Eight points:
1) I grew up in an east coast coal mining town that was heavily immigrant. People came in to Ellis Island, and were shipped off to Pennsylvania to mine coal. In a local coal mine museum, they have the miners' instructions that were posted in the mines. They were written in 6 different languages. When I was a kid, there were two Yiddish weeklies in town. All my HS friends had grandparents from Europe. Some of the grandparents barely spoke English. My grandmother could communicate in seven languages, six of them Slavic. She spoke passable English, but it was by no means her strongest language. My grandfather died when I was 5, so I don't remember him all that well.
My dad understood Russian, but couldn't really speak it. I learned very little Russian except for foods that grandma sent over. I taught myself the Cyrillic alphabet as an adult, and was surprised to find out that not a few Russian words are recognizable once you understand their alphabet. I joke that I speak "restaurant Russian". I could look at a Russian menu and probably have a good idea what would show up if I ordered it.
2) I have a friend from San Antonio, Mexican grandparents. He, like me, is second generation American. His experience with his ancestral language is essentially the same as mine. He knows Spanish about as well as I do (I speak Portuguese, can read simple Spanish reasonably well). He is by no means fluent. He's a literal rocket scientist at JPL.
I'm an All But Dissertation (ABD) in Comp Sci. All of my sibs have college degrees, though I was the first in the family to get one. My dad was a dropout who eventually got a GED.
3) I used to visit Winnipeg in the early 1980s. Even lived there for a few years. They started what was supposed to be a one-off festival called Folklorama. Kind of sounds like a 1960s/70s name, no? It was similar to the Greek Festival in SLC, except it was 14 different pavilions for various nationalities scattered around town.
Long story short, it was spectacularly successful, and is still going on. When the number of pavilions got into the upper 20s, they split it over two weekends. It is still going on 40-some years later. There are about 40 pavilions, and transit buses are free for traveling between pavilions, partly because street parking is horrendous around the pavilions because of the crowds, and partly because plenty of alcohol from the pavilion's country is sold.
Winnipeg had two Ukrainian Immersion high schools when I lived there. I have no idea how many French Immersion schools they had. Winnipeg has the largest concentration of French speakers outside Quebec.
With all that, the city does not feel fractured. Immigrants have accents. They just do, and the accent is not likely to disappear. Their kids raised in Canada might have a slight accent. Might. The next generation are like me and my friend at JPL. No distinctive accent at all, unless the city we grew up in had a regional accent, and those are becoming more rare. My Florida relatives, Millennial generation, sound like they are from Cleveland, which is to say, no discernible accent.
4) I went to the Greek Festival in SLC for lunch today. The Festival starts today. They had a large rat maze line for the food booths. It was already six switchbacks deep, and they were not short switchbacks. Gaach! The event is spectacularly popular.
5) My local church works with Dreamers at St Stevens (or Esteban's if you want to go ethnic) in SLC, and we have a sanctuary family staying at the church. The oldest daughter staying at the church is 7 and has been in the US three years. Her English is unaccented. You would have no idea she wasn't born here.
Dreamers speak flawless English, are totally acculturated to the US, for the most part are HS grads, and a fair number are college grads. They have either no recollection or little recollection of their birth country. The expensive part of raising them is over. They are educated. They are not liabilities now, they are assets, yet people want to throw them out. They are American in every way that counts except paperwork.
6) Yesterday, NPR in conjunction with Minnesota Public Radio aired a series of interviews they did with the local Somali community. Listen to it as see how "foreign" and unassimilated you think they sound.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/09/05/minnesota-somalis-get-a-national-forum-on-nprs-1a7) I have a friend, retired prof from the UofU, who grew up in East LA. He looks Hispanic, and his name is Hispanic. Both sides of his family are descended from the original Spanish land-grant settlers of Los Angeles 400 years ago. He occasionally gets the "why don't you go back home". He points out that his family was in LA for 250 years before the Anglos showed up and ruined the neighborhood. That's longer than the US has even existed, though we are getting close to 250.
7) Canada is 23% immigrant (many of whom are also now Canadian citizens). Australia is 33% immigrant. The US is 14% immigrant, again, many of whom are also US citizens. I've never attended a US citizenship ceremony, but I did go to a Canadian one. It was quite the tear-jerker. People are thrilled almost beyond words to be part of their new home country.
Yes, our immigration system is FUBAR, but it has always been FUBAR, and we have always have had lots of immigrants. We hated the Irish in the 1850s. Then it was the Chinese, after they helped us build the transcontinental railroad. Then the Germans, before and during WWI. By WWII, we were OK with Germans, but rounded up the Japanese, and kept out the Jews. In the 1950s, West Side Story was written about Polish and Puerto Rican street gangs in New York. Neither group was particularly well liked. Pollock jokes were the coin of the realm in the 1950s.
Then the unfavored group was the Vietnamese, and yada yada.
When was the last time you heard a Pollock joke?
How many Vietnamese restaurants are in your town, and doing fine?
And of course there are been Chinese restaurants around for as long as all of us have been alive.
We will survive FUBAR immigration. We always have. Calm down. Give it a couple generations.
8) And finally!.....
The minister at SLCUU, just yesterday, in the church newsletter, wrote about attending the citizenship ceremony for his son-in-law. He's Jewish with a dry sense of humor, Keep that in mind.
https://slcuu.org/news/latest-news/item/992-torch-article-reverendly-yours-rev-tom-goldsmith05 September 2019
Last week I faced the U.S. flag, pledged allegiance to it, and sang the national anthem, all while placing my right hand over my heart. I had only a fleeting impulse to take a knee, or not cross my heart, or not even stand. But I proceeded with these patriotic exercises nonetheless, and felt proud.
I was in Fairfax, VA, witnessing my son-in-law take the oath in becoming a U.S. citizen. He’s from Bangladesh, married my daughter almost seven years ago, but still faced relentless scrutiny while traveling. With a middle name of Mohammed, it sure ain’t easy entering the U.S. But he likes to say he only travels with his lawyer (my daughter). When you string together the number of hours they have been detained, it would equal a month worth of humiliating searches and intimidating cross-examinations.
But there we were, the three of us in a crowded room, following the protocol for all the rituals on the road to becoming a citizen. Everyone was instructed several times about crossing one’s heart when saying the pledge, as though noncompliance could possibly nullify the mountain of paperwork and endless anxiety in dealing with immigration bureaucrats. Nobody was going to take that chance.
But despite feeling like one was being processed on an assembly line, a mood of joy mingled with relief and pride. My son-in-law’s ceremony included sixty-six people representing thirty-nine different nations from around the world. There was one from Germany, England, Canada, and Ukraine. Everyone else was dark-skinned or Asian, lifted by a spirit of new beginnings/new life.
We sat through a video of Donald Trump reminding us how great it was to be an American, and a video of Madeleine Albright, an immigrant herself, addressing the unlimited possibilities in America for immigrants. We all pledged, and sang, and waved little American flags, and finally, one-by-one, each immigrant was called by name to receive her or his naturalization papers. Each immigrant took the certificate as though receiving an Oscar. Smiles and tears and love and laughter filled the room.
I felt enormous delight that my dear son-in-law could travel now with a U.S. passport, eliminating the duress of going through customs. But the contradictions ricocheted around my mind: Immigrants are not welcome in our country; endless opportunities do not exist for people of color; Democratic principles are on the chopping block. And yet…there is still an ideal of America we seem to carry in our hearts. It’s like a blueprint for a country that strives for equality and justice, even when it stumbles along the path to freedom. I realized that despite my criticism of our nation’s hard right turn, I was not about to forsake my U.S. citizenship. Hope for this country is unfailing and all enduring. My son-in-law can now join the rest of us Americans in turning this country around
We went to dinner that night at their favorite restaurant in Alexandria. When my daughter made the reservation she was asked if it was a special occasion. She explained the circumstances, thinking nothing of it. The whole restaurant staff must have been alerted. When we arrived, the African American bartender fixed us free drinks. When moving to the dining room, our table was draped with the American flag. Our Korean waiter told us he had become a citizen just the year before. Then a guy from the kitchen crew came out to greet us. He was from Bangladesh. They babbled on in Bangla as though they were brothers.
It was a slice of America that filled me with warm sentiments. Not the free drinks, but the international tapestry of immigrants, still counting on making their dreams come true in this country. They each have a story to tell. And all their stories together comprise the threads of American greatness, making it incumbent upon us all to realize our nation’s potential. TRG
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Whew. If you made it this far, thank you. Between immigrant grandparents, living in highly ethnic cities, and having spent a year or more each living in four foreign countries (five if you count Provo), this is a subject in which I am deeply invested.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/06/2019 09:52PM by Brother Of Jerry.