
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 25, 1990                   TAG: 9003262160
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THOSE DANGED FOREIGNERS JUST KEPT POURING IN

I HOPE it is permissible, even though it may sound contradictory, for a recent immigrant to these parts to offer a hearty endorsement for James Tucker's bemoaning of " . . . polyglot Unionists . . . whose wish is to " . . . dump foreign refugees on our homeland" (letter March 6).

According to my Oxford dictionary, polyglot refers to a person who speaks or writes several languages, and we all know how evil that is! Thank goodness American school children in their wisdom refuse the best effort of polyglot teachers to seduce their innocent minds with the temptation to speak Spanish, or Japanese, or Russian, or - would you believe people could stoop so low? - yes! even English!

But I diverge from your correspondent's most important point: that is, the most important after the need for the South to secede again. I refer to the dumping of all these refugees on America's fair shores. He is so right. And it's been going on for so long, and this despite the best efforts of so many to bring it to a halt.

The Indians had absolutely no luck with the folks who settled in at Jamestown and Plymouth up (please excuse the reference) North. Catholics, clearly because of orders from Rome and not because of persecution as the historians, those devilish liberal deceivers, would have us believe, settled in Maryland. Quakers, those traitorous creatures who - imagine it! - refused to kill anyone, even Indians, settled in Pennsylvania.

And still the foreigners poured in. Native Americans (what do Indians know?) tried to stop it. The Know-Nothing Party did its best. Good patriots wrote into work ads that Irishmen need not apply, but did that keep them out? Forget it. These refugees just kept on coming, doing the jobs other people didn't want, mining our coal, manning our factories, teaching our children, even having the gall to fight - and die - in our wars!

Yes, foreign refugees have been a curse. It should have been nipped in the bud back there at the beginning in the 17th century. But wait a minute. That wasn't really the beginning, was it? I mean, a few thousand years before that, it was the Indians who fled something or other in Asia to come to this continent.

Well, maybe keeping them out wouldn't have been such a bad idea, either. I'm sure the true original inhabitants, the bison and bear, now mostly gone would drink to that.

\ JOE MICHAELS\ HARDY

by CNB