That's several quotes from an article originally written for the Southern Poverty Law Center about Hispanic vs. Black gang violence in LA, which has been going on for a very long time (and doesn't seem to have much to do with immigration), and a 20-year-old threat from one of the more rabid of the original Sandinistas.

I am reminded of the Know-Nothing Party of the 1950, who were also anti-immigrant. Rather than being anti-Hispanic, they were anti-Irish and anti-Catholic; one of their "accomplishments" was destroying the stone that the Pope had sent for inclusion in the Washington Monument, then under construction. Like many of the current crop of anti-immigrants, hey also felt that the allegedly higher birth-rate among Catholics and the Irish in particular would destroy American culture.

Aztlan? Yes, there may still be some Hispanics of Aztec (or Mexican) descent who think that the American Southwest and the Mexican Northwest should be split off into a separate nation. There are also fringe cases among African Americans, such as some members of the nation of Islam, who believe in black separatism, some militia members who would like to break off from the US (or to reform it in their image), some religious cultists who don't think the laws of the US apply to them, and so forth. However, those groups also don't appear to have much to do with immigration.

The majority of Americans of Hispanic origin believe, like Navarrette, that there is a serious problem here, and that placing the illegals on a fast track toward legal status isn't the answer...but that immediate deportation (besides being impractical) isn't either. Where I live, in New Mexico (yes, that is a state in the United States, regardless of the name), many of the residents descend from families that have been here since some years before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts. Some isolated enclaves still have Spanish as their first language, and I am told that it is a very old dialect of the language; many others do not speak Spanish at all. Yet, very few of the letters to the paper from people with Hispanic surnames favor an unrestricted opening of the gates to people from the south.

It is clear, I'm sorry to say, that at least two of the active participants in this discussion equate Hispanics with illegal immigrants (and vice versa). There are large numbers of illegal residents in the US from Ireland, China, Poland, and, yes, even Canada, but these people do not seem to be part of the problem. Are you as vehement about immigrants, legal or not, from Spain? Could it be that the issue is really with the fact that the majority of them, right now, are from Mexico and Central and South America, are part Indian in ancestry, and are darker in complexion?

Please, don't lash right back - take a while to think about it.