“I love this country, it has given me everything that I have, and I’m proud to be part of it,” said Victor Sanchez, a 37-year-old Monrovia resident wearing a Mexico jersey. “But yet, I didn’t have a choice to come here, I was born in Mexico, and that is where my heart will always be.”
That’s a quote from an LA Times story on the booing of the U.S. soccer team by an overwhelmingly Latino audience during a U.S.–Mexico match at the Rose Bowl. Examine the odd logic: Mr. Sanchez is booing the country that gave him “everything” while cheering the country that apparently gave him very little. “I didn’t have a choice to come here,” he says; one immediately thinks, “But you most certainly do have a choice to return to the nation where your ‘heart will always be.’” Can Mr. Sanchez not even offer symbolic thanks to the country that blessed him, perhaps a clap or two at the Rose Bowl when the United States is mentioned? And if the immigration service arrived at the Rose Bowl to bus spectators without legality back to Mexico, where his “heart will always be,” would he boo or cheer?
He reminds me of a former student who, during the anti–Prop 187 marches years ago, was marching with a group waving Mexican flags — that is, the flag of the country he did not wish to return to, as a Mexican national — but desecrating the flag of the United States, the country that he most certainly wished to remain in.
That schizophrenia is what confuses so many about illegal immigration — the simultaneous furor over even the suggestion of compliance with federal immigration law and the occasional symbolic expressions of dislike for the United States in public fora, whether booing at the Rose Bowl at mention of America, or walking out of a California high school en masse at the sight of an American-flag T-shirt on Cinco de Mayo.
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