The Melting Pot: 2006

Mary Grabar writes:

In the northern suburbs of Atlanta, just inside Interstate 285, formerly middle-class shopping centers house businesses whose signs read in languages other than English. Some are Korean, Chinese, or Vietnamese, but the dominant language is Spanish. In the Chamblee-Doraville area a special bus service unloads passengers coming from Mexico; family members wait in the parking lot crowded with cars and trucks. On a Saturday night Mexican men in jeans and t-shirts and women pushing strollers maneuver six-lane highways on foot. Just before dusk, the area with apartment complexes and businesses surrounding the northernmost rail transit station is bustling with activity. Getting lost there on a way to a friend’s party, I felt like I had driven into a foreign land. I could not read the signs.

This, I think, is what it must have felt like for my parents when they first arrived in this country. Certainly no one translated signs into Slovenian for them or gave them government documents in their language. But today Spanish-speaking immigrants to Georgia expect to earn high school diplomas by taking the exams in Spanish. Billboards in Georgia advertise government services (welfare) in Spanish that have been available to illegal aliens.

[Snip]

In the three decades since I was fed the political correctness by teachers in my riot-torn high school, things have only gotten worse. The demonstrations have disrupted daily life and threatened public safety in cities like Los Angeles. But imagine billboards advertising welfare benefits for Slovenians or Ukrainians in native languages. Imagine Slovenians taking to the streets at the threat of denial of welfare for those who are in the country illegally. The image is preposterous. It would be preposterous even to the educators and radical groups who support the protests on behalf of the Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants. They have spent the last three decades working to instill the idea of this particularly visible group as
suffering special persecution. They have started with the most gullible—the young people, their students. And the masses have been emboldened to the point of taking to the streets and burning the flag of the country in which they live. Their claims to be part of the heritage of American immigration sound specious to this immigrant

But they have joined the American mainstream. They have become just another aggrieved minority walking about with their hand out and a chip on their shoulder.