You’ll be wanting to scroll up on that wikipedia page.
The whole anti-Ginger thing is ridiculous. You’re telling me that all the racists are going to turn against people with red hair just because they need someone to look down on? What about the fact that all of these people are likely to have members of their own families with red hair. Anyone with any Celtic blood, which would be like 75% of America, is probably going to have some recessive genes for red hair, and maybe not even just them - I’ve met Poles, Russians and Eastern European Jews with red hair. Thomas Jefferson had red hair. Are all these people going to start condemning Thomas Jefferson?
There was a time when there was ethnic strife between different European groups - especially the Irish, but also the Poles, Germans, Scandinavians, Eastern Europeans and Italians. And, of course, the Jews. Today there is virtually none, except for anti-Semitism. My prediction would be that if someone has to bear the brunt of of bigotry after the immigrants are gone, it would be the Jews.
The whole anti-ginger thing comes from a damn south park episode.
I think you’d have a situation parallelling a cross between some sort of The Postman or Canticle for Leibowitz style post-Apocalyptia and massive social upheaval as it turns out that half the doctors at the local hospital are from India, that the maintenance crew at the phone and power companies are made up of Canadians and Mexicans, the city’s chief Engineer was born in China, and several of the local police officers turned out to be from various countries that weren’t the US.
Then, as someone pointed out, you’d have the diplomatic repercussions as everyone wanted to know where their Nationals went to (assume Alternate Earth is a nice place with happy feelings and kittens and [insert things everyone likes here]).
In short, I don’t think it would be pretty.
I must say that I find this a bit of a useless exercise. Unlike, for instance, exploring what would happen if every ILLEGAL immigrant was expelled.) May I ask why you created this thread?
[/QUOTE]
Well, I heard some people at the supermarket the other day make some unfortunate comments about a certain ethnic group, and that got me thinking about racism and Xenophobia. Then I remembered an old Twilight Zone episode along the “be careful what you wish for because you just might get it” theme, and thought “This could be an interesting discussion thread”. I chose America because most of the posters here are American and the country is famously founded on immigration. Happy?
And such incidents as “Kick a Ginger Day” last year.
Also, I see little difference between most people who hate illegal immigration and those who just hate immigrants. I’ve dealt with such people before; and they refer to anyone who “looks foreign” as an illegal immigrant. They just know that someone is illegal.
I regard the majority of the anti-illegal alien movement as simply anti-immigrant with a facade about a concern for law and order. If the “illegal” part mattered so much, they’d be just as angry with the richer, whiter people who break the law by offering the poorer, browner illegal immigrants jobs. And they’d be just as angry at white, English speaking immigrants as they are at brown Spanish or Hindi speaking ones.
I dont know why you would call it a disaster, it doesnt seem very bad to me.
Prices would not go up, they would go down with a decrease in demand, esp housing prices.
No more traffic, no lines, no more waiting at the hospital ER. Our prisons would be half empty, cops would have little to do, unemployment would cease to exist. No more gang wars. America would once again become energy self-sufficient.
Taxes would go way down, big cuts in welfare spending and food stamps, and our state and federal governments would have surplus budgets. No more deficts in our balance of trade, and the value of the US dollar would skyrocket.
Very little air and water pollution, and lots and lots of reclaiming of the land, more forests, more fields, more farms, etc after 100 million people vacate.
English would be the language in the United States.
America would look, and act, a lot like the 1940’s again.
But people’s mortgages don’t go down when the price of their house goes down. Even more people get underwater on their homes than the 23% of homeowners who are underwater now.
Renters would face problems, too. Some landlords have mortgages on their properties, too. If they do, the amount they have to pay for the mortgage doesn’t go down because the demand for the property does. Landlords in this situation would have to cut back on things like maintenance and security, which might make their rental housing a less nice place to live.
You’re assuming we keep the same number of jobs we have now. We wouldn’t. Businesses would lose customers as well as employees. Immigrants like my neighbors buy stuff, too.
There are only about 31 million foreign born people in the US.
That’s interesting. But I don’t get why, after hearing what you did at the supermarket, you jumped to ponder about ALL immigrants. That’s certainly not a common complaint. The complaint is about illegal immigrants. I have NEVER heard anyone rant that we shouldn’t have any immigration at all (except for possibly a short moratorium, to encourage assimilation). My guess is that you didn’t go that route with your hypothetical because the world with no illegals would turn out just fine.
God help the blacks (and gingers).
No one says that, since so many of us are the children or grandchildren of immigrants. But when any “alien” people move into an area in fairly large numbers, there is resentment to some extent. That even occurs when they are moving into million dollar houses.
It is more love of the status quo than racism - where I used to live in New Jersey, there was some resentment by the old time residents against the wave of people (I was one) who moved in to work at the nearby research centers, almost all of us US born and raised. It was an undercurrent, but it was there.
Most of the blacks in America are native born, which makes your comment ridiculous. This topic has absolutely nothing to do with black native born Americans.
So?
So what?
Most things that you borrow money to buy, are not worth the same after you have used it for a while.
I am sure your car, your television, your stereo, your pajamas, etc are not worth the same amount today as what you originally paid for it.
Obviously, we are not going to get rid of legal immigrants.
We can, and should, get rid of all illegal immigrants, we must deport all of them immediately.
However, the topic does bring up the question as to should we continue to have immigration at all.
Do we really “need” more people living in this country?
Do we really need hundreds of millions of more people living here?
Do we really have so many unfilled jobs that we need to import hundreds of millions of more job seekers?
Do we still have millions of acres of empty unclaimed land that needs to be homesteaded?
Immigration is a tool that should only be used when you absolutely need to have more people living here.
Immigration was a useful tool a hundred years ago, but it makes no sense today.
Wow. You don’t get it, do you?
YOU said that the result of this would be that:
To which **Attack from the 3rd dimension ** replied that this would not be a good thing for blacks. Because, I am not sure if you know, blacks were not treated very well in the 1940’s in America. That whole segregation malarkey.
Thanks villa. I was beginning to think I was hallucinating.
Susanann, I don’t think you’re reading carefully. Multiple times within this thread the comment has been made that the purveyors of discrimination would turn on native born targets - black people, and semi-facetiously, red-haired people, or ‘gingers’, if immigrants disappeared.
Your ode to an America without immigrants, and in particular your summary sentence:
summed this up nicely, especially since the 40’s was a period with fewer immigrants, and visible minorities were even more discriminated against. The fact that you were making this comment without any sort of recognition of this fact suggests you didn’t think about this, don’t know about the 40’s, or don’t care. Your subsequent comment:
again suggests that you are not reading the thread carefully. If you have any difficulty in this regard, or perhaps I’m being to subtle, I’ll spell it out more carefully.
[Spelling it out] I propose that IF all the immigrants went away, the jerks who treat people badly because of their skin color, accent, dress or other easy identifier of otherness would turn their focus on native born people who are in any way different, such as black people or japanese people. In many bad ways, this would be a regression to a less enlightened time, such as the 1940’s. [/Spelling]
You may or may not approve of this result, I cannot say, I merely point it out, since you didn’t seem to be understanding this point.
Oh, in the interest of full disclosure, I should also point out that I am an immigrant*.
- A white anglo saxon immigrant to Canada.
There is also the possibility that she could think it was a good thing (you know, blacks in their place and all…).
I didn’t want to be the one to drag this thread to the pit, so I thought I’d let her comment as she saw fit.
The difference is (with the possible exception of the car, but not in my case), I don’t make a monthly payment on those things. I do on my house.
Now, imagine that my situation changes and I can no longer afford to make that monthly payment on my house, as has happened to so many people recently. Or maybe I need to move to another city to find a job. If that happened to me tomorrow, I could sell my house and pay off my mortgage, and then look for an apartment or a cheaper house, or move to another city.
But if I can’t sell my house for enough money to pay off my mortgage, then I have to come up with a large amount of money to pay it off before I can sell my house and look for cheaper housing (or else persuade the bank to accept less money than they loaned me, which banks are understandably reluctant to do). That puts me between a rock and a hard place if my situation changes and I need to sell my house.
ETA: I don’t borrow money to buy those things, and a lot of people don’t. More do to buy a car, but there are a lot of us who don’t have to borrow money to buy a TV or pajamas.
Beats me why anyone would think going back to the 1940s would be a good thing. That decade was one of the worst in the world’s history.