Representative Delia Ramirez, from Illinois, was in the news recently for standing in front of a group of Hispanics in Mexico City and declaring that she is a proud Guatemalan before she’s an American. Indeed, she’s so proud of Guatemala that her family fled the country, settled here illegally, and have refused to return. They would rather break the law in this country than live in Guatemala. That’s how proud of Guatemala they are.
That’s the inherent contradiction anytime an immigrant claims to be so deeply proud of the homeland that they desperately don’t want to live in. But the greater problem, of course, is that Congresswoman Ramirez has announced that she is more loyal to a foreign country than to her own. Granted, her loyalty to Guatemala seems rather uninspiring and conditional. She’s loyal from a distance. But her loyalty to the United States is clearly even weaker. She puts it second place to the country that her family have spent decades trying to avoid going back to.
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