{"id":22704,"date":"2020-03-27T13:15:39","date_gmt":"2020-03-27T17:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/?p=22704"},"modified":"2020-03-27T13:15:43","modified_gmt":"2020-03-27T17:15:43","slug":"illegal-immigrants-elites-media-immigrationreform-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/2020\/03\/27\/illegal-immigrants-elites-media-immigrationreform-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Want to Be Famous? Be Illegal."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the latest illegal alien to gain fame and fortune by whining about how gravely she and similarly situated illegals have been mistreated by the United States. Her new book, Undocumented America<\/em>, purports to be<\/a>, \u201cthe story of the devotion immigrants have for a country that wants to expel them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And literary critics have fallen head over heels for her writing, regularly spouting fatuous nonsense<\/a> like, \u201cParticularly in her depictions of immigrant women, Villavicencio reveals a fullness of character that feels subversive, simply because of how rare it is.\u201d The thing is, the kind of self-aggrandizing, \u201clook at me\u201d schlock that Ms. Villavicencio is peddling isn\u2019t new at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, the modern American literary canon is littered with books written by illegal aliens. They range from Jose Antonio Vargas<\/a>\u2019 Notes of an Undocumented Citizen<\/em> to Alberto Ledesma<\/a>\u2019s Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer<\/em> to Julissa Arce<\/a>\u2019s\u00a0 My (Underground) American Dream <\/em>and Someone Like Me.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

They all follow a\nfamiliar pattern: Alien enters the U.S. unlawfully. Alien becomes a trespasser.\nAlien complains that he\/she isn\u2019t unquestioningly accepted as an American\nsimply because he\/she showed up here. \nThey all fail to accept any responsibility for their predicament. And\nnone of them provide a satisfactory explanation for why they believe the United\nStates owes them an apology for access to education, aid and economic\nopportunity they would never have had in their native countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That kind of ungrateful griping is a little tough to swallow from any illegal. After all, America\u2019s millions of uninvited guests<\/a> are free to go home if they aren\u2019t happy here. But in the case of these authors it is profoundly dishonest.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist<\/a>.\u00a0 Alberto Ledesma earned a PhD in ethnic studies from the University of California at Berkeley and now serves as that institution\u2019s graduate diversity director for arts and humanities. Julissa Arce earned a college degree then landed highly compensated jobs at Goldman Sachs and Merrill-Lynch. And Ms. Villavicencio went to Harvard and is now a PhD candidate in American studies at Yale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their status as\nimmigration violators doesn\u2019t seem to have kept any of these individuals from\nachieving the type of success that eludes many working class Americans. In\nfact, in most cases it is the very basis for their fame and fortune. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact,\nAmerican\u2019s willingness to spend money to read their stories demonstrates that\nthis is not a country that treats illegal aliens harshly or unfairly. And their\nachievements indicate that, far from being discriminated against, in many\ninstances, they were actually treated better than similarly situated Americans.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that brings us to the most disturbing aspect of all these accounts. We have reached a point where our cultural elites have taken up the cause of foreign interlopers, who they see as more deserving of the American dream than down-home, native-born locals. When is the last time you heard about an American kid from the rough-and-tumble streets of Detroit or Pittsburgh getting a free ride to an Ivy League school? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those stories do still happen. But one suspects that, should a book telling that tale arrive in the near future, it won\u2019t generate the type of fawning prose the critics have lavished on the immigration law breakers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the latest illegal alien to gain fame and fortune by whining about how gravely she and similarly situated illegals have been mistreated by the United States. Her new book, Undocumented America, purports to be, \u201cthe story of the devotion immigrants have for a country that wants to expel them.\u201d And literary<\/p>\n

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