The real apple pie: bashing immigrants

The new law would make it a felony not only to be an “illegal” alien but also to assist one. It’s all about protecting our country against terrorism. It’s even in the title of the bill, “The Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act.”

Allowing “illegals” to get medical care or a homeless shelter bed would send the wrong message to those foreigners who want to blow up our buildings and take away our precious freedoms. It’s a known fact that terrorists come here to use our hospitals and HIV-positive support groups just before they release dangerous gases into the subway system. Oh wait, that was our government.

If your partner is undocumented, better draw up the divorce papers now and call the INS – not the IRS. Even the mere knowledge of someone’s illegal status can lead to five years in jail, if you don’t report him or her immediately to the nearest immigrant official.

It all makes perfect sense. After all, we’ve always been a country of legal immigrants.

Christopher Columbus and his men carried their green cards on the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. The first thing the pilgrims did when they stepped off the Mayflower onto Plymouth Rock was to show Native American immigration officials their papers. The European immigrants with the most impressive papers, however, were the southern Italians, though for some strange reason they earned the nickname WOPs – WithOut Papers.

It’s impossible to comprehend why some people are now saying that our country hates immigrants. Millions of protesters with foreign names have taken to the streets with banners that attack our country as anti-immigrant. They’re obviously being misled by the liberal media.

Our country is damn crazy about immigrants. Every July 4, we get all warm and fuzzy about the poem written at the base of the Statue of Liberty, which was sent to us by some foreign government. Most of us can probably recite one or two words of it. “Uh, give me your poor, your tired, your ... uh ... people from many lands, amen.”

America is the great melting pot. All those ethnic groups mashed together and cooked over a high flame for a few centuries have produced a suburban McCulture that’s the envy of the world. That’s why so many people want to come here. You can’t blame them.

Actually, we can. We can deport them, too, if they’re not the right color and class.

Those ultra liberal ACLU types just want us to hate our own country. They point to “No Italians Need Apply” signs that were proudly displayed in shops a century ago or the fact that those Chinese workers building the railroads weren’t allowed by law to send for their wives. They bring up anti-Semitism as if it’s still the ‘60s.

The NINA signs were designed to protect Italians from possible racist violence on the job. As for the Chinese, having wives here would have distracted them from their work. And anti-Semitism, wasn’t that eradicated when we crushed Adolph Hitler?

Besides, what’s the point of dwelling on the past? It’s not as if it’s going to teach us anything. The Sensenbrenner/ King bill makes good American sense: Criminalize the people who come to this country to do sweaty, back-breaking work in our fields and in the kitchens of our restaurants, not to mention the people who cross borders desperate for work fixing our toilets because the international treaties we make with their governments leave their villages poor and without jobs.

When it comes right down to it, anti-immigrant laws are more American than apple pie.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca raises hell as a radical working-class southern Italian faggot living in San Francisco. This article was originally published in SF Bay Times

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