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……………………Today….the word……IMMIGRANT…….denotes something EXTREMELY BAD…….Immigrants are people that we are told to look down upon with ridicule and disgust…..People who are stealing from us, who are taking our jobs, who are killing and raping us, who are destroying our country…….The SAME THINGS WERE SAID over a century ago when the millions of immigrants came to this country from foreign lands!..”Simply put, an immigrant is a person living in a country other than his or her birth…..no matter if that person has taken the citizenship of their destination country, served in the military, married a native, or has another status. He or she will forever be an interna-tional migrant”…….Unfortunately, we forget ALL IMMIGRANTS through the centuries have ALWAYS been looked upon this way!…..I am the FIRST GENERATION of an ITALIAN IMMIGRANT FAMILY……Both of my grandfathers came to this country from the same town in Italy. My grandfathers came here together on a boat, as close friends. to support each other, entering a country they knew nothing about, not speaking the language…..just with the HOPE OF A BETTER LIFE for their families…..My father came here as a very young boy, not quite school age, alone with his father to a foreign land, also not speaking the language…My grandfather would eventually enter his young first born son, my father, into a Catholic school with other immigrant children…My grandfather was a fisherman in Bari, Italy, but it was not something he could continue in America…….Somehow….he started his own business, if you could call it that. He built his own push cart, and collected used paper, bundled it up with string, and found people who would buy this paper from him….Where did he get this idea from? Maybe he saw others doing it?…Was he one of the first in the recycle business????He would take my father with him from early morning until late at night, sharing a crammed apartment with other Italian immigrants in what is known as Little Italy in NYC…….He worked hard until he was successful enough to build a business, and  bring his wife, my grandmother, and the rest of his family to America……Eventually, he made enough money to buy his own four family building in the “country” on Avenue U between 11th and 12th street in Brooklyn……my first home until I was 3 years old…My aunts and uncles, my grandfather’s children, all lived in this building……..All immigrants, Italians, Irish, Germans, and Jewish people who escaped the horrors of the many countries they came from….were all considered sub-human, and were treated terribly by so called “Americans”…….who’s families, though many decades earlier, all came to this country as IMMIGRANTS too…….The PURITANS were IMMIGRANTS…..They were NOT native Americans. They came here as immigrants to escape religious persecution……Let that FACT NOT BE FORGOTTEN!….Let’s not forget it was those early immigrants. like my family, who built this nation….The Chinese immigrants, on the west coast, built our railroads as slave labor…..I was born in this country, and have always been proud of being an American, but my parents were always afraid we would be treated the way they were, and for that REASON ALONE they never taught us Italian, because they feared we might have an accent…..I never knew this until I became an adult…..One day I asked my mother, also born in Bari, Italy….WHY they never taught us how to speak Italian? I told her with my career, and all of the travel I did to Italy, it would have been a great help…..That’s when she explained to me why she didn’t want us to have an accent, because she feared we would be looked down upon….She wanted us to be American…..It was eye opening to me, and I finally started to understand what their lives were like when they first moved here as young “foreign” children….They told my brothers and myself only the “good” stories, never the hardships they went through……TODAY……I see NO CHANGE in the way immigrants are looked upon, even thought a great majority of them are citizens, in the military, and are hard working people contributing to the growth of this country as our forefathers had…..Where would we be today without the immigrant population….who take jobs nobody else would deem to want….cleaning public toilets, cleaning hotel rooms, cutting the lawns of wealthy people’s homes, migrant workers toiling in the fields of America picking the produce we all eat…..Imagine how the cost of these products would sky rocket if these workers didn’t do these menial jobs for little money, and were all deported!!!………We, as Americans MUST change the way we look at immigrants, and not listen to the hate, and lies……..because after all is said and done…….WE ALL CAME FROM IMMIGRANTS…………..Today IS the most important day of your lives, your children’s lives and generations to come…..VOTE, VOYE, VOTE, VOTE…….VOTE FOR DEMOCRACY………….VOTE FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS………….VOTE FOR FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!