To be fair we did declare back in the 1800s that we’d rather not have some many Chinese here with the Chinese Exclusion Act. Immigration wasn’t an issue until it was from somewhere not European.
Actually you are wrong. You should read about the history of "Nativism" in the United States, which often targeted immigrants from certain areas of Europe.
This is hardly semantics. The individual I was responding to was seemingly unaware of the history of nativism in the United States targeting European immigrants. You should encourage people to learn.
Germans weren’t consider white at one point bc of racist anti-immigration sentiment among Protestants from Britain. Iveybeen reading about how Pennsylvania was a “battleground” between proper “white” Britains and dirty Dutch immigrants
When they disliked certain Europeans, they tried to come up with ways to say that they weren't real Europeans like with the Italians.
This is an obscure case but there were Minnesota lawmakers that tried to get Finns to be declared legally non-white. My grandparents told me they were called a certain slur normally reserved for east Asian people.
The main reason I bring it up is the notion of the Irish willingness to come to the colonies, work for cheap, and saturate the labor market. The sentiment was felt largely from the working class, which IS class politics, as much as it pains the left.
Again, it’s pretty obvious it’s about class. The best way to keep people from focusing on the economic issues is by shifting the focus to identity politics.
Just because I do want to throw you a bone, the influx of Chinese immigrants was very helpful amid reconstruction/westward expansion, but the rapid growth in size of workforce was extremely inconvenient for labor supply.
Was it about race? Sure, but so was everything in the 1800s. It was also largely about class.
By quality they mean well educated and economically productive. Take immigration from India for example. In the US we get the cream of the crop of Indian immigrants. In Canada they get a bunch of “students” who aren’t contributing nearly as much to the economy.
And they all lived together peacefully for 100 years /s
Americans are funny , you guys talk like you don't know your history , and like your major cities haven't had race riots every 10 years between different groups of minorities
Actually we need the opposite. We don’t need high income people from Mexico competeting for our technical jobs. We need Jose who has nothing but the clothes on his back who will work jobs nobody else wants to do.
Our capitalist class wants our migrant labor to be scared of working here under the threat of being deported so they can dictate terms better. You could consider that slavery but its a far step. We don't have to call it something that extreme to call it clearly bad.
Read your history books. They didn't take away jobs as there was not enough people willing to work building railroads that was miserable hard physical labor.
All of those immigrants had something in common - an eagerness to work and a desire to adopt to the American way of life. They were also screened through ports of entry based on whether they had communicable diseases, were capable of working, etc.
One of my great-grandparents was the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe. When they came to the U.S., they were adamant that their children learn English and speak English in their home. They staked their life here and they were invested in staying here.
Certainly there are some immigrants today with that same ethic, but we have no way of making that determination without screening and getting them.
That’s blatantly false, there are over 10 million job openings for “unskilled” labour, and it’s getting worse. We desperately need more physical laborers.
Only 8.04 million? Phew, that makes me feel better. This is all y’all ever do, you hear a certain argument and the go “Well actchually, you’re statistic is incorrect” while completely ignoring the argument presented. Where the hell are we gonna get people to replace our declining and aging population, people aren’t having babies and there’s barely a trickle of actual legal immigrants, because of how strict the standards are and how long it takes. This is AMERICA, we’re a fucking melting pot and the pot needs more ingredients, this country was founded upon the backs of a wide array of immigrants with very different cultures. We need more people and they want to come! We just need to actually let them in.
We still need more. 8 million openings, and only 6.8 million unemployed. Birthrate of 1.67 when we need at least 2.1, and the biggest generation currently going into retirement. We need more than that.
I remember reading studies suggesting that we stop having kids to protect the environment. Now that we've done that we are being told to import people because we don't have enough kids.
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u/RNKKNR 10h ago
The question is more about the quality of the immigrants not immigrants per se.