The problem could also be that the immigrants are the same, yet we’ve changed tremendously. Even in the 1950’s racism was perfectly fine, misogyny was a given and homosexuality was considered deviant - even labeled as such by the medical establishment.
Not so much growing. The Illegal Immigrant population peaked in 2006.
And they certainly have a way to acquire legal status-- go back to their home country and apply like everyone else.
Point taken. It rises and falls in accordance with U.S. labor demands among other factors.
For Mexican immigrants anyways, my understanding is that the quota for that country is completely taken up by people applying who already have family (legally) here. If that doesn’t include you, then you don’t have any realistic way of applying for a legal residence.
In anycase, given the risks and difficulties illegal immigrants take to get and stay here, I can’t imagine applying and gaining legal status is a realistic possibility for them, or they presumably would do that instead of trying to wander through the desert
How could celebration of diversity possibly be at odds with assimilation? They’re the same thing! When you don’t assimilate, you end up with the immigrants all clustered in their own ghettos and enclaves. When you celebrate diversity, you end up with them all taking part in the same society.
True, but perhaps more slots would open up if everyone here illegally returned to their home countries and applied for entry. There might be some mixing of cause and effect here. Farmers would be literally screaming to loosen immigration policy, if there weren’t so many folks here illegally.
But what if it feels right?
Maybe, though employers have been pushing for looser immigration policy for a decade or more
Plus, from the individual immigrants perspective, “go back to your home country, and get all the other 11 million other illegal immigrants to go back with you and then wait and hope for the deadlocked American political system to increase immigration quotas and then apply for re-entry” leaves a lot to be desired as far as plans go.
Sure it does. But the complaint that there aren’t enough legal spots open when there are so many folks here illegally is not something I’m all that receptive to.
Don’t get me wrong. I am, on a certain level, very sympathetic with the folks who are here illegally. If I were in their place, I’d probably be doing the same thing. However, I hope I would be self-aware enough to realize that may actions were creating a problem for those who, back home, were trying to get in legally. The two issues are not unrelated.
Nobody emigrates for that!
I don’t know how serious this is but celebration of diversity is just one way of looking at the world, just one sort of ethos. Trying to assimilate people who have an ethos at odds with this would be difficult or impossible. As impossible as it would be for one of us to go somewhere and after a while start believing women, gays and blacks are inherently inferior and should be treated as such.
Celebrating diversity is in reality an impossibility and almost oxymoronic when applied to population norms. A population can only celebrate diversity in a limited way - the diversity ends at accepting racists and homophobes for example.
What social safety net are you referring to? Most immigrants are not eligible for much more than food stamps (with the curious exception of Cubans).
Do you think the actions of the typical American also contribute to illegal immigration?
I know I’m not thinking about immigration policy when I seek out low prices in the produce section. But I’m self-aware enough to know that someone is picking those cheap tomatoes. This self-awareness isn’t going to make me change my consumer habits, though.
Probably true.
But once you’re here, and you don’t speak the language, and don’t have many skills, and have a choice of working your fingers to the bone and sacrificing to be self-sufficient, or taking it a bit easier, it’s very tempting. Which is very nice in the short run, but in the long term, at the group level, does not work out as well. At any rate, it’s different than the earlier waves of immigrants who had to sink or swim, which is to the point of the OP.
They’re eligible for some and not others. Virtually all poor immigrants get one form or another of free medical care, for example.
But more importantly, American-born children of immigrants (whether legal or illegal) are citizens and entitled to full benefits. So if the question is about the future of the current wave of immigrants, as compared to what the outcome was for the prior waves of immigrants, the issue is significant.
It’s odd that you would identify the safety net as a change that makes immigrants different. Do you believe it has some different impact on first or second generation immigrants than it has on anyone else in America? If not, isn’t it a bit like answering the OP’s question by pointing out that because of advances in science immigrants now have access to genetic testing?
Fotheringay-Phipps, governmental hand-outs to immigrants is hardly a new thing.
It’s a bit different because new immigrants are self-contained sub-cultures to a greater extent than other Americans. So if a given immigrant community is poorer than average (which is not uncommon), and social safety net payments become widespread in that community, then there’s a greater risk that this will become the accepted way of life than there is that it will become the accepted way of life among the country as a whole.
Meaning, suppose for example that 70% of Elbonians are on some sort of welfare, and Elbonians think of themselves as something of a distinct community, then this will have a bigger effect on whether a given Elbonian thinks of welfare as a way of life than there would be for some random American who has some vague knowledge that a lot of his grandparents immigrated from Italy or Germany or wherever. Because the latter would identify more with the vast majority of Americans who are not on welfare and who in many cases think of people on welfare as losers to an extent. But if you identify primarily with your Elbonian community, where “everyone does it”, then you might do it too without thinking too much about it.
Which is not to say that this is not an issue for native-born Americans too. But it’s a bigger issue for immigrant communities, which tend to be poorer and more isolated than the native-born, as above.
[Even if it were the same for native-born as for immigrants, it would still not detract from the point being made, which is about the comparison of current immigrants to prior immigrants, and not the comparison of current immigrants to current native-born people. But at any rate it’s a bigger issue for new immigrant communities, as above.]
True. But those hand-outs required that the recipient work pretty hard after getting it. So it couldn’t breed a culture of long-term dependence.
You do realize that our current version of welfare requires individuals work, right?
There’s no one “welfare”; there are a lot of different programs available. Some have work requirements, most don’t, and even the ones that do have a lot of exceptions.
It’s not remotely comparable to telling someone “here’s some land, go make whatever you can of it”.