I find it quite ironic that a large group of
people would leave a beautiful country, where rich Americans go for
vacation, and come to a free country and then protest for better
treatment.

If these 11 million people protested their oil-rich,
fraudulent government, they just might get out of poverty and stay in
their own country, speak Spanish and keep their culture.

Ms Harriet Paradis, of Corvallis, wrote to the Gazette-Times to suggest that, as "we fought for our country; let them go back to their beautiful sunshine country and fight for their legal rights there."  The first bit of stupidity is that the illegal immigrants all come from a single country, presumably Mexico. 

The second, and indefensible, bit of stupidity is that Mexicans have the same rights we have to protest their government, to speak freely, to organize and campaign for electoral change, and so on.  This is far from true.  The power structure in Mexico places tremendous limits on the ability of citizens to work for change.  As I wrote in BlueOregon, the people who risk their lives to come here and live like criminals would much rather stay home with their familiies, in their homeland.  They eventually decide they cannot.

And this is the final, and most shameful, piece of stupidity.  Mexicans, and Guatemalans and El Salvadorans and Panamanians and Chinese and Koreans and whoever else among the millions who find and will continue to find ways to sneak in no matter how onerous we make our laws -- these people love their home lands.  They would rather stay there and work in peace than become economic refugees in another country -- especially a country where the citizens so actively hate them.  This is not about making lots of money for their famililes; it's about making any money at all.  In America, they can pay for food and a home; in Mexico, and elsewhere, they cannot even do that.  Worst of all, and something the know-nothing I-got-here-first-so-tough-shit-amigo nativists/isolationists refuse to acknowledge, they cannot fight their government for change and hope to come out unscathed.  To oppose the government in Mexico is to discover that what seemed like a situation that was as good as it could get -- ain't.