@ Brendan Rizzo
And you, my friend, are wrong.
The nativist movement, while annoying, has a rational reason: 9/11. It isn't a particularly good reason, and it has definitely been stoked by politicians playing to fears. What's more, it has more-or-less evaporated in the states not facing illegal immigration, because human nature is to tend towards xenophobia.
Again, lrn to sociology. This is normal for any country, we just happen to be the latest. Hell, (actual) Muslims aren't even facing that much prosecution, just the Ground Zero Mosque bit! Certainly small potatoes compared to the remnants of slavery-which, I hate to remind you since you'll just single it out, was an unfortunate outgrowth of a need for an underclass in a democratic society.
Was it wrong and bitterly ironic? Yes. Did it provoke a civil war over different economic systems, one which depended on slaves and the other on paid labor? Yes. Has it left scars which have been extremely slow to heal, and only started with the Civil Rights Act? Yes.
Does it make the United States somehow unique? Hell no-Britan has its class divides (due to the feudal system), China has its weird pseudo-communism (a remnant of it's actually communist days), and Russia has its underworld (a remnant of...everything in the Cold War).
So please, quit with the myopia. It just shows you to be as bad as the jingoists-only worse, since you take that as carte blanche to do nothing at all. At least the jingoists have ideals they believe in.
