Mitt Romney’s family NOT a collection of “illegal aliens”

Somebody doesn’t know their history, or their immigration law. Or perhaps they’re just susceptible to the idea that anybody from Mexico is somehow “illegal” just by their very existence.

That’s about the only way to describe NBC News reporter-type Andrea Mitchell, who I think was trying to make some sort of sympathetic point that being “illegal” doesn’t make one a bad person.

THE ONLY PROBLEM is that her statement that the Romney family (including Mitt’s father, George, who was 5 at the time) did not follow the law when they returned to the United States in 1912 (after having spent several decades in Mexico to escape religious persecution in this country).

Now I know the ideologues will claim they were being persecuted because of their polygamous beliefs. But I’m sure the “good Christians” who were particularly worked up would have found something else to complain about with regards to Mormons.

But back to Immigration. I guess we’re supposed to think that George Romney (who went on to become governor of Michigan) was an “illegal alien.” Does that make Mitt (born in Detroit) an “anchor baby?”

I write those terms that way to mock them, because the whole concept is nonsense.

IT TRULY IS someone who doesn’t really comprehend immigration law and its history trying to place things in a contemporary context of hate that makes no sense.

For me, I was able to shoot this claim down in my mind when I double-checked the year that the Romney family returned to this country – 1912. They wanted to get away from the hostilities in Mexico that eventually became the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s.

Whereas the first U.S. immigration laws were enacted in 1924. Even then, the original immigration policy specifically exempted Mexican citizens from any of the restrictions that were imposed against Jewish people and non-whites who might have wanted to come to the United States.

The reason that was done was because the xenophobes in Congress of the 1920s were more concerned with keeping eastern European Jews out of the United States. They gave little thought to Mexicans.

AND IN THE Southwestern territories that later became states, people crossed over that border in both directions every day without a thought given to it.

My point being, if they came in 1912, there was no federal immigration law in place. Their arrival was not “illegal” in any sense – unless you are letting your view of an immigration policy be guided by your ethnic hang-ups.

And as newspaper columnist Ruben Navarette has reported, when  the Romney family originally fled the United States for Mexico in the 1880s, they never did anything to renounce their U.S. citizenship.

In fact, Mexican officials allowed them to live there (in separate colonies where they were not assimilated into the Mexican masses) but never granted them citizenship.

IT TOOK SEVERAL decades for those Romneys who did not return to eventually become so ingrained in Mexico that they now have citizenship – although my understanding is that the Mexican Romneys claim dual citizenship (a concept our own nation does not recognize).

But the point being, how can it be “illegal” for anyone with U.S. citizenship to return to this country?

It makes me glad that I missed the Chris Matthews Show (where all this happened) on Sunday, because I would have been screaming obscenities at the television screen.

Nobody was illegal. And for Andrea Mitchell to use the term is offensive because she’s giving it a certain credibility – when anybody with sense ought to be going out of their way to show how stupid its use is with regards to immigration.

WHAT WE OUGHT to be doing is making the use of “illegal” to describe people the equivalent of those people some four decades ago who deliberately ate grapes and lettuce picked by migrant farm workers so as to show their disgust for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers – even though he called for a boycott of such foods.

It would be a sign of just how big of nitwits they truly are!

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