My first letter to the Editor of the STrib

[trevize1138]

Enjoy :)

-Chris Druckenmiller
Minneapolis

Last night a friend and I were out discussing the revitalization of the old Sears building on Lake St. and Chicago Ave. One man overheard our conversation and agreed it’ll be a great asset to the community and housing prices in the area are sure to go up dramatically.

This man proceeded to say what it’ll do, too, is move all the poor people out of Minneapolis and into the trailer homes where they belong. Furthermore, he said, this idea that poverty creates crime is an excuse. “Crime wasn’t a problem back in the ‘30s when everybody was poor!”

My friend and I pointed out that crime has actually been in decline since the ‘80s, to which this man tried to pretend that’s what he was saying all along. Ah yes, typical example of an uninformed person.

The next morning I read a letter to the editor in the Star Tribune saying immigrants in Minnesota today should learn English because they’re on welfare unlike the German immigrants more than 100 years ago.

What about the hundreds of acres of farm land German immigrants were given in the 1800s as an incentive to move here? Seems to me that’s a significantly bigger handout than any welfare check. Also, a recent study found that 98 percent of Minnesota’s immigrant population is gainfully employed and not on welfare at all. Furthermore, the state immigrant population is around 5 percent, this compared to 29 percent in 1900.

Suggesting that all current immigrants are on welfare is surely just the typical babbling of an uninformed man, right? No, this was one of our elected officials making grossly-misleading statements with no compelling data to support it, Rep. Brad Finstad of New Ulm.

I expect as much from the rabble you find on the street. I expect considerably more from our elected officials at the state capitol.

[Dickie Flatt]

1. what study

[trotsky]

2. Fantastic!

I saw Finstad's letter today. What a prick.

[Carolab]

3. I believe in immigration with a quota system.

The guest worker program, with amnesty, is a recipe for disaster. Why should immigrants be allowed to pour illegally over our borders just so that corporations and "rich people" have cheap labor and "yard help", an added source of revenue into the tax base without its payees ever necessarily collecting, not to mention the fast-track to citizenship as a carrot to ensure more cannon fodder for future wars. Immigration needs to be properly policed and carefully circumscribed, just as it is in other nations of the world. Otherwise, it will lead to unemployment and crime, though not necessarily among immigrants but among native or naturalized citizens who cannot work to survive.

[wellstone dem]

4. Excellent letter

Also until at least WWI, the schools out here in parts rural Minnesota were actually conducted in German, that was the language people spoke. The idea that the folks came here, and then learned English to fit in is just wrong.

[trotsky]

5. So true.

We are a few generations removed now but ask your parents/grandparents, they undoubtedly know of tons of European immigrants who never really did learn to speak English. Today, just like back then, their kids are generally bilingual, and their grandkids probably won't use the native tongue at all.

[trevize1138]

6. Just ask my wife!

Her grandfather didn't learn English until he went to school. Until then he was speaking German, and he was born in southern, rural Minnesota. His parents emmigrated here and never bothered to learn English. Didn't stop them.

I love the idea that we should force immigrant to learn a specific language when they come here despite that there currently is no official language in the US. :)

I bet Finstad sucks at Spanish =P.

[no name no slogan]

7. Force everybody to learn Esperanto

and use it as a primary language. That should shut up a few of those nativist "English First" types.

Your wife's family sounds like my wife's: emigrants from Bavaria and Bohemia, German spoken at home and English learned at the schoolhouse with the other German and Irish immigrants.

Not much different from today, really.