Trump’s wall will increase boat sales

If Trump’s wall goes up, people-smugglers will buy boats.  Instead of smuggling people over the Rio Grande they will be taking them to isolated beaches in California, Texas. Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Don’t think it can’t happen?  Consider the thousands that smugglers have taken across the Mediterranean, often with fatal consequences.

And if Trump insists on putting walls up on all these beaches, do you think the local boaters and fisherman will be happy?

Sent to Rep. Pete Stauber (MN-8) and Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith.

Immigration

Comment to “Trump cannot get its story straight…”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2018/06/18/daily-202-trump-team-cannot-get-its-story-straight-on-separating-migrant-families/5b2701f030fb046c468e6ef6/?utm_term=.4fad262b503d

Gosh, the inhabitants of this continent over a thousand years ago had a lousy immigration policy.  First they let those drunken, war-mongering Vikings in.  Then they let some murderous Spaniards in.

Pete Seeger captured this mistake with his tale of two Indians watching a little boat come ashore from a bigger boat.  A man stepped out of the little boat and said "Buenos dias, señores."  One Indian looked at the other and said, "Well, there goes the neighborhood!"

And this invasion from Europe just grew and grew until it was a flood that overwhelmed and often killed the original inhabitants.

I think these illegal aliens should go back where they came from.

Gosh!  What am I going to do?  I am a descendant of these illegal aliens.  But how can I "go back where I came from"?  I would have to be sent back in pieces.  I have known ancestors from England, Germany, and Poland, and probably as my name suggests, from Ireland.

Interestingly, many of the ancestors of these "illegal" immigrants once upon a time freely crossed the Rio Grande, moving back and forth for trade and for better weather.  Then a bunch of these Europeans decided they wanted the land north of the Rio Grande, and...

Trump to stop immigration from Italy?

Donald Trump wants to stop immigration of “terrorists" from Muslim countries and stop immigration of “rapists" from Mexico.  Why not stop the immigration of leg-breaking mobsters from Itaiy?  See “46 alleged East Coast mobsters indicted”, John Riley, Newsday, reprinted in Duluth News Tribune, 2016-08-05 at http://www3.forumnewspaper.com/olive/Tablet/DNT/SharedArticle.aspx?href=DNT%2F2016%2F08%2F05&id=Ar00501.

Guess who stopped them?  Immigrants!  The U.S. Attorney is Preet Bharara, born in India.  The head of the New York FBI office is Diego Rodriguez, born in Columbia.

Am I a descendant of illegal immigrants?

My great-grandfather, John J. R. Magree, was supposedly born in Brooklyn, New York, at least according to all the census records from 1870 on, his obituary, and other records.  Brooklyn has no record of his birth.

Because John C. Magree was a mate in New York harbor in the 1850 census and master of the Ship Ivanhoe in Jan. 1851, I assumed that John C. Magree was his father.  The Brooklyn city directories of the 1850s list a Margaret Magree, widow.  Was she the abandoned wife of John C. Magree?  John C. Magree was still alive during the Civil War.

However I did find records of the marriage in Liverpool, England, of John C. Magree and Margaret Pope, and then of the birth to this couple of John James Richard Magree.  Given the rarity of the name Magree, isn't the probability rather strong that this is the John James Richard Magree who became known as John J. R. Magree as an adult?

But I can find no record of Margaret Magree and John J. R. Magree traveling on John C. Magree's ship or any other ship.  Did John C. bring them as unlisted passengers?  Did they not need to be on the manifest because they were the master's family?  As far as I can tell, the same manifest did not list any of the crew, either.

So, do we follow the rule that Barack Obama, born in Hawaii of an American mother and a Kenyan father, is not born in America?  Or do we follow the rule that Ted Cruz and John McCain, born in Canada and the Panama Canal Zone, respectively, of at least one parent who was a U.S. citizen, are born in America?  I guess, sarcastically, since I am white we follow the Cruz/McCain rules.

However, if we follow the "Obama" rule, then I am the descendant of illegal immigrants.  Not only was my great-great grandmother presumably born in England, but we have have no birth certificate to prove that John C. Magree was born in the United States.  The only "proof " is that on his marriage application in England, John Cornelius Magree gave his father's name as Vinsent Magree.  There was a Vincent Magree in the 1840 census with at least one male around 12 years old.

That's all rather slim evidence that my paternal line has been born of legal immigrants.

If that makes me an illegal immigrant too, where should I be deported to?  England, Germany, Poland?  I have traced ancestors to all three of those countries.

Why state secession is a bad idea

Several petitions are under way for various states to secede from the Union.

Be careful what you ask for.

What the proponents of secession ignore is that the United States is and has always been a country with a mobile population.  Not only was the United States started by people who moved from other countries or their descendants, but these people kept moving west, often overrunning people already there.  In the Twentieth Century people moved in almost every direction.  Small town people went to the big city.  People moved from one city to another to seek different opportunities.  Corporations moved people from state to state for many reasons.  I myself have lived in three states and my wife in six.

If a state were to secede, what would they do about "immigration"?  Would business people from other states need a passport to do business in the independent state?  Would tourists need a passport?  If no passport were required, what would the independent state do about "illegal immigration".

What about people in the seceded state?  Would they need passports to work or vacation in other states?

What about all the wars that the United States has been involved in?  Would seceded states continue these wars?  Often the states with secessionist movements have a significant portion of their populations who are bellicose.  If the seceded states were involved in their own foreign wars, would they drag the United States into their wars?

Speaking of war, wasn't it a Republican who led a war against states seceding from the union?  Isn't it ironic that some of the major proponents of secession call themselves Republicans?  Did Lincoln "die in vain"?

Quote of the Day – Education, immigration, and taxes

"We've bought into the idea that education is about training and "success", defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge.  We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.  A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is to its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death." - Chris Hedges, posted on Facebook.  The quote is from "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle".  Click on the title to see more quotes from the book.

Here's some more food for thought.  There are over 1,000,000 (or is it 3,000,000) jobs that can't be filled because there are not enough "qualified" applicants.  There are not enough "qualified" applicants because "qualified" is often very narrowly defined (can you do everything on day one).  Many corporations expect applicants to have gained the "skills" elsewhere.  To gain "skills" one has to have been trained at another company or at a university.  Many large corporations and overpaid CEOs don't want to pay the taxes for a high quality education system.  Many are calling for more H1-B visas to allow for more "highly-skilled" immigrants.  In other words, the taxes in other countries are supposed to pay for educating these "highly-skilled" immigrants.

Personally I'm all for unlimited immigration, but not when it is a dodge to get lower-paid workers.

BTW, I spent six years in Europe as a "highly-trained" foreign worker.  I sometimes had to travel to another country to help out on a problem, even when the local was probably better qualified to solve the problem.

Quote of the day: If Republicans Are So Great For Business, Why Does Silicon Valley Support Democrats?

See http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/republicans-great-business-why-does-silicon-valley-support-193631152.html I recommend watching the interview as well as reading the summary.

Let's solve illegal immigration for once and for all!!

Illegal immigration has been a problem in America (and many other countries) for centuries.  In what is now called the United States let's solve it by sending the children of illegal immigrants and the children's children, yea unto to the sixteenth generation, back where they came from.  Let's start with sending all the Mayflower descendants back to England!

Did they really get permission from all the governments of the people already living here to stay put and to take resources from the then current occupants?  Did they learn the customs and the languages of the people already living here?  No, they insisted on following their Old World customs and speaking their Old World language.  Even that language was a mishmash of the language of illegal immigrants from another part of the Old World.

Then let's send back all the children of the Southern planters and the children of their children.  They grabbed great swaths of land from those already reaping the bounty of the land, they cleared the land of those pesky forests that produced an abundance of food, and they pushed those who already lived on the land farther and farther from the coasts.

And on and on it went, decade after decade, farther and farther west.  Now the true illegal immigrants want to push out the descendants of the Anasazi, the Aztecs, the Toltecs, and the Mayans from land they had occupied for millennia until the real illegal immigrants arrived.

And we should send the Ojibwe out of the territory they took from the Dakota.  And we should send the Lenni Lenape out of the territory they took from others as they pushed east to the Great Salt Sea (see James Fenimore Cooper).

If we all stayed put in the land of our fathers and their fathers, just think of how we could reduce the problem of illegal immigration!!  Of course, if we all did that, we would still be peasants working from dawn to dusk, suffering cold and heat according to the season, and wondering when a drought or the foreign overlords would wipe us out.

We really should follow the advice of Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?"  That means we have to absorb people moving in and we have to be sensitive when we move into others' territory.  And next year we will have world peace.

Lessons from Colonial Quakers

From the founding of Pennsylvania until the mid-18th century, the colonial government was under the control of the Quakers. With increased immigration of other groups, especially Germans and Irish, the Quakers became less representative of the populace and found it hard to govern for at least two reasons.

The Quakers of the time held strongly to their beliefs no matter what the pressure. One was they refused to take an oath; another was their pacifism.

English law required that court officials and witnesses take an oath. Since the Quakers wouldn't take an oath they couldn't serve as judges and other officials. Since they wouldn't take an oath, they felt they couldn't administer an oath. The courts nearly ground to a halt.

As the population increased, the western movement put more and more pressure on the Indians. The invasion of Europeans was resisted violently be the Indians. Of course, the Europeans didn't think they were invaders but civilizers. Since the Quakers were pacifists, they didn't provide any military protection of the settlers. In fact, they thought gifts to the Indians would keep the peace.

Fewer and fewer Quakers ran for public office. In fact, some even withdrew from office rather than act against their beliefs.

For more about the Colonial Quakers, see "The Americans: The Colonial Experience", by Daniel Boorstin.

Doesn't this sound familiar in today's events? We have a party that would rather see the government fail than go against their own beliefs. We have people who don't like foreign troops in their countries and react violently. We have people who think if we only provide gifts to others things will get better (military aid to corrupt governments or concessions to people who are fighting those they consider invaders).

We will be in deep, deep trouble if we are governed either by those who look for ideological purity or by those who think we should act nice to violent people.

Quote on immigration

"They were welcome, for a sensible country needs the talents of a varied people in order to get all the things done that need to be done."
Sheri S. Tepper, The Family Tree, p. 53

The original illegal immigrants

There have been many waves of illegal immigrants to this continent, but one of the most notorious arrived

Not speaking the language,
Carrying many contagious diseases,
Having few of the skills needed for the existing society, and
Quickly established a criminal record.

Who were these invaders who would not score many points as proposed in the current immigration bill? Why, the Pilgrims.

They did not speak Algonquian, the language of the Nauset whose land they occupied.
Over half of them had died from various diseases,
They knew very little about farming,
They stole grain stores from the local people, and
Eventually they murdered many of the locals.

I guess I can't complain too much about them; both my wife and son-in-law are descended from them.