njlauren
Posts: 1577
Joined: 10/1/2011
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: truckinslave
quote:
-"We have the highest percentage of non English Speaking immigrants in our history"...really?
Yes. Really. The Irish spoke English......
quote:
many of the people coming from central and south america have a lot more in common with their supposedly 'conservative' values than white trash like Honey Boo Boo and her family
I agree. Culturally, hispanics generally and Mexicans specifically should be good Rs. By "less in common with Western values" I meant such groups as Hmong, Somalians, and Muslims, all of which have been "targeted" for immigration into the United States and have little or nothing in common with our religious, social, or cultural mores... not even a shared root language.
My point is and has been that the less an immigrant population shares with its host the more difficult assimilation is. Our immigrant population (legal and illegal) is too big and assimilating too slowly. I want to cut it off, reduce it basically to zero, until those already here assimilate.
The Irish were not all the immigrants, they were the first big wave, but they were not the only ones. The US had waves of immigration, and in the 19th and early 20th century the immigration was from mostly southern and eastern Europe, when Poles, Italians, Czechs, Hungarians and others came to the US, and it dwarfed the Irish immigrants, and few of them spoke English. It should be interesting to note that in 1920, when they stiffened immigration rules, they deliberately excluded people from Eastern and Southern Europe, and a large part of that was that these people didn't speak English and also posed a threat to "native" culture.....likewise,in the 1880's there were the Asian exclusion acts, that pretty much stopped Asian immigration to the US until the 1960's,when they were repealed, for the same reason, fear of 'the yellow peril' and so forth....
One of the problems with your assertion about immigrants not from Europe and such is that it leaves out something that should be so obvious but isn't. Immigrating is a big deal, and when you move to another country it takes someone willing to do it, uproot themselves, and go, and there has to be a reason for it. Among other things, talk to immigrants, and they will tell you that when they settle someplace, they never really totally feel at home, they lose their identification with home, but they also never really get the comfort level of a native (obviously, this won't apply to all, and the feeling of comfort level will vary I am sure). And yes, economics is a big motivation, better food, better opportunities, and yes, hope of freedom from persecution, they all play into this....the key thing is the people don't pull up shop and leave for the heck of it, or for nike running shoes, they do so because they feel they have no choice.....and when they go someplace, they aren't trying bring the old country with them in the sense of forcing others to live as they do, they go someplace to live there and be part of it. While they tend to live among people like themselves, which helps them feel comfortable, they also slowly are assimilating, finding their own place, and moreso their kids, and this is an old, old pattern. What I find especially sad, that would be funny if it wasn't so serious, is when I hear about people 'taking over the culture of the US', or 'forcing their ways on everyone else', especially with Muslims. The irony is they whine about Sharia law, Muslim law taking over, yet the same buttfucks often are the ones claiming that the US is a 'Christian" nation and that "christian' morals and such should be our law, that Christian prayer should be in the schools, whine about not having the 10 commandments in public buildings and so forth....more importantly, the Muslims who come to the US for the overwhelmingly large part, do so because they know the US offers opportunities for them to live their lives as they see fit, rather than being told by others how to live, and that often is by other Muslims.......very few come here and want to recreate the oppression at home, it makes no sense. Have I heard things from Muslims that upset me? Sure, in Paterson, NJ, not too far from where I live, there is a a large Arab/Muslim population, and the local Muslim groups were upset when the state introduced an anti bullying/harassment campaign that included gays......and many were upset by that, but in the end they protested and such, but they didn't win (I might add the other group arguing against it were Hispanic parents who were Catholic or evangelical Christian, should we deport them for trying to 'force their beliefs' on others? Or the small group of black parents who protested?).
That doesn't mean I think that unlimited open borders make sense or that we don't need to come up with a rational immigration policy. For example, we claim that high tech is the wave of the future, that we need to get our population trained in tech and science and such, but what do we do? We have policies that took specialized worker visa (the H1B), that once was about getting unique talent that wasn't easily available, and turned it into a cheap foreign worker program to employ people from India and Bangladesh and Asia, depressing wages and job opportunities in the very fields we tell kids to go into, and no, it isn't that India and Bengladesh are producing waves of all these uber talented, skilled people that are better than produced in the US, most of them are routine to mediocre, and simply are brought in to work as drone labor; most work for a company for 8 months, then flit to the next job, and so forth.......or we have the waves of illegal immigration, and emphasize punishing the people who came here, and basically look the other way at the companies who gladly hire them in fields like construction and so forth, which drives the immigration, because said companies have economic power to say 'don't look at us, boss'. Once upon a time, construction trades paid a living wage, today the typical guy you see on a construction site from Mexico or South America is making 8 bucks an hour in my area, with no benefits, if the guy gets hurt on the job they are lucky if the employer takes them to the emergency room, and often are lucky if they get paid.......so there is a real debate here.
In theory, you are right, the market would work, but the irony is the people frustrated at Indian call centers or the hispanic guys working at Home Deport who can't speak English, let alone know what fire rated sheetrock is, are the same people who insist on paying the very cheapest prices they can, and they don't figure out the two go together. What happened is very simple, when walmart and then the other big retailers decided that cheap prices were everything and (rightfully) figured out most people's money wasn't where they mouth was, it forced suppliers to go offshore..then the same people who go berzerk over a black friday sale on a tv whine about jobs going overseas, dealing with "robert" in Mumbai who barely speaks english and is reading from a script, and so forth. Basically, the market would work if there were alternatives, but Wal Mart and our dear government (who gives huge tax subsidies to companies sending jobs offshore, still), made sure there weren't, and people's intrinsic need to get things as cheap as possible did the rest....
I think rational immigration policy makes sense, as does also thinking about the needs of our population rather than shareholders or executives wallets, but demonizing immigrants is scapegoating them for issues that are more fundamental, political and social issues. It is true that illegal immigrants take jobs others might once have had, jobs that teens used to get, for example, or that in fields like construction it has driven wages down so low the only people often doing it are illegal immigrants, but what that leaves out is that companies have been allowed to do this, there are laws on the books to penalize companies for hiring undocumented workers, when I get hired I have to prove that I am a US citizen, go through the hoops, but with firms that hire illegals, there rarely is any kind of major enforcement or penalties (when companies get hit with penalties for hiring illegal immigrants, amazingly the fines are generally never collected..). People who say immigration was never based upon need, who cite the statue of liberty, are pretty naive, in general, the reason large numbers of immigrants were let into this country was need, whether it was scandinavian immigrants lured to the upper midwest by railroad companies eager to have land they were granted farmed (and produce products that needed shipping by rail), or the immigrants who worked in the garment and construction trade, the factories, the steel mills and mines, you name it.....the original Chinese came here to work on the transcontinental railroad and other railroads, and were excluded when it was decided there were too many for existing jobs (and racism, of course). Jews came here and were many of the people who worked in the garment trade or in factories, Eastern Europeans often ended up in the coal mines and steel mills in Pennsylvania, etc......immigration always has had a large element of need to it. The problem today is that illegal immigration is supplying labor to business owners whom they can pay dirt bottom wages to, no benefits, while they charge people the cost as if they were paying full wages (to give you an idea, a local fence place quoted me 1200 bucks to replace an existing walk through chain link gate with a 10 foot wide double gate a car could drive through. It basically meant moving a post about 5 feet, cutting the top bar of the chain link fence to the wider width, and then attaching the two 5 foot gates to the left and right post. They would have sent a couple of mexican guys they were paying maybe 10 bucks an hour, would have taken them at most 2 hours......I ended up doing the job myself, took about 4 hours, and the parts were about 50 bucks at home depot...so the guys cost would have been about 50 bucks in labor, maybe 50 bucks in materials, and he was going to charge me 1200....). The main reason we haven't seen immigration reform is a lot of businesses don't want reform, they are making too much money exploiting illegal immigrants who they know won't fight back for fear of being deported, and they also know that for all the noise the government, especially conservatives, make about 'enforcing our borders', they know that they get the nod nod wink wink from the government aimed their way...
|
RE: I am quickly developing a problem with immigrants. - 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread