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America has no social fabric. It has never had a social fabric.
America is a nation of various people who came here from somewhere else. Then there was that slavery and civil war thing. Thus we are a “nation” of warring tribes that hate each other. Public education is determined at the state and local level, which makes the problem worse.
The end result: we’re the most dysfunctional of the rich countries. Look at incarceration, crime, and poverty rates. We also have a level of religiosity closer to that of Saudi Arabia than the civilized nations of northwestern Europe. A higher percentage of US adults believes in a literal Hell than Darwin’s theory of evolution.
A shining city on a hill? I doubt the rest of the world thinks so, other than dirt-poor immigrants fleeing third-world countries.
Only immigrants commit crimes? Hmmm ... That's an eye opener.
Immigrants don't build up social isolation and conflict; the natives do that through xenophobia, prejudice, and intolerance. 120 years ago, natives bristled at immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Fifty years before that, Chinese immigrants, and 10 years before that, Irish immigrants.
Where did your family emigrate from, OP?
The OP included all immigrants in the title of the thread.
I know more than a few more recent immigrants and/or their children who have served in the armed forces.
You are familiar with all the Chinatown and Little Italy neighborhoods throughout the country, along with neighborhoods that years ago were concentrations of immigrants of Polish, Slovenian, German, Irish, Hungarian etc. ancestry? The large Cincinnati neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine was almost exclusively German until after World War I - more than 60 years. Please elaborate how that neighborhood was "tearing the whole fabric of society"?
Another example is my mother's hometown, a coal-mining town in Western Pennsylvania. My grandfather was an immigrant; my grandmother the child of immigrants. The coal miners were Hungarian, Polish, and Italian. Each group had its ethnic churches and ethnic grocery stores and ethnic social clubs. Yet the fabric of society survived just fine, and the town is still thriving even though the coal mines are gone.
Hmmm...First of all, I wasn't responding to the OP. Go look at my post again.
No one ever said that "recent immigrants and/or their children [never] served in the armed forces", did they? I was discussing groups that came in the past
Not all ethnic groups formed their own enclaves. The country where my maternal grandparents came from never did form enclaves. They attended a church geared to their ethnic group and formed social clubs. In fact, they lived in a neighborhood that had European immigrants from different countries. English was the language that bound them all. My grandparents and their kids became lifelong friends with an Italian family and an Armenian family.
You are missing the point entirely. While some groups formed ethnic enclaves, it didn't stop them from learning English and assimilating. If you paid attention, you would notice that the Little Italy neighborhoods are shrinking in size due to those who moved to the 'burbs. Meanwhile, OTOH, Chinese immigration is unrelenting thus Chinatowns are growing in size.
You haven't seen your community destroyed by illegal immigration, have you? Thus you are unaware as to how they have destroyed the social fabric of such places.
Because the Democrats and the media are constantly fomenting hate and violence between the races, I fear where they are taking us. It doesn't have to be that way as most people live in peace without being stirred up but the Dems need hatred.
You are missing the point entirely. While some groups formed ethnic enclaves, it didn't stop them from learning English and assimilating. If you paid attention, you would notice that the Little Italy neighborhoods are shrinking in size due to those who moved to the 'burbs. Meanwhile, OTOH, Chinese immigration is unrelenting thus Chinatowns are growing in size.
Oh, but they really truly didn't always learn English and assimilate. For example:
Quote:
What Salmons and Wilkerson found was a remarkable reversal of conventional wisdom: Not only did many early immigrants not feel compelled out of practicality to learn English quickly upon arriving in America, they appeared to live and thrive for decades while speaking exclusively German.
In many of the original German settlements in the mid-1800s from southeastern Wisconsin to Lake Winnebago and the Fox Valley, the researchers found that German remained the primary language of commerce, education and religion well into the early 20th century, Salmons says. Some second- and even third-generation German immigrants who were born in Wisconsin were still monolingual in German as adults.
Aside from Native Americans, we are all immigrants. How do you think they felt when we (non-indigenous people) invaded their lands, forced them onto reservations and all but destroyed their culture? Just saying.
Native Americans are descended from immigrants as well. I'm pretty sure they had cycles of conquest, particularly in Central and South America. Europe went through a similar invasion cycle multiple times. The Celts, for example, were pushed into Wales. I'm sure none of them were happy about it at the time.
Can you back that up with facts and data? Define massive. There are 44.8 million immigrants already living in the U.S as of 2018, making up 13.7% of the population.
It is just reality. It is not even that they alone commit crimes, it builds up social isolation and conflict between people.
It is not and never has been healthy.
Immigration is what made America great. If there is anything exceptional about America, it is that we are a country of immigrants. Except for the 1.6% of the population that are Native Americans, we are ALL children of immigrants.
Immigration is what made America great. If there is anything exceptional about America, it is that we are a country of immigrants. Except for the 1.6% of the population that are Native Americans, we are ALL children of immigrants.
The so-called native Americans migrated here just as the Europeans and subsequent immigrants did. So no, they weren't native to this country/continent.
We are no longer a nation of immigrants today we are mostly a nation of U.S. born citizens. Time to shed that stupid label and just be ourselves. I wasn't even a child of an immigrant my parents were born here to. Immigration helped make America grow but today we don't need many immigrants and we certainly don't need illegal aliens.
Old news. It's a well known fact that in places like ND, there were towns where the only language that was spoken was German. Watch some YouTube videos of Lawrence Welk. He was born in ND but spoke English with a German accent.
Also, it's old news that the older immigrants who came to the US at the turn of the century either never learned English or only learned very little. What was different back then was that when those older immigrants needed any help, they would turn to family members to act as translators. They didn't expect government agencies to provide interpreters for them. Nor did they expect anyone to give them welfare checks. Their families took care of them. They may not have assimilated but their younger family members did.
You can't compare what happened in the past with what is happening today. Before there were serious clampdowns, legal immigrants were petitioning to have their elderly parents come to the US. Before that was granted, those sponsoring them had to agree to fully support their parents. Yet, far too many would manage to get their parents on welfare and Medicare. This was done in violation of the law.
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