Ok...enough of that. Let me share a with you all a fresh perspective. First, I'm an American, of Irish/English heritage, born and raised in South Bend Indiana. I now live in Toluca, Mexico very close to Mexico City. I've been here for 7 years. I teach high school (English). Why? Because I wanted to experience something different in my life. I sold houses in Chicago and did well, but life was becoming ever more meaningless, but I digress. What I would like to tell you all is that most Mexicans don't want to live in the USA, a few (relatively few) cross the border because of the lack of opportunities here, or the worst case scenario is that they CANNOT find work and cannot feed their families. They mostly wanna go to the USA for a few years (and leave behind their loved ones) so that they can save enough money to start a business here or build a house here (in Mexico). It's a sacrifice to be away from their family for many years, they do it out of love, honor, duty, things that we as Americans can certainly respect. Yes, it's wrong, yes it causes problems with the social systems in the USA. I'm not condoning it, but I understand it. The reasons that they have to do this are many...mostly because the government here really sucks. It robs the people of their money (taxes etc) and the politicians get rich, the people just get poorer. This is especially predominant in the states of Michoacan and Zacatecas. Furthermore, we looked the other way for many years because we didnt want to pay more for fruit and vegetables. Cheaper labor = cheaper prices in the supermarkets, right? Cheaper labor means cheaper prices in restaurants, right? Our own citizens don't want (or didnt want) to work in these menial jobs until recently. Well times have turned hard in the USA and now we want to kick em all out and close the border. Granted, this is an oversimplified explanation, but there is much truth in it.
Mexico (and Mexicans) are very upset about the shit going on in Arizona. This has caused a lot of talk down here, and of course it gets blown out of proportion, and there is bound to be backlash.
The people down here are good people and deserve our respect. Treat an incident as an incident, do not condemn the whole country. I used to get a lot of people saying things like Americans are assholes....you and your f-ing president Bush, starting wars all over the place in the name of freedom and democracy, they told me that they knew we just wanted to control the oil! I said, whoa whoa whoa.....I hate Bush, and I didn't vote for him, and he's not MY president, anymore than whoever is president here is THEIR president. Don't judge me because of him. All I ask is that you all don''t judge an entire country for the acts of a relative minority, and to have a little compassion and empathy. (Yes, I vote Democrat)
My 2 cents.....Peace to all of you and your families. Rob