Bourdain on Immigration

I'm about fifty pages into Anthony Bourdain's so-far magical new collection The Nasty Bits -- it's just out this week -- and just happened upon the timeliest little chapter on immigrants and immigration, titled "Viva Mexico! Viva Ecuador!" An excerpt (especially prescient in light of the remarks of Fox News yammering head John Gibson):

The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn't it? Who the hell is America if not everybody else? We are -- and should be -- a big, messy, anarchistic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones. Like our kitchens. We need more Latinos to come here. And they should, whenever possible, impregnate our women. [Ed.: Take that, Gibson!]

[...]

Solution? Simple. I suggest immediately opening up our borders to unrestricted immigration for all Central and South American countries. If the [Culinary Institute of America] grads don't want to squat in a cellar prep kitchen for the first couple of years of their career, or are too delicate or high-strung or too locked into a self-image that precludes the real work of kitchens and restaurants, then they should just stand back and watch their competition from south of the border take those jobs for good. Everyone will end up getting what they deserve.

He's right, of course. It's not that hard-working immigrants are somehow not as good as the rest of us. It's not even that they are our equals. No, it is that they are better than us. Much better. They have proven something none of us have -- that they would choose this country over their birthplace, and would risk life and limb to get here, and would continue to do so by starting at the very bottom, toiling long hours for little money in jobs so difficult we cannot even imagine.

It's high time many pro-immigration advocates in this country change their tactics to suit this reality: Stop apologizing for immigrants and immigration, and start hammering home the point that immigrants are at least as much a part of the true fabric of this country as those who are American simply by birthright.