When Will the GOP Figure Out What Immigration Really Means?

Mike Weisser
4 min readOct 7, 2024

In 1993 I moved from New York to Massachusetts and as soon as I settled into my apartment, I called up Nynex to order a phone. I got an electronic message that told me which button to punch and then the message was repeated in Spanish. This was the first time I ever was given a choice as to what language I wanted to use to contract some business over the phone.

A year later, Newt Gingrich started up that Contract with America crap and one of the terms of the contract was that English would be declared the ‘official’ language of the United States.

Several years later, I happened to be sitting in some airport waiting to board a connecting flight when I struck up a conversation with a black man who was part of a maintenance sweeping the terminal floors, emptying the garbage cans, and basically keeping the place neat and clean.

He told me that he had been in the country for six or seven years and had managed to bring over his entire family from some country in Africa that I never heard of and couldn’t pronounce the name. The man further told me that he couldn’t believe how safe and secure he felt living in the United States, and he was also satisfied with the union wage that he was being paid.

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