" Religious zealotry, oppression of women, and extremely retrograde sexual mores"
No worries. We have many homegrown examples of such in this country, often in the name of some branch of christianity.
Or Hassidic Judaism.
It is a known problem, and is arguably what spurred the populist movement over there, notably in places like the UK, Hungary, and France. The elite “limousine liberal” types who are creating/revising these pro-multiculturalist policies typically aren’t the ones living in the trenches so to speak, where the real, gritty working class multicultural mixing is occurring. They are simply not experiencing the day to day problems associated with extreme multiculturalism. They live in affluent neighborhoods, surrounded by other successful, educated people from different backgrounds who speak multiple languages well (including the native language), have an easy/carefree commute to work, shop at high end stores, eat at high end restaurants, send their kids to private schools, and in general mingle with people primarily in their socioeconomic class. So even though there is multiculturalism taking place, it is an attractive/ideal form of it.
That attractive form of multiculturalism simply doesn’t exist in many working class neighborhoods, hence why the primarily working class populist party people are upset. Immigrants moving into their neighborhoods often barely speak the native language (if at all), are poorly educated, are not interested whatsoever in local culture or traditions, are uncouth, etc. etc… whatever the situation may be. The seamless blending of cultures is simply not occurring… instead, cultures have become segregated into parallel societies, and everyone just kind of does their own thing within their own culture. And then to top it all off, the policy makers are guilt-tripping them, labeling them as racists and bigots for feeling the way that they do, and that they need to embrace multiculturalism… I imagine it’s frustrating and depressing.
I think most people would love to live somewhere where the top example of multiculturalism was prevalent.
I am incredibly insulted by how you just characterized members of my family. uncouth? Segregated and parallel societies? You are painting with a very broad brush.
I am running through my husband’s cousins in my head. I cannot think of one that married another Latino. Education is prized and celebrated. There are factory workers and painters as well as business owners, IT specialists, and a Fellow at am ivy institute.
I think you don’t see us because we don’t appear as an “other” to you in our JCrew and Gap clothing, driving Subarus and Audis, cheering on our kids in hockey games.
Seems like many modern day countries (including but not limited to those in Europe) have not learned this lesson, since they have put themselves in the vicious cycle situation of hostility toward immigrants and local-born descendants* leading toward segregation and hostility among them against the majority group, inciting greater hostility among the majority group toward the minority group, inciting greater hostility among the minority group toward the majority group, etc…
*This includes lack of jus soli citizenship, so that many are born and live all or most of their lives in a country where they are denied citizenship, but have little or no connection to the country that they may have citizenship in, or are stateless.
Of course I’m painting with a broad brush… what do you want me to start listing off every neighborhood in Europe and doing an in-depth analysis here?? Give me a break…
Does anyone have a link to an explanation of what is being proposed with the points system? It is being compared to our system in Canada but I have heard comments that it will effectively reduce the number of legal immigrants. The U.S. Already has a much smaller proportion of legal immigrants and thus this will make the gap even wider? Are there provisions also for family reconciliation and refugees?
Here is an article https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/08/02/sweeping-trump-plan-upend-and-slash-legal-immigration-draws-rebukes/533936001/
It will affect families.
@fractalmstr Do you think that this is what is occurring in the US or will occur?
Re: #127
The part of Cotton’s RAISE proposal that reduces the number of legal immigrants is the reduction of the categories of family-based immigration, not the point system, which is presumably intended to replace the existing overcomplicated mess of employment or skills based visa categories that exists now.
Of course, with a point system like in Canada, the number of immigrants allowed through employment or skills can be adjusted by adjusting the point threshold. If the US were to emulate Canada with respect to immigration, it would have to allow a significantly higher level of immigration than it has now, and retain provision for some family-based immigration beyond what Cotton’s RAISE proposal would allow, in addition to going to a point system for employment or skills based immigration.
One thing that such a point based merit system could do is to eliminate the exploitive H-1B visa program.
Boy, reading this thread makes me realize how successful a pivot the proposed legislation has been.
Apparently in reference to #122 and #126…
Increased hostility toward immigrants or elimination of jus soli citizenship will make it more likely to occur.
Here is a summary of Cotton’s RAISE proposal, including the proposed point system for employment and skilled based immigration, cuts to family based immigration, limit on refugee immigration, and elimination of the diversity visa lottery:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40814625
The text of the bill is here:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/354/text
However, since it is written as changes to existing law, you probably need to read it alongside existing law to understand what changes it makes.
Junior and I watched PBS last night, enjoying a show about the nature and beauty of the west coast and islands of Ireland. We talked about Irish immigration to the Americas (many of the coastal villages and farms of 150 years ago are abandoned today). What he really found surprising was that by many WASPs, Irish Catholic immigrants in America generally were not considered “white,” say from the antebellum period until well after the turn of the century.
When I was a kid the population of the United States hit the 200 million mark. We are now over 300+ million people. I have never understood why immigration into this country is not viewed through the environmental impact it will have.
Farm land is being developed for housing. The fruited plain is now a subdivision or a warehouse. Open space is disappearing. The need for more energy imposes severe environmental impacts no matter what it’s source. Water is a finite resource. The roads are clogged with traffic.
We Americans have to look at immigration from the prism of what is good for the country and the people already here.
Immigration has always raised these passions, there have been ‘culture battles’ going back to the founding of this country, I am sure the Native Americans were shocked at European ideas that land could be owned, for example, and they had the right to determine who could hunt where, or that with something basic like food it was okay one guy was fully sated and another was starving to death…
In the 19th century, Nativists were worried about the influx of “Papists” destroying our country, putting it under the control of the pope, first with the Irish, then with the Italians and Poles (and there in some ways was some truth to that, in some places like Boston the local church hierarchy were responsible for things like books being banned, a magazine was effectively shut down by the post office because it had an ad for a book that advocated for birth control back in the 1920s, because of the power of the Catholic Bishops back then). The old money wasps were worried in the 19th century about the Nouveau riche industrialists, all these crass buffoons with more money than culture (their words, not mine), and museums and institutions like the Metropolitan Museum were designed to preserve “their” culture, classical music and classical painting, versus tin pan alley and cartoons I guess lol.
The problem is people forget and like so many things, look at the past as being some perfect melting pot that turned out “Americans” right out of the bat, much the same way the 1950’s have been mythologized, and it isn’t true. Both sides of my family come from immigrant stock (different types, but still), my dad wasn’t born here, came here at 6 in the late 20’s, my grandfather came here just before they closed the door on us “Swarthy” types (Southern Italian in my case). My grandfather and grandmother never really learned more than broken English and maybe they could read and write, but they didn’t have to, they lived in areas with fellow Italians, and my grandfather being a stonemason most of the people he worked with were Italian. My father was fully fluent in multiple languages, he spoke Italian, he spoke general english, and he could speak Bronx-ese, too grin, as were his brothers…and the rest is a 'typical" American story,2 of the brothers were engineers, third one was skilled trade but had been to college, next generation all have advanced degrees shrug. Yet back then there were those who would point at my dad’s family and say “how come they don’t speak English?” and the like (NYC it is true would be a bit difficult, given in any apartment building you would hear many dozens of languages spoken), but it was common to hear that about immigrants in other parts of the country, because they are facing the first generation…and from what i can tell, with recent immigrants it is the same thing.
I also will add that the US has had a mass of immigration from other places except central and south america, yet few people are complaining about that with our 'culture" being overwhelmed, in the NYC area there are areas of the city, and suburban towns, that have become mostly one group (Korean or Chinese mostly), but I don’t hear people for the most part complaining about that, that the people in the towns are speaking Korean or Chinese, that stores often have signs only in their language, Korean churches, etc…meanwhile, my wife and I have seen plenty of times where we are in a store, people are speaking Spanish, and people around them are muttering and giving them the stink eye, and I have heard plenty of times “why don’t you speak English, this is America” muttered audibly…but I have never seen that where people are speaking Chinese or Korean or Hindi or whatnot…
The other thing to ask yourself is what is “our culture?”…are we talking the culture of let’s say a rural town in Alabama, a college town in Michigan? Are we talking northern California or western California or LA or SF areas? To be honest, usually those kind of claims are people who are facing immigration for the first time, the strongest anti immigration sentiment tends to be places that are the least diverse, not surprisingly.
There have always been down sides to immigration, in the 19th and early parts of the 20th century immigrants were exploited as cheap labor, and were doing jobs in factories and mills and mines at a pittance, and in many cases natives making more were routinely fired and they would bring in immigrants to fill the jobs at a fraction of the cost (and later on, as new groups came in, often more desperate, they would replace earlier immigrants). There are real questions about things like schools when families start coming into play, in towns where property taxes pay for the schools immigrant families often have a number of kids, and the property taxes on the places they live in don’t even begin to cover the extra cost (among other things, there is a lot of ‘stacking’, a lot of people living in an older house, that pays the property tax as if a single family lived there), there are real issues with security and crime (not saying all immigrants, legal or illegal,are criminal, but if people slip into the country it means criminals can do it, too…crime stats on immigrants for the record, legal and illegal, don’t show higher rates of crime than people born here in the same economic circumstances).
The US has never really been a melting pot per se, there are plenty of cultures here, and the other thing to keep in mind is that the next generations are moving up and on, the way kids have done for generations. The BS about not learning english is aimed at first generation hispanics IME, their kids don’t end up monolingual, and despite my reservations about bilingual education programs being ‘keep kids in their native language’, studies have show that in the end the kids do end up learning english, and their kids end up full english speakers. There are initial costs with immigration, given many start out poor, and yes they can take more in social services and such, but that is true of legal and illegal immigrants, but over time every study shows it becomes a big plus down the road. When my dad was young he caught pneumonia and was treated in a NYC municipal hospital and it saved his life, I guarantee you he more than paid that back over time.
We need to look at immigration reform and figure out rational,logical ways to do it, we have often failed to do this in the past and maybe we have to learn its lessons, like the refusal in the US to take on Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe, including offers from the Nazis to let Jews go to countries who would take them, but anti semitism doomed that effort and the voices against them in many ways sound very familiar to what I hear today. No country can have open borders, for a lot of reasons, but immigration policy needs to be based on facts, not fears and on the best interest of the country based on those facts.The funny part is the one US culture that in the end, somehow, seems to come through is the one where most people in the end realize people different than themselves aren’t so bad, and that immigration is not a bad thing. A hundred years ago Italians and Irish were looked upon as second class people, so were Jews to many people, yet over time, especially after WWII, they became “American”, once upon a time Puerto Ricans in the NYC area were treated with much the same disdain, these days the later generations are part of the fabric of things, have moved on despite claims they wouldn’t ‘assimilate’.
The US isn’t a melting pot, but things do kind of seep in, just think about what people eat these days and where it came from, and you have a pretty good idea, and you get interesting fusion, like Chino-Latino cooking:)
Right. Exactly. The best interests of the United States of America. Not the best interests of individual human beings, no matter how much compassion we may have, and certainly not the best interests of other nations.
@tating:
That is very true, though some of that is not so much immigration or the population growing as policies that have favored “urban sprawl” rather than the much more efficient models of central town/city living. Take a look at growing cities like Atlanta and the like, and you see sprawl, housing developments further and further out, traffic, etc, in large part because the US has a strong culture against planning. At the same time this is happening, rural areas are dying, the farms that are getting developed are in exurban areas around city areas.
The other problem is despite immigration, the other thing is we are getting older as a society, and younger immigrants are needed to keep up with jobs. Japan is facing a population implosion, and for example workers once kind of forced to retire at 60 or less, are staying on. There is no doubt bigger populations take resources, but we also have created a society where we grow old but are still following models from earlier periods, we retire at 65 but live into our 80’s…so someone has to do those jobs. It raises questions for the future, though, with so many jobs either going overseas or the real cause, automation and AI, how many immigrants do we need? And how many can we take in based on what we always claim, that the US is a country of big hearts? I find it sad that people whose ancestors came here escaping oppression and poverty and death in Ireland, or the economic malaise that was/is southern Italy, or the poverty of a place like Sicily and so forth, can only see the negatives of immigration or fear it (and again, I am not cheerleading illegal immigration; keep in mind when many of our ancestors came over, they didn’t really have immigration laws, those started in the 1880’s and came to full bore in 1920), there wasn’t really illegal immigration because all immigration was legal, except perhaps if you were found to have some sort of disease or the like, relatively few were sent home who came here shrug.