Last of the rough drafts to finish up for tonight!<\/i><\/p>\n
The pro-immigration lobby, and pro-immigration* researchers, tell us that there\u2019s no reason to fear large-scale immigration from Mexico because their children will assimilate just as seamlessly as generations past.\u00a0 Anti-immigration types will dispute this, and say that there are a number of factors that make the current situation different than the past:\u00a0 the proximity to Mexico reinforcing ties; the prevalence of Spanish, both in government services and day-to-day interactions (\u201cpress 2 for Spanish\u201d); the welfare system, affirmative action, and the grievance industry reinforcing the ethnic identity, and so on.<\/p>\n
(* Note that \u201cpro-immigration\u201d and \u201canti-immigration\u201d aren\u2019t really the right words, but \u201csupporters of large scale immigration of unskilled workers from Mexico\u201d is a mouthful.)<\/p>\n
But what I was thinking of the other day is this: To say \u201cimmigrants will assimilate just as easily as in the past\u201d is very rosy in another way:\u00a0 the large waves of immigration in the past were not as simple as downtrodden people finding a better life in America.<\/p>\n
To be sure, some immigrants made their way directly from the steamer to the homestead, but these were people who already had the resources to travel West and equip a covered wagon full of household goods.\u00a0 They were, basically, already middle-class.<\/p>\n
But the \u201chuddled masses\u201d went from wrenching poverty in Europe to almost-as-wrenching poverty in the U.S.\u00a0 Remember tenements?\u00a0 Jacob Riis and How the Other Half Lives?\u00a0 Child labor?\u00a0 Tammany Hall?\u00a0\u00a0 (My Irish ancestors?\u00a0 They arrived in Quebec first, and only later immigrated to the U.S. as a reasonably middle-class family.)<\/p>\n
What was the impact of the post-industrialization waves of poor immigrants on those already in the country? \u00a0Machine politics and graft were not victimless. \u00a0The non-immigrants of the time were not just a bunch of middle-class people who lived in isolation from the immigrants, or perhaps benefitted from them as servants.
So I went down to the basement to see what books I could unearth, and couldn\u2019t really find anything. \u00a0And I don\u2019t recall having read anything in the past about the non-immigrant poor and how new waves of immigrants affected them. \u00a0Maybe there\u2019ll be something at the library, but I doubt it; I\u2019d really need a university library for that.<\/p>\n
But my point is that I\u2019m skeptical of the presumptions underlying the idea of \u201cimmigration in the past was harmless, therefore future immigration will be, too.\u201d \u00a0In any event, the assimilation and middle-class-ization of today\u2019s unskilled immigrants is a long way into the future, and our economic problems are in the present.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last of the rough drafts to finish up for tonight! The pro-immigration lobby, and pro-immigration* researchers, tell us that there\u2019s no reason to fear large-scale immigration from Mexico because their children will assimilate just as seamlessly as generations past.\u00a0 Anti-immigration types will dispute this, and say that there are a number of factors that make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n