<p>I'd take enough money to take care of my aging folks, makes sure my wife and kids would have all they needed and most of what they wanted, even after I die. I'd help out my relatives. I'd give some to church and some to charity and buy some toys: new place to live, car, lots of travel. Then I'd endow a school for everybody who was ever told they were dragging down the averages, that they couldn't make it and wouldn't amount to anything, that they just weren't good enough, and were either too broke or too stupid or too mean or too hardheaded to amount to anything much. This school would be for them. To hell with all those valedictorians with perfect scores on the SAT and straight A averages who are doing resarch on the weekends at CERN and agonizing over wheter to matriculate at Harvard or Yale. I'd start a school for the rest of us, sons and daughter of sons and daughters who came to the U.S. hoping. </p>
<p>To those who didn't become presidents, governors, tycoons, fathers of new weapons, judges, or stars of stage, screen, radio, television, video or as-told-to books on the best-seller lists. </p>
<p>To those who thought liberty absurd, and those who despised the idea of equality, and those whose dream was a dream of greed that brought them here to get rich, from slave labor if necessary, and go back to the old country where stay-at-home peasants would have to lick their boots. </p>
<p>Here's to the pickpockets, too, and burglars, thieves and killers, to all those exported in European chains who regarded the New World as a prison. To those who fled from the gallows, seeking a hideout where rascals could safely flourish. </p>
<p>Here's to the traitors, like Tom Paine, who fled England to avoid being hanged for his radical politics. </p>
<p>Lucky timing made Paine's radicalism heroic. Other immigrants were not so lucky, so here's to Sacco and here's to Vanzetti, doomed for their anarchism by a hanging judge and a hanging governor and a whole nation in a hanging mood. </p>
<p>Here's to all hanging judges, and to all hanging governors, and to the Supreme Court justices, who have the power to indulge the whole nation in its hanging moods. All are immigrants' heirs. Here's to all the troublemakers: To the union organizers who made life hard for the sweatshop profiteers, who preferred to be just plain hard-working businessmen; to the hard-working businessmen, too, and to their goons who clubbed the skulls of the immigrant and immigrant-offspring working stiffs. </p>
<p>Here's to the bankers, including embezzlers and cheaters of widows and orphans. Until immigration there wasn't a single banker anywhere in the land. Salutes to you, ye banking fruit of immigration. </p>
<p>Salutes, too, to widows and orphans, including widows and orphans who are landlords cruel to their tenants, especially in winter when they go to Jamaica to escape hard-luck tales of icicles on the radiator. </p>
<p>Here's to the gangsters created by Prohibition and here's to the bank robbers created by the Depression. </p>
<p>Here's to the pistoleros created by the national craving for drugs and here's to the Ku Kluxers created by ignorance. </p>
<p>Here's to the bigots, to the nigger-haters, the fag-bashers, the no-wops-kikes-Irish-need-apply people and to every immigrant and immigrant's child, grandchild and multigreat-grandchild who ever said the only good Indian was a dead Indian. </p>
<p>You say you wouldn't want your sister to marry one? That's neither here nor there. </p>
<p>The point is that without them America wouldn't be the same country we celebrate this weekend. </p>
<p>The point is that it's unfair to ignore all the results of immigration except its big shots. </p>
<p>The point is that in an America without rogues, felons, psychopaths, bigots, swindlers, liars, cheats, brutes, frauds, crooked politicians and corrupt cops liberty would have collapsed of terminal flabbiness shortly after the first few boatloads of saintly immigrants fell to their knees weeping pure thoughts upon first glimpsing Liberty Enlightening the World. </p>
<p>To retain their muscularity, people committed to liberty require constant challenge from people who don't know the difference between liberty and making a mess. </p>
<p>It is only fitting then to salute the mess-makers, for they far outnumber the glittering successes who resulted from immigration to the New World. </p>
<p>For every Lee Iacocca bestriding the motor world like a colossus there are thousands of immigrants or bearers of immigrant heritage on the production line putting the wrong bolt in the car. For every Mayor Koch doing government work with zest there are thousands of government workers, the bureaucratic result of immigration, who wish the governed would go away. </p>
<p>So here's to everybody the $5,000-per-head crowd doesn't want to think about when they think about the meaning of immigration. </p>
<p>Here's to the wife-beaters, and here's to the car thieves. </p>
<p>Here's to the people who cancel your insurance, here's to the guy who steals your television set, here's to everybody with enough money to buy Congressmen, and here's to Congressmen who rather wish they didn't have to jump at their buyers' commands and if pressed on the subject say, ''But let's be realistic -'' </p>
<p>Here's to the losers, the failures, the rats, the finks, the louts, the finaglers, the boors, the chiselers. We have immigration to thank for them all. What would America be without them? </p>
<hr>
<p>OK. So I didn't write it. Russell Baker did in the NY Times in 1986, a love song to immigrants on Independence Day. I just came across it and wanted to share. Ain't irony grand? And he's right too. Where WOULD we be without them (immigrants or not)?</p>