You really seem interested in emphasizing the point that people who want less immigration are on the same side as Hitler. I still don’t know what that proves. There’s a pro-Mexican immigration group that is far more explicitly anti-Semitic and admiring of Hitler than anything you’ll hear left of the KKK. So what?
I’m going to expand on my statement about the Chinese Exclusion Act being racist. When it was in effect, few people bothered to distinguish between the racial differences and the cultural differences between Chinese and Americans. Because racism was not the social stigma it is today, people didn’t bother to say, “I oppose Chinese immigration on cultural grounds, not racial grounds.” So I don’t think it’s possible to characterize the Chinese Exclusion Act as purely racist in motivation. (It was sometimes said that the Chinese were inherently unassimilable, but that was also said of Southern and Eastern Europeans, so that doesn’t quite make it a racist position.)
Why does this matter? People around the world, even those from racist cultures themselves (like China), know that the worst thing you can call an American is racist. So if they want mass immigration to the U.S. to continue, they’ll try hard to characterize opposition to immigration as racist. The truth is much more complex. There is ample evidence that Mexican immigration has economically damaged African-Americans disproportionately to whites in Southern California. Is it racist to allow that to continue? Also, under today’s immigration policy, it’s much easier for Chinese, Indians, and Latinos to immigrate than whites or blacks. Pro-immigrationists display a studied lack of curiosity about these things.
Actually, immigraiton laws that specifically excluded Asians from eligiblity for naturalization were on the books until 1952, and the effects of racially discriminatory immigration laws are being felt to this day:
The Diversity Visa Lottery was created in partial compensation for all the years that people of certain nationalities were completely barred from immigrating and/or strongly underrepresented as a result of national origin-based quotas.
I’ll try to spell this out for you in simple language. I’m not happy with any policy or action of the US government that has been or would be praised as a model to follow by someone like Adolf Hitler.
In my opinion it is not at all hard to slip from a position wanting stricter immigration controls to an attitude of “they” are ruining our perfect country.
We are all immigrants unless you are the one true Native American Hyperelastic. Now that you’re ancesters made it you seem to want to pull up the ladder. Lot’s of luck. The US is getting overcrowded. Hell, the world is getting overcrowded and to believe that the US can remain a sparsely populated enclave is naive. We simply have to have an immigration policy that recognizes that fact, and I don’t think posting a bunch of vigilantes at the Mexican border is such a policy.
Some of my ancestors were immigrants, but most were settlers. There’s a big difference.
At some point, you have to, don’t you? If it’s a matter of life or death, people can get in as refugees. Otherwise, I see no obligation for the government to foist mass immigration on an unwilling native population.
If your sense of fairness demands that today’s immigrants should be entitled to the same opportunities as those enjoyed by the last great wave of immigrants (my immigrant ancestors arrived in 1910), remember that there used to be forced assimilation, no welfare state, and an almost complete cutting of ties to the home country. Modern American society will not tolerate a return to that, so it is not reasonable to expect mass immigration to work out the same way it did the last time.
Moreover, many of the dire predictions made during the previous wave of immigration were essentially correct. Take Cleveland as an example (I happen to be familiar with the demographics because I’m from there). Cleveland was settled by New Englanders - you can see it in the layout of the city around a public square. In 1880 it was about as WASPy as you can get. Then the immigrants came. By 1920, Cleveland was overwhelmingly foreign, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. It was a completely different city, kind of like the change Los Angeles went through over the past few decades. It was my ancestors who wrought those changes, but that does not prevent me from seeing that those who warned that Cleveland was going to be changed utterly by immigration (a) had a point, and (b) were proven right by history.
If you’re talking about the “Minutemen”, they seem more akin to a neighborhood watch than vigilantes. They’ve been out there for a couple of weeks now and nobody’s gotten a scratch.
Don’t paint with such a broad brush. I’m sure Hitler, who decreed the construction of the Autobahns in Germany, would have admired our Interstate Highway System if he had lived to see it, and there’s nothing oppressive about that, is there? (Some environmentalists may disagree . . .)
While I’m willing to argue that the motrives of the anti-immigration movement are not fueled by racism, as someone who is married to the granddaughter of non-WASP immigrants who ended up in Cleveland, whose family made their own little contribution in making the city “completely different,” this particular example sticks in my craw.
Let me state it more clearly - my own great-grandparents hit Cleveland in 1910 fresh from a fishing village in Sicily. They moved into a neighborhood around E. 25th St. that was 95% foreign-born, mostly Italian. They never bothered, or needed, to learn much English because they made their living selling bread and macaroni to other Italians. Personally, I like the way Cleveland turned out, because those were my people (I’m certainly no WASP.)
But – those who dominated Cleveland before the great wave of immigration liked the way their city was, wanted it to stay that way, and rightly predicted that immigration would change it forever. I chose the word “change” carefully; I didn’t say they “ruined” it. I won’t argue whether any particular cultural change is objectively good or bad - such arguments are futile, because what is culture other than an intellectually arbitrary set of customs?
Today, you have people who think a city with no sizable foreign or minority population is morally defective. Look at any thread on the SDMB about quality of life in a city. Odds are, someone will either complain that it’s too “white-bread”, or enthuse over the interesting foreign enclaves. The elites are so receptive to this kind of judgmentalism that you can make a good living peddling it in books. I’ve even seen people post that they delight in having signs in their neighborhood in languages they can’t understand. What possible sense does that make? How can you be enriched by a foreign enclave if you can’t understand what they are saying? I think some people treat foreigners like objets d’art instead of human beings - “I don’t speak Thai, and I have no Thai friends or interest in Thai culture, but I’d never live in a city without a good Thai restaurant.”
I’m getting overexcited here, but I’ll just conclude by saying that I believe that the desire of people to preserve their culture in a particular region is at least as legitimate as the desire of others to want to extend their culture to places it does not presently influence. There are no easy answers. If the government is going to promote mass immigration, cultures are going to collide, and there are going to be winners and losers. Polygamy is either legal, or it isn’t. Female circumcision is either legal, or it isn’t.
But immigrants to the U.S., for the most part, are not seeking to “extend their culture to places it does not presently influence.” (That’s what the Americans did when we settled the West.) What most immigrants want is better economic prospects than they have back home. If they are sometimes reluctant to assimilate to American culture, it’s because assimilation is never easy and (like your grandparents) they would rather put it off as long as possible – not because they want to colonize America with enclaves of their own culture. (Some Latino radicals might want to do that, but I’m sure they’re a minority within the Latino community.)
Of course, and they came to America (during the last Ice Age or whenever) as settlers, not immigrants. The difference is whether the newcomers enter a territory with an existing society into which they join. Immigrants might not immediately assimilate to their new country’s culture but they do immediately start participating in its economy and society, and assimilation usually follows, in one or two generations at the latest. In the Indians’ case, there was nobody else there when they arrived. In the Anglo-American settlers’ case, the Indians were there, but the whites vastly outnumbered them and, in any case, intended to supplant them – kill them or push them aside – rather than assimilate to their culture or their economy. A third category would be conquerors, like the Spanish in Mexico and South America – who did not exterminate the Indians, but subjugated them and set themselves up as a ruling caste. And a fourth would be transients. Many “immigrants” to America in the 19th Century stayed just long enough to make some money, then returned to their homelands; and many foreigners in America today are not true immigrants but come only for seasonal work (or to attend college), with no intention of becoming permanent residents.
Pat Buchanan and Linda Chavez are both Townhall collumnists. Her collumn here is the story of the the demographic change in the world.
Linda Chavez knows personally that assimilation can work.
Yes, immigrants, the parents from the old country, are resistant to change. But it is their children; the new and younger generation of Asians and Hispanics that are assimilating.
“Between one third and one half of all young, U.S.-born Asian Americans and Hispanics now marry whites.” That is a significant statistic which goes against a major anti-immigration arguement.
I’ll say it again. Assimilation works! The fallacy of the arguement is that we are looking at the short term effects of people coming to America but we aren’t thinking about the long term results.
Whether those numbers are good or bad is debatable. Historically, immigrants have tended to assimilate within a couple of generations. However, three factors that promoted assimilation in the past no longer exist.
One is the widespread acceptance among people like teachers and judges that assimilation was desirable (multiculturalism killed that).
Another is that immigration slowed dramatically between the First World War and 1965, providing a long breathing space. With current levels of immigration, which rival or exceed those at the height of the last great wave, there is a perpetual, large group of unassimilated recent immigrants.
A third factor is that immigration from Europe in the age of steamship travel meant that once you were gone, you were gone for at least a year, and you couldn’t phone home. Now, a large proportion of immigrants (an overwhelming majority in some areas) come from Mexico, and legal Mexican immigrants can pretty much come and go as they please. The middle school where I used to tutor, which is 95% Mexican, closes for the entire month of December because the kids go home to Mexico. That is not assimilation.
These are mostly U.S.-born kids of illegals. They are considered U.S. citizens. I suspect most of their parents plan to stay here as long as we’ll have them.
The point is that the school is taking double the normal Christmas break in order to accommodate lengthy visits to Mexico. Even then, a lot of the kids don’t come back until two or three weeks into the New Year. Ask any teacher what a long break like that does to a kid’s education.
Changing the fundamental operation of a school in order to accommodate Mexican norms is not doing these kids any favors at all. In fact, if they run schools according to Mexican traditions, the schools will be just like Mexican schools, which kind of defeats one purpose of immigration, doesn’t it?
Also, speaking of assimilation, the room we tutored in had a picture of Cesar Chavez, a Mexican flag, and several large Aztec-style wallhangings, but no American flag. This is a conscious attempt by the Mexican faculty to maintain Mexican culture in an American public school. The idea that Mexican nationalism is a fringe belief that plays no part in Mexican immigration is just not true. It’s amusing to me how liberals fret about the conspicuous display of American flag bumper stickers, yet have no qualms about Mexican decals (flags, state of origin, Calvin pissing on “La Migra”, etc.), which are about equal in number to the American flag decals in Los Angeles. If you’re an American patriot in America, you’re somehow suspect, but if you’re a Mexican patriot in America, that’s OK.
One room? I assume that the Mexican faculty weren’t illegal immigrants or resident aliens? You admit the kids are US citizens. Sounds like you are complaining more about Americans of Mexican decent than illegal immigrants.
The Mexican national movement that you mention earlier ( Atzlan ) is a fringe minority group of nutcases. Not unlike anti-immigrant groups like Ranch Rescue and the Arizona Guard.
This is a free country. You can use Mexican decals just as freely as American decals.
There are problems with illegal immigration. They are enviromental, economic, and security. Not some notion about a decay of some mythical monolithic US culture.
That was the only room I had occasion to go into. I tutored once a week, on my lunch hour.
I am most definitely complaining about Americans of Mexican descent, although if you called them that, they’d probably object and demand to be referred to as “Mexicans living abroad.”
There is a whole spectrum of Mexican nationalist activism that is strongly entrenched in Southwest U.S. politics. When the Speaker of the California Assembly is an unreconstructed Mexican nationalist socialist, you have a problem.
Of course. Mexicans are using their freedom of speech to conspicuously display their loyalty to a foreign government and contempt for ours. It’s not a free speech issue, it’s an assimilation issue.
I’ve never understood this resistance to the idea that there is a distinct American culture. It’s derived from British folkways, centers around the English language, religious tolerance, and representative government. There are various minority cultures, which are tolerated to a degree unknown in any other country with the possible exception of Canada, but they just prove the rule. How can something so obvious be so controversial? I suppose it’s easy to take for granted, but look at what goes on in other parts of the world.