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No, I have never lived in the suburbs. I live in two small condos in the old historic central cores of two large US cities, one on each coast. My parents were in language-teaching professions, had worked on/off in two German-speaking countries (and still live in a large city where the native language is German). I traveled with them all over Europe when I was a kid - Europe is not big, and you can visit a diffetent universe just over the weekend. My significant other (we were together for a long time; he died) was French. I spent many years in training with a very international mix of people from everywhere. So, I really am solidly international... just a description of where I am coming from; otherwise, I don't have anything else to add to the stuff I slready said. Oh, I do want to add that I "mix" with all kinds of Americans - my American professional colleagues are not at all shallow, certainly not stupid - they are smart, they are professional, but everything I already said still applies to them on a personal level.
As a result, Latinos in Spain are not marginalized, and Dominicans, Mexicans, Brazilians, and the like do very well. .
Have you checked the backgrounds of the Latin American immigrants who you claim do well in Spain with those who you claim are ghettoized in the USA. If Spain was so wonderful wouldn't all of Puerto Rico and the DR not go there instead of to the USA?
It is normal for a former colonial power to give immigration preference to its former subject.
First its not normal for former colonial powers to give any immigrant preference to their former subjects. The UK and France, the two largest former colonial powers, aside from Spain, certainly do not. It is way easier for Jamaican and Haitians to migrate to the USA than to the UK/France.
Your attitude towards poor people is like that of most Americans. To be poor is to be a leech and a loser. Funny thing is that you are more "American" than you think that you are.
Have you checked the backgrounds of the Latin American immigrants who you claim do well in Spain with those who you claim are ghettoized in the USA. If Spain was so wonderful wouldn't all of Puerto Rico and the DR not go there instead of to the USA?
I think that its more complex than that.
There are a lot of Dominicans here. Puerto Ricans, not so much. There are a lot of Colombians and Venezuelans here.
Different people when they leave a country want to go to different countries.
For starters Latin American immigrants moving to Spain do not have to learn a new language. It's fairly easy for them to get citizenship here. The university system here is cheap (unlike America) and the healthcare system is free. It's a lot easier for them to assimilate.
You also find a number of South Americans with say an Italian grandparent who get Italian citizenship.
First its not normal for former colonial powers to give any immigrant preference to their former subjects. The UK and France, the two largest former colonial powers, aside from Spain, certainly do not. It is way easier for Jamaican and Haitians to migrate to the USA than to the UK/France.
Your attitude towards poor people is like that of most Americans. To be poor is to be a leech and a loser. Funny thing is that you are more "American" than you think that you are.
A lot of immigrants from Eastern Europe go out of their way to assimilate into the white American mainstream. It's pretty typical.
With that said, it's not normal for former colonial powers to give this much preference to former subjects. But Spanish telecommunication companies provide the telecom services throughout it's former empire. The biggest banks in the former Spanish empire are Santander and BBVA of Spain. Spanish utility companies are huge in Latin America. As are Spanish energy companies like Respol.
Those governments in exchange for allowing Spanish interests to essentially own huge parts of their economy likely wanted something in return. Therefore it's a lot easier for Latin Americans (and from the Equatorial Guinea and the Phillipines) to migrate to Spain and get Spanish citizenship.
During the long boom from the 80s till the crisis, many working class and poor Latin Americans moved to Spain, as they needed the construction labor. The crisis occurred.
So Spain revised it's immigration requirements. Foreigners have to come on certain visas like student, work, and non lucrative and one must show one's bank account balance at a certain level. Or if some is partially Jewish one can get the Sephardic citizenship, but that requires one to spend a certain amount of money. In recent years they act to screen out poor people.
Africans and Asians who are capable of investing 500,000 euros will find themselves on an expedited path to citizenship. This could mean buying a house, investing in stocks, or opening up a business.
First its not normal for former colonial powers to give any immigrant preference to their former subjects. The UK and France, the two largest former colonial powers, aside from Spain, certainly do not. It is way easier for Jamaican and Haitians to migrate to the USA than to the UK/France.
Your attitude towards poor people is like that of most Americans. To be poor is to be a leech and a loser. Funny thing is that you are more "American" than you think that you are.
You are right in that I have only disgust and disrespect for most welfare-dependent people in the US, but here is how that originated. I grew up in a country in which nobody was rich except ball players and a few politicians/high level economic criminals (there was a major overlap between these two "professions" :-), but people held education in high regard, and even the very poor were very solidly educated. I come from that, from "genteel poverty". We (my family) literally had nothing except bread and butter to eat much of the time, and we did not have enough money to pay for heating in the winter - but we were educated, and valued our ability to work and contribute to society. Due to tremendous political upheavals every few decades, there were also people (former aristocracy, landed gentry or industrialists) that may have once been affluent families, but had lost everything - such as my mother's family (who owned huge amounts of lands and a factory in the 19th and early 20th century, but were poor in my lifetime). Despite widespread poverty, there was very little crime (and the criminals were actually those who were NOT poor - it was not violent crime, but economic crime, illegal business practices, racketeering-like tax evasion and that sort of thing). My country of origin had a major hatred between three religious groups (which always played a role in obtaining a job or career promotion), and had - among the uneducated - a major "macho" element that led to some risk of being beaten up (or raped) at night in the large cities when young male "hooligans" (with very little brains and a lot of testosterone) roamed the streets in search of someone to harass - that was basically the only pattern of crime, but even that was rare; there was more of the fear of that among the general population than crime in reality. Despite general poverty, though, people worked as much as they could, the unemployed were supported by meager pooled family resources, and there was almost no welfare. Being on welfare was a horrendous embarrassment, and certainly nobody sought to exploit that route (it would have been pretty impossible to exploit it either).
I came to the US with nothing in 1983, and supported myself on a $8,000 per year graduate research stipend for 3.5 years, then started earning $20,000 per year in medical training, and my earnings stayed in the $20k's and $30k's for the next 10 or so years that I spent in postgraduate training. So, I was poor in the US for a long time, but was surrounded with other graduate students and trainees (almost all of them foreign when I was in the grad school/research, and some/many of them foreign when I was in postgraduate training), and these people surrounding me were also poor - BUT, we were all educated, and nobody was criminal (and of course not on welfare either). We worked very hard, those of us who were foreign certainly did not have any defite plans for staying in the US and earning any substantial money. But our focus was on our professional skills, NOT on money; we had enough to survive, and that seemed enough. It was never even discussed.
Around the age of 40, due to things associated with my still not permanent and unstable (although always legal) immigration status, I left the academia and started providing certain healthcare services on temporary contracts, frequently in "underprivileged" communities. Up until that time, I had only compassion for poor people, because the only experience I had with poverty was that poverty which I described to you: the poverty coming out of misfortune, certainly not a poverty CHOSEN deliberately due to laziness and due to opportunity to get almost everything from someone else who works for it. Man, was I shocked, shocked, shocked out of my mind when I saw the actual welfare populations in the US! The main thing that shocked me was all the obnoxiousness and ENTITLEMENT displayed at every moment by those people, who get everything for free, and yet complain endlessly about everything. And the rampant crime committed in these communities is not at all due to needing something to eat, but out of BOREDOM, ENTITLEMENT, and overpowering desire for INSTANT GRATIFICATION. These people, by and large, have no concept of social usefulness or personal responsibility. They are like 3-year old toddlers who only WANT and WANT and WANT and DEMAND, and have nothing to give. Disgusting beyond measure.
Re this intellectually fascinating remark from NYDude (in total agreement with his general line of thinking) that Eastern Europeans try hard to assimilate with the whites: hello, Eastern Europeans are actually white genetically, and about half or more of us are blond :-). One does not try to assimilate with something someone has been born with :-). But whiteness is completely irrelevant, and there are still huge differences between the Europeans and Americans. CaribNY, what do you want me to explain about that? I already explained: Europeans are largely individualistic, have a major curiosity about things outside their own experience (a trait I find common with Africans from Africa), take interest in education for the sake of education (a trait I also find common with Africans from Africa), tend to make effort towards excellence in their work regardless of the level of income, do not insist on group status, and greatly care about good quality of life (which they prefer to both income and status). Americans largely have a group mind, typically do not value individuality at all except possibly in arts, and do not in fact value the quality of life compared with money or status (ie, a great majority of Americans will work theselves to death only if there is an opportunity for a major financial gain, which will then be used to buy something that shows the owner's status. A great majority of Europeans will rather have a pleasat life than earn more money, and most of them do not work exclusively to raise their social status. A lot of Americans (including on this forum) have problems with boredom in retirement because they simply do not know how to use leisure time, which phenomenon is practically unknown in Europe). I do not consider myself "superior" for being closer to my European roots in terms of these behaviors (an average American would consider my interest in unpaid time to pursue personal interests very worthless, not "superior") - these behaviors are just simply different between these different societies. What else do you want me to "explain" about this?
elnrgby, if you arrived here in the 80s, you should probably thank all those "entitled" people you seem to despise for being allowed to come here. You could have stayed in poverty in your own county instead of riding off the backs of our poor whose BLOODSHED opened the door for you to be here. Be thankful, and show some G-D respect.
elnrgby, if you arrived here in the 80s, you should probably thank all those "entitled" people you seem to despise for being allowed to come here. You could have stayed in poverty in your own county instead of riding off the backs of our poor whose BLOODSHED opened the door for you to be here. Be thankful, and show some G-D respect.
I never minded poverty. I did not come to this country to scoop the money (I did end up with some savings, but far less than an American-born person in the same profession, which I also don't mind at all), but I came here because my own country had a civil war brewing (in which I lost some extended family and friends), the war between the nation of my father and the nation of my mother - we became undesirable in every part of that country due to the ethno-religiously mixed marriage of my parents. I am very grateful to the US for offering me a chance (btw, a FAR more limited chance than any poor US-born person is automatically offered by birth in this country, but I consider that normal too), but please explain how the entitled welfare users in the US helped me in any way, or how I rode off the backs of your poor whose bloodshed opened the door for me to be here. I am grateful to the US immigration laws (even though it took me 29 years to become a citizen of the US - I was stateless/a refugee, with a legal work permit but no other rights in the US, for a long time), and to the US market forces that had a need for my services. Please note that I never, NEVER used any welfare, never sponged off of anyone, paid for my own health insurance off of a $8,000 per year graduate research stipend (rather than had someone else subsidize it), paid my own rent off of the same (rather than live in a subsidized housing), did not have kids since I could not afford them (rather than demand that the society raises them). I show respect where the respect is due. Respect has to be earned, the way all the decent immigrants earned it doing diligently the same thing that I did, building the US over several centuries. I am glad I could give my contribution to building it, and I respect everyone who did the same - not the people who sit on their fat rear ends, collect welfare, and rob other people on the street for drug money (none of these things are "steteotypes", as I have seen them all, in LARGE numbers).
No welfare mother, drug addict, or street criminal ever "opened a door of the US" for me. People like that certainly don't give a fig about me or about anyone else, they just cause problems to everyone else. The door was opened by the fact that the US still needs foreigners to fill certain positions in certain professions - ie, it was opened by market laws of demand and supply.
There were caps on immigration until the act of 1965...which was the direct result of the Civil Rights Movment that AFRICAN-AMERICANS fought for. Immigration is not a system for the poor. Very few institutions are. Please believe you are only here because it was politically advantageous for some faction of our society. Point blank period. You and other immigrants would do well to learn and never forget that the PRIMARY reason you are here is because black people are designed to stay at the bottom. You may not have fared well had you stayed in your war-torn country, so be grateful and learn the immigration history of the US. You are no better than the people you thumb your nose at...and you can always go back home.
There were caps on immigration until the act of 1965...which was the direct result of the Civil Rights Movment that AFRICAN-AMERICANS fought for. Immigration is not a system for the poor. Very few institutions are. Please believe you are only here because it was politically advantageous for some faction of our society. Point blank period. You and other immigrants would do well to learn and never forget that the PRIMARY reason you are here is because black people are designed to stay at the bottom. You may not have fared well had you stayed in your war-torn country, so be grateful and learn the immigration history of the US. You are no better than the people you thumb your nose at...and you can always go back home.
There were caps on immigration when I came into the US, and there are caps on immigration now. The caps have nothing to do with the civil rights movement. African Americans did not fight against immigration caps, but for their own rights (as they should have - the right for equal treatment as the whites in every sphere of the society, which has been achieved, and overachieved, by now).
Sure, immigration is most definitely not a system for the poor - it is just that many immigrants ARE poor, and yet take care of themselves without subsidies and without the life of crime. Of course I believe (and I even said so) that I am in the US only because that was advantageous for filling a certain market need in the US.
Black people are absolutely not designed to stay at the bottom (Obama, the president of the country for two terms? The president is designed to be at the bottom?). First of all, Black and poor is not at all identical. The richest artists and sportsmen in this country are black. Black doctors, engineers and other professionals are very common.
People who work for their keep, in any situation ARE better than people who CHOOSE not to work, but rather to take from other people, via political pressure or via crime.
I cannot go back to my country of origin because it no longer exists. None of the new 7 countries on the territory of my former country would give me the citizenship even if I wanted it. I have last been there in 1986, and do not expect to visit ever again. My family and other close people have been displaced or killed, I have nothing and nobody left in that part of the world. There is no "back" to go to, and my only homes are in the US (and I worked for my homes, and paid for them out of my own earnings).
Last edited by elnrgby; 07-16-2018 at 03:41 PM..
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