Are all cultures equal? Leave race out of it, and look at the countries of origin of all the peoples you've mentioned, and then look at the countries that the (illegal) immigrants of today come from. Do you see any difference there in terms of success and prosperity? I think you have to take that into account before you can say that immigration will always have a positive effect.
there are people from all different cultures who have come to the US...and the US has been better for it.
An immigrant can get his/her citizenship "fast-tracked" currently by joining the military. I don't know what that entails, but it happens.
I agree with you, but can you really say that immigration is "people from all different cultures" these days?
Let’s see.... For a case study let’s take a look at... (sorry Max): The Irish. The Irish were well known for being lazy, constantly drunk and unable to control their tempers. As a group (at least until after most of them came here) they were unable to even put together enough concerted effort to keep from being England's b**ch. The English essentially considered them to be so shifty and pathetic that they weren’t even human. Victorian British people that would hire them as house servants would give them fake British names, because it was embarrassing to have to have Irish help. The potato famines which drove them here were seen as proof that they were too pathetic to even feed themselves. Would you describe the Irish as a negative influence on this country? I can do this with almost every group that came to the USA. This one was easiest, but the bottom line is that people who were happy, well adjusted, and well off don't immigrate to a new country. I can do the same with the Hessians, the Czech, the Finns, Ashkenazi Jews, etc. We are a nation made up or losers. The ones that don’t want to be kicked anymore come here. It usually takes a generation for them to get on their feet but when they do, they reenergize the country. My personal experience is that I see incredible numbers of second generation Mexican-American small business owners that hustle nonstop and are hungry enough to do the work that keeps this country vibrant. The only reason they stand out to me, is that I have been conditioned like everybody else in the image of the 'typical Mexican'. Can you locate for me one single group that has been a net negative for the USA? The image of the Lazy Mexican? In the 1930's that image was the Lazy Italian in exactly the same form, except he had a Chico Marx type hat instead of a sombrero and ate pasta instead of tortillas. Do you think of Italian people as shiftless, drunk, and lazy? Everybody that comes here has been viewed as "inferior" while they are immigrating.
France PAYS immigrants to go back home... http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,484716,00.html Interesting article on the costs of low skilled immigrants in the US... http://washtimes.com/national/20070524-104520-5637r.htm
Absolutely. And many Irish changed their surnames to sound more English...dropping the Mc or the O'. It used to make my grandfather furious to hear a name that he knew was an Irish name originally, but which had been changed. The Irish were portrayed as monkeys by both the English and the "native" Americans. The famine that caused many of them to leave (including my family) was largely inflicted by the British to begin with. Their land and the food it produced was seized from them and sent back to England. Imagine the poorest of the poor in third world countries today in Africa and that's exactly what Ireland had become. People eating grass to survive, literally. So they arrive here and they're immediately competing for jobs with freed slaves. They're called "white Negroes." Harper's Weekly suggests they should be extinct as they are inherently inferior and cause too much trouble. So today it's the Mexicans immigrating in heavy numbers. And we throw somewhat similar barbs at them. Most of them come from poor conditions. But give them a generation to get here and get their feet under them...and these sterotypes will die as well. People are people...and people who are hungry for opportunity end up producing children who shine. That's the story of our nation, frankly. And it's truly awesome. I can be critical of America on many fronts...but this isn't one of them.
yet another reason to not worry about what the French think of us. the cultural concerns some have here that are threatened by immigration in America are multiplied exponentially in cultures that historically have been homogenous. here in the states...the culture is about holding on to an idea that immigration makes us better. that we were never all the same to begin with.
I wish I still had a copy of the Rice University study from 1997 about this very thing. What it said is that the people who come from Mexico are hardworking, industrious, and cause little trouble. The trouble begins with their children. They see their parents, who have no real education, struggle but make ends meet. They believe that since their parents did ok, when they graduate high school they will do better than their parents. They are doing worse than their parents and tend to be more angry, etc. The study then goes on to look at the numbers of the children of immigrants in prison, etc etc. One of the fundamental ways in which things are different now than they were when the Irish came over is that we have a complex and established economy. This economy has been set up by volumes of laws (most of which enacted post 1900). To take people with no knowledge of our system and allow then in en masse is a recipe for disaster. If we had a system by which we could equip immigrants to assimilate into this system, we would all be better off. BTW...the Catholic church is cracked on many issues. Immigration is just one of them. The church has a history of mandating the high and mighty point of view while providing no guidance on how to pay for their solution to the problem.
I've heard that is the case too. I've heard that there have been immigrants soldiers who have died in battle and have had citizenship granted posthumously.
It is an interesting article and in it notes that the Heritage Foundation study saying illegal immigrants cost more in government services is contradicted by a Cato Foundation study that says the opposite. Without looking at both its hard to say which one is more valid but I'm wondering if they considered immigrants impact on inflation in either study.
There may be something to that but I would hardly generalize. We've seen the children of many immigrant groups do even better than their parents. While at the sametime there are many Americans whose families have been here for generations continue to struggle. But that belies the facts that we have immigrants from cultures much more different than Mexico compared to the US assimilate very well. In my lifetime Hmong immigrants who came from a culture neither urban or industrialized and without a written language assimilate into the modern US culture.
Do they learn the language in order to compete? The problem is that we have a flood of people coming here who have little interest in doing the things needed to compete.
but those immigrants were coming here to stay permanently. many illegal immigrants come here w/ no intention of staying.
So that would seem to make learning English seem less important? Also, I looked for information on exactly how many illegal immigrants intend to be here perminently, and how many are temporary and I can't find any information on this at all. If you haver any hard information in this regard, could you post it because I am very interested.
obviously it is less important for the migrant workers to learn english. in my line of work the majority of the guys on the construction site speak no english (especially in san antonio). ive never tried to look for hard #'s on it. im not saying that the majority of the 12 - 30 million people here illegally are of the migratory nature b/c i dont believe that they are, but even if you say only 5% are you are still talking about 1 million people and that is not a small number. i just go by personal experience. i worked in restaurants for many years and i am now in the homebuilding industry and my brother-in-law owns his own framing buisness. obviously, the service and the homebuilding industry are where you will find the majority of the migrant worker-type. i knew people who stayed for as little as 6 months or as long as a few years, but they never thought of staying permanently. many of these guys are married and have children back home - they arent brining them here - they stay for a few months, work their asses off and go home, only to come back and do the same thing a few months later. again, i dont have stats on this, and im really not sure how you could gather them in any accurate fashion anyway (we dont even have any idea how many people are in the u.s. illegally to begin with), but this is what i saw and continue to see first hand everyday in my work.
maybe i missed it, but i havent really seen anyone bring up the effect of nafta or the north american union on all this. to me, illegal immigration is part of the bigger picture - if it wasnt good for big business than it wouldnt be tolerated. when nafta was signed it was touted as this great thing which would bring good jobs to mexico and provide incentive for people to stay, but instead we went from 5 million illegals in the mid-90's to the 12-30 that we have now. as ricky ricardo would say, "wha happened?"
Funny. I can't recall seeing street signs in German or Italian. I can't recall the state spending tons of cash on bilingual education in German or Italian. The groups that you mentioned never expected to be catered to in their native tongue. That is a major difference from what is going on today.
Probably you can't remember it because you weren't alive then? Because it did happen. source [rquoter] Bilingual education is not an invention of the 1960s. Contrary to popular misconception, earlier waves of immigrants often enrolled their children in bilingual or non-English-language schools -- public and private. In 1839, Ohio became the first state to adopt a bilingual education law, authorizing German-English instruction at parents' request. Louisiana enacted an identical provision for French and English in 1847, and the New Mexico Territory did so for Spanish and English in 1850. By the end of the 19th century, about a dozen states had passed similar laws. Elsewhere, many localities provided bilingual instruction without state sanction, in languages as diverse as Norwegian, Italian, Polish, Czech, and Cherokee. Enrollment surveys at the turn of the 20th century reported that at least 600,000 primary school students (public and parochial) were receiving part or all of their instruction in the German language -- about 4% of all American children in the elementary grades. That's larger than the percentage of students enrolled in Spanish-English programs today. (Until recently, German was the dominant minority language.) But political winds shifted during the World War I era. Fears about the loyalty of non-English speakers in general, and of German Americans in particular, prompted a majority of states to enact English-only instruction laws designed to "Americanize" these groups. Some went so far as to ban the study of foreign languages in the early grades -- a restriction that was struck down as unconstitutional in 1923. [/rquoter]
