Can you just imagine the outrage if someone wrote a column in a major, respected U.S. news magazine decrying that his or her hometown had become overrun with immigrant Jews?
Well, that’s exactly what Time magazine columnist Joel Stein did when bemoaning that his beloved hometown of Edison, New Jersey, has been the destination of immigrant Indians looking for the American dream – you know, kinda like Jews did before them.
Only the Indians have every hatful slur and insult hurled at them from Mr. Stein.
I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in India as how to instruct stupid Americans to reboot their Internet routers.
My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A and P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. ... There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime. ...
... Unlike some of my friends in the 1980s, I liked a lot of things about the way my town changed: far better restaurants, friends dorky enough to play Dungeons & Dragons with me, restaurant owners who didn't card us because all white people look old. But sometime after I left, the town became a maze of charmless Indian strip malls and housing developments. Whenever I go back, I feel what people in Arizona talk about: a sense of loss and anomie and disbelief that anyone can eat food that spicy.
Unlike previous waves of immigrants, who couldn't fly home or Skype with relatives, Edison's first Indian generation didn't quickly assimilate (and give their kids Western names). But if you look at the current Facebook photos of students at my old high school, J.P. Stevens, which would be very creepy of you, you'll see that, while the population seems at least half Indian, a lot of them look like the Italian Guidos I grew up with in the 1980s: gold chains, gelled hair, unbuttoned shirts. In fact, they are called Guindians. Their assimilation is so wonderfully American that if the Statue of Liberty could shed a tear, she would. Because of the amount of cologne they wear.
I’m not kidding. This was actually printed in Time.
Of course, Mr. Stein has issued the obligatory "apology" for his racist hate, but that’s not nearly enough.
At a time when an father was beaten to death in front of his wife and two sons in a bias hate crime in nearby Old Bridge, New Jersey, it’s time for this racist hate monger Joel Stein to be fired.
Tell Time that hate has no place: letters@time.com