One of those melting pot sequences
Driving down Telegraph Avenue through Berkeley to Oakland and you might notice a slew of Ethiopian restaurants. If ones ventures toward the South Bay, opposite San Francisco, you'll hit the town of Fremont. With the sunroof down, you shouldn’t miss the rich smell of curry cooking if you go down a main drag. Keep driving south, taking a bit of a detour through Watsonville and Gilroy (home of the Garlic festival) and you'll pass strawberry and tomato fields filled with Latino-immigrant workers. A National Public Radio report today noted that Cupertino, a Silicon Valley city, just recently became majority Chinese. Veer off of the I-405 Santa Monica Freeway down Magnolia Street and you might find 80% of the signs are in Vietnamese. These immigrant enclaves in California, indeed America, are endless: anyone who has been to Queens , NYC can spot a Dominican, Russian, Colombian, Italian and Jamaican in one blink (though the may not know it).
There is no indicator better than immigration to refute any claim that America is something other than a bastion of hope, a beacon of possibilities. If such is the case, the 57.4% increase in immigration from 1990 to 2000 (some 11 million legal immigrants) is a telling sign In times of economic uncertainty, this has been cause for consternation - with anti-immigrant fervor always an incremental increase in the unemployment rate away.
Perhaps us Americans, fueled by our media, are prone to look at the huddled masses in the near-future, seeing a dismal increase in the unemployment rate, and bring up that tireless worry: will some foreigner get my job?
My job, as immigration paralegal for a prominent law firm, is directly related to this question. For some it is a question of a shot at the land of milk and honey; for those who see immigrant communities as a threat, or nuisance, they might wonder if our milk might sour and our honey disappear.
As a general blood-letting of the world economy ensues, the stock market indices continue to decline, firms suffer layoffs - of foreigners and otherwise - some wonder if, even done legally, its such a good time to allow porous borders.
In a three part series, I'll address what I have experienced as the concerns of both citizens and foreigners of immigration in a time of economic uncertainty. First: personal reflections on growing up with immigrants. Second: an in-depth view of those larger looming questions of immigration as "homeland security". Third: some hopes for our immigration system in this hybrid-mixed melting pot named after an Italian cartographer.
The White Guy
I grew up in a typical WASP household: Our church songs were morose and somber, “Get out ma’ grill” meant “Retrieve the grill, I’m gonna BBQ,” the word ‘gracias’ was made into a funny joke about hairy rear-ends, shoes stayed on in the house, we ate everything but 'finger foods' with silverware, hip-hop and rap were discouraged, and we buttered our rice.
Yet, unequivocally, most of my friends growing up and to this day have been from immigrant families/minorities. This circumstance has allowed me the pleasure of evaluating my norms along side others: church can have soul, you took your shoes off at the door, hip hop and rap are awesome, ‘get out my grill’ means ‘leave me alone’ I now speak very descent Spanish, know how to eat with the correct hand, and soy sauce, not butter, goes with rice.
At least since the beginning of Junior High, I have gravitated to people of other cultures. Perhaps it was my mother’s insistence that I learn some of my distant native peoples’ heritage, her own diverse group of friends, or maybe my Californian upbringing: for some reason I was usually the only white guy in the group. I quickly learned that this meant my friends of the same background could talk about me in their native tongue and refer to me as the whitty. Gorra, guero, gringo, nguoi tay, pute: they all refer to the peculiar state of being a fair-skinned person of a foreign connotation.
What’s in a name?
My culturally divergent counterparts seemed to gravitate to what I thought was typically American. Nowhere more than given names has this been driven into me. For instance: my friend Anoop of Indian decent (before I knew the difference in Indian) became ‘Snoop’ (after the Dogg himself), Sanjeet became Sonny, Asad is Sid, Huy became Danny, A-Qi morphed to Alphonse, Gustavo turned into Gus. As I noticed these distortions, I wondered what deeper sense propelled people to change their names. So, in my many years of being one of the few white guys in the group, it has never struck me as strange at all: everyone, it seemed, was in some way trying to integrate with what might be more largely perceived as the “dominant” ‘white’ culture. While this does not hold true for everyone, and certainly my buddies Jamal and DeShaun offer a different correlation (explored more by the Freakonomics guys), I gradually noticed that integrating in this Western Democracy meant practicing some creative license with ones name.
For more mainstream examples, I offer two up and coming public officials – Governor Piyush “Bobby” Jindal and Anh “Joseph” Cao. Both immigrated to Louisiana and, perhaps not so coincidentally, are Republicans. To top it off one need only consider President-elect Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan, used to go around calling himself Barry.
Code-crackers and Meat-packers
It is important to note that these prominent figures, as well as most of my friends’ families, have mostly immigrated to the United States legally. However, if the good graces of the United States had not allowed such legal immigration to take place, we would surely have a much less diverse populace representing Americans from jobs ranging from Secretary of State (Albright and Kissinger, both from immigrant families) to your typical software engineer from your computer conglomerate (of which I work with everyday).
Most assuredly, economics tells us, so long as they can get away with it and there remain profit incentives, there would still be a steady flow of people from other lands flooding ours - legally or not. Economic progress will always and forever be a driver for the movement of labor. Absent lawful ways of traversing national boundaries would mean a steadier stream of illegal aliens. These flows of ‘illegals’, however, would be relegated to the shadow economies of which millions do currently exist in – tidying up your gardens, slaughtering and shipping your meat, selling you ‘discounted’ perfume (and the best tacos), rearing our kids as nannies and building our bridges.
In order to explore some of the differences between legal and illegal immigration, prime examples of blunders for both, and where immigration fits under Homeland Security: you’ll have to wait until part 2.
Driving down Telegraph Avenue through Berkeley to Oakland and you might notice a slew of Ethiopian restaurants. If ones ventures toward the South Bay, opposite San Francisco, you'll hit the town of Fremont. With the sunroof down, you shouldn’t miss the rich smell of curry cooking if you go down a main drag. Keep driving south, taking a bit of a detour through Watsonville and Gilroy (home of the Garlic festival) and you'll pass strawberry and tomato fields filled with Latino-immigrant workers. A National Public Radio report today noted that Cupertino, a Silicon Valley city, just recently became majority Chinese. Veer off of the I-405 Santa Monica Freeway down Magnolia Street and you might find 80% of the signs are in Vietnamese. These immigrant enclaves in California, indeed America, are endless: anyone who has been to Queens , NYC can spot a Dominican, Russian, Colombian, Italian and Jamaican in one blink (though the may not know it).
There is no indicator better than immigration to refute any claim that America is something other than a bastion of hope, a beacon of possibilities. If such is the case, the 57.4% increase in immigration from 1990 to 2000 (some 11 million legal immigrants) is a telling sign In times of economic uncertainty, this has been cause for consternation - with anti-immigrant fervor always an incremental increase in the unemployment rate away.
Perhaps us Americans, fueled by our media, are prone to look at the huddled masses in the near-future, seeing a dismal increase in the unemployment rate, and bring up that tireless worry: will some foreigner get my job?
My job, as immigration paralegal for a prominent law firm, is directly related to this question. For some it is a question of a shot at the land of milk and honey; for those who see immigrant communities as a threat, or nuisance, they might wonder if our milk might sour and our honey disappear.
As a general blood-letting of the world economy ensues, the stock market indices continue to decline, firms suffer layoffs - of foreigners and otherwise - some wonder if, even done legally, its such a good time to allow porous borders.
In a three part series, I'll address what I have experienced as the concerns of both citizens and foreigners of immigration in a time of economic uncertainty. First: personal reflections on growing up with immigrants. Second: an in-depth view of those larger looming questions of immigration as "homeland security". Third: some hopes for our immigration system in this hybrid-mixed melting pot named after an Italian cartographer.
The White Guy
I grew up in a typical WASP household: Our church songs were morose and somber, “Get out ma’ grill” meant “Retrieve the grill, I’m gonna BBQ,” the word ‘gracias’ was made into a funny joke about hairy rear-ends, shoes stayed on in the house, we ate everything but 'finger foods' with silverware, hip-hop and rap were discouraged, and we buttered our rice.
Yet, unequivocally, most of my friends growing up and to this day have been from immigrant families/minorities. This circumstance has allowed me the pleasure of evaluating my norms along side others: church can have soul, you took your shoes off at the door, hip hop and rap are awesome, ‘get out my grill’ means ‘leave me alone’ I now speak very descent Spanish, know how to eat with the correct hand, and soy sauce, not butter, goes with rice.
At least since the beginning of Junior High, I have gravitated to people of other cultures. Perhaps it was my mother’s insistence that I learn some of my distant native peoples’ heritage, her own diverse group of friends, or maybe my Californian upbringing: for some reason I was usually the only white guy in the group. I quickly learned that this meant my friends of the same background could talk about me in their native tongue and refer to me as the whitty. Gorra, guero, gringo, nguoi tay, pute: they all refer to the peculiar state of being a fair-skinned person of a foreign connotation.
What’s in a name?
My culturally divergent counterparts seemed to gravitate to what I thought was typically American. Nowhere more than given names has this been driven into me. For instance: my friend Anoop of Indian decent (before I knew the difference in Indian) became ‘Snoop’ (after the Dogg himself), Sanjeet became Sonny, Asad is Sid, Huy became Danny, A-Qi morphed to Alphonse, Gustavo turned into Gus. As I noticed these distortions, I wondered what deeper sense propelled people to change their names. So, in my many years of being one of the few white guys in the group, it has never struck me as strange at all: everyone, it seemed, was in some way trying to integrate with what might be more largely perceived as the “dominant” ‘white’ culture. While this does not hold true for everyone, and certainly my buddies Jamal and DeShaun offer a different correlation (explored more by the Freakonomics guys), I gradually noticed that integrating in this Western Democracy meant practicing some creative license with ones name.
For more mainstream examples, I offer two up and coming public officials – Governor Piyush “Bobby” Jindal and Anh “Joseph” Cao. Both immigrated to Louisiana and, perhaps not so coincidentally, are Republicans. To top it off one need only consider President-elect Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan, used to go around calling himself Barry.
Code-crackers and Meat-packers
It is important to note that these prominent figures, as well as most of my friends’ families, have mostly immigrated to the United States legally. However, if the good graces of the United States had not allowed such legal immigration to take place, we would surely have a much less diverse populace representing Americans from jobs ranging from Secretary of State (Albright and Kissinger, both from immigrant families) to your typical software engineer from your computer conglomerate (of which I work with everyday).
Most assuredly, economics tells us, so long as they can get away with it and there remain profit incentives, there would still be a steady flow of people from other lands flooding ours - legally or not. Economic progress will always and forever be a driver for the movement of labor. Absent lawful ways of traversing national boundaries would mean a steadier stream of illegal aliens. These flows of ‘illegals’, however, would be relegated to the shadow economies of which millions do currently exist in – tidying up your gardens, slaughtering and shipping your meat, selling you ‘discounted’ perfume (and the best tacos), rearing our kids as nannies and building our bridges.
In order to explore some of the differences between legal and illegal immigration, prime examples of blunders for both, and where immigration fits under Homeland Security: you’ll have to wait until part 2.
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