Consider this March 30 editorial in The Washington Times:
In 1907, during one of the great immigration waves, President Teddy Roosevelt said that the immigrant who comes here “in good faith … shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin.” However, he added, “We have room but for one flag, the American flag.”
Words well worth recalling as we noticed what student protesters decided to hoist up their high school flagpole while ostensibly demonstrating against immigration reform. In Spanish this is called reconquista, the reconquering of Mexican land lost during the Mexican-American war (1846-48), and its appearance in Los Angeles this week adds a dark dimension to the entire immigration debate.