What Will We Call It?

What will we call the next "Night of Broken Glass?"

Images of Germany/Austria, November 9-13, 1938 came to mind when I read this news article:

Parents: Hispanic kids being bullied in law's wake
JAY REEVES
From Associated Press
October 22, 2011

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — It was just another schoolyard basketball game until a group of Hispanic seventh-graders defeated a group of boys from Alabama.

The reaction was immediate, according to the Mexican mother of one of the winners, and rooted in the state's new law on illegal immigration.

"They told them, 'You shouldn't be winning. You should go back to Mexico,'" said the woman, who spoke through a translator last week and didn't want her name used. She and her son are in the country illegally.

Spanish-speaking parents say their children are facing more bullying and taunts at school since Alabama's tough crackdown on illegal immigration took effect last month. Many blame the name-calling on fallout from the law, which has been widely covered in the news, discussed in some classrooms and debated around dinner tables.

Justice Department officials are monitoring for bullying incidents linked to the law. ...

Federal officials say some parents — particularly illegal immigrants — may not report bullying to teachers and principals because they fear coming into contact with government officials. ...

Opponents contend the law is creating a climate of fear and mistrust in the state that's unsettling for immigrants who are both legal and illegal. Immigrants tell of dirty looks in grocery stores, and online forums are full of angry, anonymous comments and from both supporters and opponents of the law.

Machine shop manager Hector Conde said his family has seen the problem firsthand. Conde, whose family lives in Autauga County north of Montgomery, was appalled when his 12-year-old daughter, Monica Torres, told him a schoolmate called her a "damn Mexican" during a school bus ride.

"She is a citizen. She doesn't even speak Spanish," said Conde, a U.S. citizen originally from Puerto Rico. "The culture being created (by the law) is that this sort of thing is OK."

These laws against illegal immigrants are being enacted in the very states that segregated, subjugated and terrorized black ppl for centuries. I agree that there needs to be some control of our borders, but we also need to accommodate the large number of people willing to come here and do the grunt work that Americans refuse to do.

Arizona & Alabama are just the first of these laws to hit the books and to be challenged in the courts. But Florida has also proposed such divisive law and we just wait until the first Puerto Rican gets harassed by the cops as being an illegal immigrant. Also, will they check the immigration status of EVERYONE that gets stopped in some unrelated traffic infraction (that alone has been used against black ppl so often that "driving while black" has entered our vernacular).

I live in a multi-ethnic community. In fact as an English speaking person I am the minority in South Florida. We have immigrants from all over South & Central America and the rest of the world. Quite a few from the former Soviet Union live here - blond, blue-eyed ppl who would cause quite a bottleneck if the cops decided to check their immigration status.

But, that is all lost on these state immigration laws that seem only to target brown ppl with Spanish accents. And as this article indicates the resultant prejudice and hostility to a whole class of ppl in these backwater Southern/Western states.

So, when the mobs of American citizens start attacking the Hispanic ppl in their homes, what will we call it?

We called it Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) when prejudice against the Jews caused the citizens of Germany (with government blessing) to attack them in their homes and businesses. Maybe we can stay with that as glass will obviously be broken.

Maybe call it Cristalnoche. Think it can't happen again - here in the U.S.

I don't feel the need to defend my liberal bonafides even if some of this is interpreted as insensitive or politically incorrect. The correlation between the beginning of the Nazis' attempted extermination of millions of their citizens and what is described in Reeves' article is absurd.

That doesn't mean I excuse or condone what the rednecks are doing but I think their attitude is due in large part to the perceived lack of willingness on the part of Hispanics here illegally to assimilate into the culture of the society they came to. I.e., learn the language! Maybe it's really the fault of American corporations for making $ their only concern, turning America into a bilingual country.

I do sympathize with people who come here to seek a better life even if they don't follow the rules but they lose much of that sympathy when they adopted an attitude of entitlement.

You know what the big difference between these new immigration laws and the real Night of Broken Glass? In the latter, people run the risk of being deported while in the former, people ran the risk of being deported to a death camp.

ALL illegals SHOULD go back! This is something I have very strong feelings about.

Opa Shale wrote:

That is a very logical and str8forward stance. If only it were so easy a solution.

In today's paper was an article how Alabama farmers can't get ppl to work their fields because a lot of the illegals have left.

Some produce is going to waste because there are no experienced pickers who will work the long hours at the pay that the illegals did. Look for produce prices to go up soon.

Fix one problem and another arises. Perhaps some more thot should have gone into the first problem.

What complicates the matter is that not all of the children are illegals.

I do think there are enough ~ legal or illegal ~ to work all the fields that need it; problem is, farms are just one of many jobs they are hired for. Cleaning rooms, washing dishes, cooks. . . Those are jobs that the unskilled and less skilled Americans used to do (I don't know what the unskilled do anymore). Construction used to be sought after jobs until a few decades ago, before the construction industry got cheap and starting hiring them for much less.

I used to travel to San Francisco every other year. Last time, I was in Japantown and walked by Benihana's and noticed that the chefs were now all Hispanics; two years earlier they were all Asian. Which tells me that something changed and it was probably the wages.

Reagan's amnesty of the illegals during his reign would have been acceptable to me if he had followed it with tightened borders. As it was, it only opened the flood gates even wider. And no leaders or law-makers want to touch the issue with a 10' ft pole.