It used to be hard to fathom"but no longer. There are Americans who would say the following in describing Mexicans, legal or illegal:

Since NAFTA was instituted, the rise of immigration, legal and illegal, has swept this once great country like a plague, and our government not only allows it to happen, but hastens it. I am not wealthy, and I am forced to live and work among these barbaric animals known as Mexicans. Our despicable government, which I would have at one time died for, has betrayed all American citizens by allowing this to happen.

"That hate is what defines these people. They don't care about legality, they just use illegal border crossing as an excuse. Their e-mails talk about "Third World vermin," "filthy Mexicans," "leeches, thieves," etc. Some use "mud people" . to describe Mexicans..."

"When you fight a war you don't fight it with rhetoric," Hernandez said. "When you fight a war, man, you go in and kill the enemy. .... A signal has to be sent to Mexico and all those countries that we are tired of it and we're not going to put up with it."

And if you think this is an isolated incident, here is a quote by one of the leading voices in the anti-Mexican movement, Frosty Wooldridge: "Ladies and gentlemen of America"we are LOSING all four factors. If you look around you, we are losing the cohesive thread of our society. at over four million legal and illegal immigrants annually. They are not assimilating nor are they speaking our language."

I wonder "which" American society Frosty Wooldridge believes is losing its "cohesive thread"? Is he talking about the German-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, Chinese-American, Japanese-American societies? Or, is he talking about the Mexican-American communities one finds in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas?

Those who rant and rave about immigration and use such insipid arguments as "we are losing the cohesive thread of our society." never explain just what American society or culture they mean. You might be interested to know there are some anti-immigration extremists who refuse to acknowledge America is a nation built on, with, and by immigrants.

Laredo, Texas, is an American border town. It was founded by a Spanish officer, Don Tomas Sanchez de Barrera y Gallardo, who named the town Villa de San Agustin de Laredo after a town in Spain. In Laredo, Texas, the stores have bilingual signs and bilingual employees. Think of it"bilingualism in America! There are some pizza and Chinese restaurants but Mexican eateries line the streets. There is local Spanish television, radio, and newspapers. No one discriminates on the basis of which language is spoken.

Is this the "society" Frosty Wooldridge means when he says, "we are losing the cohesive thread of our society" .?

Frosty and his anti-Mexican followers are not only confused most of the time in the questionable rhetoric they spew but are very loose with the facts. I have written extensively on one of the mainstays of their position"Mexicans are spreading diseases that America once conquered. Frosty, not an authority in epidemiology, insists that America is about to be wiped out from long-dormant diseases that Mexicans are spreading throughout America. And like sheep, the anti-Mexican guys accept Frosty's word over that of the CDC which tells me what Frosty claims and his following sheep accept as gospel is not true at all!

Who are you going to call the next time you need some expertise regarding the spreading of infectious diseases: Frosty, an uncredentialed bicyclist and naturalist, or the Center for Disease Control?

Frosty and his followers spin is nothing new. Read what Bill Steigerwald, Associate editor/columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Pittsburgh, observed in 2003:

"Frosty the "snow" man?

Friday, November 21, 2003.

Frosty Wooldridge has been peddling a screed - a version of which you ran ["Our Country Coming Undone," November 12] - to op-ed pages of newspapers claiming that it was illegal aliens who served up Hepatitis A to folks here at a Chi-Chi's.

Your site carried this b.s.

"You may have read in the newspapers: "... 34 children in a Michigan school tested positive for Tuberculosis"; or in Monaco, Pennsylvania, "Two people died of Hepatitis A," while 1,110 other patrons of Chi-Chi's Restaurants were 'served' the disease by six illegal alien employees."

I don't know how Frosty the snowman got this info, because we haven't heard it yet. I exchanged e-mails with him earlier the week of November 10, telling him he was either wrong or lying. (He had sent us an email pitching his op-ed).

Health officials here have had no idea how the problem here started (they still don't whether it came from an employee or a food source, such as green onions); no paper here has said a word about illegal or legal aliens.

Frosty's zeal, as I told him, has gotten the better of him. I wouldn't trust any of his "facts" without checking them. We'll never run anything he sends us.

"...he was either wrong or lying"."Need I say more?