immigrant rant
I am so tired of people being totally ignorant of the Latin American immigrant situation. They need to learn some facts and get over it. (What caused all this was a LJ post I saw from someone I don't know)
To go farther back, if you're like a majority of the country, your family immigrated here in the late 1800s/early 1900s. That was the highest immigration has ever been. Ever. (Today's immigration rate is actually lower than it traditionally has been) They were probably European. My German ancestors immigrated here in 1912 in Baltimore. That's the most obvious argument - "dude, your ancestors were immigrants too so stop treating the current immigrants like crap, will ya?". The immigrant situation back then is about the same as now or even more extreme. Different ethnicities stayed with their ethnicities. They moved to neighborhoods where they could speak their own language and where they could retain their own culture. That's how such Baltimore neighborhoods like Locust Point (German), Fells Point/Canton (Polish, Eastern European), Little Italy (Italian), and Greektown (Greek) were founded. Yet people throw a fit when the same happens today. They complain how Hispanics need to learn the language and the American culture. These people need to remember that their ancestors did the same thing the Hispanics do today. And don't argue that it's different because it's not. Hispanic immigrants today are fleeing from persecution, just as our ancestors did. They are fleeing from poverty and starvation, just as our ancestors did. That's just one argument.
Most complain about the language - how immigrants need to learn to speak English (you can't even imagine how pissed off I get when I see something that say "I want you....to speak English!" on it). First of all, the United States has no language. Books will only tell that English is popularly spoken and Spanish is the second most popular language. But we have no official language. Second of all, we take for granted how hard English is to learn. It's incredibly tough because it comes from so many different languages - German, Latin, etc etc. If you know Spanish, it is relatively easy to learn other Romance languages like French and Italian. But English? No way. English grammar is weird and English pronuncation is weird. We have words spelled the same yet are pronounced different and mean different things (for example, "read" (present tense and command) and "read" (past).) That doesn't exist in Spanish. We have two pronouncations for each letter. Spanish only has one for each letter. "A" is "a" - not "long A" or "short A" depending on the word. English grammar is weird too. Spanish grammar has rules - it's easy to conjugate any verb. But English is so strange - there are no rules for conjugation. It is hard for me to teach English to the EBLO kids, even though I am a native speaker, because it is so hard to explain.
William Donald Shaefer complained a few years ago because he went to a McDonalds and the drive-thru cashier couldn't speak English very well. He went off on this whole stupid rant about it at a city meeting that had nothing to do with it. (I don't understand why some people like this guy. A year or so after making the McDonalds comment, he said that all those with AIDS deserved to have it.) I felt like slapping him. Seriously. Where the heck do you expect them to work? They are fighting to survive. They are living in bad and poor parts of the city. What are they supposed to do? Wait until they become fluent in English to get a job? Yeah, Schafer, take an immigrant family and force them to do that and then watch as they and their children slowly starve to death. They are attempting to learn English. And no, most of the time, they don't have the opportunity to learn English before coming here. Can you imagine immigrating to the United States from Guatemala? "Okay, my family is being killed off but let me take these English classes before fleeing to the US." In the case of illegal immigrants, "Okay, my family is being killed off but let me wait for official papers from the US embassy before fleeing to the US." What a joke.
Some want to go as far as closing as the border. Now tell me, how does that fulfill the American dream? How does that follow American history? All of us are children of immigrants. Many of us lead great lives of prosperity and now we want to bar other people from doing the same thing? We want to claim that we're "true Americans" (truly the only people that can say that are the Native Americans) and these new immigrants will never become so. What a load of crap. What makes us "true Americans" anyway? Because we've been here for a couple of decades? Because we speak English? Let me tell you the truth - we speak horrible English. We don't follow grammar rules, we don't follow traditional ways of speaking (who says "hello" anymore? We say "hi" or "hey".), and most often we have crude horrible accents that are hard to understand (I admit to having one). Is it because we buy into the materialism of the US? Is it because we believe the US is infalliable or because we follow the president? I don't undestand what makes us "true Americans". Tell me, how many decades does a family have to be here to be called a "true American"? We want to close the border because we don't want to hear Spanish anymore? Because we're afraid of immigrants stealing "the white man's job"? (By the way, we thought the same thing about the Chinese. We didn't allow them in the country starting in 1882 and in 1924, we didn't allow any Asians, except Filipinos, in the country for the same reason) Last time I checked, unemployment wasn't a HUGE problem here. Besides, immigrants take the jobs that most of us don't want anyway. See "A Day Without A Mexican".
Okay, I think I'm off my soapbox now.
To go farther back, if you're like a majority of the country, your family immigrated here in the late 1800s/early 1900s. That was the highest immigration has ever been. Ever. (Today's immigration rate is actually lower than it traditionally has been) They were probably European. My German ancestors immigrated here in 1912 in Baltimore. That's the most obvious argument - "dude, your ancestors were immigrants too so stop treating the current immigrants like crap, will ya?". The immigrant situation back then is about the same as now or even more extreme. Different ethnicities stayed with their ethnicities. They moved to neighborhoods where they could speak their own language and where they could retain their own culture. That's how such Baltimore neighborhoods like Locust Point (German), Fells Point/Canton (Polish, Eastern European), Little Italy (Italian), and Greektown (Greek) were founded. Yet people throw a fit when the same happens today. They complain how Hispanics need to learn the language and the American culture. These people need to remember that their ancestors did the same thing the Hispanics do today. And don't argue that it's different because it's not. Hispanic immigrants today are fleeing from persecution, just as our ancestors did. They are fleeing from poverty and starvation, just as our ancestors did. That's just one argument.
Most complain about the language - how immigrants need to learn to speak English (you can't even imagine how pissed off I get when I see something that say "I want you....to speak English!" on it). First of all, the United States has no language. Books will only tell that English is popularly spoken and Spanish is the second most popular language. But we have no official language. Second of all, we take for granted how hard English is to learn. It's incredibly tough because it comes from so many different languages - German, Latin, etc etc. If you know Spanish, it is relatively easy to learn other Romance languages like French and Italian. But English? No way. English grammar is weird and English pronuncation is weird. We have words spelled the same yet are pronounced different and mean different things (for example, "read" (present tense and command) and "read" (past).) That doesn't exist in Spanish. We have two pronouncations for each letter. Spanish only has one for each letter. "A" is "a" - not "long A" or "short A" depending on the word. English grammar is weird too. Spanish grammar has rules - it's easy to conjugate any verb. But English is so strange - there are no rules for conjugation. It is hard for me to teach English to the EBLO kids, even though I am a native speaker, because it is so hard to explain.
William Donald Shaefer complained a few years ago because he went to a McDonalds and the drive-thru cashier couldn't speak English very well. He went off on this whole stupid rant about it at a city meeting that had nothing to do with it. (I don't understand why some people like this guy. A year or so after making the McDonalds comment, he said that all those with AIDS deserved to have it.) I felt like slapping him. Seriously. Where the heck do you expect them to work? They are fighting to survive. They are living in bad and poor parts of the city. What are they supposed to do? Wait until they become fluent in English to get a job? Yeah, Schafer, take an immigrant family and force them to do that and then watch as they and their children slowly starve to death. They are attempting to learn English. And no, most of the time, they don't have the opportunity to learn English before coming here. Can you imagine immigrating to the United States from Guatemala? "Okay, my family is being killed off but let me take these English classes before fleeing to the US." In the case of illegal immigrants, "Okay, my family is being killed off but let me wait for official papers from the US embassy before fleeing to the US." What a joke.
Some want to go as far as closing as the border. Now tell me, how does that fulfill the American dream? How does that follow American history? All of us are children of immigrants. Many of us lead great lives of prosperity and now we want to bar other people from doing the same thing? We want to claim that we're "true Americans" (truly the only people that can say that are the Native Americans) and these new immigrants will never become so. What a load of crap. What makes us "true Americans" anyway? Because we've been here for a couple of decades? Because we speak English? Let me tell you the truth - we speak horrible English. We don't follow grammar rules, we don't follow traditional ways of speaking (who says "hello" anymore? We say "hi" or "hey".), and most often we have crude horrible accents that are hard to understand (I admit to having one). Is it because we buy into the materialism of the US? Is it because we believe the US is infalliable or because we follow the president? I don't undestand what makes us "true Americans". Tell me, how many decades does a family have to be here to be called a "true American"? We want to close the border because we don't want to hear Spanish anymore? Because we're afraid of immigrants stealing "the white man's job"? (By the way, we thought the same thing about the Chinese. We didn't allow them in the country starting in 1882 and in 1924, we didn't allow any Asians, except Filipinos, in the country for the same reason) Last time I checked, unemployment wasn't a HUGE problem here. Besides, immigrants take the jobs that most of us don't want anyway. See "A Day Without A Mexican".
Okay, I think I'm off my soapbox now.