To continue with yesterday's theme from Westside Story: "What's the difference between Puerto Ricans and Poles?", here's a surprising summary of Mark Krikorian's latest book "The new case against immigration: Both legal and illegal":
[W]hat's different today is not the immigrants, but us. Today's immigrants are very similar to those of a century ago, but they are coming to a very different America -- one where changes in the economy, society, and government create fundamentally different incentives for newcomers. In other words, the America that our grandparents came to no longer exists. And this simple fact must become the new starting point for the explosive debate about immigration policy.Strange, an immigration expert, who has done countless studies on the subject and who is most certainly more educated, and dare I say, more intellectually endowed, than Bernardo, fails to have that flash of insight of Bernardo's when Bernardo says that his Puerto Rican countrymen will always have troubling fitting in America unlike his Polish and Irish counterparts.
I will have to read the whole book to make an educated comment on this excerpt. Perhaps Krikorian is right, but this isn't the consensus of many other experts, which is that current immigrants are very different from those who would have come here during Krikorian's grandparents' days.
Still, there is still a lot to unravel in just this one excerpt. For example, Krikorian's changed, contemporary America is actually more of a reflection of these current immigrants than the American of yonder years (which I assume means pre-1960s). In other words, Indians are coming to an America with large numbers of Indians already here. The change has already been allowed to occur, starting in the 1960s. And yes, certainly, these current Indians would be no different in some respects (for example in aspiration - to get better jobs, to live peaceful lives, to earn more money, to escape war etc...) than any other immigrant.
But to categorically say that they are all the same as his grandparent's days damages his thesis.
