Greater Cincinnati’s Hispanic Community Grows Increasingly ‘Isolated’: Placing the Blame Where It Belongs
The Cincinnati Business Courier, the area’s local weekly business newspaper, had a front-page feature on Greater Cincinnati’s growing Hispanic community. Words/terms used: “isolated,” “suspicion,” “feeling like an outsider,” “falling behind on inclusion,” “chill,” “friction,” “prejudice.”
It’s impossible to escape the fact that indigenous legal Hispanic immigrants and recent legal Hispanic arrivals have been brutally hurt by the permissiveness of our government in allowing illegal Hispanics to flood in, especially those of the criminal variety (see here and here for two local examples; the national involvement of illegal immigrants in identity theft is covered here). This has unfairly affected the perception of all Hispanics; yet the same people who don’t understand why the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” matters now accuse those who do understand, and are very concerned about it, of bigotry. Hogwash — this country owed it to Hispanics who played by the rules to keep those who don’t belong here out. But instead our leaders turned their backs on them and insultingly dressed up their own sanctioning of illegal activity as “diversity.” I care a hell of a lot more about the welfare of those who play by the rules than I do about whether some drunk-on-PC ignoramus calls me a bigot.
One gentleman quoted in the article says he believes there may be as many as 65,000 - 75,000 illegal immigrants in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky alone, with the vast majority of them being Hispanic. If he is correct (and my instincts are that if he’s wrong, it’s not by much), that would be well over twice the number here legally cited elsewhere in the article (28,628 in 2005, per the Census Bureau). Again if this illegal-to-legal proportion is correct or close to it, a presumption in the absence of evidence to the contrary that a given Hispanic person seen in Greater Cincinnati is here illegally can be described in two words: Probably Correct.
The judgment (again in the absence of contrary evidence) is not disputable. And it is not the presumers’ fault that they must sometime make that judgment. But it is a real shame. We can thank the illegal-immigration permissives of the past 20 years for creating the tense, divided situation that has devolved to the terms described in the first paragraph. A pox on them, from the past two Presidents of the United States, to most of the congressmen and senators of both parties during that time, to the country’s leading newspapers, on down.
How bad is it? On Saturday, I heard the current House Minority Leader, supposedly a leading light in the secure-the-borders-first agenda, tell a group of high school students during an informal Q&A that during the past few years — not few months, which is conceivably possible — we’ve been doing a better job of controlling the borders now than we have in 20 years. While he may have been referring to legislation instead of actual enforcement efforts, I still can’t help but thinking — “Baloney, John.”
