by Ian Black Trippen

Created on: June 08, 2007

To say that allowing illegal immigrants citizenship is a bad idea is to say that either they don't deserve citizenship or that we can't afford to give it to them. From a historical standpoint, neither is the case.

Historically speaking, most groups to immigrate to the modern United States from Europe, Asia, Africa, or Latin America (once there was a Latin America) have found upon arrival that they were worked harder than anyone else, but were eventually granted citizenship.

Take for example the Slavs, Italians, and Poles who came at the beginning of the 20th century. People were afraid that these newcomers would be too different from the native-born Americans to integrate. Native-born Americans looked down on them and feared being drowned in the flood. That didn't happen, and now in most parts of the country people of German, Russian, and English decent are considered not just equal, but the same. White is white now.

Looking again at history, the group who had to work the hardest to live here was the English. The first settlements in Virginia and New England nearly starved to death every winter. The settlement at Roanoke did starve to death. Things were particularly bad at Jamestown, Virginia, where newcomers were worked so hard that about half of them died of disease, starvation, or overwork within their first year of arrival. From 1619 to 1622, after the settlement had already existed for several decades, 80% of Jamestown's population, most of whom were newly arrived, died.

Granted that no one wants to go through quite so much pain as the first English settlers dealt with, what the Mexican and other Latin American immigrants are asking for right now is to be treated exactly as other groups have been treated. They are willing to do the work, but they want to be accepted into the society. If we are going to treat them differently from other groups, then we need to have a good reason for it.

We don't have a good reason why we shouldn't accept Latino immigrants into the U.S., and the only reason why we haven't is that a wartime labor system has been hijacked and maintained outside the boundary of the law. The federal government began cracking down on immigration from Mexico in the 1930's during the Great Depression and didn't let up until our entry into WWII made it necessary to replace the agricultural workers who were going to war. The Bracero Program arranged for temporary workers to come up from Mexico to take now-vacant farm labor jobs. Things went well during

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