Dear Mr. President..........

Bill:

Even though I have followed it with great interest, because of unrelated reasons I have chosen to stay out of this discussion until now.

I can only speak for myself, give my own observations, and provide the conclusions that I have reached.

I am probably one of (if not the) most conservative persons that regularly participates in this forum. Both of my parents were first generation Americans. My grandparents were from Italy and Serbo-Croatia. All of my grandparents were proud to be Americans, learned the language, tried to learn the customs, and I never heard any of them claim to be any sort of “hyphenated” American even though they all spoke with fairly heavy accents and tried to teach us about “the old country” until the days that they died.

One of my very closest, most trusted friends claims to be a liberal and always bragged (until the last 10 or 12 months) that he has always voted a straight Democratic ticket. I even consider Viet Vet a friend and would come to his aid in a heartbeat.

I have worked on many projects with expatriates from Germany, Austria, Korea, Japan and Italy. During these projects, I not only worked with these folks, but also traveled with them and socialized with them. Most of them became good friends, and I felt a tinge of sadness when we parted ways. I took them “under my wing” to keep them from danger or embarrassment due to their being “different” while they were here in America, and they did the same for me on occasions when I had to go to their countries.

I’ve lived for three years on the south side of Chicago, nearly three years just outside of Los Angeles, and three years in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and have lived and worked as well in ethnic areas nearly everywhere else around the country. I was a bachelor until age 44, and have dated legal immigrants and American citizens of nearly every ethnic background.

I have stood up for complete strangers being harassed in bars solely due to ethnicity, and even taken an a$$-whipping in the process.

I say all of that to try to lend some credence when I say that I do not consider myself to be bigoted (except towards fools and bigots).

With all of that having been said, I feel compelled to make a few observations.

First, you seem to have the ridiculous view that all conservatives are racists. That is such a stupid generalization that it deserves no further comment.

Next, you seem to imply that conservatives are opposed to illegal immigrants only because they are “different” than we are, and that if they were not “different”, we would not be opposed to their illegality. America is a melting pot. Exactly which illegal immigrants are you aware of that are NOT different, and from where did they come? If they are NOT different, I would estimate that the odds are about 100 million to one that they are either A) an exiled American trying to sneak back in; or B) a KGB-trained spy who for some reason is not welcome as a defector.

As a young man, when I went to Boston most of the people I met were different. Some of them I liked, some I did not. The same occurred a few years later when I moved to Southern California, and again when I moved from there to Oklahoma. (The folks in Oklahoma were not only different from me, they were very different from the folks that I had just left in California.) Yet, in each of these places, I met some people that I liked, and some that I did not.

Would you care to discuss the time I spent in Japan? NONE of the people that I met there were immigrants (they were all natural-born Japanese citizens), they were all very different, yet some I liked, and some I did not. Some liked me, some did not--even though I entered their country legally and tried, to the best of my ability, not to offend anyone, break any of their laws, seek any special treatment, or take advantage of any of their social services. (Do you think those Japanese who disliked me must have been “conservative Japanese”?)