U.S. Politics - are you born on this board?

[All-for-Joffrey]

Btw -- whatever happened to RhaegarTar? At first I thought he was just some whack-a-doo Repub on the fringes but over the past few months/years it's become apparent that he's not (even just going off these boards alone) and now people are just coming out of the woodwork because I guess it's publicly acceptable to say all this shit now. He would feel right at home in this thread! 

[Guest]

Btw -- whatever happened to RhaegarTar? At first I thought he was just some whack-a-doo Repub on the fringes but over the past few months/years it's become apparent that he's not (even just going off these boards alone) and now people are just coming out of the woodwork because I guess it's publicly acceptable to say all this shit now. He would feel right at home in this thread! 

 

Dude, this fellow has not been seen in some time.  I should know.  My deteriorating mental health can be attributed to too long awaiting his return.

[lokisnow]

 
Isn't that basically why Julian Castro was nominated as Secretary of HUD? [emoji14] 

Sure, but I feel like the Clintons are too risk averse to associate their ticket with the name castro.

[Martell Spy]

Conclusion, democrats need to find a broadly popular male Latino Gen x politician with no major scandals to be veep, especially if Rubio is the other veep.

 

 

After recent events, I'm kinda wishing that Jorge Ramos would jump in the race. Yeah, I know it won't happen.

[all swedes are racist]

 
Dude, this fellow has not been seen in some time.  I should know.  My deteriorating mental health can be attributed to too long awaiting his return.

Fairly certain he was posting a few months ago, in the dating thread perhaps?

[Ramsay Gimp]

Btw -- whatever happened to RhaegarTar? At first I thought he was just some whack-a-doo Repub on the fringes but over the past few months/years it's become apparent that he's not (even just going off these boards alone) and now people are just coming out of the woodwork because I guess it's publicly acceptable to say all this shit now. He would feel right at home in this thread! 

 

The whole "silent majority" thing has some truth to it. Political correctness doesn't seem to actually change people's "un-good" views, it just silences them or drives them to more extreme venues

[Ramsay Gimp]

I can sort of understand arguments about culture: that Latinos are more collectivist, that they work hard but don't put as high a value on education, that there's a culture of 'machismo' that may lead to higher rates of violence.

 

But then I remember that similar things were said about the Germans, the Irish, the Poles, and the Chinese.

 

Does anyone have data comparing the rates of immigration from the aforementioned European countries in the 19th century to the rates of latino immigration today? Serious question, I don't have a clue.

 

Regarding the Chinese...you really think there wouldn't be a major cultural transformation if they became the USA's dominant ethnic group? 

 

RG, I have adopted sisters and an adopted brother, none of us look like eachother. We run the specrrum from white to.Asian to very dark Latino. I can assure you its just fine, if you're worried about us having to exist with different looking people. Thanks.for your concern though.

 

Yeah, because your unique and rare personal experience is a good guide to how countries are effected by shifting demographics...

[Altherion]

Does anyone have data comparing the rates of immigration from the aforementioned European countries in the 19th century to the rates of latino immigration today? Serious question, I don't have a clue.

Wikipedia has a table with a rough summary of the historical data. The foreign-born percentage tops out around 1890 at 14.8% of the population with the immigrants coming mainly from Germany and Ireland (though also from Canada and the UK). If you look at this PDF (from the census), the foreign-born percentage in 2010 is around 12.9% with an overwhelming plurality (though not quite a majority) coming from Mexico. I would extrapolate that in 2015, we are fairly close to the historical maximum, though we have not reached it yet.

 

That said, if you look through the PDF in more detail, the immigrants from Mexico are a significant outlier in many respects: they don't become citizens (only 23% naturalized), they don't speak English (only 28% speak it well), they don't finish high school let alone college (only 40% with a high school degree and 5% with a bachelor's degree) and they are much more likely to be poor than immigrants from other countries (29% of families in poverty). I don't think the same was true of the Germans and Irish after a generation or so back in the 19th century.

[IamMe90]

Yeah, because your unique and rare personal experience is a good guide to how countries are effected by shifting demographics...

 

and your generic and commonplace personal experience about not wanting to not have to deal with the thought of you being a minority, and how icky it would be for you to slowly not be surrounded by white people, is a great guide as well

 

 

 

As for why a latino majority in the USA would be a bad thing...well, I don't want me or my children to become strangers in our own land. Some here may mock me for that (and again, it's a long ways off) but it's pretty damn universal across the world. Does anyone really want to be a minority? Does anyone want to wake up and realize their neighbors all look and speak different than him?

 

Do you think something being "universal" in human culture is proper justification for anything? That seems like weak logic to me. And lol at the last part of this post. First of all, immigrants aren't changing the language of the USA - and no one will EVER wake up and realize all of their neighbors look different AND speak differently than them. pretty "melodramatic" to be honest

[Larry of the Lawn]

 
Does anyone have data comparing the rates of immigration from the aforementioned European countries in the 19th century to the rates of latino immigration today? Serious question, I don't have a clue.
 
Regarding the Chinese...you really think there wouldn't be a major cultural transformation if they became the USA's dominant ethnic group? 
 
 
Yeah, because your unique and rare personal experience is a good guide to how countries are effected by shifting demographics...

Well your personal distaste for people who look and speak differently than you is.also pretty irrelevant to shifting demographics, although it certainly explains a lot. Additionally, immigrants tend to assimilate, so your fears seem ridiculous.

[Ormond]

 

 

That said, if you look through the PDF in more detail, the immigrants from Mexico are a significant outlier in many respects: they don't become citizens (only 23% naturalized), they don't speak English (only 28% speak it well), they don't finish high school let alone college (only 40% with a high school degree and 5% with a bachelor's degree) and they are much more likely to be poor than immigrants from other countries (29% of families in poverty). I don't think the same was true of the Germans and Irish after a generation or so back in the 19th century.

 

I think it is really unfair to just throw those statistics out without discussing the reasons for them.

 

In the first place, the % of the foreign born who become citizens would be directly connected to the % of them who are legal immigrants. The whole point of the controversy over "amnesty" etc. is that "illegal" immigrants are not able to become citizens in the first place. I doubt if the % of "legal" immigrants from Mexico who eventually become citizens is that different from other countries' figures.

 

The "speaking English well" and the educational rates are very confounded with each other. Most of today's immigrants from Europe and Asia arrive in the USA already having high education levels, which includes having at least begun to learn English in their home countries before they even arrive here. Almost all immigrants from India would be English speakers before they get here at all, for instance. 

 

And Mexico and Central America are simply the parts of the world where it's easy for poor and uneducated persons to get to the USA from. Even most "illegal" immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere are people who arrive on tourist or student visas and overstay their welcome. Even to be smuggled in from Asia would on average require having a lot more resources to get here than would be the case for those from Mexico and Central America. They are simply the places these days where we get our poor uneducated immigrants from -- so it's to be expected that they have lower education and language proficiency rates than those from countries where most of the immigrants, legal or not, are from middle class backgrounds even before they get here. 

 

And you just can't go back to the 19th century and get valid comparisons, for gosh sakes. Before 1920 there was no such thing as being an "illegal" immigrant from Europe (unless you had a criminal record or tuberculosis) so they didn't have the barriers to citizenship that modern Mexican immigrants have. And the % of the native born population in the 19th century that had high school diplomas, much less college degrees, was so much smaller back then than today that it renders comparisons on that issue very problematical.

 

In other words, with our present immigration system where we end up having the great majority of our poor "illegal" immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America in the first place, complaining about the fact that they show lower rates of citizenship and education and higher rates of poverty once they get here than the other immigrants do seems to me to be akin to "blaming the victim."

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

 

I think it is really unfair to just throw those statistics out without discussing the reasons for them.

 

 

I actually don't think this is necessarily true at all. If the discussion is about whether the current waves of immigration differ from prior waves of immigration in the country's history, and whether these differences 'mean' anything vis a vis the impact on the US, then I don't necessarily think the underlying reasons for why those differences exist is necessarily relevant at all. The idea that this is in some way 'victim blaming' is not so much false as simply beside the point - the issue has nothing to do with individualized moral judgments of immigrants. For example, if you believe in the concept of a nation (and all of us in the west live in them), and you believe that there should be some base level of cultural connection between people that live inside a nation, and you believe that language is properly considered an element of culture, then it matters whether people coming into the country either know how to speak the language or have shown a propensity for learning how to speak the language. If it's true that they don't come to the country speaking the language and they show an unusual resistance to learning the language, you and if you think that's a relevant consideration, then it really doesn't matter why that's the case.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

 

Phew! Well thank God they're Christian and speak a romance language! Not like those heathens with their jibber jabber tongues fleeing to Europe from war-torn countries!

 

You should be nicer to Hayyoth. I know there's a tendency to view all conservative boarders as nutjobs formed from the same cookie-cutter but our current crop of conservatives, Hayyoth included, are actually the most interesting we've had in a while. 

[OnionAhaiReborn]

I actually don't think this is necessarily true at all. If the discussion is about whether the current waves of immigration differ from prior waves of immigration in the country's history, and whether these differences 'mean' anything vis a vis the impact on the US, then I don't necessarily think the underlying reasons for why those differences exist is necessarily relevant at all. The idea that this is in some way 'victim blaming' is not so much false as simply beside the point - the issue has nothing to do with individualized moral judgments of immigrants. For example, if you believe in the concept of a nation (and all of us in the west live in them), and you believe that there should be some base level of cultural connection between people that live inside a nation, and you believe that language is properly considered an element of culture, then it matters whether people coming into the country either know how to speak the language or have shown a propensity for learning how to speak the language. If it's true that they don't come to the country speaking the language and they show an unusual resistance to learning the language, you and if you think that's a relevant consideration, then it really doesn't matter why that's the case.

 

Of course it matters why it's the case- it could well be that US policy choices are the reason why there's a difference, and so changing policy could eliminate the difference. Ormond's point that prior to "1920 there was no such thing as being an "illegal" immigrant from Europe" is a potentially very important why. It's easy to imagine that immigrants with legal status and rights might assimilate more rapidly and have greater access to education than those who are forced into marginal status, with limited employment opportunities where they tend to be surrounded by others of the same marginal status and limited opportunities. On the point of lower naturalization rates, it is even more obviously plausible that the political choice to limit immigration (and thus create illegal immigrants who are blocked from naturalizing) is the cause instead of some airy propensity purportedly holding across several nationalities.

[Ormond]

 

I actually don't think this is necessarily true at all. If the discussion is about whether the current waves of immigration differ from prior waves of immigration in the country's history, and whether these differences 'mean' anything vis a vis the impact on the US, then I don't necessarily think the underlying reasons for why those differences exist is necessarily relevant at all. The idea that this is in some way 'victim blaming' is not so much false as simply beside the point - the issue has nothing to do with individualized moral judgments of immigrants. For example, if you believe in the concept of a nation (and all of us in the west live in them), and you believe that there should be some base level of cultural connection between people that live inside a nation, and you believe that language is properly considered an element of culture, then it matters whether people coming into the country either know how to speak the language or have shown a propensity for learning how to speak the language. If it's true that they don't come to the country speaking the language and they show an unusual resistance to learning the language, you and if you think that's a relevant consideration, then it really doesn't matter why that's the case.

 

Where is your evidence that immigrants from Mexico "show unusual resistance to learning the language?" I do not think that is true at all. 

 

Learning a new language as an adult is difficult, and especially difficult for those who have extremely low levels of education in their native language. I do not believe that Hispanic immigrants today are learning English at any lower rates than immigrants from continental Europe did in the 19th century. 

[Inigima]

You should be nicer to Hayyoth. I know there's a tendency to view all conservative boarders as nutjobs formed from the same cookie-cutter but our current crop of conservatives, Hayyoth included, are actually the most interesting we've had in a while. 

I agree, actually. I still disagree with them on most things but I think they are my favorites to debate with since Dirjj.

[Kelli Fury]

 
Where is your evidence that immigrants from Mexico "show unusual resistance to learning the language?" I do not think that is true at all. 
 
Learning a new language as an adult is difficult, and especially difficult for those who have extremely low levels of education in their native language. I do not believe that Hispanic immigrants today are learning English at any lower rates than immigrants from continental Europe did in the 19th century. 

I know of personally, white immigrants (who are elderly or dead by now) who never learned English. Both in my dad's family and my boyfriend's dad's family. There is no evidence this was more common in other waves of immigration. I used to live by a church in Minneapolis that held Norwegian language services because people who look like you were here and OMG NOT ASSIMILATED

[Fez]

I know of personally, white immigrants (who are elderly or dead by now) who never learned English. Both in my dad's family and my boyfriend's dad's family. There is no evidence this was more common in other waves of immigration. I used to live by a church in Minneapolis that held Norwegian language services because people who look like you were here and OMG NOT ASSIMILATED

 

Wait, wait, wait. Hold the phones. Are you saying we're being invaded by damned Vikings now? Have we learned nothing from the lesson of Æthelred the Unready? 

 

Someone tell Trump he's focusing on the border! Meanwhile, I'm going to start taking church valuables and burying them underground.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

 

Does anyone have data comparing the rates of immigration from the aforementioned European countries in the 19th century to the rates of latino immigration today? Serious question, I don't have a clue.

 

Regarding the Chinese...you really think there wouldn't be a major cultural transformation if they became the USA's dominant ethnic group? 

 

It depends. Does it happen gradually and organically (at an accelerated rate)? No more so than the Germans bringing hot dogs and hamburgers and brats, the Irish bringing St Patrick's day or Latinos bringing Cinco de Mayo, Tacos and Fajitas. Most Asian Americans I know are very Americanized.

 

If a hundred million randomly selected Chinese magically show up in America? Who knows.

Wikipedia has a table with a rough summary of the historical data. The foreign-born percentage tops out around 1890 at 14.8% of the population with the immigrants coming mainly from Germany and Ireland (though also from Canada and the UK). If you look at this PDF (from the census), the foreign-born percentage in 2010 is around 12.9% with an overwhelming plurality (though not quite a majority) coming from Mexico. I would extrapolate that in 2015, we are fairly close to the historical maximum, though we have not reached it yet.

 

That said, if you look through the PDF in more detail, the immigrants from Mexico are a significant outlier in many respects: they don't become citizens (only 23% naturalized), they don't speak English (only 28% speak it well), they don't finish high school let alone college (only 40% with a high school degree and 5% with a bachelor's degree) and they are much more likely to be poor than immigrants from other countries (29% of families in poverty). I don't think the same was true of the Germans and Irish after a generation or so back in the 19th century.

Are those stats for first, second or third generation immigrants? I don't know what the stats were for Irish immigrants, but I doubt the people escaping the potato famines were particularly well educated.

 

 

You should be nicer to Hayyoth. I know there's a tendency to view all conservative boarders as nutjobs formed from the same cookie-cutter but our current crop of conservatives, Hayyoth included, are actually the most interesting we've had in a while. 

Hayyoth is interesting to me because sometimes he's a very reasonable conservative with well thought out arguments, and other times he's like an alt right mouthpiece. I suppose the difference is in the eye of the beholder.

 

 

I actually don't think this is necessarily true at all. If the discussion is about whether the current waves of immigration differ from prior waves of immigration in the country's history, and whether these differences 'mean' anything vis a vis the impact on the US, then I don't necessarily think the underlying reasons for why those differences exist is necessarily relevant at all. The idea that this is in some way 'victim blaming' is not so much false as simply beside the point - the issue has nothing to do with individualized moral judgments of immigrants. For example, if you believe in the concept of a nation (and all of us in the west live in them), and you believe that there should be some base level of cultural connection between people that live inside a nation, and you believe that language is properly considered an element of culture, then it matters whether people coming into the country either know how to speak the language or have shown a propensity for learning how to speak the language. If it's true that they don't come to the country speaking the language and they show an unusual resistance to learning the language, you and if you think that's a relevant consideration, then it really doesn't matter why that's the case.

I think the American concept of nation is fundamentally different from the Old World, for lack of a better term, concept of a nation. There's no illusion that everybody was from one tribe that lived one piece of land since dawn immemorial. We're a nation of immigrants, descendants of immigrants, and marginalized natives, united by a vaguely defined "American Dream" and the principles of liberal democracy and rule of law. For me, a defining feature of the American nation is that it's open to people from all over the world and all walks of life.

[BloodRider]

I immigrated to this country and I favor sharia law!

 

Nah man, just kidding. I am an atheist...oh wait, isnt that worse?

 

The way the naturalization system works in the US for a large number of cases is an extended waiting period where the folks are already present under some form of visa. And then the citizenship test only demonstrates your knowledge of civics and whether you paid your taxes. There is really no way to screen for 'sharia-law' adherents under the current process unless the pipeline from Muslim majority countries were to be severely restricted in a broad sense from the visa stage.

 

I think the latter is already the case, so we are safe from Sharia law for many many generations. But there are difficulties inherent in the process to include any litmus test.

I wish I could be so confident.  I am not worried about Shira per se, but about "God's law" or "Divine Law".  That is much closer to becoming ensconced in our laws in the US.