When the United States recognized Israel as a legitimate country in 1948, one of the justifications given for backing a Jewish state on that Middle Eastern site was the concept that Jewish people had once had a homeland there some 2,000 years earlier.

By that logic, the southwestern portion of the United States that was once a part of Mexico not quite two centuries ago gives Latinos a legitimate reason to think they are a full-fledged part of this country, despite the xenophobic rhetoric often used to try to claim that Latinos are 'too foreign" to fit in and that immigration is a drain on the nation.

And that is what Raul Ramos y Sanchez, the host of an online forum for immigrants to the United States who also is writing a trio of novels that center around the issues of immigration, said makes the nation's growing Latino population different from any other ethnic group that has immigrated to the United States during its history.

"The United States was willing to recognize a Jewish state in Israel because of a tie going back some two millennia," Ramos said. "The tie between the southwest and Mexico is less than two centuries old. How can they say this land always belonged to the U.S.?"

Ramos spoke to students at Columbia College recently (Oct. 29) as part of their Latino heritage celebration of the past month, giving a presentation about the current status of the Latino population.

Ramos made his comparison between Israel and the southwestern U.S. when asked whether the various ethnic groups that comprise Latinos would be like past ethnic groups that were demonized by an Anglo establishment - only to eventually become a part of that establishment.

"There aren't any Italians, Poles or Jews who can seriously say, 'This was once my land'," he said. "That is the difference between the Latinos and any other groups that have come to this country.

"It is the one wildcard factor in the future development of Latinos in this country," Ramos said.

Not that Ramos, who personally is of Cuban ethnic background, is among those people with delusions of "reconquista" - a re-conquest of the region into a Latino state. "The U.S. did win the southwest through war, and the spoils of war go to the victor."

He concedes that people living in the former Mexican states of Texas and California, and the Arizona territory - now known as the U.S. states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and part of Oklahoma - have done well economically and likely would resist returning to Mexico, regardless of their ethnic background.

"I doubt Texans want to go back to being Mexican," Ramos said. "But we need to see things in a bigger context when studying issues such as immigration."

During his half-hour speech at the college, Ramos gave a history of immigration in the U.S., portraying it as a continuing process of existing citizens trying to demonize the newcomers while ignoring their own immigrant family backgrounds.

"It's a little galling to hear the 'know-nothings' of today talk about how their ancestors were legal," Ramos said. "Immigrants are Americans, regardless of their legal status. Immigration is what this country is largely about."

Ramos even went so far as to try to portray the original Pilgrim settlers at Cape Cod as illegal aliens. "Who issued green cards to the Pilgrims?" he asked snidely, while also calling the original white settlers into what was in the early 19th Century the Mexico state of Texas, "illegal squatters on foreign soil."

Yet he concedes those early Texans left their homes throughout the southern United States of the era for reasons remarkably similar to what the current newcomers from Latin America seek these days when they enter the United States -- a better life.

"The family from Oaxaca that comes to the U.S. in the 21st Century wants nothing more than those who crossed into Texas in the early 1800s," Ramos said.