>>>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8248197/China-builds-worlds-longest-bridge.html
>>>
>>>4 years, 26.4 miles, £5.5billion~$8.8billion = $208million/mile
>>>
>>>By comparisson : consider the new East Span of the SF Bay Bridge
>>>
>>>11 years 2.2 miles, $5.487 billion (est) = $2.494billion/mile
>>>http://baybridgeinfo.org/faq
>>>
>>>10x more cost efficient = A thumpin!
>>
>>This is the kind of post that brings out the Merle Haggard in me.
>>
>>For one thing Chinese workers earn peanuts. That sure will bring the cost down. For another they steal ideas, they don't create them. Tell me one good thing China has invented since moo goo gai pan. They are company men, not visionaries. (And I do mean men. Good luck being a woman in China).
>
>But you want to open the floodgates from Mexico. Mexico specializes in corruption, thievery, poverty, and illegal drugs (sounds like Washington DC).
>

Which is why they want to move someplace better.

You have changed the subject completely. I wasn't talking about Chinese people, I was talking about the Chinese government and businesses.

My opinion has always been clear. We are a huge, bountiful nation with room for plenty more. "Bring me your tired, your poor" -- ring a bell? Not only have immigrants always poured into the U.S., we can accurately be described as a nation of immigrants. Wave upon wave have come to these shores. There is probably not a country on earth that does not have a sizable immigrant population in the U.S This is our strength, not our weakness.

English, Irish, Italians, Polska, Germans, Jews, Russians, Scandinavians, Greeks, Asians, on and on. Mexicans are only the latest wave. In every case they have been greeted with hostility by previous immigrants who want to pull up the drawbridge behind them. If you removed all immigrants and their descendents from this country there would be nothing left but Indians shooting arrows at buffalo.

Yes, I understand the difference between legal and illegal immigrants. It doesn't sit well with me, either. The problem is that we accept only a limited number of Mexican immigrants each year. We are a rich country, still, and share a long border with a poor country. If it was you on the south side of the border and you saw a chance to make a better life for you and your children, wouldn't you walk across it? Don't tell me you wouldn't. I sure would.

It was soccer that changed my thinking. I had really not known that many Mexican-Americans before that. (Most if not all legal AFAIK). What you quickly discover interacting with the kids and their parents is that they are no different from us. They laugh the same way. They goof around. They are upset when they mess up a play or are not in the game. The parents are different from most of us in that they have a far deeper understanding of the game and are far more passionate about it. Probably half of the players I coached were Mexican-American and I always had a fleet of unofficial assistant coaches on the sidelines ;-) Who can be against passion?

What puzzles me is why the Republican Party is so anti-Hispanic. Maybe they only like white people, period. If I were a Republican strategist (!!!) I would not only tamp down the rhetoric, I would actively court them. Not only are they a huge demographic group, having passed blacks in numbers, they tend to be religious, family oriented, and conservative. IOW a natural constituency.