500,000 people, and no one called me?

NONE OF YOU thought of calling? I mean, I could see if it was a small dinner party: You thought I wouldn’t mesh well; you already had a smugly self-obsessed, attention-needy columnist, maybe Mickey Kaus -- I get it. But there were 500,000 of you at Saturday’s pro-immigration rally downtown, more than 13% of the city’s population, the largest gathering ever in L.A. This was a snub.

Did you think I didn’t own a white T-shirt to symbolize peace? Because I do. And I adore immigrants.

My great-grandparents were immigrants. And I’m pretty sure the guy who waters our plants is, though I don’t talk to him much because he only speaks Spanish.

I would have marched because our country needs immigrants. Sure, my great-grandparents were useless, Yiddish-speaking peasants, but my grandfather started a vending business that my father built up, employing hundreds of people, one of whom was Al Roker. Sure, our nation could survive without vending machines, but how would we fare without Al Roker? At best, a little less happy and a lot more inappropriately dressed for the weather.

By the time I was born, the Steins had been here long enough to figure out how to work the American system.

I studied a little in high school, joined the Model United Nations Club, went to Stanford and have ever since been making wads of money contributing nothing to society besides penis jokes. When I have kids and send them to private school in L.A., they’re destined to become worthless drug addicts who drop out of Skidmore and occasionally put up art shows downtown. Video installations.

Our agriculture and manufacturing and housecleaning businesses can’t exist without a huge stream of Latinos; otherwise, you’d be paying a lot more for strawberries and to get stuff home from Home Depot. Capitalism dictates that Mexicans are going to find a way to hack through the wall along the border if the good jobs are here. Because that’s what you do for your family.

If the complaint is that illegal workers don’t pay taxes while using our hospitals and our schools, then the solution is to crack down on the businesses that escape payroll taxes by hiring the 11 million unauthorized immigrants. Or we could help convert illegal immigrants into taxpaying citizens. Again, this is going to make strawberries expensive, which would have the benefit of finally making us realize that, despite the marketing, strawberries are not at all sweet.

Or we could just make up the loss in taxes by not wasting the $10 billion we spent fruitlessly patrolling the border over the last decade. Besides, there are plenty of angry old men in Arizona who will do it for free.

But this is not about taxes or job loss. This is racism. Which I totally get. I hate other people. Especially new guys. They’re annoying and hard to understand and time-wasting, and they change the way we do stuff. The Irish sucked. The Italians really sucked. The Germans -- I don’t have to tell you about the Germans. And Asians are still annoying the hell out of us. Like those railroads are doing us a lot of good now.

But I kind of like the Mexicans. I find it hard to hate people who clean my house and serve delicious, cheap food. If the Germans could learn to dust and make a decent taco, I think we would have stopped making Holocaust movies a while ago.

So don’t try to pass some law trying to kick hardworking people out of our country just because they’re different. Don’t even pass a law requiring them to promise to learn English. That’s not only insulting (trust me, they want to learn English; you try following the Pellicano case without knowing English) but against the founding concept of this country, which purposely didn’t establish an official religion or language. And you can be comforted knowing that Spanish is just as much of a repressive, imported, colonialist language as English. Before you want to kick out someone who risked his life for the chance to become an American, ask yourself what exactly you did to earn your citizenship.

So next time one in eight of you decide to hold a giant afternoon party downtown, ring me up. I have some good ideas. Like that maybe when you’re marching for American citizenship, you should leave the Mexican flags at home. Listen, we got it, you’re from Mexico.

Perhaps a sombrero or one of those cool wrestling masks would get that across better than waving a flag for a different country when you’re asking to be a citizen here. Also, I could bring bagels. It’s the only decent food my people ever came up with.