re: #250 Van Helsing

This country has always had an issue with immigrants (No Irish Need Apply, No Chinks, etc.) , legal or otherwise, but the Melting Pot idea worked. It took a generation per wave of immigration, but it worked.

Hate to point out the obvious, but Mexico is contiguous with the US. The ‘Melting Pot’, unplugged or not, will not work in assimilating a vast number of Mexican immigrants regardless of the legality of their status. If this were the case it would have happened long ago and that goodwill would have flowed south of the border and into Mexican-American communities north of it in the past century and a half that has seen African-Americans emancipated from slavery and granted suffrage, Irish, Eastern European and Asian populations integrate into mainstream society, as well as the formation of a bittersweet, regretful Romanticism over the treatment of Native Americans in our history.

The state of Mexican social/political discourse today regarding nationalism and race is so degraded that you are safer walking on the streets of many Muslim Arab majority cities than you are Mexican ones as a white or black American. It is an extremely xenophobic, racist country with racial essentialism encoded into its very constitution and some of the harshest anti-immigrant laws and policies seen in any Western Democracy, and significantly harsher than some actual despotic totalitarian states.

While a good portion of the blame for a lack of integration can be put on the back of the multicultural perspective in supporting groups like La Raza that teach a form of racial supremacism, it is still a matter of fact that La Raza is a Mexican entity whose core doctrine is extremely pervasive in Mexico itself.