This land is my land
It’s good to break out of your Internet filter bubble every once in awhile and experience some fresh, different opinions. No, wait… it’s the internet. It’s difficult to find a forum of discussion where people express dissenting opinions without degenerating into name calling. Some days, when I feel like strengthening my negative feeling about the future of humanity, I read user comments on Seattle Times.
It’s pretty easy to pick out the articles that will get the good comments going. Some made up examples that demonstrate the patterns:
Article: Microsoft announces changes to benefits starting in 2013
Comment: Too bad all those benefits are going to H1B visa holders and not our American people!!!
Article: Weather forecast calls for higher than normal snowfall this winter
Comment: So much for global warming you liberal Obama lovers!!!
Article: Missing mountain climber was long time volunteer and nature activist
Comment: I hope his family has to pay money for OUR HARD EARNED TAX DOLLARS used to look for him when he CHOSE TO ENGAGE IN DANGEROUS ACTIVITY!!!
etc.
So when I saw the title “Foreign enrollment skyrockets for UW,” I had a pretty good idea what to expect. I think the article was trying to incite even more anger by using this as the main picture and caption:
Red Square?! Nice job.
Comments get rated up or down by users. Generally, the “interesting” ones look more like this:
But the trend I found in the comments for the UW article was that anti-China comments were overwhelmingly rated positively, and pro-foreigner/diversity comments were rated negatively.
Hmm. Having lived in both the South and Midwest, I always thought of Washington, particularly Western Washington, as a diverse, racially tolerant place. The more I dig into the local mentality, the more I suspect that there’s a thick layer of resentment towards increasing immigrant population, particularly the Chinese and Indians.
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So there are the standard type of comments:
“At this rate, the Huskies of the future will dominate NCAA Div 1...ping pong.”
“You think they will replace English instructors with Chinese?”
“How do you say ‘Go Huskies’ in Chinese?”
“Time to cut off public funding for the UW. Or perhaps it should be Bejing State University?”
“What I can tell you first hand is that community colleges have open door policies for admissions. If this standard is applied to international students, the consequences are bad. There are classrooms with over 60% international students. …this leads to a serious degradation of quality. Imagine reading Shakespeare or Ginsburg to a class that is predominantly from the Far East!”
Well, I personally can’t think of someone reading Ginsburg to any class without giggling. But Shakespeare? I actually had a Korean instructor for one of my Shakespeare classes in university. The American elementary education majors in the class complained every time we had to write an essay. Talk about serious degradation of quality. Wait, let’s go back to Shakespeare. HE ISN’T AMERICAN. A classroom full of Indian students might be more qualified to study Shakespeare than a classroom of American ones, if you want to use linguistic proximity to the source as the qualifier. Geez.
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But other types of comments worried me a lot more.
THEME: China is taking all over the world, and everyone who looks Chinese is out to destroy America.
“What I don't see mentioned here is the number plants that China puts into our country. Plants (not lucky bamboo) but people that become citizens that find their way into our defense technology resources that China wants if they can get it without their own R&D. Along with that nearly every computer network in the U.S. is under attack as they look for holes within these vital systems both to shut them down and more importantly to gain that same data that plants sent here for. And its not just China doing it or Asia. But in recent years it has been the most prolific.”
Fantastic. More fun accusations of Chinese people spying for the PRC. Remember Wen Ho Lee? Even if you become an American citizen and umm, AREN’T EVEN FROM CHINA, apparently you might be a plant.
“Anyone who spends an hour on UW campus can see that, while foreign born students may be ‘only’ 20% of the student body, about half (or more) of the student body is of Asian extraction, which means they are either immigrants or the direct descendants of immigrants (there were very few Asians in the US before the 1980s). We are being uprooted from our own country by our own government. Fight back!”
“Before you lionize these Chinese students for their superior motivation, remember that this is above all else a visa scam. Student status brings you the right to live in the US while you study. A degree plus English gives you the ‘right’ to an H1b visa to work here. An H1b visa, after six years, gives the right to permanent residency, and then citizenship. Citizenship confers the right to sponsor your entire family back in China. Each one of these students is the leading edge of up to HUNDREDS of new immigrants. The UW is by now nearly majority Asian. According to the article, ‘only’ 20% of those are ‘foreign’ (non-resident, non-citizen) students. That means the rest are descendants of ‘anchor’ migrants who arrived since the laws were changed in 1965, and the flood of 3rd world immigration began.”
This pisses me off. Descendants of European immigrants become “American” as soon as they the accents disappear. African Americans definitely face their own form of discrimination, but people make a clear distinction between their group and actual Africans. But it seems like an Asian American, even if he marries into the local population, doesn’t understand his family’s native language, dresses like an American, participates in American culture and community service, etc. will never be considered a real American. He’s the competition, a descendant of visa scam anchor migrants, ready to uproot all the white people from their own country.
I guess it would be possible to chalk these comments up to a handful of extremists, but I think at this point, it’s more than just that. Many Americans aren’t thrilled with the state of things in this country right now. They are worried that life in the future isn’t going to be as good as life in the past, and they’re looking for someone to blame.
“This is just great! Educate the children of foreigners. The state still gets money from tax payers. When we have educated all of China, have all our factories in China, buy all the products from China, and owe trillions to China, where we be then? Maybe we should all be working on the farms as that may well be our job in the future.”
“So, if you add local Asians to imported Asians the total would make more than 50% of the student body population. Maybe, it is time for the UW to start giving extra points to white male applicants so the student body would more reflect image of the local population. Personally, I think, I would feel uneasy working under Asian supervisor. But it looks like pretty soon I will have no choice.”
“With more than half the foreign students from China, yet more proof that China is taking over the world and most disturbingly, America. American's [sic] will continue to be asleep at the wheel until one of these days they wake up and on their very own Tiananmen Square.”
The farm idea is great! Washington is so in need of apple pickers now after it has scared all of its immigrant labor off that companies are now hiring prisoners to do the job! Oh, but that’s a whole other can of worms…
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In the end, I’m not sure there’s any justification for this spewing of paranoia. Stats, both from the UW website and the article itself:
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Stats for 2011 aren’t available yet, but looking at the stats from 2000 to 2010, resident enrollment has been consistent, with a slight trend upwards. Non-resident enrollment (unfortunately, no stats splitting out international enrollment) has grown significantly. So these international students aren’t taking the spots of resident students. New spots are being made available for them. While it would be nice to see the resident enrollment grow at the same rate, it’s unrealistic to expect this to happen without increased state funding, since these spots are highly subsidized. -
“Last spring, 41 percent of international applicants said ‘yes’ to the UW's acceptance letter - a percentage that was well above historical trends and caught the UW by surprise.” Aha! It’s unclear without full numbers, but it seems highly likely that rise in foreign enrollment is more due to higher percentage of international students choosing the UW after being accepted and not due to a significantly higher number of them being given acceptance letters (which many people are interpreting this to mean).
But the fear of a changing world is a legitimate one. It would be wise to take a hint from Buddhist philosophy: Everything is temporary. It’s a losing battle to try to keep things exactly the same.