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njlauren -> RE: I am quickly developing a problem with immigrants. (12/25/2013 1:02:11 PM)
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I can understand the frustration and anger, but in many ways it is misplaced, you have to be very careful because perceptions and facts are not the same thing. For example, if you go into an area with a heavy ethnic concentration, you often will find people who are recent immigrants and don't necessarily speak English, in part because they are living in an area with people who speak the same language, and it can isolate them, especially now when you cable channels and such that are in the home language. It can seem like no one speaks english, and then you get into the situation, like with a local home depot, that thanks to the douchebag then running the chain, they decided they wanted low cost labor and were hiring recent immigrants (most of whom I suspect were illegal), because like most immigrants at any period in history, tend to work for little...and damn nearly ruined the store doing it....
One of the reasons this has happened I think is that unlike past generations, when immigrants tended to concentrate in big cities, or maybe certain areas of certain states, it has become a lot more widespread. When I was growing up, the only recent immigrants in my area of NJ (suburban, well off) tended to be Asian or South Asian (Indian mostly), and they tended to work in high tech jobs, many of them were engineers and scientists under the then H1B program that actually brought in highly skilled workers, not the cheap jobs program it is today. Now, there are recent immigrants from Mexico and South America, who have moved to towns with older housing, to be able to fill jobs in construction and in restaurants and such, and people are seeing immigration for the first time really. Read about when Italians and Poles and Jews came to the US in numbers, you heard the same thing, only most of us are well removed from it.
One of the things that drove language skills was because in the cities, where immigrants went, the schools had people from all over, and English was the common language. My dad spoke Italian at home (he would be 91 if alive today), but he grew up in school and such with Italians, Jews from Eastern Europe, poles, people born here, so in the streets and such they would be speaking english, so kids would pick it up (okay, Bronx or Brooklyn English might seem like a foreign language, but it is...:). With kids it came naturally, and my dad spoke English without an accent, he learned, as did my wife who came in a later generation from eastern Europe.
Years ago, long before the immigration from south of the border, in NY the predominant immigrants were Puerto Rican (who actually were already citizens...), and a lot of people said the same thing, they would never learn english, especially when the schools started so called bi lingual education, that often turned into a 12 year crutch rather than what was intended, to act as a bridge...but that didn't happen, the kids and grandkids of Puerto Rican immigrants are no different than other NY'ers, they speak english as a native, though many of them are bi lingual, which is great. Same with the kids of other groups, Asians, Indians, Hispanics from all over, the same trend happens, the next generations are full English speakers, who may or may not be bilingual....every study is showing this, with one exception, which is among Mexicans of recent immigration status, there there are problems with the next generations. One theory is the immigrants coming here now don't want to permanently settle here, so they don't have the interest in learning the language or their kids, others because many of them are illegal and their kids and they are isolated.....I suspect it is a blip, because learning english is widely understood to be the way to advance, you may be able to get a job at a car wash without english skills, not the same thing when working other jobs. In tech fields we have people from all over, but English is the lingua franca, and no matter how good your tech skills are, if you can't communicate you are going to be very limited in what you can do.
Again, being in the middle of immigrants and immigration, it is hard to lose perspective. There are grains of truth to what some have said, in Miami I ran into the 'you should learn spanish" crap, and I told them (in spanish) where to go with themselves, the Cubans who came here after Castro were an arrogant bunch, and some of the people who moved from South America, the well off ones, tend to be more arrogant, but it isn't all by far....I also have been around recent Asian immigrants through my son being in music, where many of the kids in the programs were from Asia (especially Korea), and the parents can be arrogant and standoffish (and it isn't just language skills), there is some kind of haughtiness there about cultural superiority and such (saw that more with Koreans than Chinese), but their kids, whom my son made friends with many of the kids, were already integrated; their parents saw the other kids as threats to their kids or enemies to be crushed, the kids saw the other kids as friends *shrug*. At college, my S is is running into students from Asia, and both the Chinese and Korean students from there tend to be very insular and unfriendly, while the kids who came here when young or were born here from the same background are the same as anyone else, they see the other students as friends and colleagues, the kids from China and Korea especially look down on the kids, Asian or non Asian, as inferior.....you always have to be careful about what first generation immigrants look like and the next ones, many of those complaining today had ancestors who were demonized, excluded, you name it.
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