A few years ago I was friends with a coworker and we went out for dinner.
She was 3rd generation Hispanic and lamented the fact that she knew little Spanish. She was really feeling bad about it.
I told her I was 2nd generation German and knew little German and it didn’t bother me and she said…
“That’s different”
In what why, I asked?
…it just is.
Lamentations over immigration have been going on since before the US was a country. Benjamin Franklin supposedly railed about German immigrants. In the mid-19th century a sizable political party was created mostly to keep out Irish immigrants. In the early 20th century there were riots on the West coast to keep out Asian immigrants.
The argument is always that the previous waves “assimilated” while the current ones are not. I mostly disagree with that argument but I will throw this out: each of those waves changed American culture in ways that are accepted now as part of their assimilation; modern objectors to immigrants are comfortable with those changes because they lived through them. 50 years from now American society will be slightly different because of the current immigrants and we’ll be fine.
I wonder does modern communications technology stall assimilation at all? You can read newspapers from your home country, websites, and watch television from home too.
That’s an excellent point. Take a tour of Ellis island and you’ll see pictures of immigrant laborers being taught English after a day or work. To a degree, I’m sure they felt it a necessity if they wanted to avail themselves of all their new society offered. With the options you mention, the “need” is greatly diminished. That does not serve us well.
From what I’ve read, it has the opposite effect. Thanks to television, radio, and the internet, immigrants today are much more exposed to English on a daily basis than immigrants were a hundred years ago and their language assimilation is accelerated by this.
A lot of people in this thread have made the same point, but it’s a very weak argument in my opinion.
I’ll play Devil’s advocate: if you bought a nice house in the suburbs a generation ago, and now find you can’t speak with your neighbors, and can’t expect guests to find a parking place in front of your house, and can’t rely on being treated at the emergency room, it’s not much comfort (nor is it very rational) to expect that everything will somehow sort itself out in 50 years in spite of poor planning today.
No, it’s a very good argument. Being as past predictions that German immigrants and Irish immigrants and Italian immigrants and Eastern European immigrants would ruin this country all proved to be false, then the assumption should be that current predictions that Mexican immigrants will ruin this country are most likely just as false.
First of all, the idea that historical patterns can be used to predict the future is a logical fallacy that most of us un-learn in elementary school.
Second, nobody of any intelligence is saying “ruin this country.” We’re pointing to very specific problems that exist now, and should have been foreseen and avoided.
We did? They didn’t teach me that in my school. We were told history was a useful guide for predicting the future.
What did they teach you was a good method for predicting the future? Astrology? Tarot cards? I Ching?
So based on your post, I’d guess your answer to how present U.S. immigration is different from earlier waves is that you don’t like your neighbours and you’d like to have them deported. Because they have chickens and somebody took your parking space.
Careful re. the illegitimacy rate. Many of those are the product of common-law marriages. My cousin spent 8 years in Venezuela as a secular missionary: what she did was help people with paperwork. She met many people who thought they weren’t legally allowed to be married because an ancestor of one of them had been illegitimate; who thought they couldn’t send their kids to school because they weren’t married…
When I was in Mexico, a coworker took a day off because his parents were getting married. Seven kids, a boatload of greatkids, and they finally decided to get around to doing the paperwork when the grandkids started asking “why aren’t Grandpa and Grandma married?”
As for working fewer hours, I work fewer hours than many of my coworkers. I also get a lot more work done. It’s not a good indicator at all.
I have encountered this reluctance to teach children English. However, I would be very interested in seeing citations indicated that the rate of “assimilation” of Mexican (+ south of there) immigrants and their children is atypically slow, as this runs counter to my current understanding of the matter.
Wow, what a stunningly wrong and offensive misreading. I said nothing of the sort of course. You should leave your stereotypes at the door next time.
I’ll check out now, because it’s impossible to carry on against such dishonest debate tactics. Sorry to anyone else who wanted to have a reasoned discussion about this issue.
Key Lime Guy - Post #26 - 10-25-2008 10:48 am: “The general quality-of-life has changed. (Not uncommon in LA: 3 families living together in a suburban house and raising chickens.)”
Key Lime Guy - Post #46 - 10-27-2008 7:03 pm: “if you bought a nice house in the suburbs a generation ago, and now find you can’t speak with your neighbors, and can’t expect guests to find a parking place in front of your house”
Some forms of diversity are good and some aren’t. If you’re trying to design a car, it helps to have many different kinds of people contributing ideas. Women use cars a little differently than men and having women involved in the design can increase the chance that the car will be successful. But it would be counterproductive to have someone on the design team agitating to put the steering wheel on the right because that’s how cars are built in his country. When I see, for instance, immigrants demanding that local governments and courts cater to them in their frequently very obscure native languages, or allowing them to settle disputes according to foreign legal traditions, I don’t see cultural richness. I see someone screwing up the system by insisting on driving on the wrong side of the road.
There have been a number of posters who have completely missed or ignored the point I made in my first post. To answer what is different about this wave of immigration compared to past ones, I gave the very simple answer that previous waves eventually tapered off. People are using the supposed success of the 1880-1920 wave, something that had a start and a stop, to justify a permanently high level of immigration. I think that is a disastrously false lesson. If one believes in using history as a guide, then 40 years of high immigration at one time (1880-1920 or 1965-the present) is enough. Letting it go on longer than that, especially in the face of widespread public opposition, is going into uncharted territory.
Also, immigration supporters say that immigrants assimilate, and immigration opponents say they don’t. But at current levels of immigration, it doesn’t matter, because there is always a large number of very recent arrivals. If we say very optimistically that it takes five years for an immigrant to assimilate, that means there are about five million unassimilated immigrants continually present at current rates of immigration. Most people think that’s too many, especially when they are so concentrated in a particular area. Maybe some political scientist can some in here and explain how this supposedly democratic government has been able to ignore public opinion for so long.
I missed this one earlier. Spanish speakers are currently in the absolute majority among persons younger than 18 in LA County. So how do you figure English will be number one on 50 years?
Based on this thread, I’d say it’s because Americans who consider immigration reduction a high-priority issue are far fewer than you seem to think.
According to that link, 85% of under-18 Spanish speakers in LA County speak English “well” (26%) or “very well” (59%), so it seems that English is not in a bit of danger.
As your cite clearly shows, the vast majority of people who speak Spanish also speak English. I’m guessing the great majority of people who grow up speaking English do not learn Spanish. So English remains, and will remain, the dominant language.
And since when was 47% an “Absolute majority”?
Those are objective truths. You turned them into my subjective feelings:
Little Nemo - Post #49 - 10-27-2008 09:02 PM: “you don’t like your neighbours and you’d like to have them deported.”
This is tantamount to a personal attack, and it’s also not true.
What a pathetic method of debating! I really can’t believe I’m continuing to spend time responding.
I see your committment to your statement that you were leaving this debate is as steadfast as that to the other statements you’ve made.