Immigrant Success Quotes

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As we encounter each other, we see our diversity — of background, race, ethnicity, belief – and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.
Dan Smith (The State of the World Atlas)
It's a success story," said Chanu, exercising his shoulders. "But behind every story of immigration success there lies a deeper tragedy." Kindly explain this tragedy." I'm talking about the clash between Western values and our own. I'm talking about the struggle to assimilate and the need to preserve one's identity and heritage. I'm talking about children who don't know what their identity is. I'm talking about the feelings of alienation engendered by a society where racism is prevalent. I'm talking about the terrific struggle to preserve one's own sanity while striving to achieve the best for one's family. I'm talking--" p. 88
Monica Ali (Brick Lane)
People who are driven by their values will overcome hurdles, difficulties, and obstacles in ways that people driven only by profit will never be able to
Simon S. Tam
People who are driven by love will overcome hardships and hurdles in ways that people who are only driven by profit never can.
Simon S. Tam
Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It’s up to the people who have the power to exclude. Often it’s on the basis of race. Depending on a culture’s fears and biases, Jews can be treated as outsiders. Muslims can be treated as outsiders. Christians can be treated as outsiders. The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders—even in their own homes. Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick and poor people on the margins of society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins. And we’re often not honest about what’s happening. If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I’m not in that situation because I’m different. But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I’m no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.
Melinda French Gates (The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World)
A succession of philosophers and historians spent their time studiously attempting to say nothing as successfully as possible. The less that was successfully said, the greater the relief and acclaim. No attempt to address any idea, history or fact was able to pass without first being put through the pit-stop of the modern academy. No generality could be attempted and no specific could be uttered.
Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam)
We have a bubbling successful melting pot in this country so long as the ingredients are essentially European.
Jared Taylor (Convergence of Catastrophes)
The rest will fall into place, because true wealth and true happiness are reserved in this world for the people who are willing to risk it all in order to capture it. (p216)
Simu Liu (We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story)
The Klan capitalized on white fears of just about anyone they defined as nonwhite, non-American, and non-Protestant. For example, Klan members successfully lobbied for the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which limited immigration from select countries.
Jemar Tisby (The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism)
Britain has no ‘white history’. British history is the multiracial, interracial story of a nation interdependent on trade, cultural influence and immigration from Africa, India, Central and East Asia, and other regions and continents populated by people who are not white, and before that, invasion by successive waves of European tribes most of whom, had the concept of whiteness existed at the time, would not have fitted into it either.
Afua Hirsch (Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging)
Looking back now, success seems foreordained. It wasn't. No colonists in the history of the world had defeated their mother country on the battlefield to win their independence. Few republics had managed--or even attempted--to govern an area bigger than a city-state. Somehow, in defiance to all precedent, Washington, Hamilton, and the other founders pulled off both. Their deliriously unlikely success--first as soldiers, then as statesmen--tends to obscure the true lessons of the American Revolution. The past places no absolute limit on the future. Even the unlikeliest changes can occur. But change requires hope--in the case of both those unlikely victories, the hope that the American people could defy all expectation to overcome their differences and set each other free. in the summer of 1788, Alexander Hamilton carried this message to Poughkeepsie, where he pleaded with New York's leaders to trust in the possibilities of the union, and vote to ratify the new federal Constitution. Yes, he conceded, the 13 newborn states included many different kinds of people. But this did not mean that the government was bound to fail. It took an immigrant to fully understand the new nation, and to declare a fundamental hope of the American experiment: Under wise government, these diverse men and women "will be constantly assimilating, till they embrace each other, and assume the same complexion.
Jeremy McCarter (Hamilton: The Revolution)
All this is the more maddening, as Edward Shils has pointed out, in a populistic culture which has always set a premium on government by the common man and through the common judgement and which believes deeply in the sacred character of publicity. Here the politician expresses what a large part of the public feels. The citizen cannot cease to need or to be at the mercy of experts, but he can achieve a kind of revenge by ridiculing the wild-eyed professor, the irresponsible brain truster, or the mad scientist, and by applauding the politicians as the pursue the subversive teacher, the suspect scientist, or the allegedly treacherous foreign-policy adviser. There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies. Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various times in Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes, or immigrants, the liquor interests or the international bankers. In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of this tradition of Know-Nothingism, the intelligentsia have at last in our time found a place.
Richard Hofstadter (Anti-Intellectualism in American Life)
When you were the child of immigrants, you weren't just you; your success was also your parents' your cousins', your relatives' still struggling for life in Haiti or India, wishing they were you. It was your job, your preordained celestial existence or whatever, to make the most of it.
Ben Philippe (The Field Guide to the North American Teenager)
Those on the far right I came to know felt two things. First, they felt the deep story was true. Second, they felt that liberals were saying it was not true, and that they themselves were not feeling the right feelings. Blacks and women who were beneficiaries of affirmative action, immigrants, refugees, and public employees were not really stealing their place in line, liberals said. So don't feel resentful. Obama's help to these groups was not really a betrayal, liberals said. The success of those who cut ahead was not really at the expense of white men and their wives. In other words, the far right felt that the deep story was their real story and that there was a false PC cover-up of that story. They felt scorned. "People think we're not good people if we don't fee sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees," one man told me. "But I am a good person and I don't feel sorry for them." With the cover-up, as my new friends explained to me, came the need to manage the appearance of their real feelings and even, to some extent, the feelings themselves. They didn't have to do this with friends, neighbors, and family. But they realized that the rest of America did not agree. ("I know liberals want us to feel sorry for blacks. I know they think they are so idealistic and we aren't," one woman told me.) My friends on the right felt obliged to try to modify their feelings, and they didn't like having to do that; they felt under the watchful eye of the "PC police." In the realm of emotions, the right felt like they were being treated as the criminals, and the liberals had the guns.
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right)
immigrants who are from those countries—have substantially outperformed their Western counterparts at mathematics, and the typical assumption is that it has something to do with a
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
They will want you to succeed, but never more than them.
Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
The price of success is steep and I've never been able to distinguish it from the feeling of sacrifice. If I could hold success in my hand, it would be a beating heart.
Weike Wang (Joan Is Okay)
The land of opportunity", "The American dream", "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness": these are the sounds of the great sucking mechanism of the American parasite. The reliance of seduction and persuasion over coercion that sold democracy to the American people eventually sold it to the rest of the world. Although there are a minority of examples of the direct parasitism of involuntary immigration, especially slaves from Africa and the "legal" incorporation of Native Americans, voluntary immigration through the lure of freedom and and equality is only a more indirect form of parasitic predation. What is voluntary can be no less predatory than coercion, just as capitalism can be no less predatory than military imperialism. From the point of view of competition among nations, the point is not whether a citizen or their ancestor originally arrived voluntarily or involuntarily, but whether a nation or ideology is successful in harnessing its human resources towards its national interest or way of life. American parasitism works because it offers the secular Judaism of liberalism rather than the secular Christianity of communism. Communism could never compete with the immigrant American hope that they themselves might one day be a filthy rich capitalist.
Mitchell Heisman (Suicide Note)
Look at the immigrants coming to America looking for a better life. What they got now? If they had the misfortune to be successful one of the most gruesome cultural straightjackets in history.
William S. Burroughs
The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating back-and-forth that all of us here grew up with, the ritual post-immigrant struggle for success turning pathological in, of all places, the gentleman farmer's castle of our superordinary Swede (a character). A guy stacked like a deck of cards for things to unfold entirely differently. In no way prepared for what is going to hit him. How could he, with all his carefully calibrated goodness, have known that the stakes of living obediently were so high? Obedience is embraced to lower the stakes. A beautiful wife. A beautiful house. Runs his business like a charm... This is how successful people live. They're good citizens. They feel lucky. They feel grateful. God is smiling down on them. There are problems, they adjust. And then everything changes and it becomes impossible. Nothing is smiling down on anybody. And who can adjust then? Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible. ... the tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy -- that is every man's tragedy.
Philip Roth (American Pastoral)
we are prisoners of the story we tell about ourselves, the story of the parents descended from poor immigrants who made it good and now have the Cadillacs and the beautiful, successful children and the most porch lights at Christmas. We are so determinedly fine it must be overwhelming for them to have a daughter who has suddenly shown up with the marks of all that is not fine so visibly on her.
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir)
The many Asian-American success stories have forced developmental psychologists to revise their theories about proper parenting. They used to warn against the “authoritarian” style, in which parents set rigid goals and enforced strict rules without much overt concern for the child’s feelings. Parents were advised to adopt a different style, called “authoritative,” in which they still set limits but gave more autonomy and paid more attention to the child’s desires. This warmer, more nurturing style was supposed to produce well-adjusted, selfconfident children who would do better academically and socially than those from authoritarian homes. But then, as Ruth Chao and other psychologists studied Asian-American families, they noticed that many of the parents set quite strict rules and goals. These immigrants, and often their children, too, considered their style of parenting to be a form of devotion, not oppression. Chinese-American parents were determined to instill self-control by following the Confucian concepts of chiao shun, which means “to train,” and guan, which means both “to govern” and “to love.” These parents might have seemed cold and rigid by American standards, but their children were flourishing both in and out of school. The
Roy F. Baumeister (Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength)
The success of college towns and big cities is striking when you just look at the data. But I also delved more deeply to undertake a more sophisticated empirical analysis. Doing so showed that there was another variable that was a strong predictor of a person’s securing an entry in Wikipedia: the proportion of immigrants in your county of birth. The greater the percentage of foreign-born residents in an area, the higher the proportion of children born there who go on to notable success. (Take that, Donald Trump!) If two places have similar urban and college populations, the one with more immigrants will produce more prominent Americans. What
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are)
Asian Americans were first derided as “unskilled labor” until the 1965 Immigration Act prioritized Asian Americans who were more highly educated and financially successful, in the belief that they would “contribute” more to American society.
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
To many persons around him, he appears too much the academic. There may be some things about him that recall his beginnings—his shabby clothes; his persistent poverty; or his dark skin (in those cases when it symbolizes his parents’ disadvantaged condition)—but they only make clear how far he has moved from his past. He has used education to remake himself. They expect—they want—a student less changed by his schooling. If the scholarship boy, from a past so distant from the classroom, could remain in some basic way unchanged, he would be able to prove that it is possible for anyone to become educated without basically changing from the person one was. The scholarship boy does not straddle, cannot reconcile, the two great opposing cultures of his life. His success is unromantic and plain. He sits in the classroom and offers those sitting beside him no calming reassurance about their own lives. He sits in the seminar room—a man with brown skin, the son of working-class Mexican immigrant parents.
Richard Rodríguez (Hunger of Memory)
Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It’s up to the people who have the power to exclude. Often it’s on the basis of race. Depending on a culture’s fears and biases, Jews can be treated as outsiders. Muslims can be treated as outsiders. Christians can be treated as outsiders. The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders—even in their own homes. Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick and poor people on the margins of society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins. And we’re often not honest about what’s happening. If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I’m not in that situation because I’m different. But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I’m no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.
Melinda French Gates (The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World)
Even back in 1968, the first time I was at the Berlin Film Festival with one of my films, I found it ossified and suffocating. I felt the festival should be opened up to everyone and screen work in other cinemas around the city, so I took the initiative, got hold of some prints by young filmmakers and rented a cinema for a few days in Neukölln, a working-class suburb of Berlin, which at the time was populated largely by immigrants and students. The free screenings at this parallel venue were a big success and generated intense discussions between audiences and filmmakers, which were exciting to witness. The whole thing was my rebellious moment against the Establishment, which I saw as being unnecessarily exclusive. I told the festival organisers they needed to have more free screenings and open the festival up to the wider public, which shortly afterwards they did.
Paul Cronin (Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin)
More broadly, it is vital for leaders to work across international boundaries to minimize the number of people who feel the need to leave their home countries in the first place. That requires building healthy democracies, fostering peace, and generating prosperity from the ground up. However, success in that endeavor demands a way of looking at the world that recognizes the humanity we share with one another, and the interests that nations have in common. Those who are content to look inward, and who see no higher purpose than to shield themselves from the different, the new, and the unknown, will be of no help.
Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation
Amy Chua (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother)
there was another variable that was a strong predictor of a person’s securing an entry in Wikipedia: the proportion of immigrants in your county of birth. The greater the percentage of foreign-born residents in an area, the higher the proportion of children born there who go on to notable success. (Take that, Donald Trump!)
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are)
Asians like predictability. We like safety. We want to know that if we work hard, there will be a payoff. Downward mobility and the shame that comes with it is an Asian immigrant nightmare. And in entertainment, you very well might not make it despite all of those years you invested. There is no linear path to success, and no linear path to maintaining it even if you do achieve it.
Ali Wong (Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets & Advice for Living Your Best Life)
We need a young generation and others who will be willing to stand in loving confrontation, but real confrontation, in contrast to the mentality of constant accommodation with the current forms of the world spirit as they surround us today, and in contrast to the way in which so much of evangelicalism has developed the automatic mentality to accommodate at each successive point.[14]
David Platt (A Compassionate Call to Counter Culture in a World of Poverty, Same-Sex Marriage, Racism, Sex Slavery, Immigration, Abortion, Persecution, Orphans and Pornography)
One of the West's singular migrations--from the Azores to California's Great Central Valley--is given faces and voices in Anthony Barcellos's new novel, Land of Milk and Money. Along with its triumphs, the Francisco family embodies the challenges to an immigrant family in a new land, including the often ignored difficulties posed by success and the loss of the old culture. A must read...
Gerald Haslam (The Great Central Valley: California's Heartland (A Centennial Book))
Hitler wasn’t a senior officer – in four years of war, he rose no higher than the rank of corporal. He had no formal education, no professional skills and no political background. He wasn’t a successful businessman or a union activist, he didn’t have friends or relatives in high places, nor any money to speak of. At first, he didn’t even have German citizenship. He was a penniless immigrant.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: ‘An intoxicating brew of science, philosophy and futurism’ Mail on Sunday)
When it first appeared, in 1943, it was called, by those critics who liked it, an honest book, and that is accurate as far as it goes. But it is more than that: It is deeply, indelibly true. Honesty is casting bright light on your own experience; truth is casting it on the experiences of all, which is why, six decades after it was published and became an instant bestseller, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn continues to be read by people from all countries and all circumstances. Early on in its explosive success it was described as a book about city life, a story about grinding poverty, a tale of the struggles of immigrants in America. But all those things are setting, really, and the themes are farther-reaching: the fabric of family, the limits of love, the loss of innocence, and the birth of knowledge
Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
Karl Marx famously belittled religion as an “opiate for the masses,” a drug that the spread of worldwide socialism would one day make undesirable. Obama’s aside in San Francisco about “bitter” Americans clinging to belief in God out of economic frustration was nothing more than a restatement of Marx’s view of religion. Like Marx, Obama views traditional religion as a temporary opiate for the poor, confused, and jobless—a drug that will dissipate, he hopes, as the federal government assumes more God-like powers, and his new morality of abortion, subsidized contraception, and gay marriage gains adherents. “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not,” Obama said, warming to his theme in San Francisco. “So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Phyllis Schlafly (No Higher Power: Obama's War on Religious Freedom)
Jewish immigrants like the Floms and the Borgenichts and the Janklows were not like the other immigrants who came to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Irish and the Italians were peasants, tenant farmers from the impoverished countryside of Europe. Not so the Jews. For centuries in Europe, they had been forbidden to own land, so they had clustered in cities and towns, taking up urban trades and professions. Seventy percent of the Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island in the thirty years or so before the First World War had some kind of occupational skill. They had owned small groceries or jewelry stores. They had been bookbinders or watchmakers. Overwhelmingly, though, their experience lay in the clothing trade. They were tailors and dressmakers, hat and cap makers, and furriers and tanners.
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
For the first time in twenty-five years there was no Person of Color on the Board of Estimate, whatever traditional roles they’d had in City government erased. Squeezed by growing immigration, the breakdown of old political networks, a changing economy and soon, waves of drugs, crime, and disease, New York’s African Americans would be forced over the next thirty-five years into new cultural and social strategies that would in turn change the world.
Thomas Dyja (New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation)
There is no doubt that those Jewish immigrants arrived at the perfect time, with the perfect skills," says the sociologist Stephen Steinberg. "To exploit that opportunity, you had to have certain virtues, and those immigrants worked hard. They sacrificed. They scrimped and saved and invested wisely. But still, you have to remember that the garment industry in those years was growing by leaps and bounds. The economy was desperate for the skills that they possessed.
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
The strategy of the Germans and their French police cohort was stealthy, predictable, and almost successful. Until mid-1942, when anti-Jewish operations became more violent and the rumors of a Nazi Final Solution had finally reached Paris, most well meaning and generous Parisians were aware in general of the laws restricting the lives of their Jewish co-habitants, but had convinced themselves that the government was only trying to control immigration and terrorism.
Ronald C. Rosbottom (When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944)
America's distinctive history - its ethnicity-transcending national identity and its unusual success in assimilating people from diverse origins - has shaped how we see the rest of the world and has deeply influenced our foreign policy. It's not just ignorance, racism, or arrogance that predisposes us to ignore ethnic, sectarian, and tribal divisions in the countries where we intervene. In the United States, immigrant communities from all sorts of background have become 'Americans'; why wouldn't Sunnis and Shias, Arabs and Kurds, all similarly become 'Iraqis'?
Amy Chua (Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
If you wanted to bestow the grandiose title of "most successful organization in modern history," you would struggle to find a more obviously worthy nominee than the federal government of the United States. In its earliest stirrings, it established a lasting and influential democracy. Since then, it has helped defeat totalitarianism (more than once), established the world’s currency of choice, sent men to the moon, built the Internet, nurtured the world’s largest economy, financed medical research that saved millions of lives and welcomed eager immigrants from around the world.
David Leonhardt
Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade. You must be fluent in not only Spanish but the Kabbala-like intricacies of health codes, tax law, fire department regulations, environmental protection laws, building code, occupational safety and health regs, fair hiring practices, zoning, insurance, the vagaries and back-alley back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there's the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, any one of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it's a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen's Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he's taking back the delivery; you didn't order enough napkins for the weekend — and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?
Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)
As Mayor Giuliani began his cleanup of the Times Square area, nobody in power gave any thought to the thousands of “support” people whose survival would be affected when the economic driver of sex was removed from the scene. And the optimistic view that these workers would be forced toward more legitimate work turned out to be puritanical hypocrisy—it was crime itself that gave these men an entrée into the straight world. In time, Santosh began selling laptops of dubious origin, Rajesh started offering small short-term loans, and Azad operated an increasingly successful sideline as a job referral service for undocumented immigrants. Whenever otherwise legitimate employers found themselves in need of some quick off-the-books labor—and they often did, even the hedge fund titans and investment banks down on Wall Street—Azad made it happen for them with one phone call.
Sudhir Venkatesh (Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy)
After generations of separations and decades of forgetfulness, the mention of the South brings back to our memories ancient years of pain and pleasure. At the turn of the twentieth century, many African Americans left the Southern towns, left the crushing prejudice and prohibition, and moved north to Chicago and New York City, west to Los Angeles and San Diego. They were drawn by the heady promise of better lives, of equality, fair play, and good old American four-star freedom. Their expectations were at once fulfilled and at the same time dashed to the ground and broken into shards of disappointment. The sense of fulfillment arose from the fact that there were chances to exchange the dull drudgery of sharecrop farming for protected work under unionized agreements. Sadly for the last thirty years, those jobs have been decreasing as industry became computerized and work was sent to foreign countries. The climate which the immigrants imagined as free of racial prejudice was found to be discriminatory in ways different from the Southern modes and possibly even more humiliating. A small percentage of highly skilled and fully educated blacks found and clung to rungs on the success ladder. Unskilled and undereducated black workers were spit out by the system like so many undigestible watermelon seeds. They began to find their lives minimalized, and their selves as persons trivialized. Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.
Maya Angelou (Letter to My Daughter)
When you add in the US immigration processes encouraging a “brain drain” of elites from countries like China and India, the vast majority of the “academic success” we see when we think of Asian Americans is only available to wealthy, highly skilled immigrants who already have a high level of education, and their offspring—while only 17 percent of Pacific Islanders, 14 percent of Cambodian Americans, and 13 percent of Laotian and Hmong Americans have four-year college degrees,4 compared to 22 percent of black Americans and 15 percent of Hispanic Americans.5 The stereotype that Asian Americans naturally excel at math and science also discourages Asian American students from pursuing careers in the arts and humanities and keeps those who do pursue those careers from being taken seriously in their fields. A 2009 census report showed that under 15 percent of Asian American degree holders majored in the arts and humanities, less than any other racial or ethnic group in America.6
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
It is not only through their complexity that the immune systems confuse their owners' longing for security; they cause even more perplexity through their immanent paradox, as their successes, if they become too thorough, are perverted to become their own kind of reasons for illness: the growing universe of auto-immune pathologies illustrates the dangerous tendency of the own to win itself to death in the battle against the other. It is no coincidence that recent interpretations of the immunity phenomenon exhibit a tendency to assign far greater significance to the presence of the foreign amidst the own than was intended in traditional identitary understandings of a monolithically closed organismic self - one could almost speak of a post-structuralist turn in biology. In the light of this, the patrol of antibodies in an organism seems less like a police force applying a rigid immigration policy than a theater troupe parodying its invaders and performing as their transvestites.
Peter Sloterdijk (Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents))
But then something unexpected happened. Donald Trump, a real estate mogul and television celebrity who did not need the Koch donor network’s money to run, who seemed to have little grasp of the goals of this movement, entered the race. More than that, to get ahead, Trump was able to successfully mock the candidates they had already cowed as “puppets.” And he offered a different economic vision. He loved capitalism, to be sure, but he was not a libertarian by any stretch. Like Bill Clinton before him, he claimed to feel his audience’s pain. He promised to stanch it with curbs on the very agenda the party’s front-runners were promoting: no more free-trade deals that shuttered American factories, no cuts to Social Security or Medicare, and no more penny-pinching while the nation’s infrastructure crumbled. He went so far as to pledge to build a costly wall to stop immigrants from coming to take the jobs U.S. companies offered them because they could hire desperate, rightless workers for less. He said and did a lot more, too, much that was ugly and incendiary. And in November, he shocked the world by winning the Electoral College vote.
Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America)
Immigrants are almost always outsiders. Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to margins the people who trigger in us the feelings we try to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and poor and sick people on the margins of the society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we are most afraid we will find in ourselves. ....And we are often not honest about what's happening. If we are in the inside and we see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves: " I'm not in that situation because I'm different. But that's just prime talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don't want to confess what we have in common with the outsiders because it is too humbling. It suggests that success and failure aren't entirely fair. And if you know, you got the better deal, then you have to be humble and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say :" I am no better than others." So instead, we invent ways for our need to exclude. We say it is about merit or tradition when it's just protecting our privilege and our pride.
Melinda Gates (The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World)
The Irish and Italian immigrants who came to New York in the same period didn’t have that advantage. They didn’t have a skill specific to the urban economy. They went to work as day laborers and domestics and construction workers—jobs where you could show up for work every day for thirty years and never learn market research and manufacturing and how to navigate the popular culture and how to negotiate with the Yankees, who ran the world. Or consider the fate of the Mexicans who immigrated to California between 1900 and the end of the 1920s to work in the fields of the big fruit and vegetable growers. They simply exchanged the life of a feudal peasant in Mexico for the life of a feudal peasant in California. “The conditions in the garment industry were every bit as bad,” Soyer goes on. “But as a garment worker, you were closer to the center of the industry. If you are working in a field in California, you have no clue what’s happening to the produce when it gets on the truck. If you are working in a small garment shop, your wages are low, and your conditions are terrible, and your hours are long, but you can see exactly what the successful people are doing, and you can see how you can set up your own job.”*
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
The future of democracy in developed countries will depend on their ability to deal with the problem of a disappearing middle class. In the wake of the financial crisis there has been a rise of new populist groups from the Tea Party in the United States to various anti-EU, anti-immigrant parties in Europe. What unites all of them is the belief that elites in their countries have betrayed them. And in many ways they are correct: the elites who set the intellectual and cultural climate in the developed world have been largely buffered from the effects of middle-class decline. There has been a vacuum in new approaches to the problem, approaches that don’t involve simply returning to the welfare state solutions of the past. The proper approach to the problem of middle-class decline is not necessarily the present German system or any other specific set of measures. The only real long-term solution would be an educational system that succeeded in pushing the vast majority of citizens into higher levels of education and skills. The ability to help citizens flexibly adjust to the changing conditions of work requires state and private institutions that are similarly flexible. Yet one of the characteristics of modern developed democracies is that they have accumulated many rigidities over time that make institutional adaptation increasingly difficult. In fact, all political systems—past and present—are liable to decay. The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will
Francis Fukuyama (Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy)
In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai. To discover the secret to Silicon Valley’s success, you need to look beyond the standard origin story. When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind—after the HBO television show, of course—are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook; Jobs/ Wozniak, Page/ Brin, Zuckerberg. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways. First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information. Moreover, as other markets have matured, smart founders from around the globe are electing to build companies in start-up hubs in their home countries rather than immigrating to Silicon Valley.
Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
The attachment voids experienced by immigrant children are profound. The hardworking parents are focused on supporting their families economically and, unfamiliar with the language and customs of their new society, they are not able to orient their children with authority or confidence. Peers are often the only people available for such children to latch on to. Thrust into a peer-oriented culture, immigrant families may quickly disintegrate. The gulf between child and parent can widen to the point that becomes unbridgeable. Parents of these children lose their dignity, their power, and their lead. Peers ultimately replace parents and gangs increasingly replace families. Again, immigration or the necessary relocation of people displaced by war or economic misery is not the problem. Transplanted to peer-driven North American society, traditional cultures succumb. We fail our immigrants because of our own societal failure to preserve the child-parent relationship. In some parts of the country one still sees families, often from Asia, join together in multigenerational groups for outings. Parents, grandparents, and even frail great-grandparents mingle, laugh, and socialize with their children and their children's offspring. Sadly, one sees this only among relatively recent immigrants. As youth become incorporated into North American society, their connections with their elders fade. They distance themselves from their families. Their icons become the artificially created and hypersexualized figures mass-marketed by Hollywood and the U.S. music industry. They rapidly become alienated from the cultures that have sustained their ancestors for generation after generation. As we observe the rapid dissolution of immigrant families under the influence of the peer-oriented society, we witness, as if on fast-forward video, the cultural meltdown we ourselves have suffered in the past half century. It would be encouraging to believe that other parts of the world will successfully resist the trend toward peer orientation. The opposite is likely to be the case as the global economy exerts its corrosive influences on traditional cultures on other continents. Problems of teenage alienation are now widely encountered in countries that have most closely followed upon the American model — Britain, Australia, and Japan. We may predict similar patterns elsewhere to result from economic changes and massive population shifts. For example, stress-related disorders are proliferating among Russian children. According to a report in the New York Times, since the collapse of the Soviet Union a little over a decade ago, nearly a third of Russia's estimated 143 million people — about 45 million — have changed residences. Peer orientation threatens to become one of the least welcome of all American cultural exports.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
So Japan is allied with Germany and they’re like “Sweet the rest of the world already hates us let’s take their land!” So they start invading China and Malaysia and the Philippines and just whatever else but then they’re like “Hmm what if America tries to stop us? Ooh! Let’s surprise attack Hawaii!” So that’s exactly what they do. The attack is very successful but only in a strictly technical sense. To put it in perspective, let’s try a metaphor. Let’s say you’re having a barbecue but you don’t want to get stung by any bees so you find your local beehive and just go crazy on it with a baseball bat. Make sense? THEN YOU MUST BE JAPAN IN THE ’40s. WHO ELSE WOULD EVER DO THIS? So the U.S. swarms on Japan, obviously but that’s where our bee metaphor breaks down because while bees can sting you they cannot put you in concentration camps (or at least, I haven’t met any bees that can do that). Yeah, after that surprise attack on Pearl Harbor everybody on the West Coast is like “OMG WE’RE AT WAR WITH JAPAN AND THERE ARE JAPANESE DUDES LIVING ALLLL AROUND US.” I mean, they already banned Japanese immigration like a decade before but there are still Japanese dudes all over the coast and what’s more those Japanese dudes are living right next door to all the important aircraft factories and landing strips and shipyards and farmland and forests and bridges almost as if those types of things are EVERYWHERE and thus impossible not to live next door to. Whatever, it’s pretty suspicious. Now, at this point, nothing has been sabotaged and some people think that means they’re safe. But not military geniuses like Earl Warren who points out that the only reason there’s been no sabotage is that the Japanese are waiting for their moment and the fact that there has been no sabotage yet is ALL THE PROOF WE NEED to determine that sabotage is being planned. Frank Roosevelt hears this and he’s like “That’s some pretty shaky logic but I really don’t like Japanese people. Okay, go ahead.” So he passes an executive order that just says “Any enemy ex-patriots can be kicked out of any war zone I designate. P.S.: California, Oregon, and Washington are war zones have fun with that.” So they kick all the Japanese off the coast forcing them to sell everything they own but people are still not satisfied. They’re like “Those guys look funny! We can’t have funny-looking dudes roaming around this is wartime! We gotta lock ’em up.” And FDR is like “Okay, sure.” So they herd all the Japanese into big camps where they are concentrated in large numbers like a hundred and ten thousand people total and then the military is like “Okay, guys we will let you go if you fill out this loyalty questionnaire that says you love the United States and are totally down to be in our army” and some dudes are like “Sweet, free release!” but some dudes are like “Seriously? You just put me in jail for being Asian. This country is just one giant asshole and it’s squatting directly over my head.” And the military is like “Ooh, sorry to hear that buddy looks like you’re gonna stay here for the whole war. Meanwhile your friends get to go fight and die FOR FREEDOM.
Cory O'Brien (George Washington Is Cash Money: A No-Bullshit Guide to the United Myths of America)
But Ky understood. She hated how well she now understood. After all, hadn’t she kept every hurt she’d ever experienced from her own parents? Hadn’t she hidden the bullying, the name-calling, the cruel acts of strangers, the times she’d been told to go back to where she came from, the ching-chongs, the pulled-back eyelids, the blondies with the Cabbage Patch Kids, the way she was forced to play the monster, the way she was asked why she couldn’t just take a joke, the times she was told that Asian women were ugly, kinky, docile, crazy, nerdy, unworthy, the way she was dismissed by men, the way she was dismissed by white men, their comments about what Asian women were and weren’t, what Asian women could or couldn’t be, the way she smiled with her tongue pressed against her teeth even as an ache beat in tandem with her heart—hadn’t she hidden all of that? And hadn’t she lived her own ambitious, exciting, anxious, uncompromising life while knowing that she could never, ever, ever, ever tell her parents about what she had been through? Because knowing would break their hearts. Because she had to help them believe that their sacrifices had paid off. Because she had to help them believe that moving to a country where they didn’t speak the language and weren’t seen as individuals had been worth it. Because she had to convince them that they’d done right by their children, that no one had failed, that no one had been let down, that they were one of the lucky ones who’d followed the path and found success. It made perfect sense. You lied to protect. You lied because of love.
Tracey Lien (All That's Left Unsaid)
While the reasons why hunter-gatherers became farmers may still be the subject of debate, the most important consequences are now established. This change in the means of subsistence initially represented great success for the human species: according to some authors, the global population increased tenfold from 8 million at the start of the Neolithic to 85 million in 5000 BCE.6 At the same time, a gradual process of sedentarization and hence the accumulation of goods occurs, firstly of food and subsequently also of household effects and even valuables. It started with the semi-permanent establishment of hunter-gatherers in places that were so rich in natural nourishment that they no longer had to constantly hunt for their food. But this only became possible for larger parts of humanity with the development of agriculture. This, too, was a lengthy process. In many parts of the world, farmers who employed the slash-and-burn method remained highly mobile. Every year, or every few years, an area of forest was burned down and crops were sown in the fertile ash. These farmers were thus continuously changing land. The specialization of certain farmers as pastoralists also involved a high degree of mobility. Finally, permanently established farmers could decide to move for all kinds of reasons – as evidenced by the immigration from the Old to the New World following Columbus’s discovery of that continent.7 These caveats aside, it remains the case that, since the Neolithic, humanity has become considerably more place-bound, which has had an enormous impact on the organization of work. It was a
Jan Lucassen (The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind)
children of immigrants from nearly every country in the world, including from poorer countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and Laos, are more upwardly mobile than the children of US-born residents who were raised in families with a similar income level.
Ran Abramitzky (Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success)
Our data reveals that, despite major changes in immigration policy over time, immigrants today move up the economic ladder at the same pace as European immigrants did in the past.
Ran Abramitzky (Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success)
An astonishing 77 percent of Indian-born immigrants to the United States hold a college degree today, compared to only 8 percent of residents of India.
Ran Abramitzky (Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success)
Indeed, if one extends the “social” dimension to include the successful integration of immigrants, surely America’s democracy would emerge much less defective than the alleged models of Western Europe.
Andrei S. Markovits (Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (The Public Square Book 5))
If the meaning of the mountain range overlooking the home’s peace is called the Quteniqua Mountains, which is rally made up of the Langeberg Range (northeast of Worcester) and the Tsitsikamma Mountains (east-west along The Garden Route), and if the collective name of the mountain range references the idea of honey, the honey that can be found at Amanda and Lena’s home starts with kindness, a type of kindness the touches the world’s core understanding of compassion. “I want to give you a used copy of my favorite book that I think helps to explain what exactly I love about this area. Out of all of her books, this is probably one of the least favorite books based off readers’ choice, yet it is my favorite book because I think it truly understands the spirit of this area.” Amanda handed me the book. “Da-lene Mat-thee,” I said. “Is that correct…” Before I could finish, she had already answered my question. “Yes, the author that I had spoken about earlier today. Although she is an Afrikaans author, this book is in English. The Mulberry Forest. My favorite character is Silas Miggel, the headstrong Afrikaans man who didn’t want to have the Italian immigrants encroaching onto his part of the forest.” She paused for a second before resuming, “Yet, he’s the one who came to their rescue when the government turned a blind eye on the hardships of the Italian immigrants. He’s the one who showed kindness toward them even when he didn’t feel that way in his heart. That’s what kindness is all about, making time for our follow neighbors because it’s the right thing to do, full stop. Silas is the embodiment of what I love about the people of this area. It is also what I love about my childhood home growing up in the shantytown. The same thread of tenacity can be found in both places. So, when you read about Silas, think of me because he represents the heart of both Knysna and the Storms River Valley. This area contains a lot of clones just like him, the heartbeat of why this area still stands today.” That’s the kind of hope that lights up the sky. The Portuguese called the same mountain range Serra de Estrellla or Mountain of the Star… If we want to change the world, we should follow in the Quteniqua Mountain’s success, and be a reminder that human benevolence is a star that lights up the sky of any galaxy, the birthplace of caring. As we drove away, for a second, I thought I heard the quiet whispers from Dalene Matthee’s words when she wrote in Fiela’s Child: “If he had to wish, what would he wish for, he asked himself. What was there to wish for…a wish asked for the unattainable. The impossible.” And that’s what makes this area so special, a space grounded in the impossibility held together through single acts of human kindness, the heart of the Garden Route’s greatest accomplishment. A story for all times…simply called, Hospitality, the Garden Route way…
hlbalcomb
Thus anti-immigrant rhetoric, like other GOP talking points, lost its use value for Republicans by the mid-1990s. As Clinton strategist Mark Penn explained about his candidate’s continued success, “We did this by co-opting the Republicans on all their issues—getting tough on welfare, tough on crime, balancing the budget, and cracking down on illegal immigration.”21 Nativist politics largely lay dormant
Kathleen Belew (A Field Guide to White Supremacy)
However, I was told that I “spoke good English” for a “foreigner” in a hostile and menacing tone of voice. Furthermore, some schoolmates resented the fact that I was a “foreigner” who wanted to get good grades and become someone successful. Some of my classmates thought that I was not allowed to advance more in American society than those who were born in the U.S.A., which is why they made my life a nightmare. The main issue at hand is that I am not the only person who has been affected in this way. I did not realize that some people seek to initiate a psychological war against immigrants. It is very anti-American to hate immigrants, considering the fact that America is a nation of immigrants. It is also shameful that some Americans choose to practice behaviors that not only go against freedom, democracy, and justice (core values of American society), but also against their ancestors, who were immigrants. Many Bosniaks went through this experience in the past and still continue suffering in this manner to this day.
Aida Mandic
Page 117: Assimilation takes place in the spheres of religion and language most easily and is most successful among people who are culturally similar to the dominant group. When race is the distinguishing feature, assimilation efforts become irrelevant.
Milica Zarkovic Bookman (The Demographic Struggle for Power: The Political Economy of Demographic Engineering in the Modern World)
Page 193: Any attempt to increase the population size of one ethnic group relative to others is confrontational. As such, it is clearly not meant to dissuade ethnic leaders and nationalist populations against ethnic conflict. In fact, the goal of increasing ethnic populations is based on the underlying view that, with successful demographic engineering, an ethnic group will gain dominance over others. Similarly, the methods for population augmentation involve processes that are antagonistic to selected ethnic groups. Indeed, relocating population, forcing assimilation, and encouraging population growth of a target population are all antagonistic acts. Such confrontational policies are resented by those they are meant to affect, and are bound to provoke an intensification of nationalist sentiment and amplify demands for ethnic rights (be they cultural or secessionist). … Since ethnic regulation implies the elimination or suppression of ‛other’ ethnicities, instead of easing inter-ethnic animosities and improving inter-ethnic relations, the demographic struggle for power portends the perpetuation of inter-ethnic conflict.
Milica Zarkovic Bookman (The Demographic Struggle for Power: The Political Economy of Demographic Engineering in the Modern World)
Netherlands, which has a restrictive immigration policy compared to the United States. Most European nations, including the Netherlands, after all, have universal health insurance coverage, which makes drug treatment and psychiatric treatment more available, and the Dutch government subsidizes more housing. Finally, the Netherlands’ big success was with heroin, which has effective pharmacological substitutes, methadone and Suboxone, not with meth, which lacks anything similar. But there may be fewer obstacles than appear. The Netherlands has a private health-care insurance system similar to that of the United States and covered the people who needed health care in ways similar to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which significantly expanded access to drug treatment, including medically assisted treatment, in the United States.4 San Francisco subsidizes a significant quantity of housing, as we have seen. While California is larger than the Netherlands, the population of Amsterdam (872,000) is nearly identical to San Francisco’s (882,000).5 And while California’s population and geographic area are larger and more difficult to manage than those of the Netherlands, California also has significantly greater wealth and resources, constituting in 2019 the fifth-largest economy in the world.6 And the approach to breaking up open drug scenes, treating addiction, and providing psychiatric care is fundamentally the same whether in five European cities, Philadelphia, New York, or Phoenix.
Michael Shellenberger (San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities)
Wasn't that the point, though? Wasn't that the narrative for every immigrant and refugee who had come to the United States? To come and build a better, safer life for yourself and your family? If the measure of success was that I was living a more comfortable, easier life than they had, then why was I simultaneously penalized for it?
Julie Tieu (The Donut Trap)
Of course, television is not alone in being confronted with this destiny - this vicious circle: the destiny of all those things which , no longer having an objective purpose, take themselves for their own ends. In so doing, they escape all responsibility, but also become bogged down in their own insoluble contradictions. This is, however, more particularly the critical situation of all the current media. Opinion polls themselves are a good example. They have had their moment of truth (as, indeed, did television), when they were the representative mirror of an opinion, in the days when such a thing still existed, before it became merely a conditioned reflex. But perpetual harassment by opinion polls has resulted in their being no longer a mirror at all; they have, rather, become a screen. A perverse exchange has been established between polls which no longer really ask questions and masses who no longer reply. Or rather they become cunning partners, like rats in laboratories or the viruses pursued in experiments. They toy with the polls at least as much as the polls toy with them. They play a double game. It is not, then, that the polls are bogus or deceitful, but rather that their very success and automatic operation have made them random. There is the same double game, the same perverse social relationship between an all-powerful, but wholly self-absorbed, television and the mass of TV viewers, who are vaguely scandalized by this misappropriation, not just of public money, but of the whole value system of news and information. You don't need to be politically aware to realize that, after the famous dustbins of history, we are now seeing the dustbins of information. Now , information may well be a myth, but this alternative myth, the modern substitute for all other values, has been rammed down our throats incessantly. And there is a glaring contrast between this universal myth and the actual state of affairs. The real catastrophe of television has been how deeply it has failed to live up to its promise of providing information- its supposed modern function. We dreamed first of giving power - political power- to the imagination, but we dream less and less of this, if indeed at all. The fantasy then shifted on to the media and information. At times we dreamed (at least collectively, even if individually we continued to have no illusions) of finding some freedom there — an openness, a new public space. Such dreams were soon dashed: the media turned out to be much more conformist and servile than expected, at times more servile than the professional politicians. The latest displacement of the imagination has been on to the judiciary. Again this has been an illusion, since, apart from th e pleasing whiff of scandal produced, this is also dependent on the media operation. We are going to end up looking for imagination in places further and further removed from power - from any form of power whatever (and definitely far removed from cultural power, which has become the most conventional and professional form ther e is). Among the excluded, the immigrants, the homeless. But that will really take a lot of imagination because they, who no longer even have an image, are themselves the by-products of a whole society's loss of imagination, of the loss of any social imagination. And this is indeed the point. We shall soon see it is no use trying to locate the imagination somewhere. Quite simply, because there no longer is any. The day this becomes patently obvious, the vague collective disappointment hanging over us today will become a massive sickening feeling.
Jean Baudrillard (Screened Out)
To understand the fundamental benefits of an immigrant population, imagine that you could divide the population of any country into two groups: one consisting on the average of the youngest, healthiest, boldest, most risk-tolerant, most hard-working, ambitious, and innovative people; the other consisting of everybody else. Transplant the first group to another country, and leave the second group in their country of origin. That selective transplanting approximates the decision to emigrate and its successful accomplishment.
Jared Diamond (Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis)
People in general are swayed by emotion. How much of Trump’s improbable victory in 2016, for example, was driven by America’s emotions? But in the black community, this is particularly true. You can’t control us with our money, because there’s not enough wealth in the black community for that to matter. You can’t talk about tax policy, because there aren’t enough people who will benefit from that. The same goes for today’s other hot-button issues. LGBT rights? Immigration? Are you serious? African Americans are still largely fighting for our own rights. And so, instead of discussing these other issues, liberal politicians usually produce an emotional argument or statement that leads back to slavery, Jim Crow, or racism. The Democrats have found success by connecting any issue to the one that’s always affected us most.
Gianno Caldwell (Taken for Granted: How Conservatism Can Win Back the Americans That Liberalism Failed)
In all, at least three dozen Lithuanian immigrants with ties to the Nazi massacres there found sanctuary in the United States beginning in the 1950s, clustered in Florida, Massachusetts, and Illinois. With U.S. immigration policies wide open to immigrants from the Nazi-occupied “captive nations” in the Baltics, these men had little difficulty getting into America, hiding themselves among thousands of legitimate war refugees from the region. More than a dozen of them came from a single Nazi-controlled battalion in Lithuania that carried out a string of massacres in the region that were considered brutal even by Third Reich standards. Resettled in America, these Nazi collaborators from Lithuania were now American success stories: leaders of their churches, pillars of their communities, exemplars for other U.S. immigrants.
Eric Lichtblau (The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men)
Asian Americans have been stereotyped as highly successful, suggesting that the American Dream is their reality (perhaps more so than that of other racial minorities), though the uncomfortable truth is that there are wide economic disparities among Asian Americans. Some ethnic groups, such as the Japanese, Chinese, and Indians, have been described as “outwhiting the whites” in terms of economic success, while some Southeast Asian American groups who immigrated to the United States as refugees with few resources (such as Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Laotians) are trapped in intergenerational poverty; in fact, some of these ethnic groups lag well behind Latinx and African Americans in terms of socioeconomic status.
Nikki Khanna (Whiter: Asian American Women on Skin Color and Colorism)
The reason Black immigrants generally have higher educational levels and economic pictures than African Americans is not that their transnational ethnicities are superior. The reason resides in the circumstances of human migration. Not all individuals migrate, but those who do, in what’s called “immigrant self-selection,” are typically individuals with an exceptional internal drive for material success and/or they possess exceptional external resources. Generally speaking, individual Black and Latinx and Asian and Middle Eastern and European immigrants are uniquely resilient and resourceful—not because they are Nigerian or Cuban or Japanese or Saudi Arabian or German but because they are immigrants. In fact, immigrants and migrants of all races tend to be more resilient and resourceful when compared with the natives of their own countries and the natives of their new countries. Sociologists call this the “migrant advantage.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
During the Second World War, just when Chinese were finally being granted the right to apply for naturalization, Japanese were subjected to one of the most spectacular violations of civil rights in living memory. Soon after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese Americans living in the continental United States were rounded up and sent to internment camps. Here they were kept behind barbed wire and guarded by soldiers. The property they left behind was either stolen or sold at a sharp loss. At the time of the evacuation, the Federal Reserve Bank estimated Japanese property losses at $400 million382—a figure that, today, would be many billions. This wholesale internment was far worse than anything done to blacks then or since. Many of the men, women, and children who were rounded up are still living today. If any group in America had wanted to give up, blame white society, and try to live off its victim status, the Japanese could have. Instead, when the war was over, they went back to what was left of their lives and started over. Twenty-five years after the war, they had long since caught up with white society and, as a group, had incomes 32 percent above the national average.383 Asian Americans have not tried to blame others for their troubles or shirk responsibility for their own success or failure. They have looked to their own resources to succeed. White America has clearly oppressed them in the past, just as it has blacks. Some people have argued that Asian immigrants have the advantage of starting out fresh when they get to America, whereas blacks must constantly drag the baggage of slavery and oppression behind them. This obviously does not apply to the descendants of Asians who came to America a century ago practically in bondage and who, in many cases, were treated as badly as blacks. If racism is such an obstacle to success in America, why have Asians overcome it while blacks have not?
Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
Doing so showed that there was another variable that was a strong predictor of a person’s securing an entry in Wikipedia: the proportion of immigrants in your county of birth. The greater the percentage of foreign-born residents in an area, the higher the proportion of children born there who go on to notable success. Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
Davidowitz, Seth
The Union army's southward march-especially in the Mississippi Valley-stretched supply lines, brought thousands of defenseless ex-slaves under Union protection, and exposed large expanses of occupied territory to Confederate raiders, further multiplying the army's demand for soldiers. On the home front, these new demands sparked violent opposition to federal manpower policies. The Enrollment Act of March 1863 allowed wealthy conscripts to buy their way out of military service by either paying a $300 commutation fee or employing a substitute. Others received hardship exemptions as specified in the act, though political influence rather than genuine need too often determined an applicant's success. Those without money or political influence found the draft especially burdensome. In July, hundreds of New Yorkers, many of the Irish immigrants, angered by the inequities of the draft, lashed out at the most visible and vulnerable symbols of the war: their black neighbors. The riot raised serious questions about the enrollment system and sent Northern politicians scurrying for an alternative to conscription. To even the most politically naive Northerners, the enlistment of black men provided a means to defuse draft resistance at a time when the federal army's need for soldiers was increasing. At the same time, well-publicized battle achievements by black regiments at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, and at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, eased popular fears that black men could not fight, mitigated white opposition within army ranks, and stoked the enthusiasm of both recruiters and black volunteers.
Leslie S. Rowland (Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War)
Every means and source of struggle. They peeled and sorted and bunched and sprayed and cleaned and stacked and shelved and swept; my father put them to anything for which they didn't have to speak. They both had college degrees and knew no one in the country and spoke little English. The men, whom I knew as Mr. Yoon and Mr. Kim, were both recent immigrants in their thirties with wives and young children. They worked twelve-hour days six days a week for $200 cash and meals and all the fruit and vegetables we couldn't or wouldn't sell; it was the typical arrangement. My father like all successful immigrants before him gently and not so gently exploited his own.
Chang-rae Lee (Native Speaker)
In the wake of the Great Famine of 1847, nearly one million immigrants fled Ireland for the United States. Among them was a farmer from Wexford County, Patrick Kehoe. Leaving his wife and seven children behind until he could establish himself in the New World, he first settled in Howard County, Maryland, where he found work as a stonemason. In 1850, he sent for his oldest son, Philip, a strapping seventeen-year-old. The rest of the family followed in 1851. By then, Michigan Fever—as the great surge of settlers during the 1830s came to be known—had subsided. Still, there was plenty of cheap and attractive land to be had for pioneering immigrants from the East. In 1855, Philip Kehoe, then twenty-two, left his family in Maryland and journeyed westward, settling in Lenawee County, roughly one hundred miles southeast of Bath. For two years, he worked as a hired hand, saving enough money to purchase 80 acres of timberland. That land became the basis of what would eventually expand into a flourishing 490-acre farm.1 In late 1858, he wed his first wife, twenty-six-year-old Mary Mellon, an Irish orphan raised by her uncle, a Catholic priest, who brought her to America when she was twenty. She died just two and a half years after her marriage, leaving Philip with their two young daughters, Lydia and a newborn girl named after her mother.2 Philip married again roughly three years later, in 1864. His second wife, twenty-nine at the time of their wedding, was the former Mary McGovern, a native New Yorker who had immigrated to Michigan with her parents when she was five. By the time of her death in 1890, at the age of fifty-five, she had borne Philip nine children: six girls and three boys. From the few extant documents that shed light on Philip Kehoe’s life during the twenty-six years of his second marriage, a picture emerges of a shrewd, industrious, civic-minded family man, an epitome of the immigrant success story.
Harold Schechter (Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer)
Ethnic entrepreneurship englobes the totality of projects and economic initiatives undertaken by ethnic minority individuals that are not yet integrated into the society of a country with a large number of immigrants.
Arnaud Segla (Successful Citizens through entrepreneurship)
A Malthusian catastrophe (also known as Malthusian trap, population trap, Malthusian check, Malthusian crisis, Malthusian spectre, Malthusian crunch) occurs when population growth outpaces agricultural production, causing population to be limited by famine or war. It is named after Thomas Robert Malthus, who suggested that while technological advances could increase a society's supply of resources, such as food, and thereby improve the standard of living, the resource abundance would enable population growth, which would eventually bring the per capita supply of resources back to its original level. The modern formulation of the Malthusian theory was developed by Qumarul Ashraf and Oded Galor. Their theoretical structure suggests that as long as: (i) higher income has a positive effect on reproductive success, and (ii) land is limited factor of production, then technological progress has only a temporary effect in income per capita. While in the short-run technological progress increases income per capita, resource abundance created by technological progress would enable population growth, and would eventually bring the per capita income back to its original long-run level.
Wikipedia: Malthusian Catastrophe
Come to think of it, who really is Jesus’ dad? No one is mentioned on his birth certificate. In fact, he doesn’t have a birth certificate. Talk about a Birther conspiracy theory. Why isn’t Trump on the case? Obama has nothing on Jesus. Jesus isn’t American. He’s a Middle Eastern immigrant. Isn’t the Donald supposed to be stopping those cunts with their fanatical religious beliefs from getting into the country? Build the fucking Wall! Keep out Jesus.
Adam Nostra (The Devil and Jesus Debate Tinder Strategies: How to Optimize Your Tinder Success)
So much of immigration is about loss. First you lose bodies: people who die, people whose deaths you missed. Then you lose history: no one speaks the language anymore, and successive generations grow more and more westernized. Then you lose memory: throughout this trip, I tried to place people, where I had met them, how I knew them. I can’t remember anything anymore.
Scaachi Koul (One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays)
My parents already know I'm bereft of their culture, that their son is almost as Frank or Bill as any other American, but they also believe this is necessary: that if their son is to become president, it won't happen while he is wearing a turban. They're willing to surrender their culture in order to assure my success, which means the price of my inclusion here is our alienation from each other.
Jaswinder Bolina (Of Color)
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Quoting page 65-66: Race-conscious affirmative action is a familiar term of journalistic convenience. It identifies unambiguously the controversial element of minority preferences in distributing benefits. But it also conflates racially targeted civil rights remedies with affirmative action preferences for groups, such as Hispanics and women, given protected class status irrespective of race. … It includes nonracial as well as racial preferences, and it distinguishes such remedies, available only to officially designated protected classes, from the soft affirmative action … which emphasized special outreach programs for recruiting minorities … within a traditional liberal framework of equal individual rights for all Americans. … The architects of race-conscious affirmative action, Skrentny observes, developed their remedy in the face of public opinion heavily arrayed against it. Unlike most public policy in America, hard affirmative action was originally adopted without the benefit of any organized lobbying by the major interest groups involved. Instead, government bureaucrats, not benefiting interest groups, provided the main impetus. The race-conscious model of hard affirmative action was developed in trial-and-error fashion by a coalition of mostly white, second-tier civil servants in the social service agencies of the presidency… To Skrenty’s core irony, we may add three further ironies, first, the key to political survival for hard affirmative action was persistent support from the Republican Party… Second, the theories of compensatory justice supporting minority preference policies were devised only after the adoption of the policies themselves. Finally, affirmative action preferences which supporters rationalized as necessary to compensate African-Americans for historic discrimination, and which for twenty years were successfully defended in federal courts primarily on those grounds, soon benefited millions of immigrants newly arrived from Latin America and Asia.
Hugh Davis Graham (Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America)
There are many histories of North America. The experiences of successive waves of immigrants are distinct, as are—to a large degree—the histories of the different classes compromising the immigrant waves. The histories of the various peoples native to the continent are also quite distinct within themselves. The story of each of these groups holds a rightful claim to its own integrity, to its own place and fullness of meaning within the whole. To deny this is to distort.
Winona LaDuke
A succession of philosophers and historians spent their time studiously attempting to say nothing as successfully as possible.
Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam)
Immigrants chase success differently because we have something to prove to the people we left behind and the people who note our differences—our accent, our appearance, our religion, our culture—every day.
Jane Igharo (Ties That Tether)
But there were two more hopeful causes and both pointed to the fundamental role communities had in transforming New York. First, immigration. First- and second-generation immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than the native born, and hundreds of thousands of them had been moving into at-risk neighborhoods, diluting the percentage of criminals. And many were there because of the second reason, the Housing Initiative that replaced urban entropy with homes. “What happened,” says Trina Scotland of the East Brooklyn Congregations, “was that as the mind-set changed, and as the police changed, that’s when the crime rate started going down.” A Melrose Court resident in the
Thomas Dyja (New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation)
When you were the child of immigrants, you weren’t just you; your success was also your parents’, your cousins’, your relatives’ still struggling for life in Haiti or India, wishing they were you. It was your job, your preordained celestial existence or whatever, to make the most of it.
Ben Philippe (The Field Guide to the North American Teenager)
Black immigrants are more motivated, more hardworking, and “more entrepreneurial than native-born blacks,” wrote one commentator in The Economist in 1996. Their success shows “that racism does not account for all, or even most, of the difficulties encountered by native-born blacks.” Ethnically racist ideas, like all racist ideas, cover up the racist policies wielded against Black natives and immigrants. Whenever Black immigrants compare their economic standing to that of Black natives, whenever they agree that their success stories show that antiracist Americans are overstating racist policies against African Americans, they are tightening the handcuffs of racist policy around their own wrists. Black immigrants’ comparisons with Black natives conceal the racial inequities between Black immigrants and non-Black immigrants
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
if you’re a first-generation American immigrant, the pressure is even worse, because as far as your mom is concerned the only way she’s been successful is if you graduate from college and get a good white-collar job—because that’s the American dream, and your success is her shot at that dream.
Jo Koy (Mixed Plate: Chronicles of an All-American Combo)
Tony Soprano, when he has sex with a one-legged Russian immigrant or beats an arrogant lawyer to a pulp—let viewers vicariously experience the true, genuine, and transparent enjoyment of life and pleasure that middle-class self-discipline prevents them to experience, as least in everyday real life—and that may resonate “authentic” and true to other working-class people, white, black, and Hispanic. They show no inclination or patience for the delayed gratification the middle-class ethics of success prescribes.72
Simone Cinotto (Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities (Critical Studies in Italian America))
New Yorkers liked Sadik-Khan’s bike lanes and the plazas; they liked the 800 more acres of parks—though Parks had cut its staff 40% between 2008 and 2012 even as the Central Park Conservancy boasted a $183 million endowment—and three-quarters of a million more trees. A certain texture was gone though, easy to see on the Upper East Side where almost a third of the apartments between 49th and 70th between Fifth and Park were vacant ten months a year, owned by shell companies and LLCs. The neighborhood was a kind of jewelry store now, apartments tended and traded for their speculative value. Yet the idea of New York City was bigger and broader than it had ever been. By 2010, 37% of New York’s residents were immigrants, two-thirds living in Brooklyn and Queens, and as much as globalization had helped gut the city’s manufacturing base, they’d been at least as much responsible for hatching its evolutions as anything done at One Police Plaza or City Hall. While Wall Street had been mining wealth for itself, immigrants from around the world had rebuilt the day-to-day economy; from 1994 to 2004, businesses in neighborhoods like Flushing and Sunset Park grew by as much as 55%. Half of the city’s accountants
Thomas Dyja (New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation)
On May 14, 1912—eight months after his stepmother’s awful death—Andrew Kehoe, then forty years old, took a wife. Her full name was Ellen Agnes Price—“Nellie” to everyone who knew her. Born in 1875, she came from a family of proud Irish Catholic immigrants, whose most prominent member was her uncle Lawrence. A Civil War hero who had fought at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, Lawrence had grown up in Michigan, returned to his home state after the war, and purchased a wilderness tract in Bath Township, which he eventually transformed into a flourishing 320-acre farm. In 1880, he turned his phenomenal energies to mercantile pursuits, successfully engaging in the grocery, lumber, dry goods, and hardware businesses before becoming a pioneer in the nascent automobile industry as founder and president of the Lansing Auto Body Company. In addition to his myriad enterprises, he served as Lansing’s chief of police and superintendent of public works, did a four-year term as a member of the city council, headed the Lansing Business Men’s Association, and ran as the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in 1916.1 Among his eight siblings was his younger brother, Patrick. Born in Ireland in 1848, Patrick had been brought to America as an infant and spent most of his life in Michigan. Financially beholden to his wealthy older brother, he worked as a farmhand on Lawrence’s spread in Bath before becoming an employee of the Auto Body Company. His marriage to the former Mary Ann Wilson had produced a son, William, and six daughters, among them his firstborn child, Nellie, the future Mrs. Andrew Kehoe.2
Harold Schechter (Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer)
Among Korean Americans, many of whom were Christian and from middle- to upper-class backgrounds as a result of status-filtering immigration laws, a child out of wedlock, a missing father, seemed to be particularly embarrassing when family success represented all that you had in this country far away from home.
Nancy Jooyoun Kim (The Last Story of Mina Lee)
Quoting page 150-151: Political camouflage, needed by legislators eager to please civil rights and minority organizations while avoiding punishment by voters for supporting racial quotas, was provided by the bureaucratic obscurity of the government’s procurement process. Voters did not understand the complexities of government contracting and agency regulation. … The weaknesses of minority set-asides were chiefly two. First, they were indubitably racial and ethnic quotas, and hence were politically controversial. As government benefits tied to ancestry, they violated the classic liberal creed that Americans possessed equal individual rights. … Nonminority contractors were barred by their ancestry or their skin color from even bidding on contracts paid for by taxpayer dollars, including their own. Second, and less obviously, set-aside programs produced a common set of flaws in implementation. The most severe problem was the concentration of set-aside contracts on a few successful firms. Agency officials, needing to spend a large amount of money on minority procurement contractors every fiscal year, found very few minority contractors able to do the job. Four-fifths of all certified minority firms had no employees, their personnel roster consisting solely of the owner of the enterprise. As a consequence, agency set-aside contracts were typically concentrated on only a few firms large enough and sufficiently experienced to meet the terms of the contracts, providing constructing, street paving, computer services, military uniforms, or other goods and services. In 1990, for example, only fifty firms, representing less than 2 percent of the certified minority firms in the 8(a) program, accounted for 40 percent of the $4 billion awarded. … such firms never seemed to “graduate” from the set-aside program, weaned from the incubator and ready to compete in the normal marketplace of competitive government contracting. … Almost all the contracts were awarded on a no-bid or “sole source” basis; in fiscal 1991, for example, only 1.9 percent of the 4,576 contracts in the 8(a) program were awarded on a competitive basis.
Hugh Davis Graham (Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America)
There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies. Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various times in Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes or immigrants, the liquor interests or the international bankers. In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of this tradition of Know-Nothingism, the intelligentsia have at last in our time found a place.
Richard Hofstadter (Anti-Intellectualism in American Life)
Those on the far right I came to know felt two things. First, they felt the deep story was true. Second, they felt that liberals were saying it was not true, and that they themselves were not feeling the right feelings. Blacks and women who were beneficiaries of affirmative action, immigrants, refugees, and public employees were not really stealing their place in line, liberals said. So don’t feel resentful. Obama’s help to these groups was not really a betrayal, liberals said. The success of those who cut ahead was not really at the expense of white men and their wives. In other words, the far right felt that the deep story was their real story and that there was a false PC cover-up of that story. They felt scorned. “People think we’re not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees,” one man told me. “But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right)
Another wave of Cuban immigrants entered in 1980 as part of the Mariel Boatlift, and this group was both racially and socioeconomically very mixed. In that year 803,000 Cubans, or about 8 percent of Cuba’s population, lived in the United States. Cubans overwhelmingly settled in Miami, and many found success as entrepreneurs and small-business owners.9
John Iceland (Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2))
In its enervating plains, far removed from the invigorating sea-breeze and the bracing cold of the mountain ranges, the keen eye, undaunted heart, and relentless arm of the successive hardy northern immigrants slowly but surely tend to change to the placid look, folded hands and brooding mind of the Eastern Sage, who, content to dream his dream of life, wearily turns from the conflict and dire struggle for existence,
R.W. Frazer (British India)
The main problem facing immigrant communities was to change the sort of sociability they practiced from an ascriptive to a voluntary form. That is, the traditional social structures they brought with them were based on family, ethnicity, geographic origin, or some other characteristic with which they were born. For the first generation that landed in the United States, they created the trust necessary for revolving credit associations, family restaurants, laundries, and grocery stores. But in subsequent generations they could become a constraint, narrowing the range of business opportunities and keeping descendants in ethnic ghettoes. For the most successful ethnic groups, the sons and daughters of first-generation immigrants had to learn a broader kind of sociability that would get them jobs in the mainstream business world or in the professions. The speed with which immigrants could make the transition from a member of an ethnic enclave to assimilated mainstream American explains how the United States could be both ethnically diverse and strongly disposed to community at the same time. In many other societies, the descendants of immigrants were never permitted to leave their ethnic ghetto. Although solidarity within the ethnic enclave remained high, the society as a whole was balkanized and conflicted. Diversity can have clear benefits for a society, but is better taken in small sips than in large gulps. It is easily possible to have too diverse a society, in which people not only fail to share higher values and aspirations but even fail to speak the same language. The possibilities for spontaneous sociability then begin to flow only within the cleavage lines established by race, ethnicity, language, and the like. Assimilation through language policy and education must balance ethnicity if broader community is to be possible. The United States presents a mixed and changing picture. If we take into account factors like America’s religious culture and ethnicity, there are ample grounds for categorizing it simultaneously as both an individualistic and a group-oriented society. Those who see only the individualism are ignoring a critical part of American social history. “Yet the balance has been shifting toward individualism rapidly in the last couple of decades, so it is perhaps no accident that Asians and others see it as the epitome of an individualistic society. This shift has created numerous problems for the United States, many of which will play themselves out in the economic sphere.
Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
It must be noted however, that there were other Europeans that travelled to other parts of the earth, but because they did not take with them the same Protestant culture of dignity of labour, they did not record the same level of success, growth and development as the early Protestant immigrants had done.
Sunday Adelaja
Through the prism of national security and homeland sanctity, entrepreneurs successfully moved explicit racial and cultural reasons for restriction from the fringe of political discussion to the mainstream.
Pratheepan Gulasekaram (The New Immigration Federalism)
As with Britain, growth in the United States started with agriculture. Then, steel, railroads, automobiles, electricity, consumer appliances, telecommunications and chemicals were among the new industries that pulled America forwards. Later in the 20th century, entertainment, electronics and new service industries continued the growth. Immigration and financial expansion helped sustain the growth. At the same time there has been continuing improvements in production efficiencies. The result has been a succession of changes – new industries and increasing productivity – which have driven ongoing growth in spending, production and incomes.
Edward A. Hudson (Economic Growth: How it works and how it transformed the world)
The DeVoses were devout members of the Dutch Reformed Church, a renegade branch of Calvinism brought to America by Dutch immigrants, many of whom settled around Lake Michigan. By the 1970s, the church had become a vibrant and, some would say, vitriolic center of the Christian Right. Members crusaded against abortion, homosexuality, feminism, and modern science that conflicted with their teachings. Extreme free-market economic theories rejecting government intervention and venerating hard work and success in the Calvinist tradition were also embraced by many followers. Within this community of extreme views, no family was more extreme or more active than the DeVoses.
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
we need to understand that some misconceptions about science are the result not of a knowledge deficit but of belief resistance, and to devise ways to short-circuit these processes. That belief resistance—and this is a critically important point—is largely coming from adults. This is why education is political in the first place, and why the children of scientists are the most likely to become scientists—an effect that is slowly striating society into knowledge haves and have-nots. Beyond scientist parents, the other major predictor of a child’s success in science is having immigrant parents. Fully 70 percent of the finalists in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search were the children of immigrants
Shawn Lawrence Otto (The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It)
The alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth was successful from the Wampanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off the Narragansett. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England Indian society as a whole, for the alliance ensured the survival of Plymouth colony, which spearheaded the great wave of British immigration to Nee England. All of this was absent not only from my high school textbooks, but from the academic accounts they were based on.
Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
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Green Card Organization
Of the some 400 surveyed, nearly 300 had become Saudi citizens or permanent residents. The immigration to Saudi Arabia was largely accomplished through the assistance of Ma Bufang, a Qinghai Muslim who served as the Republic of China’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1957 until 1961 and who would himself ultimately obtain Saudi citizenship.76 The welcome they received and the commercial success they achieved there remained well known because many of those who fled had traveled through India (often specifically Kashmir).
David G. Atwill (Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa's Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960)
But away from home, even the sturdiest men become vulnerable: beaten animals with lifeless expressions, their eyes full of extinguished stars. Far from their houses, they all become frightened children, and the only thing that could console them was the success of their venture.
Romain Puértolas (L'Extraordinaire Voyage du fakir qui était resté coincé dans une armoire Ikea)
? “What’s up, wifey?” Mina said, grabbing her by the cheeks, then smacking her ass. Seema always felt better about being the child of immigrants when she hung out with Mina, her first-year roommate. The girl had no plans before, during, or after Michigan. She worked in graphic web design, which these days was simply a catchall category for anything not involving finance or escorting. Then again, her parents were so rich she didn’t even have to grow up Asian.
Gary Shteyngart (Lake Success)
...I learned long ago, under the warmth of another sun, never to swim against a rip current, but to float, to conserve energy, to remain as calm as possible, drifting on the high seas of uncertainty. Yes, I had struggled in America, but I had also learned the most valuable lessons about myself, and I had fallen in love. I realized right then, sitting at the table, that the measure of my success is not the American Dream but my ability to swim out of the current, parallel to shore, and trust that the waves would carry me.
The Good Immigrant
Just about the only serious argument anyone tries to make in favor of diversity echoes Jonathan Alger, a lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court in favor of racial preferences: “Corporations have to compete internationally,” he says, and “cross-cultural competency is a key skill in the work force.” This argument assumes that people get along best with people like themselves, that Koreans, for example, can do business most effectively with other Koreans. Presumably, if the United States has a large population of Koreans they will be a bridge between Korea and the United States. For that to work, however, Korean-Americans should not fully assimilate because if they do, they will lose the qualities that make them an asset. America should give up the ideal of Americanization that, in a few generations, made Englishmen, Dutchmen, Germans, Swedes, the Irish, and all other Europeans essentially indistinguishable. Do we really want to give up the idea of assimilation? Or should only racial minorities give up on assimilation? More to the point, is a diverse population really an advantage in trade or international affairs? Japan is one of the most racially homogeneous nations. It would be hard to find a country that so clearly practices the opposite of American-style diversity, but it is one of the most successful trading nations on earth. If diversity were a key advantage, Brazil, Indonesia, Sudan, Malaysia, and Lebanon would be world leaders in trade. Other great trading nations—Taiwan, Korea and China—are, if anything, even more closed and exclusionist than Japan. Germany is likewise a successful trading nation, but its trade surpluses cannot be attributed to cultural or racial diversity. Only since the 1960s has it had a large non-German minority of Turks who came as guest workers, and there is no evidence that Turks have helped Germany become more of a world presence or even a better trade partner with Turkey. The world’s consumers care about price and quality, not the race or nationality of the factory worker. American corporations boast about workforces that “look like America,” but they are often beaten in their own market by companies whose workforces look like Yokohama or Shanghai. If we really took seriously the idea that “cross-cultural competence” was crucially important, we would adjust the mix of immigrants accordingly. We might question the wisdom of Haitian immigration, for example, since Haiti is a small, poor country that is never likely to be an important trade partner. And do 32 million Mexican-Americans help our trade relations with the world—or even with Mexico? Canada is our number-one trading partner. Should we therefore encourage immigration from Canada? No one ever talks about immigration in these terms because at some level everyone understands that diversity has nothing to do with trade or influence in the world. The “cross-cultural competence” argument is artificial.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
Most of the movie moguls were Jewish immigrants who began their career as theater owners in their own neighborhood and later expanded into production.
John D. Gartner (The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America)
Although most White immigrant groups were confronted with prejudice and oppression when first arriving in America, their experiences in the United States have been qualitatively different than the experiences of people of color (Takaki, 1998). In a significant way, European immigrants over the past century and racial minorities face opposite cultural problems. The new Europeans were seen as not American enough, and they were pressured to give up their strange and threatening ways and to assimilate. While it might take several generations, the offspring that were successful in this process could usually expect to become accepted citizens.
Derald Wing Sue (Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race)
Will I ever realize the American Dream? Maybe, if I keep dreaming, hoping and working harder and harder every single day, and being mindful of the fact that the American Dream, just like genius and success, is, in Thomas Edison’s words, “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” (BrainyQuote). Just because some people realize the American Dream at an early age doesn’t mean others will never realize it a little bit later, sometimes when they almost stop dreaming. The American Dream has no deadline. For millions of immigrants who traveled thousands of miles – either by air, or by boat, by walking, or even by swimming – to reach the land of opportunity and the land of the free, the Dream is, like hope, the last thing to die.
Zekeh Gbotokuma (Global Safari: Checking in and Checking Out in Pursuit of World Wisdoms, the American Dream, and Cosmocitizenship)
The New York State Department of Corrections has collected information about the top ten nationalities in its prisons for years—a practice that will presumably end as soon as this book is published. Foreign inmates were 70 percent more likely to have committed a violent crime than American criminals. They were also twice as likely to have committed a class A felony, such as aggravated murder, kidnapping, and terrorism.19 In 2010, the top ten countries of the foreign-born inmates were:           Dominican Republic: 1,314           Jamaica: 849           Mexico: 523           Guyana: 289           El Salvador: 245           Cuba: 242           Trinidad and Tobago: 237           Haiti: 201           Ecuador: 189           Colombia: 16820 Most readers are agog at the number of Dominicans in New York prisons, having spent years reading New York Times articles about Dominicans’ “entrepreneurial zeal,”21 and “traditional immigrant virtues.”22 Even in an article about the Dominicans’ domination of the crack cocaine business, the Times praised their “savvy,” which had allowed them to become “highly successful” drug dealers, then hailed their drug-infested neighborhoods as the “embodiment of the American Dream—a vibrant, energetic urban melting pot.”23
Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
You need to start applying the mindset of an explorer, an entrepreneur. Or even a mindset of an immigrant. They have to make it happen. They take the risk. They leave their country, and all they have is a dream, ambition, drive, and commitment. This is the recipe for success.   Here
Marta Tuchowska (Motivation: Motivation in 7 Simple Steps: Get Excited, Stay Motivated, Achieve Any Goal and Create an Incredible Lifestyle! (Motivation, Success, Motivational Books Book 3))
The ownership of slaves became for many immigrants the single most important symbol of their success in the New World, although few of them ever participated in the economy of the large plantation. The small slaveholding culture of the colonial frontier had been largely responsible for the initial expansion of the antebellum South, and that culture persisted. The comments of travelers are confirmed by the census returns and tax records: these people only infrequently became large planters. Furthermore, their ethnicity survived until the last decades of the antebellum
James Oakes (The Ruling Race)
Others try to remove guilt by shifting the standards of right and wrong in the name of cultural progression. One of the easiest ways to assuage guilt is to convince ourselves that our moral standards are impractical or outdated. Greed is not wrong; it’s necessary in the good of ambition. Promoting ourselves is the only way to be successful. Lust is natural for contemporary men and women, and sex is expected regardless of marriage or gender. We attempt to remove our guilt by redefining right and wrong according to cultural fads. Yet guilt remains. No matter how hard
David Platt (A Compassionate Call to Counter Culture in a World of Poverty, Same-Sex Marriage, Racism, Sex Slavery, Immigration, Abortion, Persecution, Orphans and Pornography)
No matter how hard we try, we can’t successfully erase the sense of “ought” that God has written on the human soul.
David Platt (A Compassionate Call to Counter Culture in a World of Poverty, Same-Sex Marriage, Racism, Sex Slavery, Immigration, Abortion, Persecution, Orphans and Pornography)
Green Card Immigration and Nationalization by Green Card Organization One of the most highly sought-after visa programs ran anywhere in the world is the United State Green Card Lottery program, and for most people around the world, it is a symbol of their dreams come through - one day, to move to America. For this reason, the United State Green Card program is always filled with millions of applicants fighting for a Green Card. However, out of all these people, only about 50,000 people to make the cut yearly. Migration of people from one country to another is mainly for some reasons which range from economic motivations to reuniting with loved ones living abroad. Often in most scenario, for an immigrant to be a citizen of the new country, it is required for such to renounce their homeland and permanently leave their home country. Under the United States legal system, naturalization is the process through which an immigrant acquires U.S. citizenship. This is a major requirement for someone who was not born a citizen of the U.S. and or did not acquire citizenship shortly after birth but wishes to acquire citizenship of the united states. A person who becomes a U.S. citizen through naturalization enjoys all the freedoms and protections of citizenship just like every other citizens of the States, such as the right to vote and be voted for, to hold political offices and register, the right to hold and use a U.S. passport, and the right to serve as a jury in a court of law among other numerous benefits. Year in, year out, people apply from different nations of the world for the Green Card program. However, many people are disqualified from the DV lottery program, because they unsuccessfully submit their applications in a manner that does not comply with the United States governments requirements. It should be noted that The United States of America stands with a core principle of diversity and of giving every different person irrespective of background, race or color the same chances at success and equal opportunities. In order to forestall the rate at which intending immigrants were denied the Green Card, The Green Card Organization was established for the sole aim of providing help for those who desire to immigrate and provide them the best shot at success, and throughout the last 8 years of the existence of the Green Card Organization, the organization have helped countless number of people make their dream come through (their dream of being a part of our incredible country) GOD BLESS AMERICA! It is important to note that a small amount of mistake ranging from inconsistent information supplied or falsified identity in the application forms a major cause for automatic disqualification, therefore, it is crucial and important to make sure that the Green Card application is submitted correctly and timely. A notable remark that ought to be nurtured in the mind of every applicant is that the United States do not take a No for any mistake on your application. Therefore, the Green Card Organization is here to help simplify the processes involved for you and guarantee that your application will be submitted correctly and guarantee you 100% participation. A task that since the inception of the organization, has been their priority and has achieved her success in it at its apex.
Green Card Organization
Asians are still a small minority—14.5 million (including about one million identified as part Asian) or 4.7 percent of the population—but their impact is vastly disproportionate to their numbers. Forty-four percent of Asian-American adults have a college degree or higher, as opposed to 24 percent of the general population. Asian men have median earnings 10 percent higher than non Asian men, and that of Asian women is 15 percent higher than non-Asian women. Forty-five percent of Asians are employed in professional or management jobs as opposed to 34 percent for the country as a whole, and the figure is no less than 60 percent for Asian Indians. The Information Technology Association of America estimates that in the high-tech workforce Asians are represented at three times their proportion of the population. Asians are more likely than the American average to own homes rather than be renters. These successes are especially remarkable because no fewer than 69 percent of Asians are foreign-born, and immigrant groups have traditionally taken several generations to reach their full economic potential. Asians are vastly overrepresented at the best American universities. Although less than 5 percent of the population they account for the following percentages of the students at these universities: Harvard: 17 percent, Yale: 13 percent, Princeton: 12 percent, Columbia: 14 percent, Stanford: 25 percent. In California, the state with the largest number of Asians, they made up 14 percent of the 2005 high school graduating class but 42 percent of the freshmen on the campuses of the University of California system. At Berkeley, the most selective of all the campuses, the 2005 freshman class was an astonishing 48 percent Asian. Asians are also the least likely of any racial or ethnic group to commit crimes. In every category, whether violent crime, white-collar crime, alcohol, or sex offenses, they are arrested at about one-quarter to one-third the rate of whites, who are the next most law-abiding group. It would be a mistake, however, to paint all Asians with the same brush, as different nationalities can have distinctive profiles. For example, 40 percent of the manicurists in the United States are of Vietnamese origin and half the motel rooms in the country are owned by Asian Indians. Chinese (24 percent of all Asians) and Indians (16 percent), are extremely successful, as are Japanese and Koreans. Filipinos (18 percent) are somewhat less so, while the Hmong face considerable difficulties. Hmong earn 30 percent less than the national average, and 60 percent drop out of high school. In the Seattle public schools, 80 percent of Japanese-American students passed Washington state’s standardized math test for 10th-graders—the highest pass rate for any ethnic group. The group with the lowest pass rate—14 percent—was another “Asian/Pacific Islanders” category: Samoans. On the whole, Asians have a well-deserved reputation for high achievement.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
In a country like Britain it has taken decades for opposition to female genital mutilation to be mainstream. Despite being illegal for three decades, and despite more than 130,000 women in Britain having suffered this barbaric treatment, there have still been no successful prosecutions for the crime. If Western Europe finds it so difficult even to confront something as straightforward as FGM, it seems unlikely it will ever be able to defend some of its subtler values in the years ahead.
Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam)
My brother went to Harvard seven years after arriving in the States with no English. I won the Pulitzer Prize. We could be put on a poster touting how refugees make America great. And we do. But it shouldn’t take this kind of success to be welcomed. Even if refugees, undocumented immigrants, and legal immigrants are not all potential billionaires, that is no reason to exclude them.
Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Refugees)
Immigration is not a uniquely American problem. Aside from the former Communist countries, nearly every white country has accepted large numbers of immigrants, so there is a huge flow from non-white to white countries. There are two reasons for this. First, whites have built the most successful countries in the history of the world and others want to take part in that success. Second, only white countries permit large-scale immigration; others keep their territories exclusively for their own people. Different national views on immigration therefore parallel expressions of racial consciousness in the United States. Whites—the only people who dare not express racial pride—let in large numbers of immigrants who are changing their societies. Non-whites, who have a strong sense of racial consciousness, maintain their boundaries. No non-white nation praises diversity, nor do immigrants come to the West with the intention of sharing this gift with us. Most never heard of diversity before they came here. They come because their countries are unsuccessful. Once they are here, most probably want to live their lives essentially as they did before, but with a First-World rather than Third-World income. They want to keep their languages, religions, folkways, and loyalties rather than shed their foreign skins and become American.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
The collapse of solidarity and security for many western European working people after the 1970s was compounded by the postwar flood of Third World immigrants into western Europe. When times were good, the immigrants were welcome to do the dirty jobs that the national labor force now spurned. When Europeans began to face long-term structural unemployment for the first time since the Great Depression, however, immigrants became unwelcome. Moreover, European immigration had changed. Whereas earlier immigrants had come from southern or eastern Europe and differed only slightly from their new hosts (with the notable and significant exception of Jews from eastern Europe in the 1880s and the 1930s), the new immigrants came from former colonial territories: North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, and Turkey. And whereas earlier immigrants (some Jews again excepted) had tended to assimilate quickly and disappear, the new immigrants often clung to visibly different customs and religions. Europeans had to learn to coexist with permanent African, Indian, and Islamic communities that flaunted their separate identities. The immigrant threat was not only economic and social. The immigrants were seen increasingly as undermining national identity with their alien customs, languages, and religions. A global youth culture, mostly marketed by Americans and often associated with black performers, did to local cultural traditions what the global economy had done to local smokestack industry. Anti-immigrant resentment was pay dirt for radical Right movements in western Europe after the 1970s. It was the main force behind the British National Front. The most successful of them—Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France and Jörg Haider’s Freiheitspartei in Austria—were almost entirely devoted to exploiting anti-immigrant fears, fighting multiculturalism and an alleged immigrant criminal propensity, and proposing the expulsion of the alien poor.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
Le Pen’s recipe for success was closely watched by fearful French democrats as well as by his emulators abroad. The FN focused intensely on the immigrant issue, and its ramifying related issues of employment, law and order, and cultural defense. It managed to bundle together a variety of constituencies and positioned itself to become a broad catch-all party of protest. It refrained from appearing to threaten democracy directly. When it won control of three important cities in southern France in 1995 and another in 1997, as well as 273 seats in regional legislatures in 1998, it acquired a capacity to reward its militants with office and force mainstream parties to treat with it. While there seemed little likelihood of its winning a national majority, the FN forced mainstream conservative parties to adopt some of its positions in order to hold on to crucial voters. The FN’s strategic leverage became so important in some southern and eastern localities that some conservatives with narrow margins allied with it in the local elections of 1995 and 2001 as the only way to defeat the Left. These successes at bundling constituencies, gratifying the ambitious, and forcing mainstream politicians into alliances moved the FN firmly into the process of taking root—Stage Two. In December 1998, however, a quarrel between Le Pen and his heir apparent, Bruno Mégret, divided the movement and drove its vote back down below 10 percent. Despite this setback, Le Pen rode a groundswell of resentment against immigrants, street crime, and globalization back to a shocking second-place 17 percent in the first round of the presidential elections of April 2002. In the runoff with incumbent president Jacques Chirac, however, Le Pen was held to 19 percent by a groundswell of French revulsion
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
In the programs and statements of these parties one hears echoes of classical fascist themes: fears of decadence and decline; assertion of national and cultural identity; a threat by unassimilable foreigners to national identity and good social order; and the need for greater authority to deal with these problems. Even though some of the European radical Right parties have full authoritarian-nationalist programs (such as the Belgian Vlaams Blok’s “seventy points” and Le Pen’s “Three Hundred Measures for French Revival” of 1993), most of them are perceived as single-issue movements devoted to sending unwanted immigrants home and cracking down on immigrant delinquency, and that is why most of their voters chose them. Other classical fascist themes, however, are missing from the programmatic statements of the most successful postwar European radical Right parties. The element most totally absent is classical fascism’s attack on the liberty of the market and economic individualism, to be remedied by corporatism and regulated markets. In a continental Europe where state economic intervention is the norm, the radical Right has been largely committed to reducing it and letting the market decide. Another element of classical fascist programs mostly missing from the postwar European radical Right is a fundamental attack on democratic constitutions and the rule of law. None of the more successful European far Right parties now proposes to replace democracy by a single-party dictatorship. At most they advocate a stronger executive, less inhibited forces of order, and the replacement of stale traditional parties with a fresh, pure national movement. They leave to the skinheads open expressions of the beauty of violence and murderous racial hatred. The successful radical Right parties wish to avoid public association with them, although they may quietly share overlapping membership with some ultraright action squads and tolerate a certain amount of overheated language praising violent action among their student branches. No western European radical Right movement or party now proposes national expansion by war—a defining aim for Hitler and Mussolini. Indeed the advocates of border changes in postwar Europe have mostly been secessionist rather than expansionist, such as the Vlaams Blok in Belgium and (for a time) Umberto Bossi’s secessionist Northern League (Lega Nord) in northern Italy. The principal exceptions have been the expansionist Balkan nationalisms that sought to create Greater Serbia, Greater Croatia, and Greater Albania.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
Despite many hiccups, an ICE spokesperson called the sweep the most successful weeklong event in history. The spokesperson, speaking on the condition of anonymity, indicated that while crime involving Muslim immigrants in this country was not increasing or at dangerous levels currently—in fact, it was almost non-existent—the president was looking for people who had criminal histories, were Muslim, and were potentially deportable. Critics joked it was the most successful one-week sweep of its kind in history because it was the only one-week sweep of its kind in history.
Mark M. Bello (Betrayal of Justice (Zachary Blake Betrayal, #2))
As the most privileged and skilled immigrants from China and Japan entered the US, the stereotype of Asian Americans in the US changed to one of a cultural inclination for academic and business success—ignoring the fact that the majority of Chinese and Japanese people who were unable to immigrate did not enjoy the same high levels of income or education. As that myth took hold, it did not adjust to accommodate the vastly different social, educational, and economic circumstances that Asian refugees were coming from as they fled countries like Vietnam and Cambodia. Nor did it account for the social and economic barriers they, like many other refugee populations, would face when they arrived in the US.
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
To initiate its EIR program, USCIS would also turn to an agitator. Brad Feld, an early-stage investor and prolific blogger, had become exasperated when officers of two promising startups under his watch were forced to return to their home countries because they couldn’t secure visas. He shared their story on a blog, attracting the attention of other entrepreneurs, including Ries, who couldn’t understand why there was no visa category for an entrepreneur with American investors and employees. In lieu of that category, many entrepreneurs were at the mercy of visa examiners who didn’t understand how they operated. At the point of visa application, many startups had not hired many employees or generated much revenue. This confused traditional visa examiners, who would then ask odd and irrelevant questions, often before a denial. To give just one example, it’s been years since AOL required a compact disc to use its service. And yet, visa examiners were demanding proof of a warehouse, where software startups would store their CD inventory for shipping to customers. As Feld’s idea of a “startup visa” became intertwined with, and paralyzed by, the broader debate on comprehensive immigration reform, the USCIS, with White House support, sought to accomplish something administratively within the existing law. It instituted an EIR program, to organize and educate a specialty unit of immigration officers to handle entrepreneur and startup nonimmigrant visa cases.22 The project also called for educating entrepreneurs about the available options, one of which they may have overlooked. For instance, the O-1 visa, which was reserved “for those with extraordinary ability,” had proven a successful channel for actors, athletes, musicians, directors, scientists, artists, businessmen, engineers, and others who could provide ample evidence of their unique and impressive abilities, attributes, awards, and accolades. It had even created some controversy, when visa evaluators took the term “model” to an extreme, awarding a visa to one of Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriends, a Playboy centerfold from Canada named Shera Berchard.23 If she was confident enough to assert and explain her “extraordinary ability,” why weren’t entrepreneurs?
Aneesh Chopra (Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government)
[Warren] Harding diligently worked the knots of America's body politic from the moment he took office, soothing conservatives by resizing the federal government for peacetime and adopting a pro-business outlook, soothing his Republican base by raising tariffs and lowering taxes, soothing the left by releasing from prison the socialist icon Eugene Debs and other radicals rounded up during Palmer's Red Scare, soothing the battered farm belt with an emergency tariff and federal protection for farm cooperatives, soothing labor with public works programs to ease unemployment and by cajoling the steel industry into abandoning its inhumane practice of twelve-hour shifts. Harding soothed the isolationist and nativist majority in America with tighter immigration policies and a foreign policy emphasizing legitimate national interests over crusading idealism. He soothed international tensions by normalizing relations with Germany and other former enemy states, and by convincing the world's leading naval powers to reduce tonnage at his Washington Disarmament Conference, the first gathering of its kind and a remarkable, unexpected success.
Kenneth Whyte (Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times)
Given our geography, our tolerant culture and the magnetic attraction of our economy, illegals will always be with us. Our first task, therefore, should be abolishing bilingual education everywhere and requiring that our citizenship tests have strict standards for English language and American civics. The cure for excessive immigration is successful assimilation. The way to prevent European-like immigration catastrophes is to turn every immigrant—and most surely his children—into an American.
Charles Krauthammer (The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors)
If you’re an immigrant getting deported, does it matter to you that the deporter-in-chief is the first African American president? If you’re in jail for marijuana possession or because your kids were truant at school, does it make a difference that it’s Kamala Harris who gleefully prosecuted you? Aren’t you delighted that Kellyanne Conway was the first woman to run a successful presidential campaign?
Krystal Ball (The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising)
Some couch their laziness in spiritual language, saying they're waiting to figure out what God wants them to do, all the while ignoring the glaring biblical reality that God wants them to work for others' good and his glory. This trend should not surprise us in a culture that minimizes the value of work by magnifying the goal of retirement. Success..is arriving at the place where you no longer work..but Christ never called us to this sort of retirement.
David Platt (A Compassionate Call to Counter Culture in a World of Poverty, Same-Sex Marriage, Racism, Sex Slavery, Immigration, Abortion, Persecution, Orphans and Pornography)
As a tool for offsetting the drag on growth caused by population aging, a modest amount of additional immigration is the best bet.
Dietrich Vollrath (Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success)
Ethnically racist ideas, like all racist ideas, cover up the racist policies wielded against Black natives and immigrants. Whenever Black immigrants compare their economic standing to that of Black natives, whenever they agree that their success stories show that antiracist Americans are overstating racist policies against African Americans, they are tightening the handcuffs of racist policy around their own wrists. Black immigrants’ comparisons with Black natives conceal the racial inequities between Black immigrants and non-Black immigrants.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
The reason Black immigrants generally have higher educational levels and economic pictures than African Americans is not that their transnational ethnicities are superior. The reason resides in the circumstances of human migration. Not all individuals migrate, but those who do, in what’s called “immigrant self-selection,” are typically individuals with an exceptional internal drive for material success and/or they possess exceptional external resources.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
To understand the fundamental benefits of an immigrant population, imagine that you could divide the population into two groups: one consisting on the average of the youngest, healthiest, boldest, most risk-tolerant, most hard-working, ambitious, and innovative people; the other consisting of everyone else. Transplant the first group to another country, and leave the second group in their country of origin. That selective transplanting approximates the decision to emigrate and its successful accomplishment. Hence it comes as no surprise that more than one-third of American Nobel Prize winners are foreign-born, and over half are either immigrants themselves or else the children of immigrants. That's because Nobel Prize-winning research demands those same qualities of boldness, risk-tolerance, hard work, ambition, and innovativeness.
Jared Diamond (Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis)
Her father must have sifted through hundreds of marriage résumés to narrow the field down to these ten names. Ten men he thought would make her happy and treat her with kindness and respect, unlike Jonas and all the men she'd dated before him. Layla had always considered herself a modern desi woman. She was as comfortable in a sari as she was in jeans and enjoyed hamburgers and potato chips as much as dal and curry. Her life revolved around Western friends and a large and extended family of immigrants from Northern India and Pakistan who had brought their culture and beliefs with them- one of which was the benefit of arranged marriage over the Western concept of love. Despite Dev's wonderful relationship with Rhea and the success of her parents' union, Layla had never been interested in having an arranged marriage. Even after a string of failed relationships and heartbreak, she had always believed in true love. Her soul mate was out there waiting for her. All she had to do was open her eyes.
Sara Desai (The Marriage Game (Marriage Game #1))
Above all we are prisoners of the story we tell about ourselves, the story of the parents descended from poor immigrants who made it good and now have the Cadillacs and the beautiful, successful children and the most porch lights at Christmas. We are so determinedly fine it must be overwhelming for them to have a daughter who has suddenly shown up with the marks of all that is not fine so visibly on her. And a relief for all of us when I go back to school.
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir)
Is the cause of America the cause of all mankind? And what is that cause after all? From distant glimmerings of “America” (the Waldseemüller map of 1507) to “City upon a Hill” and “Magnalia Christi Americana,” into the nineteenth century with “American Scholar” and the “[slaves’] fourth of July,” and continued throughout the twentieth century with “double-consciousness,” “Trans-national America,” “settlement ideal,” “American Dream,” “I have a dream,” “Postethnic America,” “Achieving . . . America,” and the “heyday of the fuzzies,” Americans have been trying to figure this out for quite some time. Over the course of the centuries, Americans learned and self-taught, native born and immigrant, religious and secular, and left and right have contributed to this long conversation by offering new arguments and key terms for Americans to think about the world, themselves, their truth, and their America. No one, so far, has been successful in answering these questions once and for all. They only came up with provisional explanations and then posed new questions. Perhaps we should not want it any other way. And so the conversation of American thought continues.
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History)
Zhou and Lee identify another factor important to the successful educational outcomes of Asian children: mind-set. “Asian immigrants have been raised in countries where the prevalent belief is that effort, rather than ability, is the most critical ingredient for achievement.… By contrast, native-born American parents believe that their children’s outcomes are more heavily influenced by innate ability.
Beverly Daniel Tatum (Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?)
Of course, not all norms are beneficial, and groups do indeed regularly develop arbitrary norms as well as those that favor powerful constituencies, like old men. Sometimes groups even develop maladaptive norms that are harmful to both individuals and their communities. However, social norms are put to the test when groups with different norms compete. Norms that favor success in competition with other groups tend to survive and spread. Such intergroup competition can occur through violent conflict, as Buckley experienced, but it can also occur when less successful groups copy the practices and beliefs of more successful groups or when more prosperous groups simply grow faster, through higher fertility, lower mortality, or greater net immigration. These and related forms of intergroup competition create a countervailing force that can favor group-beneficial norms over other cultural evolutionary pushes and pulls.
Joseph Henrich (The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous)
Whether or not they are assimilating is harder to quantify. Becoming an American is a complex, personal process—the kind of transition that can take a lifetime, even two. A Mexican farmhand with a sixth-grade education takes a different path into the mainstream than an Indian engineer working on an MBA, and the sometimes mind-boggling diversity of today’s immigrants can make it difficult to generalize. What’s more, even when one focuses on one group, it can be hard to assess just how well or how fast they are integrating. Economic success or failure, for example, is reflected in countless and sometimes contradictory statistics, and in today’s polarized immigration debate, any statistical portrait is sure to be controversial. Nevertheless, a lot is known about today’s
Tamar Jacoby (Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American)
The flow of immigrants into the United States was a “golden stream” which contributed more to her national wealth than “all the gold mines in the world.” Immigrants were America’s economic secret weapon.
John D. Gartner (The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America)
Mark Patkowski (1980) studied the relationship between age and the acquisition of features of a second language other than pronunciation. He hypothesized that, even if accent were ignored, only those who had begun learning their second language before the age of 15 could achieve full, native-like mastery of that language. Patkowski studied 67 highly educated immigrants to the United States. They had started to learn English at various ages, but all had lived in the United States for more than five years. He compared them to 15 native-born Americans with a similarly high level of education, whose variety of English could be considered the second language speakers’ target language. The main question in Patkowski’s research was: ‘Will there be a difference between learners who began to learn English before puberty and those who began learning English later?’ However, he also compared learners on the basis of other characteristics and experiences that some people have suggested might be as good as age in predicting or explaining a person’s success in mastering a second language. For example, he looked at the total amount of time a speaker had been in the United States as well as the amount of formal ESL instruction each speaker had had. A lengthy interview with each person was tape-recorded. Because Patkowski wanted to remove the possibility that the results would be affected by accent, he transcribed five-minute samples from the interviews and asked trained native-speaker judges to place each transcript on a scale from 0 (no knowledge of English) to 5 (a level of English expected from an educated native speaker). The findings were quite dramatic. The transcripts of all native speakers and 32 out of 33 second language speakers who had begun learning English before the age of 15 were rated 4+ or 5. The homogeneity of the pre-puberty learners suggests that, for this group, success in learning a second language was almost inevitable. In contrast, 27 of the 32 post-puberty learners were rated between 3 and 4, but a few learners were rated higher (4+ or 5) and one was rated at 2+. The performance of this group looked like the sort of range one would expect if one were measuring success in learning almost any kind of skill or knowledge: some people did extremely well; some did poorly; most were in the middle.
Patsy M. Lightbown (How Languages are Learned)
Robert DeKeyser (2000) carried out a replication of the Johnson and Newport study, working with Hungarian immigrants to the United States. He also found a strong relationship between age of immigration and performance on the judgement task. In addition, he asked participants to take language aptitude tests and found that, for participants who began learning English as adults, aptitude scores were correlated with success. However, there was no such correlation for those who learned English in childhood. These findings appear to confirm the hypothesis that adult learners may learn language in a way that is different from the way young children learn.
Patsy M. Lightbown (How Languages are Learned)
Of the rise of this singular people few authentic records appear to exist. It is, however, probable that they represent a later wave of that race, whether true Sudras, or a later wave of immigrants from Central Asia, which is found farther south as Mahratta; and perhaps they had, in remote times, a Scythian origin like the earlier and nobler Rajputs. They affect Rajput ways, although the Rajputs would disdain their kinship; and they give to their chiefs the Rajput title of "Thakur," a name common to the Deity and to great earthly lords, and now often used to still lower persons. So much has this practice indeed extended, that some tribes use the term generically, and speak of themselves as of the "Thakur" race. These, however, are chiefly pure Rajputs. It is stated, by an excellent authority, that even now the Jats "can scarcely be called pure Hindus, for they have many observances, both domestic and religious, not consonant with Hindu precepts. There is a disposition also to reject the fables of the Puranic Mythology, and to acknowledge the unity of the Godhead." (Elliot's Glossary, in voce "Jat.") Wherever they are found, they are stout yeomen; able to cultivate their fields, or to protect them, and with strong administrative habits of a somewhat republican cast. Within half a century, they have four times tried conclusions with the might of Britain. The Jats of Bhartpur fought Lord Lake with success, and Lord Combermere with credit; and their "Sikh" brethren in the Panjab shook the whole fabric of British India on the Satlaj, in 1845, and three years later on the field of Chillianwala. The Sikh kingdom has been broken up, but the Jat principality of Bhartpur still exists, though with contracted limits, and in a state of complete dependence on the British Government. There is also a thriving little principality — that of Dholpur — between Agra and Gwalior, under a descendant of the Jat Rana of Gohad, so often met with in the history of the times we are now reviewing (v. inf. p. 128.) It is interesting to note further, that some ethnologists have regarded this fine people as of kin to the ancient Get¾, and to the Goths of Europe, by whom not only Jutland, but parts of the south-east of England and Spain were overrun, and to some extent peopled. It is, therefore, possible that the yeomen of Kent and Hampshire have blood relations in the natives of Bhartpur and the Panjab. The area of the Bhartpur State is at present 2,000 square miles, and consists of a basin some 700 feet above sea level, crossed by a belt of red sandstone rocks. It is hot and dry; but in the skilful hands that till it, not unfertile; and the population has been estimated at near three-quarters of a million. At the time at which our history has arrived, the territory swayed by the chiefs of the Jats was much more extensive, and had undergone the fate of many another military republic, by falling into the hands of the most prudent and daring of a number of competent leaders. It has already been shown (in Part I.) how Suraj Mal, as Raja of the Bhartpur Jats, joined the Mahrattas in their resistance to the great Musalman combination of 1760. Had his prudent counsels been followed, it is possible that this resistance would have been more successful, and the whole history of Hindustan far otherwise than what it has since been. But the haughty leader of the Hindus, Sheodasheo Rao Bhao, regarded Suraj Mal as a petty landed chief not accustomed to affairs on a grand scale, and so went headlong on his fate.
H.G. Keene (Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan)
Arguing against people who control the terms of debate is a hard task, and in a way exponents of diversity have achieved a tremendous success in making opponents have to justify their objections, when the burden of proof should be against those advocating the radical change. Until relatively
Ed West (The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right)
My father like all successful immigrants before him gently and not so gently exploited his own. "This is way I learn business, this is way they learn business.
Chang-rae Lee (Native Speaker)
Weeks before Garvey’s final UNIA convention, delegates gathered for the Democratic National Convention of 1924 at that very same Madison Square Garden. The Democrats came within a single vote of endorsing the anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic platform promulgated by the powerful Ku Klux Klan. The platform would have been anti-immigrant, too, if Congress had not passed the Immigration Act on a bipartisan vote earlier in the year. It was authored by Washington State Republican Albert Johnson, who was well-schooled in anti-Asian racist ideas and well-connected to Madison Grant. Politicians seized on the powerful eugenicist demands for immigration restrictions on people from all countries outside of Nordic northwestern Europe. President Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts Republican who replaced Harding after his sudden death in 1923, happily signed the legislation before his reelection. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote as vice-president-elect in 1921. “The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
Immigrants are native entrepreneurs.
Ben Tolosa (Masterplan Your Success: Deadline Your Dreams)
On the other hand, the claim ignores the fact that 300,000 Lebanese men and women emigrated to the West between 1890 and 1914.16 Had the Mutasarrifiyah been as successful as some purport, there might have been fewer immigrants willing to leave their homeland in search of economic opportunity abroad.
Louis Farshee (Safer Barlik: Famine in Mount Lebanon During World War I)
Americans love the story of the immigrant who comes through Ellis Island with no possessions but struggles to success and happiness. It is the story that most defines us, and we tell it to ourselves over and over. But for the real immigrants, each story was different, and the happiness of the ending changed with every telling.
Gail Collins (America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines)
she would let you stand in the second balcony, without a ticket. Carnegie Hall didn’t know about it. It was just between you and Mary. It was a bit of a journey, but we would go back once or twice a month.”* Friedman’s mother was a Russian immigrant. She barely spoke English. But she had gone to work as a seamstress at the
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
Doing so showed that there was another variable that was a strong predictor of a person’s securing an entry in Wikipedia: the proportion of immigrants in your county of birth. The greater the percentage of foreign-born residents in an area, the higher the proportion of children born there who go on to notable success. (Take that, Donald Trump!) If two places have similar urban and college populations, the one with more immigrants will produce more prominent Americans. What explains this? A lot of it seems to be directly attributable to the children of immigrants. I did an exhaustive search of the biographies of the hundred most famous white baby boomers, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Pantheon project, which is also working with Wikipedia data. Most of these were entertainers. At least thirteen had foreign-born mothers, including Oliver Stone, Sandra Bullock, and Julianne Moore. This rate is more than three times higher than the national average during this period. (Many had fathers who were immigrants, including Steve Jobs and John Belushi, but this data was more difficult to compare to national averages, since information on fathers is not always included on birth certificates.)
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are)
Despite its own history of forced internal displacements of the aboriginal population, the United States too officially opposed population transfers, often citing its own success in “Americanizing” immigrant ethnic groups.19
R.M. Douglas (Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War)
Michelle Phan grew up in California with her Vietnamese parents. The classic American immigrant story of the impoverished but hardworking parents who toil to create a better life for the next generation was marred, in Phan’s case, by her father’s gambling addiction. The Phan clan moved from city to city, state to state, downsizing and recapitalizing and dodging creditors and downsizing some more. Eventually, Phan found herself sleeping on a hard floor, age 16, living with her mother, who earned rent money as a nail salon worker and bought groceries with food stamps. Throughout primary and secondary school, Phan escaped from her problems through art. She loved to watch PBS, where painter Bob Ross calmly drew happy little trees. “He made everything so positive,” Phan recalls. “If you wanted to learn how to paint, and you wanted to also calm down and have a therapeutic session at home, you watched Bob Ross.” She started drawing and painting herself, often using the notes pages in the back of the telephone book as her canvas. And, imitating Ross, she started making tutorials for her friends and posting them on her blog. Drawing, making Halloween costumes, applying cosmetics—the topic didn’t matter. For three years, she blogged her problems away, fancying herself an amateur teacher of her peers and gaining a modest teenage following. This and odd jobs were her life, until a kind uncle gave her mother a few thousand dollars to buy furniture, which was used instead to send Phan to Ringling College of Art and Design. Prepared to study hard and survive on a shoestring, Phan, on her first day at Ringling, encountered a street team which was handing out free MacBook laptops, complete with front-facing webcams, from an anonymous donor. Phan later told me, with moist eyes, “If I had not gotten that laptop, I wouldn’t be here today.
Shane Snow (Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking)
Yet, however noticeable physical differences may often be, race has never been a serious factor in Italian history: there is no Italian race and there never has been one. The arguments of those who claim otherwise, usually fascists or extreme nationalists, are ludicrous. So is the more recent boast by a leader of the Venetian League that, while Lombards are upstarts descended from the Gauls, his own people have a pure ethnic pedigree. 13 The truth was recognized long ago by the Risorgimento liberal Cesare Balbo, who observed that Italy was ‘a multiracial community composed of successive waves of immigrants’;
David Gilmour (The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples)
We only become the good type once we’ve transcended the stereotypes of benefit-scrounging and job-stealing. And we can only do that by being successful at sports, or winning national talent shows, or by baking delicious cakes. I am not a good immigrant, because my skills aren’t transferable, in a broad sense. No one is standing over the coders of tomorrow saying, well, this young South Asian coder, she is a good model for her people. I can never transcend.
Nikesh Shukla (The One Who Wrote Destiny)
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I felt the problem was that no one in the family had learned to stand up to Uncle Harry’s bullying. He was considered the clever one, the successful businessman and he had the most money, which intimidated my grandparents into thinking he was something they should be proud of.
May-lee Chai (Useful Phrases for Immigrants: Stories (Bakwin Award))
The Son of a vacuum Among the tall trees he sat lost, broken, alone again, among a number of illegal immigrants, he raised his head to him without fear, as nothing in this world is worth attention. -He said: I am not a hero; I am nothing but a child looking for Eid. The Turkmen of Iraq, are the descendants of Turkish immigrants to Mesopotamia through successive eras of history. Before and after the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, countries crossed from here, and empires that were born and disappeared, and still, preserve their Turkish identity. Although, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the division of the Arab world, they now live in one of its countries. Kirkuk, one of the heavens of God on earth, is one of the northern governorates of Iraq in which they live. The Kurdish race is shared with them, a race out of many in Iraq. Two children of two different ethnicities, playing in a village square in Kirkuk province when the news came from Baghdad, of a new military coup. Without delay, Saddam Hussein took over the reins of power, and faster than that, Iraq was plunged into successive wars that began in 1980 with its neighbor Iran, a war that lasted eight years. Iraq barely rested for two years, and in the third, a new war in Kuwait, which did not end in the best condition as the leader had hoped, as he was expelled from it after the establishment of an international coalition to liberate it, led by the United States of America. Iraq entered a new phase of suffering, a siege that lasted more than ten years, and ended up with the removal of Saddam Hussein from his power followed by the US occupation of it in 2003. As the father goes, he returns from this road, there is no way back but from it. As the date approaches, the son stands on the back of that hill waiting for him to return. From far away he waved a longing, with a bag of dreams in his hands, a bag of candy in his pocket, and a poem of longing by a Turkmen poet who absorb Arabic, whose words danced on his lips, in his heart. -When will you come back, dad? -On the Eid, wait for me on the hill, you will see me coming from the road, waving, carrying your gifts. The father bid his son farewell to the Arab Shiite city of Basra, on the border with Iran, after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war, as the homeland is calling its men, or perhaps the leader is calling his subjects. In Iraq, as in many countries of the Arab world, the homeland is the leader, and the leader is the homeland. Months passed, the child eagerly anticipating the coming of the feast, but the father hurried to return without an appointment, loaded on the shoulders, the passion reached its extent in the martyr’s chest, with a sheet of paper in his pocket on which he wrote: Every morning takes me nostalgic for you, to the jasmine flower, oh, melody in the heart, oh balm I sip every while, To you, I extend a hand and a fire that ignites in the soul a buried love, night shakes me with tears in my eyes, my longing for you has shaped me into dreams, stretching footsteps to the left and to the right, gleam, calling out for me, you scream, waking me up to the glimpse of the light of life in your face, a thousand sparkles, in your eyes, a meaning of survival, a smile, and a glace, Eid comes to you as a companion, without, life yet has no trace, for roses, necklaces of love, so that you amaze. -Where is Ruslan? On the morning of the feast day, at the door of his house, the kids asked his mother, -with tears in her eyes: He went to meet his father. A moment of silence fell over the children, -Raman, with a little gut: Aunt, do you mean he went to the cemetery? -Mother: He went to meet him at those hills.
Ahmad I. AlKhalel (Zero Moment: Do not be afraid, this is only a passing novel and will end (Son of Chaos Book 1))
a marked change occurred between 2019 and 2020. The dual crises of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests ran slam into the twin dangers of Q-Anon and the consolidation of the Trump paramilitary. In 2019, there were sixty-five incidents of domestic terrorism or attempted violence, but in the run-up to the election in 2020, that number nearly doubled, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Twenty-one plots were disrupted by law enforcement.5 Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization. Both are motivated by devotion to a charismatic leader, are successful at smashing political norms, and are promised a future racially homogeneous paradise. Modern American terrorists are much more akin to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) than they are to the old Ku Klux Klan. Though they take offense at that comparison, the similarities are quite remarkable. Most American extremists are not professional terrorists on par with their international counterparts. They lack operational proficiency and weapons. But they do not lack in ruthlessness, targets, or ideology. However, the overwhelming number of white nationalist extremists operate as lone wolves. Like McVeigh in the 1990s and others from the 1980s, they hope their acts will motivate the masses to follow in their footsteps. ISIS radicals who abandon their homes and immigrate to the Syria-Iraq border “caliphate” almost exclusively self-radicalize by watching terrorist videos. The Trump insurgents are radicalizing in the exact same way. Hundreds of tactical training videos easily accessible on social media show how to shoot, patrol, and fight like special forces soldiers. These video interviews and lessons explaining how to assemble body armor or make IEDs and extolling the virtues of being part of the armed resistance supporting Donald Trump fill Facebook and Instagram feeds. Some even call themselves the “Boojahideen,” an English take on the Arabic “mujahideen,” or holy warrior. U.S. insurgents in the making often watch YouTube and Facebook videos of tactical military operations, gear reviews, and shooting how-tos. They then go out to buy rifles, magazines, ammunition, combat helmets, and camouflage clothing and seek out other “patriots” to prepare for armed action. This is pure ISIS-like self-radicalization. One could call them Vanilla ISIS.
Malcolm W. Nance (They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency)
In this regard, the immigrant narrative is perhaps more limited than we would ideally like it to be. While it does urge the immigrant striver to think about the responsibility that comes with succeeding, this obligation is often narrowly focused on family and perhaps compatriots, rather than on changing social and economic structures that lead to the global inequalities that spur immigration in the first place. Many immigrants go abroad to seek economic opportunities so that they can provide financial support to those who stay behind, and the money that immigrants remit is often a vital boost to the livelihood of the developing world. But these financial flows fail to significantly reform the structural factors involved in creating and maintaining global inequality. Consequently, though the scale of remittances can be seen as a sign of how seriously immigrants treat the obligations that stem from their success, from a broader perspective these transfers are insufficient.
Jennifer Morton (Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility)
The "model minority" myth is a dangerous drug manufactured and promoted by the Whiteness. It ignores all of our diverse experiences and narratives, eliminates all nuances, and lumps us with a convenient stereotype that always renders us as foreigners. It overlooks the discrimination, bias, and hate experienced by our communities and, perhaps worst of all, uses us, Asian and South Asian immigrants in particular, to launder systemic racism and discrimination against poor Black and Latino communities. Why can't they be "models" like us? Because they are lazy freeloaders who don't take personal responsibility, whine about racism, and refuse to pull themselves up by their bootstraps! The system turns us into enforcers and defenders of Whiteness, promising success and safety in exchange for loyalty and obedience. But it's an abusive, toxic relationship, in which the system has always betrayed us on a whim, without remorse or hesitation. Being a "model minority" doesn't live up to the hype.
Wajahat Ali (Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American)
The success of many women and second-generation immigrants entering positions as clerks, secretaries, and retail workers challenged some labor market inequalities and solidified the link between education and social mobility. Their entry, however, also sparked a reaction among a predominantly male, white, native-born elite. Upper-class Bostonians used professional strategies, relying on advanced educational credentials, to control access to the most remunerative jobs.
Cristina Viviana Groeger (The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston)
Planters were more than willing to play their role in the drama. Enfranchised by the creation of a popularly elected territorial legislature, they achieved far more power than they ever had under Spanish or even French rule, and they were quick to turn it on the free people of color. In 1806, within three years of American accession, the planter-dominated legislature contained the growth of the free black population, severely circumscribing the rights of slaves to initiate manumission. Thereafter slaves could be freed only by special legislative enactment. That done, the legislature struck at the privileges free people of color had enjoyed under Spanish rule, issuing prohibitions against carrying guns, punishing free black criminals more severely than white ones, and authorizing slaves to testify in court against free blacks but not whites. In an act that represented the very essence of the planters' contempt for people of color, the territorial legislature declared that 'free people of color ought never to insult or strike white people, nor presume to conceive themselves equal to whites, but on the contrary . . . they ought to yield to them on every occasion and never speak or answer them but with respect.' With planters now in control, the free people's position in the society of the lower Mississippi Valley slipped sharply. Claiborne slowly reduced the size of the black militia, first placing it under the control of white officers and then deactiviting it entirely when the territorial legislature refused to recommission it. The free black population continued to grow, but - with limitations on manumission and self-purchase - most of the growth derived from the natural increase and immigration. The dynamism of the final decades of the eighteenth century, when the free black population grew faster than either the white or slave population, dissipated, prosperity declined, and the great thrust toward equality was blunted as the new American ruler turned its back on them. In the years that followed, as white immigrants flowed into the Mississippi Valley and the Gulf ports grew whiter, American administrators found it easier to ignore the free people of color or, worse yet, let the planters have their way. Occasionally, new crises arose, suddenly elevating free people to their old importance. In 1811, when slaves revolted in Pointe Coupee, and in 1815, when the British invaded Louisiana, free colored militiamen took up their traditional role as the handmaiden of the ruling class in hopes that their loyalty would be rewarded. But long-term gains were few. Free people of color were forced to settle for a middling status, above slaves but below whites. The collapse of the free people's struggle for equality cleared the way for the expansion of slavery. The Age of Revolution had threatened slavery in the lower Mississippi Valley, as it had elsewhere on the mainland. Planters parried the thrust with success. As in the Upper and Lower South, African-American slavery grew far more rapidly than freedom in the lower Mississippi Valley during the post-revolutionary years. The planters' westward surge out of the seaboard regions soon connected with their northward movement up the Mississippi Valley to create what would be the heartland of the plantation South in the nineteenth century. As the Age of Revolution receded, the plantation revolution roared ahead, and with it the Second Middle Passage.
Ira Berlin (Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves)
They left their daughters to grow into their hollowed Chinese, plugging English into whatever sprang a leak, stumbling on the wrong sounds, chasing intelligibility--but as Jade insisted, at least their English was beyond reproach. No trace of an accent, no problem. A hallmark of their success. A hallmark of their loss.
C.K. Chau (Good Fortune)