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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   21700 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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Who wrote "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore" on the statue of Liberty?

She wrote that when there were essentially no social services that immigrants could run up the bill for, and most of the immigrants were coming from faraway countries that they couldn't walk back to, giving them more reason to assimilate.

Immigrants through Ellis island assimilated at gun point, albeit mostly figuratively. Before the Great War there were large enclaves that mostly spoke German scattered throughout the country; the end of that was not voluntary. To say nothing of Italian, Jewish, etc immigration which was assimilated as much by force as by passage of time in a strange land, because plenty of Ellis Islanders did go back.

No doubt if Guatemalans were legally forced to assimilate they would do it. But to claim that Germans and Italians just wanted to be American is historically ignorant, because they maintained ethnic enclaves up until they were forced to stop, and didn’t use English as a first language until they were forced to.

But to claim that Germans and Italians just wanted to be American is historically ignorant, because they maintained ethnic enclaves up until they were forced to stop, and didn’t use English as a first language until they were forced to.

At least from the surveys I've looked at it sounds like hispanic immigrants want to learn English, and they make their kids learn even when they themselves don't. This is from 2015 but:

Fully 89% of U.S.-born Latinos spoke English proficiently in 2013, up from 72% in 1980. This gain is due in part to the growing share of U.S.-born Latinos who live in households where only English is spoken. In 2013, 40% of U.S.-born Latinos, or 12 million people, lived in these households, up from 32% who did so in 1980...

for Hispanics overall, 95% say it is important that future generations of Hispanics living in the U.S. be able to speak Spanish (Taylor et al., 2012). Nearly as many, 87%, say that Hispanic immigrants need to learn English to succeed in the U.S.

I'm not sure how many other Europeans were really all that forced to integrate either. Even for Germans, while prejudice and discrimination against them was definitely very real in the WW1 era, iirc the laws against German language schools were struck down pretty quickly, and I'm not aware of similar rules on Italians, Poles, etc.

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