Like a segment of the population, I trace my ancestry back to before the Revolutionary War - the oldest verified record we have is of a birth in North Carolina in 1750. After that, my ancestors moved west - first to Iowa, then to Utah in 1847. On my mother’s side, it’s a bit sketchier, but we know the family has been in the US for generations - we even have a bit of Cherokee ancestry.

My paternal grandparents were both born and raised, raised their family and died in Salt Lake City. If I so desired, I could join the Sons of Utah Pioneers. I am as authentically American as anyone can claim to be. These stories about immigration make me angry.

From Americablog:

Hispanic immigrants are being targeted, often in gratuitously violent attacks by non-Hispanics, because they are thought to carry cash rather than use banks and to be reluctant to report crimes to police, the officials said.

The attacks are occurring with such frequency that police in Prince William County have created a task force, and Montgomery police have assigned a specialized unit to tackle the problem. The crimes are having profound effects in the neighborhoods where they occur, causing some residents to alter their routines . . .

Authorities say the teenage assailants in that case targeted Serafin “Pedro” Alvarez Negrete after agreeing to “get an amigo.” They attacked Negrete, 32, as he walked home from a shopping center.

“Like alligators waiting for the gazelle to cross the river,” Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney John B. Arledge said as one of the men was sentenced last week.

Police say recent immigrants, particularly laborers who return home on foot at night, are most vulnerable. Assailants have been known to lurk between shopping centers, even sometimes outside of cash-checking businesses on payday, police say.

Next time some immigrant bashing pol starts spewing on your TV, remember he or she is giving permission for this kind of thing.

And from Hugo:

“Tammy” was my student in my women’s studies and humanities classes. She was the best student in the class each time; she was accepted to UCLA, planning to major in Women’s Studies and History. Her family had come to this country from the Philippines illegally, when Tammy was two. Tammy didn’t find out until her junior year of high school that she and her parents had no immigration documents. She found out her citizenship status when, returning home from her school’s “college day”, she told her parents that they would need to fill out the FAFSA (the standard federal student aid form.) Her parents sat her down and gently told her that that wouldn’t be possible. Tammy felt doubly betrayed: by her parents for never telling her that she had no legal status, and by the only society she has ever known. (Tammy speaks halting Tagolog, and flawless English. Because of passport issues, she has never been back to the land of her birth. Her home is Silverlake and Echo Park, not Manila.)

She was accepted to UCLA straight out of high school, but without financial aid, came to PCC.

Somehow, by borrowing money from family and friends, working two jobs, Tammy is making it happen at UCLA, and will graduate more or less on time. She’s got the raw talent and determination to succeed in the face of any obstacle. Others lack her extraordinary resolve, and slip through the cracks, moving into permanent lives in the shadow economy. I’ve seen it happen.

It ought to be a basic moral principle that children shouldn’t be punished for their parents’ crimes. I’m not sure I regard illicit immigration as a crime, but if I could be convinced that it was, it’s a crime for which the punishment ought only to come to bear on those who were adults at the time it was originally committed. The Dream Act, with its insistence on scholarship or service as conditions for naturalization, was a thoughtful, reasonable, and humane step in the right direction. And it’s been blocked.

It’s not so dramatic, but when my family first moved to Kamas, we were treated like interlopers, outsiders who could not be trusted. Many Kamas residents openly expressed the desire to build a wall around town, to tear up the road so nobody else could drive into town, to pass laws so nobody else could ever move into their cousin raping hillbilly town - they wanted to keep Kamas for themselves, as it had always been (they can have it, in case you wondered my opinion on the subject). They didn’t ever want anything to change. But change it has and the “old timers” have grown angrier and angrier about it, year after after. Their anger fuels nothing but itself, solves no problems, creates no solutions and builds no communities. Those things are left to the newcomers - whose solutions the old timers bitterly resent.

Like nativists on a national scale, the oldtimers blame the newcomers for all the problems in their world. If only these “newcomers” weren’t here, then everything would go back to being the way it was then. In Kamas, the difference is only one of scale not content. The “newcomers” and their new houses and ideas and services and stores are white people from Salt Lake, not brown people from Latin America, but they still mean change. And the old timers hate change of any sort. They really look back and think that times were better back then. Things were good. There were no problems.

FWIW, when we first moved to Kamas, my sister told me, in all seriousness, it was easier to buy drugs in the South Summit High School hallway than it had been at Bingham in Salt Lake, that alcohol was easier to get at South Summit than at Bingham, that more people were having sex at South Summit than Bingham. Maybe by the good times, the “old timers” don’t mean things were good, they mean they could ignore the things that were bad.