Okay, I’m guessing she’s from France. Am I right?

(Sorry – couldn’t resist the opportunity to slip in a French joke.)

Robin, I think I mostly agree with you, I don’t have a problem with people sending money to their family back home, that’s what the good hardworking family person does. It’s the coming here with no intention to stay, avoiding becoming an American type that gets to me.

It’s funny because where I work, we get a wide variety of immigrants working, and one, who is here temporarily, basically they know that their family will only be here a couple years, speaks pretty flawless English, and in the course of the 2 months she’s been here she’s gone to a monster truck rally, and is trying to get into baseball. That really struck me and I appreciated the gesture.

Another employee (not from Mexico) casually remarked that some day she hoped the whole world spoke her native tongue. Now, I don’t begrudge the thought, BUT saying it in America, to a bunch of English speakers, I was kind of like, you’re kidding me right. But being the not-wanting-to-get-myself-fired type, I held my tongue. Oh well.

Brad S,-

I think the distinction becomes if the expat is intending to stay or return in the new land, if they are immigranting to find work unavailable in their home, or taking a overseas rotation of some sort.

If someone is not going to be staying and has a short-term employment arrangement with an employer that is global, the employee has a duty to learn the new culture, but they need not embrace it as their own, because it is not.

I’m not sure that it matters whether the illegals are the majority or a minority. If a minority, they’re numerous enough that something needs to be done.

Colonization, No.

– Alan Cole, McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.

The real problem, as you point out in your post, is the people who don’t want to assimilate. They’re not immigrants in any real sense. They’re here only because the jobs are here, but they’d prefer to live in Mexico (or whatever other country they’re from, but most are from Mexico).

Now, the situation starts to get a little more complicated when you consider the people who want to immigrate and assimilate, but for some reason, the system isn’t working for them. I’ve heard several horror stories about the INS. So I can understand people getting frustrated with the wait and jumping the gun. For example, one husband and wife would have had to be separated for over a year, he in Venezuela and she in America, if they’d followed the rules to the letter. They ended up finding a way to work the system legally (she got nationalized as a Venezuelan resident while they waited for his U.S. citizenship to come through), so they didn’t immigrate illegally. But they were considering it.

But of course, people like my friends aren’t in the majority of immigrants, otherwise there wouldn’t be any problem.