liberals are disarmed in their defenses of immigration because they cannot admit that past examples of successful immigration have involved migrants conforming to their new culture
"And in particular if you want it and the other cities like it, to metastasize further into rural areas"
That is a purposely unpleasant choice of words and I find it perturbing that you are so comfortable using it. I say that as someone living in a very diverse city.
I am a middle-aged American. I decided to learn Spanish this year for myself. It costs 60.00 a year to get a DuoLingo subscription. A family sub is 119.00. If I can do it, anyone can. To your point, I prefer immigrants to some Americans in some jobs. However, they could put an English speaker in charge of taking orders, at the very least. And, no, it is not too much to ask people who want to become a part of a country or culture to assimilate. In some countries, it is okay to do many things to people we find reprehensible. It is a good thing to say we don't allow that here. I, too, felt I had lost something of a culture I never got to experience because I was born here. I went, I saw, and I've never been more proud of my ancestors for having the guts to come to America. America is no less unique than any other country.
And were I Hispanic, I would be insulted with all the products in a grocery store in Spanish and English. It's like everybody is smart enough to learn English but not them!
The thought that it might be deliberate was part of why I pointed it out lol. It is funny and worthy of note if done on purpose. If not done on purpose, still worth of appreciation but maybe also correction lol.
If you’re truly in favor of big government (which means you also have to generate the public will to fund it), assimilation seems like pretty much a prerequisite. You’re never gonna convince enough people to turn over their hard earned money for redistribution if you’ve divvied everyone into groups that eyes each other suspiciously. Surprising to me that more people on the left don’t see this.
Yeah there needs to be some common ground, some set of beliefs, perhaps even a secular religion that everyone believes in (football, Thanksgiving, apple pie, etc) even if it does seem a bit lame and hokey
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. "
A society built around a secular religion of Liberalism (as opposed to an ethnic group or an actual religion) is what America is. The hard part is getting it to work in practice.
Isn't "limited nationalism" just patriotism? I always understood the difference as "patriotism is love of country, which is mostly fine; nationalism is patriotism plus hatred or derision of the other, which is bad".
Iirc this is essentially what Gunnar Myrdal said about Scandinavian socialism, it works because everyone is a Protestant who might actually be cousins with the people directing the redistribution of wealth.
My Sicilian immigrant parents refused to speak Italian to us while we were growing up. I _did_ learn to swear, but "cazzo" and "vaffanculo" have limited utility when you're trying to impress the staff at Italian restaurants.
I agree that in a perfect world, employees who interface with the public would speak comprehensible English. But of course, that should also be true of those customer service representatives you're forced to talk to over the phone when you want guidance on an unauthorized credit card charge. Very little pressure is ever put on mega-corporations to port their call centers back from Mumbai, so I'm not really sure why pressure should be put on the Golden Arches. Anyway, it's kind of a moot point, no? Within 10 years, McDonald's workers and Indian phone banks alike will be replaced by AI with fabulous mid-Atlantic accents.
I'm someone who wakes up and contemplates each day through the lens of "Does that mean I will have to talk to someone?" I'd suggest you use the McDonalds app. Yer welcome.
Id also note that if folks are in favor of an ever more diverse United States, the utility of English as a lingua franca among immigrant groups is a plus as well.
"And it worked; he has always been a profoundly American guy. When he got to college, he eventually grew angry over all the assimilation. He felt that he didn’t have roots, that he was disconnected from his people, that he had been denied a rich cultural heritage that some other Chinese-American students had enjoyed. Eventually he threw himself into a Chinese cultural education, learned to speak Cantonese quite well, lived in China for a couple years, and tried his best to reconnect with what he thought had been unfairly denied to him. He would sheepishly tell me, years later, that though he was happy to have gone through that linguistic and cultural education, living in China was ultimately an alienating experience."
I have seen this and similar movies, more than once.
A colleague of mine took her family back to India, to experience the rich culture of their former country. She kissed the ground in America when she got back.
I work in the ER. We often get patients who are clearly recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America because the ER is the only place you can get care if you are uninsured. But sometimes we will get patients who according to their visit records have been in the area for upwards of three years, but who speak no more English than those recent arrivals. I wouldn’t expect them to be fluent, obviously, but how do you live in an English-speaking area for years and learn essentially no English? Obviously when you’re in a new place you want to seek out familiar things and people who speak your language and there’s nothing wrong with that in principle but I fail to see how an ethnic enclave so insular that you can live in a foreign country and not learn even a little bit of the language can possibly be good in the long run, either for that group or the wider community they’re isolated from.
Yeah, if you’re an illegal immigrant working with other illegal immigrants at the kind of places that tend to employ illegal immigrants- or even substitute “recent” for “illegal” and the point is basically the same - I understand how you would not have the opportunity or even the need to learn English. I just think that’s a bad outcome for that person and a bad situation for everyone!
I had Japanese TA in college who went on to work for Microsoft. For a while he lived in a Japanese enclave in California: the restaurants were Japanese, the dentist was Japanese, the car mechanic was Japanese.
Eventually he decamped for a white neighborhood. Why? He had two daughters and they weren't really getting the American experience.
My grandmother has been living in Canada for around 70 years in a majority white city, and still has very limited English. She, her brother, and their spouses owned a restaurant and my grandfather did all the translating. None of her grandchildren speak Cantonese (wish I had!) so that's been an unfortunate barrier my whole life. Nevertheless, she is still one of my favourite people.
Lack of local language adoption is a recursive force in lack of assimilation. It drives people into separate communities which are more isolated, which in turn perpetuates lack of language adoption and further lack of assimilation and isolation. It limits economic opportunity, which drives poverty and further dependence on isolated communities. It also hinders adoption of local cultural standards, things like "how you treat women" and a whole litany of religiously driven bigotry.
I would see that too working in the courts. When these folks have a problem though, like a flat tire or directions somewhere, they feel the result. How can people live like that?
All the dogma about assimilation being bad and racist is just that: dogma. In the religion of woke utopia, any imposition on a member of a protected class is unfair and bigoted. But the truth is we cannot have a functioning country when so many of the people do not speak the same language or learn the same customs or even how the new country works. So it won't be utopia, it will be chaos. Or it already is chaos.
And the Haitians do get help: EBT, housing owned by the NGO, low paying jobs provided by the NGO, all paid for of course with our tax monies. So we end up with a situation like the Somalis in MN, where that closed society exists outside of the greater country. Don't speak the language and be on benefits forever.
I have some Somali friends who grew up in the melting pot that is Northern VA rather than a Somali enclave, as well as a couple Somali friends who grew up (and left) enclaves in MN. My NoVA Somali friends are basically entirely assimilated and identify much more with NoVA than they do with Somalia or with Islam. Some of us drink and eat bacon together, and Eid to them is like Passover is for cultural Jews. Their parents are disappointed, but they aren't treated as apostates. The MN Somalis I know wear Abayas, pray 5 times a day, fast during Ramadan, and in general are raised in a 100% Somali bubble where they'd lose their whole community if they converted.
True, immigrants give something up but gain something too. Like many before them, the Irish like mine, the Jews like my SIL's family. And it's almost impossible to give up that identity when it dominates your city.
This puts a lot of context around the incident at Hamline with the Somali student who got an instructor fired for teaching an art history class (that had been constructed specifically with a decolonially oriented syllabus) that showed a medieval painting of the Prophet.
"on a long enough timeline, 'All of the poor people move to the rich countries' simply can’t be the solution"
I'm particularly interested in this as it relates to the Left's opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I could understand the Right's opposition as a matter of principle, if not policy. But so far as I can tell, the left-wing view is that the jobs of American citizens need to be protected from competition with non-citizens, right up until these non-citizens cross the border.
"on a long enough timeline, 'All of the poor people move to the rich countries' simply can’t be the solution"
This is ultimately the huge issue. Much wringing of hands about immigration in richer countries and very little picture ideas about how to stop it aside from bigger walls and some form of weaponised coast guards.
A good start would be to stop destroying those other countries! Mexicans came after "free trade" deals made life impossible for Mexican farmers. The wave of Hondurans came after a military coup supported by Hillary Clinton. Venezuelans are coming now, after years of the US deliberately strangling the economy. Haiti is effectively a US colony. The US invasion of Iraq, besides killing a million people, set many millions more in flight. Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine... It's astonishing how rarely the "push" side of migration enters into any discussions.
Really? The two largest recipients of US funds (excepting, perhaps, Ukraine in the last several years) are Israel and Egypt, with Israel far in the lead. Where have you seen such "aid" to Haiti?
Those free trade deals are widely credited with bringing an infusion of cash into Mexico. In addition the maquiladoras accelerated the transition of Mexico from a rural base to an industrial one, something that every other developed nation on the planet has undergone.
"All the poor people who are poor because the United States destroyed their societies and no other reason move to the rich countries simply can't be the solution because because the United States will continue to maliciously destroy societies until the end of time," is also a valid argument.
'All of the poor people move to the rich countries' is adopted by the left because of its synergy with fairly fringe economic beliefs about radical economic redistribution. It's not that they deny the costs involved of such migrations, the belief is that we can tax our way to paying for it without any degradation in public services (because fuck the rich). I think the same people also are influenced by elements of radical environmentalism, as well, that even if such migration results in a near term financial penalty for the middle class, well, that's fine, too, because a drastic cut in middle class consumerism is necessary anyway to manage global warming and other environmental problems.
'All of the poor people move to the rich countries' is a catalyst policy which plays into a lot of liberal utopianism.
"all of the poor people move to the rich countries" is NOT a policy of the Left. Not at all. First things first, the US (and the rest in its orbit, like the UK) need to stop destroying poorer countries through invasions, coups, sanctions, IMF austerity programs, etc. Let those countries breathe, and to find their own path to economic and social development, such that citizens of those countries aren't desperate enough to risk everything to move to the metropole, just for a chance to live. Massive influxes of people fleeing war and poverty also impact the working classes of Europe and North America. The PMC likes it, for it provides a ready source of cheap labor; employers like it for the same reason.
It's extremely shortsighted to seek a "solution" to mass immigration by slamming the gates closed, without at the same time ending the policies that send millions of people onto boats and/or roads seeking the life denied them at home.
Reading this, I was reminded of Heny, the Egyptian Coptic immigrant who sold me my coffee every morning at the Shell station down the street from the motel where I was living for a while in Tacoma, WA. I was standing there making small talk, pretending to barter for a cheaper coffee if I left the lid off--he giggled and we enjoyed a little silliness for a moment. Then someone came in and I think they made some inappropriate comments about his origins. After they left, he balled up a fist, slammed it into the counter between us and shouted, "I AM AN AMERICAN!" All I could say, helplessly, was "I know that."
When I was in Tacoma and Seattle, I was often the minority, between black Americans and immigrants from all over the world. I loved it so much and if you're white and you've never experienced that you don't know what you're missing.
I am now back in the middle of the country, and it is so different. I miss immigrants desperately. There is a spirit in them, a hope, a missing where they are from while still throwing their heart into the values we're supposed to hold as Americans that strengthens my own belief. If I could be surrounded by immigrants all of the time, I would.
It's pure desperation. If you manage to immigrate to the US and are then forced to throw in the towel and return home you will be the laughing stock of your community. People will point you out in the street and say to each other, "Look at that idiot. He managed to get to the US and he couldn't hack it. What a loser." Why? Because entry into the US is so coveted and there are plenty of other people champing at the bit to get in.
It also means immigrants are willing to put up with conditions and pay that the native born might reject.
I’m friends with a Ukrainian family who came to the US to avoid bombs and missiles in their home town of Odesa. They are huge fans of the USA, love everything about our democracy, and are the opposite of desperate. If Trump fucks them and they have to go back to Ukraine they will do it, start more small businesses, and try to turn Ukraine into Estonia, not Belarus. Immigrants have always been the best Americans. They self select as bad motherfuckers. If they were driven by desperation my guys would have stopped at one of the seven countries they crossed to get here.
There are all kinds of immigrants, and some of them aren't here by choice.
It's a very real phenomenon that economic migrants have hit the jackpot when they are finally allowed to immigrate. Anybody that fails to keep a job and is facing deportation is the equivalent of a lottery winner that fritters away his winnings.
When you say they'll be the laughing-stock of their community, which community are you talking about? Because it seems like you think the entire rest of the world is desperate to get to America, and terrified of failing to do so. Comes off as a bit self-obsessed.
People in France and Japan aren't driven to emigrate by economic conditions. But there is an entire class of people living in developing economies for whom an H1B or a visa is the equivalent of winning the lottery.
Houston is a great American city
"And in particular if you want it and the other cities like it, to metastasize further into rural areas"
That is a purposely unpleasant choice of words and I find it perturbing that you are so comfortable using it. I say that as someone living in a very diverse city.
"Only MAGA types complain about immigrants and their accents."
The formulation "Only X complain about Y" is responsible for so much of the vitriol and insanity of our politics. Great article, thank you!
Now THIS is a topic! Assimilation w/regard to immigration? A no-brainer.
As Bobby Jindal once said "Immigration without assimilation is invasion."
I am already offended by the image of a small child in a native American headdress.
EAGLE NOISE
I am a middle-aged American. I decided to learn Spanish this year for myself. It costs 60.00 a year to get a DuoLingo subscription. A family sub is 119.00. If I can do it, anyone can. To your point, I prefer immigrants to some Americans in some jobs. However, they could put an English speaker in charge of taking orders, at the very least. And, no, it is not too much to ask people who want to become a part of a country or culture to assimilate. In some countries, it is okay to do many things to people we find reprehensible. It is a good thing to say we don't allow that here. I, too, felt I had lost something of a culture I never got to experience because I was born here. I went, I saw, and I've never been more proud of my ancestors for having the guts to come to America. America is no less unique than any other country.
And were I Hispanic, I would be insulted with all the products in a grocery store in Spanish and English. It's like everybody is smart enough to learn English but not them!
typo alert: “…Using it on a college campus or on Blueskey can certainly invite a lot of titriol.”
That is a hilarious typo and should be incorporated into the lexicon STAT but I think you meant vitriol.
If it were less hilarious I wouldn’t have pointed it out because typos happen but everyone needs to enjoy that one.
Huh! I thought "titriol" was a deliberate Freddie coinage combining "vitriol" and condescending "titter." 😀
The thought that it might be deliberate was part of why I pointed it out lol. It is funny and worthy of note if done on purpose. If not done on purpose, still worth of appreciation but maybe also correction lol.
That sort of serendipity should not be touched.
Apparently, titriol is a beauty product?
https://estetica-dolce.ch/produkt/purity-titriol-controllo-acne-50-ml/
And "Pickelentwicklung" is the German word for pimple development, which is fantastic.
Titration is the key to assimilation.
If you’re truly in favor of big government (which means you also have to generate the public will to fund it), assimilation seems like pretty much a prerequisite. You’re never gonna convince enough people to turn over their hard earned money for redistribution if you’ve divvied everyone into groups that eyes each other suspiciously. Surprising to me that more people on the left don’t see this.
Yeah there needs to be some common ground, some set of beliefs, perhaps even a secular religion that everyone believes in (football, Thanksgiving, apple pie, etc) even if it does seem a bit lame and hokey
Like this?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. "
A society built around a secular religion of Liberalism (as opposed to an ethnic group or an actual religion) is what America is. The hard part is getting it to work in practice.
Reasons why limited nationalism is, in fact, useful.
Isn't "limited nationalism" just patriotism? I always understood the difference as "patriotism is love of country, which is mostly fine; nationalism is patriotism plus hatred or derision of the other, which is bad".
Yes, I think that's the best way to describe it. I should have simply said patriotism.
You can have a multicultural society or you can have a generous welfare state. You can't have both.
Iirc this is essentially what Gunnar Myrdal said about Scandinavian socialism, it works because everyone is a Protestant who might actually be cousins with the people directing the redistribution of wealth.
My Sicilian immigrant parents refused to speak Italian to us while we were growing up. I _did_ learn to swear, but "cazzo" and "vaffanculo" have limited utility when you're trying to impress the staff at Italian restaurants.
I agree that in a perfect world, employees who interface with the public would speak comprehensible English. But of course, that should also be true of those customer service representatives you're forced to talk to over the phone when you want guidance on an unauthorized credit card charge. Very little pressure is ever put on mega-corporations to port their call centers back from Mumbai, so I'm not really sure why pressure should be put on the Golden Arches. Anyway, it's kind of a moot point, no? Within 10 years, McDonald's workers and Indian phone banks alike will be replaced by AI with fabulous mid-Atlantic accents.
I'm someone who wakes up and contemplates each day through the lens of "Does that mean I will have to talk to someone?" I'd suggest you use the McDonalds app. Yer welcome.
Id also note that if folks are in favor of an ever more diverse United States, the utility of English as a lingua franca among immigrant groups is a plus as well.
Kinda the same way it's useful on planet Earth.
Nicely done, Freddie.
"And it worked; he has always been a profoundly American guy. When he got to college, he eventually grew angry over all the assimilation. He felt that he didn’t have roots, that he was disconnected from his people, that he had been denied a rich cultural heritage that some other Chinese-American students had enjoyed. Eventually he threw himself into a Chinese cultural education, learned to speak Cantonese quite well, lived in China for a couple years, and tried his best to reconnect with what he thought had been unfairly denied to him. He would sheepishly tell me, years later, that though he was happy to have gone through that linguistic and cultural education, living in China was ultimately an alienating experience."
I have seen this and similar movies, more than once.
A colleague of mine took her family back to India, to experience the rich culture of their former country. She kissed the ground in America when she got back.
I work in the ER. We often get patients who are clearly recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America because the ER is the only place you can get care if you are uninsured. But sometimes we will get patients who according to their visit records have been in the area for upwards of three years, but who speak no more English than those recent arrivals. I wouldn’t expect them to be fluent, obviously, but how do you live in an English-speaking area for years and learn essentially no English? Obviously when you’re in a new place you want to seek out familiar things and people who speak your language and there’s nothing wrong with that in principle but I fail to see how an ethnic enclave so insular that you can live in a foreign country and not learn even a little bit of the language can possibly be good in the long run, either for that group or the wider community they’re isolated from.
I knew a young Polish woman who had worked illegally in Chicago for four years or so, and still spoke and understoof basically no English.
Yeah, if you’re an illegal immigrant working with other illegal immigrants at the kind of places that tend to employ illegal immigrants- or even substitute “recent” for “illegal” and the point is basically the same - I understand how you would not have the opportunity or even the need to learn English. I just think that’s a bad outcome for that person and a bad situation for everyone!
I had Japanese TA in college who went on to work for Microsoft. For a while he lived in a Japanese enclave in California: the restaurants were Japanese, the dentist was Japanese, the car mechanic was Japanese.
Eventually he decamped for a white neighborhood. Why? He had two daughters and they weren't really getting the American experience.
My grandmother has been living in Canada for around 70 years in a majority white city, and still has very limited English. She, her brother, and their spouses owned a restaurant and my grandfather did all the translating. None of her grandchildren speak Cantonese (wish I had!) so that's been an unfortunate barrier my whole life. Nevertheless, she is still one of my favourite people.
Lack of local language adoption is a recursive force in lack of assimilation. It drives people into separate communities which are more isolated, which in turn perpetuates lack of language adoption and further lack of assimilation and isolation. It limits economic opportunity, which drives poverty and further dependence on isolated communities. It also hinders adoption of local cultural standards, things like "how you treat women" and a whole litany of religiously driven bigotry.
I would see that too working in the courts. When these folks have a problem though, like a flat tire or directions somewhere, they feel the result. How can people live like that?
All the dogma about assimilation being bad and racist is just that: dogma. In the religion of woke utopia, any imposition on a member of a protected class is unfair and bigoted. But the truth is we cannot have a functioning country when so many of the people do not speak the same language or learn the same customs or even how the new country works. So it won't be utopia, it will be chaos. Or it already is chaos.
And the Haitians do get help: EBT, housing owned by the NGO, low paying jobs provided by the NGO, all paid for of course with our tax monies. So we end up with a situation like the Somalis in MN, where that closed society exists outside of the greater country. Don't speak the language and be on benefits forever.
I have some Somali friends who grew up in the melting pot that is Northern VA rather than a Somali enclave, as well as a couple Somali friends who grew up (and left) enclaves in MN. My NoVA Somali friends are basically entirely assimilated and identify much more with NoVA than they do with Somalia or with Islam. Some of us drink and eat bacon together, and Eid to them is like Passover is for cultural Jews. Their parents are disappointed, but they aren't treated as apostates. The MN Somalis I know wear Abayas, pray 5 times a day, fast during Ramadan, and in general are raised in a 100% Somali bubble where they'd lose their whole community if they converted.
My brother is Somali-American. He was adopted, and would be considered assimilated, I'm sure.
True, immigrants give something up but gain something too. Like many before them, the Irish like mine, the Jews like my SIL's family. And it's almost impossible to give up that identity when it dominates your city.
This puts a lot of context around the incident at Hamline with the Somali student who got an instructor fired for teaching an art history class (that had been constructed specifically with a decolonially oriented syllabus) that showed a medieval painting of the Prophet.
"on a long enough timeline, 'All of the poor people move to the rich countries' simply can’t be the solution"
I'm particularly interested in this as it relates to the Left's opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I could understand the Right's opposition as a matter of principle, if not policy. But so far as I can tell, the left-wing view is that the jobs of American citizens need to be protected from competition with non-citizens, right up until these non-citizens cross the border.
"on a long enough timeline, 'All of the poor people move to the rich countries' simply can’t be the solution"
This is ultimately the huge issue. Much wringing of hands about immigration in richer countries and very little picture ideas about how to stop it aside from bigger walls and some form of weaponised coast guards.
A good start would be to stop destroying those other countries! Mexicans came after "free trade" deals made life impossible for Mexican farmers. The wave of Hondurans came after a military coup supported by Hillary Clinton. Venezuelans are coming now, after years of the US deliberately strangling the economy. Haiti is effectively a US colony. The US invasion of Iraq, besides killing a million people, set many millions more in flight. Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine... It's astonishing how rarely the "push" side of migration enters into any discussions.
The Chavists strangled their economy on their own perfectly well, didn't need any help from the US.
Please check on US sanctions and Venezuela over the last quarter century and then tell me that the US hasn't had an impact on Venezuela's economy.
Out of curiosity, how many other countries have sanctions on Venezuela?
Looks like EU, Canada, Switzerland, Panama. Not sure I see the relevance, but happy to help!
I am aware, and I stand by my statement.
Well, that's up to you.
I agree, but Haiti receives more aide than any other country in the world.
Really? The two largest recipients of US funds (excepting, perhaps, Ukraine in the last several years) are Israel and Egypt, with Israel far in the lead. Where have you seen such "aid" to Haiti?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_aid_to_Haiti
Those free trade deals are widely credited with bringing an infusion of cash into Mexico. In addition the maquiladoras accelerated the transition of Mexico from a rural base to an industrial one, something that every other developed nation on the planet has undergone.
"All the poor people who are poor because the United States destroyed their societies and no other reason move to the rich countries simply can't be the solution because because the United States will continue to maliciously destroy societies until the end of time," is also a valid argument.
'All of the poor people move to the rich countries' is adopted by the left because of its synergy with fairly fringe economic beliefs about radical economic redistribution. It's not that they deny the costs involved of such migrations, the belief is that we can tax our way to paying for it without any degradation in public services (because fuck the rich). I think the same people also are influenced by elements of radical environmentalism, as well, that even if such migration results in a near term financial penalty for the middle class, well, that's fine, too, because a drastic cut in middle class consumerism is necessary anyway to manage global warming and other environmental problems.
'All of the poor people move to the rich countries' is a catalyst policy which plays into a lot of liberal utopianism.
"all of the poor people move to the rich countries" is NOT a policy of the Left. Not at all. First things first, the US (and the rest in its orbit, like the UK) need to stop destroying poorer countries through invasions, coups, sanctions, IMF austerity programs, etc. Let those countries breathe, and to find their own path to economic and social development, such that citizens of those countries aren't desperate enough to risk everything to move to the metropole, just for a chance to live. Massive influxes of people fleeing war and poverty also impact the working classes of Europe and North America. The PMC likes it, for it provides a ready source of cheap labor; employers like it for the same reason.
It's extremely shortsighted to seek a "solution" to mass immigration by slamming the gates closed, without at the same time ending the policies that send millions of people onto boats and/or roads seeking the life denied them at home.
Reading this, I was reminded of Heny, the Egyptian Coptic immigrant who sold me my coffee every morning at the Shell station down the street from the motel where I was living for a while in Tacoma, WA. I was standing there making small talk, pretending to barter for a cheaper coffee if I left the lid off--he giggled and we enjoyed a little silliness for a moment. Then someone came in and I think they made some inappropriate comments about his origins. After they left, he balled up a fist, slammed it into the counter between us and shouted, "I AM AN AMERICAN!" All I could say, helplessly, was "I know that."
When I was in Tacoma and Seattle, I was often the minority, between black Americans and immigrants from all over the world. I loved it so much and if you're white and you've never experienced that you don't know what you're missing.
I am now back in the middle of the country, and it is so different. I miss immigrants desperately. There is a spirit in them, a hope, a missing where they are from while still throwing their heart into the values we're supposed to hold as Americans that strengthens my own belief. If I could be surrounded by immigrants all of the time, I would.
It's pure desperation. If you manage to immigrate to the US and are then forced to throw in the towel and return home you will be the laughing stock of your community. People will point you out in the street and say to each other, "Look at that idiot. He managed to get to the US and he couldn't hack it. What a loser." Why? Because entry into the US is so coveted and there are plenty of other people champing at the bit to get in.
It also means immigrants are willing to put up with conditions and pay that the native born might reject.
No,that's not it. It's not just desperation.
Desperation is surely a major component. The alternative, after all, is pure humiliation.
I’m friends with a Ukrainian family who came to the US to avoid bombs and missiles in their home town of Odesa. They are huge fans of the USA, love everything about our democracy, and are the opposite of desperate. If Trump fucks them and they have to go back to Ukraine they will do it, start more small businesses, and try to turn Ukraine into Estonia, not Belarus. Immigrants have always been the best Americans. They self select as bad motherfuckers. If they were driven by desperation my guys would have stopped at one of the seven countries they crossed to get here.
There are all kinds of immigrants, and some of them aren't here by choice.
It's a very real phenomenon that economic migrants have hit the jackpot when they are finally allowed to immigrate. Anybody that fails to keep a job and is facing deportation is the equivalent of a lottery winner that fritters away his winnings.
When you say they'll be the laughing-stock of their community, which community are you talking about? Because it seems like you think the entire rest of the world is desperate to get to America, and terrified of failing to do so. Comes off as a bit self-obsessed.
People in France and Japan aren't driven to emigrate by economic conditions. But there is an entire class of people living in developing economies for whom an H1B or a visa is the equivalent of winning the lottery.
nice punch line.
but also not very profound.
do any of us 1st , 2nd or 3rd generationers not feel like americans when visiting our root ethnic country.