I’ve known quite a few, and many of them were the finest soldiers–of either gender–that I’ve ever met. The military’s respect for the American melting pot is one of the few reasons I can still call myself a serviceman with pride.

Ann doesn’t really care about immigrants dying in spurious, illegal wars for the citizenship privileges she takes for granted. All she cares about is book sales. Someone should stage an immigration rally at the site of her next Barnes & Noble signing.

Even if new immigrants don’t learn to speak English, their children certainly will. Who cares if we have to “put up” with dual language signs or automated phone messages? The fact is that our country is filling with millions of brown people. This freaks the racist wingnuts out. What else can you expect of people who can’t even tolerate the minorities who are already here?

Other than slaves, what immigrants have been subjected to these things? (I’m not asking this rhetorically; there may well be examples of which I’m ignorant.) Japanese during WW2? I’ve always been under the impression that families were interred intact, and I wasn’t aware of any interference with their right to reproduce.

Rex-

Puerto Ricans were routinely sterilized, both in their own country and after migrating to the U.S., by the U.S. government and U.S.-funded programs. Though obviously not immigrants, Native American families were routinely broken up as their children were sent away to boarding schools for assimilation purposes, and a substantial proportion of women were forcibly sterilized. Black women in the U.S. have also been routinely sterilized.

So I probably should have been more clear that this wasn’t just an immigrant issue; forced sterilizations have affected nearly all groups of people of color in the United States.

America has a seller’s market in immigration, but thanks to Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law, we no longer favor skilled workers from developed nations, but instead favor unskilled immigrants from the Third World. Kennedy’s bill promptly cut the number of European immigrants in half and increased Third World immigrants to 85 percent of the total.

See, this is a really cute misrepresentation. First, it wasn’t Kennedy’s bill, although he strongly supported it…But that, apparently, is how Ann likes it.

Jill that’s a little misleading, too. From Tuesday’s WSJ:

I watched the Senate debate the immigration issue the last two weeks with a certain sense of déjà vu, for I can remember sitting in the Senate Gallery more than 40 years ago and watching Sen. Edward Kennedy floor manage what became the immigration act of 1965. It was the first major piece of legislation Sen. Kennedy managed, and he did a good job, though the debate was little noticed, coming after the rush of Great Society legislation enacted under the stern direction of President Lyndon Johnson.

What’s interesting when I look back at the debate is that almost no one anticipated what would happen as a result of the act — the vast flow of immigrants, most of them legal but many illegal, from Latin America and Asia. “Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually,” Sen. Kennedy assured the Senate. “Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same.” His brother Robert, when attorney general, predicted in 1964 that abolishing the restrictions on Asian immigration would result in a net increase of “approximately 5,000″ and as a senator in 1965 said that “the net increase attributable to this bill would be at most 50,000 a year.”