S.-born "Absolutely" guy who bought it as an "investment property" and never lifted a finger to take care of it - four-foot-tall weeds were growing out of the gutters at one point, I kid you not). Like I've said before, I want guys like him around to make my neighborhood and my country better.

Now I'm not saying that immigrants are some sort of exclusively wonderful human manna falling on America who never commit crimes or create social tensions. However, I firmly believe that the overall benefits far outweigh the overall detriments. And, though it may be an oversimplified argument, I think the best way to retard illegal immigration is to make legal immigration easier.

P.S.: Tom Tancredo is still a fucking asshole. Know what I'm waiting for? For Luis Gutierrez or Loretta Sanchez to introduce a bill in the House that would rename Tancredo's home state of Colorado with the more AMERICAN name, "Reddish-Colored." (i.e., The Air Force Academy would be located in Reddish-Colored Springs, Reddish-Colored.)