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  • Immigration and the Bee

       June 01, 2006

    Tonight ABC will air the finals of the National Spelling Bee live in prime time. Round Four of the competition will kick off at Noon Eastern Time on ESPN with the favorite, Samir Patel, attempting his next word. I have to confess, I love the Bee. The kids are hilarious to watch. At their age, they'd be awkward anyway, but when you add in the fact that they're so into spelling it's a freak show-but in a good way.

    So what does the Bee have to do with immigration? Take a look at the names of some of the kids still in the competition. Sure, we have a John Tamplin and a Katharine Close, but there's also Natalia Vélez, Kendra Yoshinaga, Allion Salvador, Kavya Shivashankar and Aishwarya Pastapur. In other words, the Bee is the classic American melting pot.

    It's kind of ironic that these kids are competing in a spelling bee. It implies that at some point, their ancestors actually learned English. We used to expect that. We used to expect something of the people that came to America. We expected them to do what they had to build a better life for their children. Now it's all about what illegal immigrants expect from us: freedom to break our laws, social services and bilingual communications everywhere.

    I've had a romantic view of immigration in the past, but the whining and entitled attitudes of so many illegal immigrants and their advocates has changed me. America, as a nation, has ceased to ask anything of illegal immigrants. We're like teachers who pass students just to move them up and out of their class. The students (or the illegal immigrants) get away with something now, but in the long run by passing them on, we ultimately fail them.

    I'm mad at the way illegal immigrants treat America, but I'm also angry with the way we treat illegal immigrants. Our government's permissive attitude is only going to spell disaster for those folks we're dooming to a lifetime in the shadows. I desperately want to see America live up to the ideal that we'll see on the Spelling Bee's stage tonight.


    Posted by kris at June 1, 2006 06:21 AM

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    Comments

    #  June 2nd, 2006 10:32 PM      FCN
    allion salvador is my friend. he is a really nice kid. u shouldnt judge him on where he comes from. he cant help where his parents come from. his parents cant help where they come from. especially when hes a child. allion is a really nice kid and he is my friend. Leave him alone u big jerk. ALLION IS NOT A SPELLING FREAK SHOW. HE IS MY FRIEND!!! besides there is more to a person than just their ancestors ethnic group. Think about what you say. and how do you think allion feels when he reads this article about himself? think it over you big jerk! -allions friend  
     
    #  June 2nd, 2006 10:34 PM      kris
    I think you're completely misunderstanding this article. Allion's ancestors come from somewhere other than America. So do mine and so do yours. That's what makes America great, we're a melting pot of the world's cultures. To me, the spellers in the Bee celebrate that. I certainly don't mean to denigrate any of the spellers. They're awesome. I use them to demonstrate the ideal of America--which is that we come from all over the world, but we come TOGETHER in America.  
     
    #  June 8th, 2006 5:49 PM      mbrlr
    Whining? Entitlement? Bloody nonsense. They're acting like Americans.

    Ceased to ask anything? You have absolutely no idea of what's involved in any immigrant's life, legal or no, to make such a statement.

    Why are you so scared of this issue? I honestly don't get it. We're a nation of immigrants. Sheesh, even the Indians came over from Siberia thousands of years ago.  
     
    #  June 9th, 2006 1:41 PM      mbrlr
    My apologies if I misunderstood anything in what you posted. I just wish there were a clearer understanding of immigration history; the first generation of immigrants always tended to cling to things from their prior culture and it usually was the second generation here after immigration that was completely "Americanized". The Irish faced prejudice and the fears of those already here in the 1840s, the Germans and the Italians in the late 1800s-early 1900s, and so on. We're merely repeating ourselves yet again, and not in a good way.

    Hey! Anybody want to deport the Attorney General because of his ancestors having been illegal immigrants? Just curious.  
     

     

     


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