Dig Deeper Texas

Actually, in this case it’s more like kicking them out of the lifeboat.

Immigrant: Judge told me to go home

Anna Calixto went to court Friday seeking an order of protection from her husband, Fernando Calixto. Instead, she was told to go back to her native country of Nicaragua by Blount County Circuit Court Judge W. Dale Young, according to witnesses. Anna Calixto and witnesses said the judge asked Fernando Calixto — who came to the United States from Mexico — if he was in the United States legally. The judge told him if he wasn’t here legally, he had “no rights in court.”

The judge then asked the same question of Anna Calixto.

“When the judge asked if I was here legally,” Anna Calixto said, “I told him I have my temporary worker permit and I have the documentation showing it from the immigration service.

“The judge shrugged his shoulders like he didn’t care — then he told me to go back to Nicaragua.

This link came through on one of the yahoo groups. So how many generations do you have to be in the country to have access to the justice system?

There’s been a lot of attention lately on immigration. And of course, all of those who are against immigration argue that the immigrants today just aren’t willing to assimilate and do the work that immigrants in the past did. In other words, they don’t speak English and what’s worst is that our media/culture is allowing this to happen by providing programs, publications, etc. in Spanish.

They self-righteously proclaim that things weren’t like that in the good ole days when their ancestor’s immigrated.

As the daughter of a family that has been in Texas since the 1840’s and whose father was part of the last generation to grow up speaking German at home, I’ve got to laugh. If you go looking for it, there is plenty of evidence that shows immigrants in the past were criticized for not assimilating and learning English fast enough for the taste of “established” citizens.

I’m reading the book 1912 by James Chace, which is about the election of 1912. It seems that that previous immigrants weren’t necessarily any quicker to learn English than those today. From page 213:

Wilson’s attempts to include and appeal to minorities among the voting population centered on two issues–immigration and racism. His racist statements on “new” immigrants from Italy, Hungary, and Poland, which he had written in his history of the American people, could never be fully explained away. Neither Taft nor Roosevelt brought up the immigration issue. But the president of the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers, a man who was close to the Republican Party managers, did. His organization claimed twenty million readers and he unstintingly attacked Wilson: “No man who had an iron heart like Woodrow Wilson, and who slanders his fellowmen, because they are poor and many of them without friends when they come to this country seeking honest work and wishing to become good citizens, is fit to be President of the United States.

20 million readers of foreign language newspapers in a county of 95 million people. How did our country ever survive?

Technorati Tags: Anna Calizto, Judge W. Dale Young, immigration, assimilation, English Only

Filed under: Anna Calizto, English Only, Jude W. Dale Young, assimilation, immigration