Immigration as Your Home

Immigration as Your Home

Our country is truly built on immigration and is, as so many say, a nation of immigrants. My Fathers family is traced to Germany and my Mothers to the Native American Iroquois tribe and England. My wife’s from traces to Scotland and England and each of us have similar stories. There is now doubt most everyone reading this can be traced elsewhere. Immigrants built America into the greatest nation on earth. So why the big fuss right now? I think our leaders aren’t seeing what is really happening to our great nation.

Imagine with me for a minute that instead of America our country was your home. One day a person shows up at your door and needs a place to stay. Let’s say that you’re a good hearted person with a few extra bedrooms and you invite them in. Let’s say you kind of like them and their needing to get on their feet, so you tell them they can stay until they find a job.

A week or so goes by and you come home after work one night, your wife isn’t too happy because your new guest invited one of their family members to live with them. You take the original person outside and explain that wasn’t the bargain, but when you hear their story of poverty you think the right thing to do is to go along with it.

All the while this is happening you’re paying the bills and your new ‘guests’ aren’t contributing to your bills. Before long there is a tent in your backyard and more ‘family’ has moved in and it is now taxing your ability to afford the new budget it takes to support this growing problem. When you contact the authorities they tell you there is no support for you throwing them out because it is inhumane.

It isn’t long before you have ten people in each bedroom and while a few work illegally their paying you nothing. You still have sympathy for their plight, you’ve tried to help but now the latest thing is they expect you to drive them around, pick them up and, within the house they don’t agree with your family having prayer at night, it is offensive to them. You remain with no help from your local or national authorities.

How long can you go on? How long can your budget and patience to hold out? How long can you have someone interrupting your life and values from within? How long will your family values stand the test with what is now chaos in your home? Only one or two of your guest’s speak English so the confusion and stress it’s creating on your wife and kids is going through the roof. What on earth do you do?

That’s the dilemma facing America today. Our borders are leaking like a broken dam in a monsoon. And our illustrious leaders want to have meetings and discuss a solution in the midst of the downpour rather than getting something done to solve the problem. They’re more concerned about the politics than the people on either side of this argument.

Let’s take a look at the immigration that built this great nation. Immigrants from Europe risked everything even their lives to come and make a life in America, just as many do on our south border today. The difference to me is the early immigrants came to be part of America and build a life here. My son-in-law is of Mexican descent and comes from a great family. His grandfather is a classic gentleman. In talking with him one day he told me they only spoke English at home and wanted the kids to speak English and he wanted to be an American. He served in the Army during World War II in the Pacific.

My wife and I had a landlord one time who escaped with his wife from Hungary when it was behind the Iron Curtain when he heard on the radio, while working, that his brother escaped with his son, their only child. He told me about bullets being fired at them as they ran across the border only to later find out that it was someone else. It would be nine years before he would be reunited with his son. They were a great family when we knew them, he built a thriving machine shop business and said this is the only place he could have done it. And he didn’t believe we should all speak his language, they spoke English.

When I worked with Pepsi several years ago I was setting up meetings for our President to go around the country and speak to all Pepsi employees, I was in Virginia and met a lady named Pearl from China who worked there. We became friends and she introduced me to the ‘Chinese’ community of the city we were in. Her story was interesting. She took me to a ‘Chinese Appreciation Day’ for the community. It was held downtown and they were thanking everyone for their cooperation and welcoming of Chinese immigrants.

Pearl taught me that they had an organized process of bringing over family and friends and how they wanted them to have skills to start a business and they stayed with one another until they got on their feet, all quite impressive stuff. Pearl came from the upper class of China before the communist takeover. She loved the old leader Chaing Kai-Shek. She also loved America. And none of them expected us to make signs in Chinese or speak their language.

That brings us to today. We live in a country we are losing, both because of our leaders ignoring the issues and the math behind having babies which our young folks don’t do much of anymore. In fact the math worldwide is more than a little scary. But when it comes the immigration today there is one significant difference. Immigrants today come to America for the opportunity but they want to bring their language and culture with them. They want us to welcome them with open arms as long as we accommodate them.

In my analogy above with immigration as your home, we now see the ‘guests’ dictating our language, our religion and our culture. Immigrants in the early days came and were lifted up by our society. We have the highest standard of living in the world. Today’s immigrants, not all but many, come and live as though they were still in their country of old.

America was built by immigrants and I believe the doors should always be open. But they should be open to people wanting to come and be part of America and not change it to their own ways. We need to stop hearing ‘Press 1 for English’ when we call the U.S. Government offices. And there are a couple other things we need to do:

1. Instead of a wall (I’m a former Marine with two tours in Vietnam so pardon me but when I hear ‘build a wall’ I cannot help but think of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s great wall he tried to build along the DMZ there that was such a joke and waste of money and lives); but instead of a wall put processing centers all along the border along with a serious and supported Border Patrol that sternly enforces entry into this country.

2. In those processing centers streamline the process for legitimate immigrants who want to come here. As for those here already, set up processing centers to legitimize their presence and extradite immediately anyone who doesn’t cooperate.

3. For those accepted into this country require they become citizens in a reasonable, but designated amount of time or leave. To become a citizen they must speak English. We may even offer classes, but part of the deal is we speak English here.

4. Over a period of time stop this nonsense and expense heaped on our school systems of having things bi-lingual. Stop paying benefits to people here illegally period. We need an express line for people wanting to come here and we need an express line for extradition. Become part of America, we’ll help, but become part of America or leave.


I am all for immigration. There are many wonderful people here from many countries that work hard, contribute and believe in what we do. But just as if you had a glass of sparkling clean water to drink, and drop by drop you put arsenic in it, and you drink it, you die. Right now America as we know it is dying drop by drop. Immigration is just one of the drops. There are a lot of bad people here that are taxing our system to the max. If you don’t fix it our grandkids will not have the America we fought for.

Think about your home and all those folks moving in and the authorities throwing their hands up … welcome home.