Actually the one that gets me most is PetSmart. Our dog has a sensitive stomach and so we have to feed him a special diet. What's we've found is for his wet food, Blue Buffalo Herring and Sweet Potato works well (yes, we know how dyke-y we are) and the only place we've found that carries it is PetSmart. Petco doesn't. That's going to be inconvenient, everything else we can live with. Pretty much anything I'm likely to buy for my car, I can do in the auto section of Fred Meyers and everything else I take it to my mechanic ('cuz computers, I do. Science, I do. Give me a bunsen burner, some chemicals, a microscope or telescope, I'm your girl. There is NO way I'm working on my car myself. I presume precision German engineering is just a polite way of saying "no, this isn't a 64 1/2 Mustang that you can go mucking about in so keep your non-grubby mitts out of the engine compartment!") and I'd hate to take it to the Audi dealer and have the mechanic say "Ummm, you DO realize that you broke your car, right?"


cheers
Aj

warning: pet-moment to follow.

( today i was told that the beasts have run out of their special low fat, duck jerky-strips, again (so that i can buy them while i'm out today).

once i compared the for-*human*-consumption, frozen chicken breast to the cost of the low-fat jerky treats and the treats cost TWICE as much as the "human" food.

i want a dyke-y award!! /derail. )

I am sure if I were an illegal in korea they would pull me over on my rickshaw pretty quickly tho!
Sometimes it is just geography.....land borders on the USA are mexico and canada....the border areas more likeley to have...illegal immigrants....
water borders i.e. flordia which is close to cuba, haiti, dominican republic, more likely to see infulux of illegals from...

We have laws, we have immigration laws,,,they need to be followed by all,,not just a few.
Dont like the law work to change it,,,not ignore it!

Aj, I loved your concise history of this country. I do, however, have one small issue. It's going to take me at least the rest of the day to wipe from my mind the picture it has formed of you in a Mr. Peabody costume.

While I agree with you 100% that this is indeed about race, I do not agree that we should stop all immigration to make that point.

I have a difficult time telling anyone they can't come here because it is the direct fault of the USA that they would even want to come here. I don't agree with geopolitical boundaries...if that makes sense.

It is a small detail I know.

I just wish there were another way to prove how racist this all is.


Do we want to be like Korea? is that what you are saying? Becasue I do not want to be anything like especially North Korea.

I don't agree that we should have these immigration laws, and yes, I would very much like to see the laws we have changed. :)

Until then, I think we need to look to the constitution for guidance, just beacsue something is a law does not mean it is constitutional and should remain a law.

If we are going by that rationale....let's look at how many states have anti gay related laws, for example Sodomy laws.

Dean:

I'm curious. How would they know you're an illegal? How would an American illegal alien in Korea look differently than an American soldier off duty and off-post in Korea? It seems to me (and I might be wrong although I can't recall my sister talking about being randomly stopped and one of my colleagues actually was over in Seoul as recently as two years ago courtesy the US Army) that you would look like a soldier on leave. Now, I'm talking about South Korea which is, (more or less--recently more than less), a democracy. You are certainly correct that in North Korea you would be pulled over very quickly. Of course, in North Korea if you didn't praise the Great Leader on cue you would also be 'detained'. Which Korea are you suggesting we emulate, South Korea (which didn't have an election that could be called free and fair until the 1990's) or North Korea?

Secondly, I'm curious if you think that a *KOREAN* citizen (and here I’m talking about South Korea) would expect to be pulled over because they *might* be Japanese or Han Chinese? I am willing to bet that if a SK police officer, pulled over a Korean citizen, and asked for her papers because she *might* be Japanese, there would be words exchanged. It might go hard on that officer (there is no love lost between the Koreans and the Japanese).

I think you are missing a very salient point here:

someone who is of Hispanic descent, whose family is descended from the Mestizo who were in the region long before your ancestors thought about coming here, is going to be phenotypically indistinguishable from someone who just came over the border last week. The issue is that *citizens*--not people in the US undocumented but citizens--whose genes have never been more than 200 miles north or south of the Mexico/US border in the last 8,000 years are going to be caught up in this. THEY will be stopped.

Now, perhaps because it is vanishingly improbable to ever be *you* or someone you are genetically related to you are sanguine about this. But if *I* were from a family whose bloodline has trod the soil in Arizona since around the end of the last ice age were stopped and asked to prove that I was a citizen of these United States, I would take issue with that. I would probably want to say something along the lines of "really? You have got to be kidding me! I'm a citizen as was my mother before me as was her mother before her. Hell the last one of my ancestors who *wasn't* a citizen woke up one day and found out that she no longer lived in Mexico but was now in a country called the United States and she didn't move an inch! My ancestors didn't cross the border, the border crossed my ancestors!"

But perhaps, that's just me. Perhaps I have a certain sympathy for this because of an experience I had when I was younger.

the law is unjust, i don't plan on blindly following ANY kind of law that's based in racism and bigotry.

further, i'm not showing my papers to anyone to prove i belong here. fuck that, as a US-american citizen i'm protected from that kind of policing.

and do they even USE rickshaws in korea?

Wouldn't it make MORE sense to go after the employers? I mean most people who come here do so for the work. It seems to me that this is almost *all* a demand-side problem. Would you support, for instance, a law that said that if you are an employer and you hire someone without proper documentation that you WILL lose your business? If not, why not? Because if that happened then the flow of people coming here would dry up real fast.

It seems to me that nations have choices how to handle immigration.

We can be a nation that welcomes people and makes a space for immigrants. In that case, we're going to have some folks who try to get in by hook or by crook and we should have some means of dealing with that (I say go after the employers, thus removing the incentive).

We can be a nation that makes it *dangerous* to try to get into the country except by an official point of entry (and given the topography of the area, that isn't as difficult as it might seem).

We can be a nation that makes it *uncomfortable* to be an immigrant here, in which case most sane people will stay where they are unless it's really, really, horrific.

Now, I'm all for strategy number one. It seems that the country is interested in experimenting with strategy number 3 and parts of strategy number 2 (on an ad hoc, vigilante basis). Now, if we're going to go with strategy number 2 then let's go all the way. I have some very interesting ideas about how to make certain that no one EVER tries to cross the border by land ever again. Of course, even as I've thought about those ideas I have also thought that that bites both ways. I might have cause to want to get out of the United States if it were to become sufficiently hostile to non-white people. (Not out of the realm of possibility by any stretch) And I wouldn't want to have to run the gauntlet of what I think would be a near airtight border.

Now I just need someone to be my "boy Sherman' and I'm all set! June is already making me a Mr. Peabody mask. :)

oy vey
 

apoco...my
example of korea was simply in reference to how easily i would be spoted in korea as a foreigner.................... I am 6'2" and weigh 320 pounds...and i have blue eyes!!!

Not everything is predicated on race....
I am sorry due to geography a larger number of illegal hispanic immagrants reside in arizona then in Schenectedy NY. I do beleive it has more to dow ith georgraphy than with race

Additionally,
Likme I said there are immigration laws, do I want the borders sealed up,,no..however, leaving one country in poverty to enter another one in slavery is not good for anyone.
especially the humans involved. it hurts the individual it hurts the country left and the country entered.

I do not know what the solution is, I do know however if the Immigration service spent more time, enforcing the working documents laws, and less time playing masked crusaders at the borders...there would be less problems.

THE USA is a "super power" well was,,,personally I think people immigrating here are foolish, what does the USA produce domestically that is so important to human survival?
Majority of the food comes from outside the USa
the CORN BELT furnishes the USA with high processed high caloric non nutritious muck and tons of Beef for our burgers....and usa farmers are starving while con-agra makes more $$ then we have good ol USA Tobacco and good ol USA Alcoholic beverages.....most everything else is imported

today for breakfast i had: a banana from peru, blueberries from chile, an apple from..somewhere....a tomato from israel spring mix salad greens from mexico, salmon from the carribean farms, drank my fiji water, and will get all cozy in my egyptian cotton sheets, while i watch my tv made in china, work on my laptop that was made in japan, and drink a small sip of ice wine from canada.

Right now a bunch of yahoos are upset that illegal immigrants are ruining the finances of "real americans" truth is if it were not for the illegal americans taking jobs that the "real americans" did not want until the financial crises.....country would have gone to hell in a handbasket a whole lot sooner.

solution:
change the laws
open the borders in both directions....get an agreement with countries for a open exchange program....and have a ball.
Let everyone become legal,,let everyone become an american citizen,,eve4ryone pays taxes....non american citizens and citizens alike..of course this will require a national identification system,,,and all the liberals and conservatives and libertarians alike will be screaming about privacy issues...

cant satisfy everyone ever.....

peace

Great question and, as it turns out, they don't (except as, perhaps, tourist traps). But ya know, they're Asians it's all "most honorable so-and-so..." and "Confucius say..." and coolies and...and....and...what's the word I'm looking for here....umm, stereophonic, no...stereo-headphones, no...stereotypes! That's it! Stereotypes! (Not you)

Rickshaws were a Japanese invention which was imported to China in the late 19th century. As far as I was able to find out in my cursory hunting around, they were never popular in Korea, certainly never an integral part of the culture, and after WWII I would imagine that they wouldn't be popular *at all* given that they were from Japan.

By the way, the word comes from Jinrikisha which is Japanese for 'human-powered vehicle'.

I have to ask.

Korea, sometimes North, has been used as an example so many times in this thread.

Why Korea?

I am not getting it.

Can someone explain why ever we would want to be like Korea, the Soviet Union or East Germany (the DDR)???

I am not trying to be dense, I try to be well read and keep up with politics, diplomacy and history, but somehow in all that I seemed to have missed why we keep using these countries of examples for the US to follow.

Norway, Finland, heck...Canada even, I get. North Korea, I do not get.

I have this weird MASH meets James Bond meets Fiddler on the Roof meets Stalag 17 meets Southpark thing going on in my head now. :blink:

They have the bike version in London. You know, around China Town.

That still doesn't address the core issue, Dean. How do you tell an American citizen whose ancestors were in what is now Arizona when your ancestors were still eking out a living in Northern Europe and dodging the European lion from someone who crossed the border last week? Because, quite honestly, without doing genetic testing I wouldn't be able to do it to be perfectly honest. I certainly couldn't do it by sight. (And even genetic testing would only be mostly reliable because there's so much cross fertilization across the border and the border hasn't been there long enough for the two populations to have diverged significantly. 150 years in human genetics is hardly any time at all!)

Cheers
Aj

I have this weird mental picture of Social Studies class when some of us older ones were in high school where maybe some of us learned the names of the countries then went home and watched James Bond and this is how we think life outside the USA is?

OK OK, now it is making sense, but just you, not the other mentions of Korea and East Germany and places where people with accents ask for "papers".

Totally agree we can't satisfy everyone.

Totally agree if someone wants to be here make them a citizen! and no, I don't mean terrorists.

Thank you :)

Back to Nazi Germany of we start doing genetic testing.

Completely objective.
 

I keep seeing "taking jobs Americans do not want".
If there were no "illegal" immigrants to take these jobs - do you think wages would finally be livable?

I'm curious to see the answers.

Here's the thing, Dean. Given this country's history (see my earlier post) why on Earth should ANY person of color in this nation believe that this *isn't* about race? I'll tell you this; if I were a Japanese American whose parents or grandparents were born in an internment camp, I'd have one eye on the exits. If I were a Japanese American who had *been* in an internment camp, I'd *definitely* be eying the exits! Because I would start thinking, "seems to me I've heard these notes before..." Now, it may turn out that the notes just *sound* like that same old song from back in the day but are actually totally different music once the song really gets going. The problem is, if it IS that golden oldie by the time you figure it out, it's too late.

Perhaps this isn't about race (that's within the realm of possibility) but given our history it is not unreasonable for non-white people to suspect that it *is* about race. Nothing at all unreasonable about that.

Here's the thing. This law seems innocuous, right? The other directive that has come down from the Arizona Department of Education that stipulates:

The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.

Full article link

Also seems innocuous enough. Both can make a lot of sense to people if they want it to. Here's the thing, there's a set of historical laws, laws from another country to be certain but of historical import never-the-less, that taken on their face ALSO seemed innocuous. Taken in isolation, no particular provision of the Nuremberg Laws or any of the other laws that were passed *seem* so horrible. The thing is to a student of history these things look more and more disturbing taken as a package.

So today, you can be stopped for 'breathing while Hispanic'. Tomorrow you can lose your job for "teaching with an accent". The day after that the 14th Amendment is repealed (yes, there are people talking about repealing or amending the 14th so that it no longer covers everyone born in this country). Then a week later you can lose your job as a teacher for 'teaching while Hispanic'. And sometime down the road, you can be arrested for BEING Hispanic.

Is that where we are heading? Only time and history will tell. The thing is, if a time traveler went back to Berlin circa 1934 with a copy of Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and, perhaps, Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" and tried to warn people, I'm willing to bet that you would barely be able to find 1 German in 1000 (including German Jews) who would have thought that the books were anything more than elaborate fictions done in very poor taste.

Again, I'm not saying America circa 2010 is Germany circa 1933. I AM saying that there is cause for concern. These things rarely happen all at once. They take a path. That path is well worn and the trail is clear for anyone willing to read history without fear but with concern. Step one is always find a scapegoat. Step two is begin to isolate that group from the population--first by laws and sanction, only later comes the physical isolation.

Cheers
Aj