In Rose Bowl, Mexico is 'home' team as U.S. soccer team is booed (updated)
...for the sake of those who will say this is just a sporting contest, and nothing is to be inferred or learned from it, here are a couple thoughts:
In soccer, as in no other sport, team allegiance mirrors national allegiance. Soccer's ultimate contest, The World Cup, is a competition of national teams. The national team World Cup mentality dominates the entire fan base. In inter-country games, the fan roots for the team whose flag owns his heart and claims his first allegiance. The PC Los Angeles Times quotes one of the Mexican team's Rose Bowl fans, in part, as follows: "I was born in Mexico, and that is where my heart will always be." Exactly. And that's the problem with recent and present Mexican immigration.
The massive river of immigrants from Mexico, legal and illegal, that the Democratic Party has been chaperoning into America for decades, in goals and desires, is not your grandparents' immigrants. The vast majority come to share space and partake of our prosperity (such as it is), not to become Americans. They are encouraged in these aims by those who welcome them for their own electoral purposes -- Democrat activists, who know that, as an unassimilated nation apart, laden with grievances and a sense of victimhood, Mexican immigrants are most likely to become dependable clients and voters of the statist party.
Judging by the sympathies of the vast majority of the Rose Bowl crowd, Democrats are getting their wish. No one will ever know for sure how many present at Pasadena on that warm southern California evening were second or third generation "Americans", or how many are in fact American citizens. But those in the crowd who fit these profiles must have been huge in number. And still, whether second or third generation, or American citizen, their first allegiance manifestly was to a foreign state.
And that first allegiance is dragging America into balkanization and disintegration. In these trends, as in so many other phenomena destructive of the nation we all once knew, California leads the way. New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado are right behind, closing fast. Other states will follow if the pattern is not stopped and soon.
In his last public utterance, then former President Theodore Roosevelt spoke of the terms on which immigration to America should be offered, and of the reward for the immigrant's acceptance of those terms:
"In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here does in good faith become an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed or birthplace or origin. But this is predicated on the man's becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American.
If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn't doing his part as an American.
"We have room for but one language here and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, and American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house; and we have room for but one sole loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people."
Letter of President Theodore Roosevelt, January, 1919, written and read, as intended, in public, just before his death.
Theodore Roosevelt's views of immigration to America, and the promise America extended to the immigrants who kept their side of the bargain, were in fact the terms on which the great waves of European immigrants to America during the period 1880-1920 came, lived their lives, and became Americans. This writer's four grandparents were among them. That system worked. And it would work again. In fact, Theodore Roosevelt's terms are those which every nation in the world, including Mexico, (but not America), requires of its immigrants.
We need to return to our grandparents' immigration: assimilation, English and single, undivided loyalty. Multiculturalism is a catastrophic, nation-destroying mistake, invented by Democrats to prop up their sagging electoral base. It is pulling America apart.
In the meantime, to each of those living in America whose hearts will always be in Mexico, we can only wish a safe one way journey that reunites heart with body.
How many places are so diverse that it could fill football stadiums with folks whose roots are somewhere else? How many places offer such a freedom of speech that someone can display an American flag on their porch one day and cheer against the flag the next? I hated it, but I loved it. It felt as if I was in a strange place, and yet I felt right at home."
"Such dramatic rejections of the United States and assertions of Mexican identity are not limited to an extremist minority in the Mexican-American community. Many Mexican immigrants and their offspring simply do not appear to identify primarily with the United States."