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I was thinking the other day how cool it is that my daughter has been learning a little Spanish here and there since her first days in Kindergarten. This seems to be fairly standard for elementary schools in North Carolina. I assume our children are being taught Spanish starting at such an early age so that those who drop out of school prior to graduation will be able to get work on a road crew or at the drive thru of a fast food restaurant. Speaking of fast food places, am I the only one who's noticed that the only chain not being completely staffed by Latinos these days is Taco Bell? (Yo quiero explicación!) The one place I really want to hear a Mexican accent, and I'm greeted by, "Y'all wanna try our new Scrapple Chalupa?"

I tend to assume that the nice, hard-working people taking my lunch orders and slowing my progress on local roads are here legally. I also tend to assume that I may be wrong about that, but since I can't tell just by looking at someone whether he or she came here through proper channels or by clinging to the underbelly of a tanker of pomegranate juice, I'm inclined to treat everyone I meet with at least as much respect as the next person who can't understand most of what I'm saying. (You know who you are.)

The issue of illegal immigration is a hot topic these days, and while I don't harbor any animosity for anyone who's trying to improve their lot in life, I do have a bone to pick with those trying to pretend that illegal aliens are anything else. Words mean things; that's why we don't just grunt at each other. (Unless we've got a big mouthful of chalupa, of course.) Those who have tunneled or ridden or skipped or catapulted across our borders without going through the proper channels aren't undocumented immigrants any more than a bank robber is just making an undocumented withdrawal. They're breaking the law, which makes them illegal. Noting that does not make me a bigot, it just makes me someone who recognizes the legitimate meaning of words.

And they're not immigrants at all; as much as it may (apparently) hurt some feelings for me to say it, they are aliens. Immigration is a legal process, one these people have specifically and intentionally avoided undergoing. They did not immigrate to our country, they snuck in. These people are illegal aliens. That's the proper term. (And I expect you all to use it.)

And don't give me that "we need them to do the jobs no one else will do" crap. Here's how we fill those jobs... We start deporting illegal aliens en masse, and for every individual we send back across our borders, we kick one person off of welfare. See? There's now a new hungry person in need of work to replace the one who we got rid of. Problem solved! Of course, this hungry person in need of work happens to be a U.S. citizen and so is actually able to legally work in our country.

For the record, I'm no xenophobe. (I'll wait while you look that up... okay, moving on.) Yes, it infuriates me to know that someone can take their driver's license test in Espanol, but only because these people then have to go drive on roads dotted with signs written in English. How many rusty, pale blue pickups go careening out of control off of bridges in January because we don't have signs reading, "El puente congela antes de camino"?

If private businesses think they can make a buck by advertising in Spanish or printing "El Cheetos" on my bag of cheese puffs, that's their business. I'm not sure the government should be doing business in any language other than English, but aside from things like that driving test, I don't really care. Of course, doing so creates something of a slippery slope. How many languages should Wake County print it's forms in, and how much more does it cost us, the taxpayers, to do so? Perhaps we'd all be ahead in the long run if we used some of our tax dollars to fund ESL classes for new immigrants.

Oh, and I'd like to send a shout out to Mexico's president, Felipe Calderón. In his recent state of the union address, he stated that "Mexico does not end at its borders," and that. "Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico." Um, I don't mean to quibble, but I feel the need to make a minor point of clarification... Mexico pretty much ends where and when we say it does. Felipe would do well to remember that. (After all, if we ever did decide to take a few battalions down to the Rio Grande and golpee algún asno con el pie, it's not like Felipe could put up much of a fight; all his able-bodied young men are over here.)