Tuesday, August 26, 2008

A Race of Convicts

I was flipping through the book I Hear America Talking, a history of American words and phrases and came across this entry for "A Race of Convicts:"

...a term that angered the colonists and was a fairly common insulting sobriquet used by the British... It was an awful thing to say, especially insulting because it contained a lot of truth: between 1607 and 1776 about 40% of the English who came to the colonies were convicts, drunks, run-aways, debtors, and others who had less than idealistic reasons for starting over in a new land.


Our contemporary anti-immigration advocates should keep that 40% figure in mind concerning their ancestors since in the current wave of illegal immigrants/undocumented workers, the vast majority of the 12 million illegal aliens estimated to be in the US are otherwise law abiding.

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