Data Point
Billy points to something that reminded me of something I wanted to be reminded to blog about but hadn’t yet for whatever reason I’d forgotten to do it.
…[inhale]…
He strikes perfectly adequately at the underlying so I won’t bother to rehash; as well George Will.
But what I was reminded of was a taxi experience a couple of months ago during a visit to Las Vegas. You must understand: I’m not one to strike up conversations with strangers, with one exception: certain working stiffs where I just get this certain "sense." For some reason, I almost always come away uplifted or feeling as though I learned something or gained perspective. This was no different and I could tell the guy was an immigrant, likely Eastern European. Sure enough: Bulgaria.
He’d been here nearly two years, as I recall. And he was headed back to Bulgaria in two months. "America isn’t a free country," he told me.
Like I said, I almost always gain perspective. You know, I have always thought Republicans to be generally full of crap and hot stinky gases on the immigration issue. And they still are because that taxi driver was only ever going to benefit others economically in spite of the welfare state. But he’s leaving; and guess who’s staying?
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Free The Animal is an eclectic writing project about everything since November 2003. 23 years, 5,500 posts, 5 million words.
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The last time I was in Chicago, I rode with a taxi driver who had immigrated here from Ukraine. He'd been here eleven years.
During conversation, he told me: "People don't come here to be Americans anymore."