the subject is how we feel about immigration
yes
would you like to get started or would you like me to
well i am very much in favor of closing our door to some extent i'm afraid i've gotten a little bit America first when i get a cab in
um-hum
almost any large city in the United States and the driver barely speaks English
yes
uh
that's happened to me too
yes of course it also happened to us in Sidney Australia this Summer uh or last Summer we got a cab and
again it was an oriental person
and we asked him to take us to the opera house and he did not know what we were talking about
oh my
so maybe my isolation isn't for our country might be a little bit for the world i don't know but uh
i just feel like
we are we have accepted people other people from other countries so well to the point that we have not taken care of our own how do you feel about
well i have i'm really torn on the subject i'm not a good candidate for this one i see what you see and i agree with you
however
well the other side i see
because we have Mexico as a neighbor
uh-huh
and i can tell you right now
uh-huh
that if i were living in Mexico
and trying to raise several children and i could see across the border where the good life would be for my children
uh
uh-huh
would i swim that river every night twice if that's what it took you know i don't care whatever it would take i have real sympathy for those people i really do and you can
um you betcha
i
um
however if you were living in Mexico in those conditions would you have several children
probably they don't have birth control
well
they have no concept of it it's against their church
but yourself you yourself would not do that you would not have several children if you couldn't
well but they don't have if you know if i had to put myself in their shoes i have to do it one hundred percent
uh
yeah but you don't have
their church doesn't teach birth control they preach against it
that's not my fault
i understand what you're saying but i'm saying
i know
i feel real sympathy for them so i really and and and by the way i feel the same way when i i just got back from Florida
um
and boy i tell you happily happily i can i can understand just a little bit of Cuban English
uh
uh-huh
just a little bit
which was about all i wanted to understand
uh-huh
uh but i it's amazing because they're they're bilingual
uh-huh uh
everything is is Spanish English in Florida and i didn't particularly enjoy it quite frankly
uh-huh
uh-huh at one point and i cannot say that it's true now but at one point the city of Chicago was
required by federal law to hire teachers who spoke Spanish so that they could teach to the the children there who only spoke Spanish
yes
but this is America and our language is English
that's right and i'm sorry that business
that's right and i'm sorry that business of making it mandatory i don't like mandatory anything
no
because it just doesn't work all the time it doesn't fit there are circumstances that are different but i do think if you come to America and you're going to live here and you're going to go to our schools and do all of this speak our language
uh
um
i think so too
i really do and it's only fair to the children i think making giving the children an out that they don't have to speak English is just encouraging them to drop out later on because they'll never make it through high school
yeah
huh-uh well it's English
and if they do it won't make any difference because there's not a job for them
it's encouraging them to not speak English
that's exactly right and that is the wrong message
uh-huh
i just
i don't know i feel so sorry for them but at the same time
but that's the same thing you're saying about the little Mexican children that you feel sorry for them and you would swim the river twice but i
i would if it were if they were my kids i would so i have to sympathize with the people that come over here and work and send money back
sure but
uh-huh
you know it's it's right on the survival level and we do what we do to survive
uh-huh
absolutely and and i know what you're saying we do what we have to do for our children regardless regardless of what that is
but i'm a little bit unsympathetic with the families right here in our own small town of five thousand who have not limited their family we have three children and that happens to be what we could afford but
i don't really feel like i ought to help even if they're people from Indiana support ten children that's not fair i didn't get a say whether they had them or not so i don't think i ought to have to help raise them
too critical i i'm concerned about world birth control and
oh i'm i'm that's that's one on me too i mean
uh-hum
there are too many children that are just conceived and produced and dropped on society
uh-huh
without a thought these crack babies
oh isn't that awful i was just reading this thing in the Chicago Tribune yesterday about this little girl who was a crack baby and she was put in a foster home for five years and was having a wonderful life and then her mother
are so sad
claimed to have her self her act together and she was given back to her birth mother who she had never seen i mean it was just one of those awful things where the Child Protection Service completely broke down
and now two years later the court ordered that she be given back to the foster people i it's just awful it's just awful the whole thing
doesn't make any sense
it's just awful i i as i say i'm isolationist i think we need to
to close our doors to some of the immigration and now they're talking about how we're bound to have an influx of immigrants from the latest war from Iraq Iran
Saudi Arabia so on and so forth and uh i'm i'm really sorry that i feel the way i do but i just think that we need to not take people as we have over the many last many many years
well we had
there there's a little background here but it it builds up to what we're talking about our church had a long
long
discussion group and basically the question started out
that as at the time when there were starving people in India i believe
uh-huh
and the question was should we save these people
yeah because
and our bottom line answer was no
because we cannot save the world
because
well and
we cannot feed the world and we should not please the world this
and i think probably they have said that if you save these people by feeding them then they reproduce and then you have a later more serious famine yeah
this
and the other thing
is we can feed them today but they'll be hungry tomorrow what'll we do with them tomorrow do we feed them again tomorrow well how long how long can we continue to feed the world we can't do it are they starving to death yes and that's very sad
yeah
yeah
um-hum
um
uh-huh
sad but we cannot save them we you know okay we can save one
uh-huh
and that's good but what's you know
back to what you're saying if you want to save somebody there's plenty in the United States that need it to
when our children were all three at home our oldest daughter uh is still a very giving caring wonderful person she's making a career of uh
well she's a director at a care center close to here in fact my mother's a resident there anyhow was uh she got us involved in the Christian Children's Fund
and we were sponsoring a young boy in Chattanooga Tennessee in a home then and that went on for oh four or five years and finally we had a letter from the Christian Children's Fund that they were no longer going to
uh sponsor children within the continental United States that all of the money would be going to children overseas because
for however much money we were sending a month they could buy so much more milk and bread and rice and so on and so forth for children overseas well at
so they're taking the world viewpoint
yeah well at that point we said no we're not doing this any more we wanted to help somebody here within the continental United States it wasn't our choice to
to send and then too i think that money gets watered down in administrative costs when it all goes overseas and i always wonder if people who need it actually get it
um-hum
but by profession
i negotiate for Texas Instruments a lot
and i'm somewhat cynical
um
about humans and their behavior
um
uh-huh
because i have had
many interesting examples of human behavior
uh-huh
when you're talking about money you'd be surprised how human we all get very quickly
it all turns different doesn't it
uh-huh um
we were on a cruise ship one time and some people from the Methodist Church were talking about how their
church diocese had poured thousands of dollars into Haiti and it had been used for Papa Doc's daughter's wedding
uh-huh there you go
which i'm sure that's not what they had in mind when they were pouring that money in the
but see that's what happens And the other sad thing i heard about the Kurds
