Immigrants helps keep America strong

By: Paul Cornish, Guest Columnist

I am at a loss to understand the vehement arguments that surround the immigration issue in this country.

I was born an Englishman and I’m proud of it, in the same way that most Americans are proud to be born American. I am now a legal immigrant (or legal alien, as the government refers to us) that calls the USA home.

So what makes us what we are? The quintessential Englishman goes back over 2,000 years. We have Saxons and Picts, and Scots and Celts and Danes and Vikings and Romans in our ancestry to name but a few. More recently, about a thousand years ago, we were forcibly integrated with the Normans from Northern France and since then have no doubt strengthened our bloodlines by intermarrying with other European races who count among their ancestors Goths, Visigoths, Trojans, Moors, Turks and Vandals.

We have ended up today still calling ourselves English but the racial stew continues to cook. What makes us truly English is that we are from England. As we reap the “rewards” of colonialism a true Englishman today may have Jamaican, Indian, Pakistani or Kenyan blood in his veins as well as everything else.

My children now count not only English in their blood but American too, and thereby gain the advantage of being 1/16th Irish and 1/16th German.

Americans, like the English, are a mixed bunch.

The United States boasts about its cultural diversity. Little Italy, Little Chinatown, Latin and Spanish Quarters, all feature in our bigger cities. Native tribes like the Sioux and Navajo still practice and show pride in their ancient cultures, yet they too have intermarried, and with those who 200 years ago sought to wipe them from the face of the earth.

This is America’s strength, but today too many people calling themselves true Americans forget how they came by that label.

If the argument against further immigration is financial rather than cultural then it becomes even less valid.

So many industries and businesses would fail overnight if immigration could somehow be stopped immediately. The retail food industry, something close to all our hearts, would take a severe hit. Many would be forced to close or charge even more in order to pay their kitchen and cleaning staff an “American living wage.” The clothing industry, the root of so many teenage girls’ existence, would collapse, the landscaping industry, the building industry, the hospital industry would all suffer and you, the good American, would pay the price, and I do mean pay.

This country doesn’t need any more lawyers. It doesn’t need any more politicians. What it needs is someone to cut the grass, sweep the floor and wash the dishes because educated Americans won’t

So what if they send a large part of their wages back to the land of their birth? Do you really think it amounts to much when you think of the billions of dollars that go abroad every day in the form of bombs and bullets, forgiven foreign debt to Third World countries, and gifts to puppet regimes?

North America is vast. In France they average about 293 people per square mile. In England we are at about 1,349 per square mile, but in the United States it’s only about 80. I think we have room for a few more.

So, I say make everyone that is here legal. Allow them to climb the success ladder just as your ancestors did. Allow them a piece of the American dream.

And when you have done that, allow more immigrants in to fill the void that they leave behind them. Given the chance they too will contribute, as your forefathers did, into making and keeping America the wealthiest country in the world.



Paul Cornish lives in Overland Park.

To submit a guest column, contact Chris Rodgers at 385-6056 or crodgers@sunpublications.com.