Posted on 05/26/2006 2:05:19 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
SACRAMENTO, California (Reuters) - Mexican President Vicente Fox praised Mexican immigrants for pushing Washington on immigration reform on Friday, the last day of a U.S. trip during which he drew Republican barbs over the issue.
"We know about their contributions to this economy and to this country. We know about their loyalty to those who they work for," Fox said in a speech.
On Thursday, the U.S. Senate backed an immigration bill that would give millions of illegal immigrants a chance to become American citizens.
"They fought for it. They earned what they got yesterday," Fox told a California Chamber of Commerce audience.
The contentious issue still faces an uncertain outcome in the U.S. House of Representatives. which has passed a very different bill that calls for tough border security and enforcement measures.
The fractious debate in the U.S. Congress was reflected in miniature in the reaction to Fox's visit on Thursday to the California capital of Sacramento.
A few Republican lawmakers skipped his address to a joint session of legislature to protest Mexico's response to the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States.
"I'm going to refuse to listen to what he has to say today," said Republican Assemblywoman Sharon Runner. "His country is not helping."
Some Republicans attended but wore lapel pins reading "No Mas!" -- a message to Fox to do more to control their emigration.
"Mexico cannot continue to ignore the crisis of illegal immigration into the United States," Republican State Senator Dave Cox said. "I do not believe it fosters a productive discussion when President Fox has stereotyped efforts to control our borders as 'discriminatory,' and called those who oppose illegal immigration 'xenophobic."'
Democratic lawmaker Mark Leno mocked the Republican protests. "You'd think that Fidel Castro was visiting," he said of the Communist Cuban leader. "It's so insulting."
Mexican President Vicente Fox (C) speaks before a joint session of the California Legislature as Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (L), D-Los Angeles and State Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, listen at the Capitol in Sacramento, May 25, 2006. (Kimberly White/Reuters)
A fox with big brass ones...
Thank you for exporting your poverty to this country, Vicente.
Did he mention the ones in prison?
Whether you like Fox or not, he is doing what's best for his country on this issue (unlike some other presidents I know).
After all, they send back $20 BILLION dollars each year
You have done well, my minions ...
It is time for the American people to act. If you don't want the illegal criminals here don't hire them.
"After all, they send back $20 BILLION dollars each year"
I'd praise them too. But, I would just say to Vicente:
BITE MY BUTT!!!!
Hope Fox chokes on the rubber chicken during his victory tour.
I salute Sharon Runner and other Republican lawmakers for not attending this travesty session.
But not enough protested. Not enough will.
Mexifornia.
That sounds like altogether too nice of a wish to me.
~evil grin~
Is the fact they are illegal included in this count?
You got it right; immigration-related violations don't count toward either total.
New caption for photo: Generalismo Vincente Fox dictates terms of surrender to the California legislature.
Why doesn't he just finish his victory lap and go home?
just... damn.
Invasion by any other name. I say we annex the northern tier of Mexican ststes, and run them right. Fox is an aristocratic POS.
Fox credits paisanos on immigration reform The Mexican president lauded President Bush and the U.S. Senate for the immigration reform bill passed Thursday, but said immigrant workers deserved the most credit.By SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON
The Orange County RegisterMexican President Vicente Fox addresses the California Chamber of Commerce in Sacramento.
SACRAMENTO – Mexican President Vicente Fox today lauded President Bush and U.S. senators for passing a comprehensive immigration bill that offers employment and citizenship opportunities, but said most of the credit should go to Mexican immigrants.
"Nobody deserved more credit than the ... paisanos here," he said, using the Spanish colloquial word for "countrymen" during a speech to the California Chamber of Commerce and Sacramento Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. "They have fought for it."
I forgot to include the link for this quoted article:
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1157587.php
Yea! the SOB praises the illegal immigrants but he refuses to do anything to raise their standard of living.That's why he continues to encourage them to go to the U.S. to earn a living and act as parasites off of our economy and taxpayers.While at the same time destroying all of the social institutions that made this country great.
You said it.
The "Free universal" healthcare crowd is going to have a field day when their "40 million uninsured" statistic jumps to "60 million uninsured" after this amnesty garbage kicks in. The 'RATS' are going to have a field day clobbering the American taxpayers with their new "poverty" statistics. This is going to get really old and the whining from the Liberals is about to get unbearable. They will be happy to get all those dues from the "Guest Worker" union though.
Lately I've been wondering if the leftists are right, there really is a BFEE (Bush Family Evil Empire). And maybe they're in the pay of El Presidente Vicente Fox. Then I realize I'm being paranoid. But still ...
Runner, too? Great! I added her to the list of those boycotting.
Time to send them all thank you notes.
Sen. Jim Battin
Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth
Sen. Tom McClintock
Assemblyman John J. Benoit
Assemblyman Russ Bogh
Assemblyman Chuck DeVore
Assemblyman Ray Haynes
Assemblywoman Sharon Runner
I heard that break on TV last night.
Praise the Lord, Jon Kyl ratted out Arlen Spector for sliding in that one moments before the final vote in the Senate.
I love Jon Kyl!
He offered his "most caring salute to all Mexicans here in the United States," whom he praised for their work ethic and loyalty not only to their new, adopted country, but to their families back home.
"We really love them, appreciate them and respect them," he said. "We know about their dignity and pride ... and contributions to this country."
Contributions to THIS Country?????? Are you referring to Mexico Mr. Fox? I know they send home plenty of $$$, but wouldn't it be more important for the thousands of employeers to thank them for their cheap labor in building homes, and other jobs. They all don't pick fruit do they?
Watch X-Files?
Truth, disguised as fiction:-)
Mexico is nearly on par with Saudi Arabia per oil production. You would think this country (Mexico) would be teeming with immigrants to fill jobs as SA is.
Corruption kills.
Our battle is not with the Senators who voted on the "Senate Version" on the bill....the two bill are "oceans" apart.. with the house version being a MUCH BETTER BILL !! our battle is with the Senators who will go to conference with house.. which I just found out will be ALL MEMBERS of the Judiciary Committee and then some additional Senators yet to be named by Reid and Frist !!!...
WE NEED TO LET THESE FOLKS KNOW that we SUPPORT THE HOUSE VERSION !! NOT THE SENATE VERSION !!! now get er done !!
---> for now we can focus our efforts on the JUDICIARY COMMITTEE MEMEBERS !!!
Arlen Specter Orrin G. Hatch Patrick J. Leahy Charles E. Grassley Edward M. Kennedy Jon Kyl Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Mike DeWine Hrbert Kohl Jeff Sessions Dianne Feinstein Lindsey Graham Russell D. Feingold John Cornyn Charles E. Schumer Sam Brownback Richard J. Durbin Tom Coburn
I have written an OPEN LETTER to the conferees and I encouge EVERYONE who cares about this to do the same.... feel free to copy/edit/distribute my letter..
Neither the weary, disciplined Roman soldiers, ranked along the west bank, nor the anxious, helter-skelter tribes amassing on the east bank could have been giving much thought to their place in history. But this moment of slack, this relative calm before the pandemonium to follow, gives us the chance to study the actors on both sides of this river and to look backward on what has been and forward to what will be.
Europe, rising out of Lake Constance in the northern Alps, bending and bowing north, then northwest, till after 820 miles of travel it reaches the coast of continental Europe and empties into the North Sea just opposite the Thames estuary. Returning to our Alpine heights, we can spot another river, rising from a smaller lake just north of Constance and coursing east for more than twice the length of the Rhine till it spends itself in the Black Sea. This is the Danube, Europe's longest river (after the Volga). To the north and east of these two Alpine rivers live the barbarians. To the south and west lies Romania, in its time the vastest and most powerful empire in human history.
The omnipotence and immensity of this empire-embracing, as it did, "the whole of the civilized world"— are not the qualities that would strike us were we to soar above the Mediterranean on that fateful day. What we would discern is the very opposite of power— fragility, specifically geographic fragility. "We live around a sea," the perspicacious Socrates had reminded his listeners, "like frogs around a pond." For all the splendor of Roman standard, the power of Roman boot, and the extent of Roman road, the entire empire hugs the Mediterranean like a child's village of sand, waiting to be swept into the sea. From fruitful Gaul and Britain in the north to the fertile Nile Valley in the south, from the rocky Iberian shore in the west to the parched coasts of Asia Minor, all provinces of the empire turn toward the great sea, toward Medi-Terra-neathe Sea of Middle Earth. And as they turn to the center of their world, they turn their back on all that lies behind them, beyond the Roman wall. They turn their back on the barbarians.
That Rome should ever fall was unthinkable to Romans: its foundations were unassailable, sturdily sunk in a storied past and steadily built on for eleven centuries and more. There was, of course, the prophecy. Someone, usually someone in his cups, could always be counted on to bring up that old saw: the Prophecy of the Twelve Eagles, each eagle representing a century, leaving us with— stubby fingers counting out the decades in a puddle of wine— only seventy years remaining! Give or take a decade! Predictable laughter at the silliness of the whole idea. But in seventy years exactly, the empire would be gone.
Eternal Rome, eleven centuries old, hardly foresaw its doom. But theories about its fall are very old indeed. Two dozen years after this Roman-barbarian encounter along the Rhine, Augustine of Hippo, second city of Roman Africa, will be lying on his deathbed, listening to the clamor of another wave of barbarians as they attack the walls of his city. He has barely finished the final pages of his great defense of Christianity— The City of God— written to contradict the Roman pagans who discerned behind the barbarian assaults the old gods of Rome, angry at being forsaken by Christian converts. (No, insists Augustine eloquently, it is not Christianity but vice-encumbered paganism that is bringing the empire down.) Nine centuries later, as impressive feats of Roman engineering and sculpture are being dug up all over Italy at the dawn of the Renaissance, the question of what became of the cultural giants who built these things will be on everyone's lips. Petrarch, the Tuscan poet and scholar who is rightly remembered as the father of Renaissance humanism, rediscovers the concept of a "fall," which, following Augustine's lead, he blames on the empire's internal faults. Machiavelli, writing a century and a half later in a less spiritual, more cynical time, will blame the barbarians.
..............
Clues to the character of the Roman blindness are present in the scene along the frozen Rhine. The legionnaires on the Roman bank know that they have the upper hand, and that they always will have. Even though some are only half-civilized recruits recently settled on this side of the river, they are now Romans, inheritors of nearly twelve centuries of civilization, husbandry, agriculture, viniculture, horticulture, cuisine, arts, literature, philosophy, law, politics, martial prowess— and all the "gear and tackle and trim" that goes with these pursuits. The world has never known anything as deep, as lasting, or as extensive as Pax Romana, the peace and predictability of Roman civilization. Inspecting the Roman soldiers now, we note the quiet authority of their presence, the polish of their person, the appropriateness of their stance— they are spiffy. More than this, there is an esthetic to each gesture and accoutrement. All details have been considered— ad unguem, as they would say, to the fingertip, as a sculptor tests the smoothness and perfection of his finished marble. Their hair is cut with a thought to the shape of the head, they are clean-shaven to show off the resoluteness of the jawline, their dress— from their impregnable but shapely breastplates to their easy— movement skirts— is designed with the form and movement of the body in mind, and their hard physiques recall the proportions of Greek statuary. Even the food in the mess is prepared to be not only savory to the taste but attractive to the eye. Just now the architriclinus — the chef — is beginning to prepare the carrots: he slices each piece lengthwise, then lengthwise again, to achieve slender, elongated triangles.
We look out across the river to the barbarian hosts, who in the slanting, gray light of winter mass like figures in a nightmare. Their hair (both of head and face) is uncut, vilely dressed with oil, braided into abhorrent shapes. Their bodies are distorted by ornament and discolored by paint. Some of the men are huge and muscular to the point of deformity, their legs wrapped comically in the garments called braccae— breeches. There is no discipline among them: they bellow at each other and race about in chaos. They are dirty, and they stink. A crone in a filthy blanket stirs a cauldron, slicing roots and bits of rancid meat into the concoction from time to time. She slices a carrot crosswise up its shaft, so that the circular pieces she cuts off float like foolish yellow eyes on the surface of her brew.
This unequal portrait of the two forces would not only have been the Roman view: it could almost have been the German view as well (for the milling hosts are of Germanic origin, as are all the intruders of this period). To the Romans, the German tribes were riffraff; to the Germans, the Roman side of the river was the place to be. The nearest we can come to understanding this divide may be the southern border of the United States. There the spit-and-polish troops are immigration police; the hordes, the Mexicans, Haitians, and other dispossessed peoples seeking illegal entry. The barbarian migration was not perceived as a threat by Romans, simply because it was a migration— a year-in, year-out, raggle-taggle migration— and not an organized, armed assault. It had, in fact, been going on for centuries. The Gauls had been the first barbarian invaders, hundreds of years before, and now Gaul lay at peace. The verses of its poets and the products of its vineyards were twin fountains of Roman inspiration. The Gauls had become more Roman than the Romans themselves. Why could not the same thing happen to these Vandals, Alans, and Sueves, now working themselves to a fever pitch on the far side of the river?
When, at last, the hapless Germans make their charge across the bridge of ice, it is head-on, without forethought or strategy. With preposterous courage they teem across the Rhine in convulsive waves, their principal weapon their own desperation. We get a sense of their numbers, as well as their desperation, in a single casualty count: the Vandals alone are thought to have lost twenty thousand men (not counting women and children) at the crossing. Despite their discipline, the Romans cannot hold back the Germanic sea.
From one perspective, at least, the Romans were overwhelmed by numbers— not just in this encounter but during centuries of migrations across the porous borders of the empire. Sometimes the barbarians came in waves, though seldom as big as this one. More often they came in trickles: as craftsmen who sought honest employment, as warriors who enlisted with the Roman legions, as tribal chieftains who paid for land, as marauders who burned and looted and sometimes raped and murdered. The End of the World
Neither the weary, disciplined Roman soldiers, ranked along the west bank, nor the anxious, helter-skelter tribes amassing on the east bank could have been giving much thought to their place in history. But this moment of slack, this relative calm before the pandemonium to follow, gives us the chance to study the actors on both sides of this river and to look backward on what has been and forward to what will be.
Europe, rising out of Lake Constance in the northern Alps, bending and bowing north, then northwest, till after 820 miles of travel it reaches the coast of continental Europe and empties into the North Sea just opposite the Thames estuary. Returning to our Alpine heights, we can spot another river, rising from a smaller lake just north of Constance and coursing east for more than twice the length of the Rhine till it spends itself in the Black Sea. This is the Danube, Europe's longest river (after the Volga). To the north and east of these two Alpine rivers live the barbarians. To the south and west lies Romania, in its time the vastest and most powerful empire in human history.
The omnipotence and immensity of this empire-embracing, as it did, "the whole of the civilized world"— are not the qualities that would strike us were we to soar above the Mediterranean on that fateful day. What we would discern is the very opposite of power— fragility, specifically geographic fragility. "We live around a sea," the perspicacious Socrates had reminded his listeners, "like frogs around a pond." For all the splendor of Roman standard, the power of Roman boot, and the extent of Roman road, the entire empire hugs the Mediterranean like a child's village of sand, waiting to be swept into the sea. From fruitful Gaul and Britain in the north to the fertile Nile Valley in the south, from the rocky Iberian shore in the west to the parched coasts of Asia Minor, all provinces of the empire turn toward the great sea, toward Medi-Terra-neathe Sea of Middle Earth. And as they turn to the center of their world, they turn their back on all that lies behind them, beyond the Roman wall. They turn their back on the barbarians.
That Rome should ever fall was unthinkable to Romans: its foundations were unassailable, sturdily sunk in a storied past and steadily built on for eleven centuries and more. There was, of course, the prophecy. Someone, usually someone in his cups, could always be counted on to bring up that old saw: the Prophecy of the Twelve Eagles, each eagle representing a century, leaving us with— stubby fingers counting out the decades in a puddle of wine— only seventy years remaining! Give or take a decade! Predictable laughter at the silliness of the whole idea. But in seventy years exactly, the empire would be gone.
Eternal Rome, eleven centuries old, hardly foresaw its doom. But theories about its fall are very old indeed. Two dozen years after this Roman-barbarian encounter along the Rhine, Augustine of Hippo, second city of Roman Africa, will be lying on his deathbed, listening to the clamor of another wave of barbarians as they attack the walls of his city. He has barely finished the final pages of his great defense of Christianity— The City of God— written to contradict the Roman pagans who discerned behind the barbarian assaults the old gods of Rome, angry at being forsaken by Christian converts. (No, insists Augustine eloquently, it is not Christianity but vice-encumbered paganism that is bringing the empire down.) Nine centuries later, as impressive feats of Roman engineering and sculpture are being dug up all over Italy at the dawn of the Renaissance, the question of what became of the cultural giants who built these things will be on everyone's lips. Petrarch, the Tuscan poet and scholar who is rightly remembered as the father of Renaissance humanism, rediscovers the concept of a "fall," which, following Augustine's lead, he blames on the empire's internal faults. Machiavelli, writing a century and a half later in a less spiritual, more cynical time, will blame the barbarians.
..............
Clues to the character of the Roman blindness are present in the scene along the frozen Rhine. The legionnaires on the Roman bank know that they have the upper hand, and that they always will have. Even though some are only half-civilized recruits recently settled on this side of the river, they are now Romans, inheritors of nearly twelve centuries of civilization, husbandry, agriculture, viniculture, horticulture, cuisine, arts, literature, philosophy, law, politics, martial prowess— and all the "gear and tackle and trim" that goes with these pursuits. The world has never known anything as deep, as lasting, or as extensive as Pax Romana, the peace and predictability of Roman civilization. Inspecting the Roman soldiers now, we note the quiet authority of their presence, the polish of their person, the appropriateness of their stance— they are spiffy. More than this, there is an esthetic to each gesture and accoutrement. All details have been considered— ad unguem, as they would say, to the fingertip, as a sculptor tests the smoothness and perfection of his finished marble. Their hair is cut with a thought to the shape of the head, they are clean-shaven to show off the resoluteness of the jawline, their dress— from their impregnable but shapely breastplates to their easy— movement skirts— is designed with the form and movement of the body in mind, and their hard physiques recall the proportions of Greek statuary. Even the food in the mess is prepared to be not only savory to the taste but attractive to the eye. Just now the architriclinus — the chef — is beginning to prepare the carrots: he slices each piece lengthwise, then lengthwise again, to achieve slender, elongated triangles.
We look out across the river to the barbarian hosts, who in the slanting, gray light of winter mass like figures in a nightmare. Their hair (both of head and face) is uncut, vilely dressed with oil, braided into abhorrent shapes. Their bodies are distorted by ornament and discolored by paint. Some of the men are huge and muscular to the point of deformity, their legs wrapped comically in the garments called braccae— breeches. There is no discipline among them: they bellow at each other and race about in chaos. They are dirty, and they stink. A crone in a filthy blanket stirs a cauldron, slicing roots and bits of rancid meat into the concoction from time to time. She slices a carrot crosswise up its shaft, so that the circular pieces she cuts off float like foolish yellow eyes on the surface of her brew.
This unequal portrait of the two forces would not only have been the Roman view: it could almost have been the German view as well (for the milling hosts are of Germanic origin, as are all the intruders of this period). To the Romans, the German tribes were riffraff; to the Germans, the Roman side of the river was the place to be. The nearest we can come to understanding this divide may be the southern border of the United States. There the spit-and-polish troops are immigration police; the hordes, the Mexicans, Haitians, and other dispossessed peoples seeking illegal entry. The barbarian migration was not perceived as a threat by Romans, simply because it was a migration— a year-in, year-out, raggle-taggle migration— and not an organized, armed assault. It had, in fact, been going on for centuries. The Gauls had been the first barbarian invaders, hundreds of years before, and now Gaul lay at peace. The verses of its poets and the products of its vineyards were twin fountains of Roman inspiration. The Gauls had become more Roman than the Romans themselves. Why could not the same thing happen to these Vandals, Alans, and Sueves, now working themselves to a fever pitch on the far side of the river?
When, at last, the hapless Germans make their charge across the bridge of ice, it is head-on, without forethought or strategy. With preposterous courage they teem across the Rhine in convulsive waves, their principal weapon their own desperation. We get a sense of their numbers, as well as their desperation, in a single casualty count: the Vandals alone are thought to have lost twenty thousand men (not counting women and children) at the crossing. Despite their discipline, the Romans cannot hold back the Germanic sea.
From one perspective, at least, the Romans were overwhelmed by numbers— not just in this encounter but during centuries of migrations across the porous borders of the empire. Sometimes the barbarians came in waves, though seldom as big as this one. More often they came in trickles: as craftsmen who sought honest employment, as warriors who enlisted with the Roman legions, as tribal chieftains who paid for land, as marauders who burned and looted and sometimes raped and murdered.
Thanks I sent thank you notes to all the others this morning. Glad to know Runner is on the list, will send one to her too.
Sorry for the double post, I got a weird message after posting the first time, and so re-posted, and then both showed up.
Me too!
I also applaud those who wore "No Más" buttons.
That took guts, also.
Using an historical event as an allegory for todays problems with immigrants. Absolutely excellent.
Thanks so much for sharing this information and your letter!
Hats off!
I have written an OPEN LETTER to the conferees and I encouge EVERYONE who cares about this to do the same.... feel free to copy/edit/distribute my letter..
Are we sure he wasn't talking about the slaves of the antebellum South?
I love writing to Tom McClintock, he always responds personally! He is the only person I have ever gotten a personal response from.
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