Inglese - nozioni generali

The making of a nation

The United States is a society of immigrants that has admitted more than 50 million newcomers, who mostly came for wealth, land, and freedom. The first who came were the Spanish, who in the ^XVI century were attracted by the gold. Then the French set up trading posts, but the first to colonize on a large scale were the British. They founded the first permanent colony at Jamestown, Virginia.

Throughout the ^XVII century, permanent settlements were rapidly established all along the east coast. Most of them were British but there were also German, Swedes, Dutch, Spanish, French, and Swiss. And don’t forget the unwilling immigrants from Africa (slaves).

Although many immigrants tried to preserve their particular culture, it has prevailed the one of the more numerous English colonists (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant).

America’s only non-immigrants were the Native American Indians. Through war and threats, their lands have been seized by the white (remember the battle of Little Bighorn, 1876, General Custer). By the end of the ^XIX century, disease and warfare had almost wiped out the Native population. Those that remained were confined to reservations.

Old immigration

Between 1840 and 1860, ten million people came to America from northern and western Europe. Between 1845 and 1860, the Great Famine sent hundreds of thousands of Irish to the US. Also, the German immigration was very high, and in the mid-1800’s, thousands of Chinese came to work on the railroad.

A new wave of immigration began in the late 1800’s. This time the majority came from southern and eastern Europe. They were Latin, Slavic, and Jewish peoples, whose languages and customs were very far from those of the earlier Celtic and Teutonic immigrants. For this reason, they usually formed ethnic neighborhoods. This is also the reason why the assimilation of these new immigrants was more difficult. The old Americans feared that America could lose its established identity. So, in the 1920’s the Congress passed quota restrictions which favored immigration from northern and western Europe. Anyway, the descendants of these new immigrants were gradually assimilated and were able to recognize themselves as Americans.

After the 1920’s, immigration has dropped, but in recent times it has again risen dramatically and the assimilation problem has come back. The newest immigrants come from Mexico, Latin America, and Asia, and among these, the Mexican are the most unwilling to assimilate.

Refugees and illegal immigration

Another immigration stream is represented by the refugees. After the 1980 Refugee Act, 50,000 refugees per year are fleeing their country because of persecution of race, religion, political opinion, and membership of a particular social group.

One of the biggest problems that America has to face is the illegal immigration. Between 1980 and 1985, about 600,000 people entered the country illegally, most of them from Mexico and Latin America. An attempt to stop it has been made with the 1986 immigration law. Rather than preventing the aliens from entering the country, this law provided to legalize them.

In the 1980’s immigration, both legal and illegal, had a substantial impact on US population growth. Some Americans think that immigrants may lower the quality of life in America. However, everybody agrees that tight restrictions are necessary to preserve America’s national identity.

Put out no flags by Matthew Rothschild

This article is about patriotism. The author writes that for some Americans patriotism is like a religion, that gives origin to a feeling of superiority and bellicose pride. The American society is built on the idea that the individual doesn’t exist but in a social framework of family, community, and country. And to strengthen this social structure, the American people is constantly suffocated by patriotic slogans and symbols.

The author of this article thinks that this is pure folly because free will and individual liberty, which are the basis of the American dream, are forsaken in this repressive philosophy. He says that people’s identities should be of their own making, not imposed by some bygone rulers. But patriotism is not just an American-grown affliction. In fact, a philosopher has observed that “patriotism is the most primitive of passions.” Rothschild ends warning us that patriotism is too dangerous a concept to be toyed with.

Report describes immigrants as younger and more diverse by John Files

The 2005 Census Bureau figures show that the immigrant population in the US is becoming younger, and the trends are forming a unique generational divide: those immigrants over 40 are largely white, while those under 40 are Hispanic, Asian, and from other minority groups. The nation’s largest minority group is the Hispanic one and half of it is formed by people under age 27. The number of Hispanics (now 41.3 million) is expected to keep increasing because of continued immigrations and a high birth rate. And if until the 70’s the Hispanics used to enter the country with a low level of education, now we are seeing a powerful cultural transformation. Experts say that this situation would help the US prosper in a global economy.

Between here and there

This article is about the border zone between the US and Mexico. This zone has always represented a problem for both countries; here, Spanish melts with English and it is not senseless thinking of the border as a separate country. But it would be a strange country: richer than Mexico, poorer than the US and above all not united. And that is the problem. The border is a series of paired cities strung out across a vast tract of wilderness, with some things in common but also with a lot of differences.

In spite of all this, the border is booming: in a decade the population of the Mexican side has increased by nearly half. Most people came to work in the “maquiladoras”, the factories that make products from duty-free imported parts for re-export to the US. They were devised to reduce migration, but what they really did was to exploit labor (in fact on average an American border makes 3 times what a Mexican does), produce toxic waste and contribute little to the wider economy, since they are often foreign-owned.

Most of the cities in the border zone began as illegal settlements set up by migrant workers, who then fight local councils to get services. The biggest concern is water. Only half the population has running water and slightly more are connected to the main sewer. Another serious problem are the services; they are overstretched in the American border cities too, but several things make life more difficult for the Mexican side:

• Almost all their money comes from the government. How much they get depends on their population, which is hard to count because many are just passing through. And what’s more, a lot of people work across the border, paying taxes in America but using services in Mexico.
• Toxic waste that during the maquiladoras’ duty-free regime used to be returned abroad, now has to stay in Mexico, where there’s only one fully-equipped refinery for industrial toxic waste.
• Social problems, like the change of traditional family roles, are brought by the explosive population growth.
• Crime, much of it related to drug traffic, is high and the justice system is overburdened.
• Drug-taking is also particularly high because of their cheapness and availability on the border.

Despite all this, things are going slowly better: factory owners are becoming more aware about the workers’ needs and the government helps workers with financing. More often pairs of border cities collaborate rather than going through the bureaucracy of Washington and Mexico City and there are countless groups for cross-border cooperation. But they have power to solve only small problems, while big decisions must be taken a thousand miles away.

Biting more than they can chew

When times get hard and the economy slows Americans have often shown their xenophobia. But this time the immigrants under attack have the resources to fight back.

In 1992 the US began a visa program in response to a shortage of skilled labor, under which companies could look overseas to find high-tech workers. These visas last six years and then workers can apply for citizenship. Since then thousands of people came to the US, mostly from India and China. But now that American economy goes better and that the visas have expired these workers are vulnerable. If they don’t find another job immediately they risk deportation. So they are forced to accept low pay deals. And they also have to deal with complaints from Americans about stealing jobs and depressing salaries.

This is an old story but unlike previous immigrants, many refuse to go home. Instead, they are taking lower-paying jobs, trying to enlist in American universities and complaining loudly.

Social security: migrants offer numbers for fee

With the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 immigrants who want to work in the US must provide a Social Security Number to prove they have entered the country legally.

There are now in America hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have crossed the border illegally and need to procure a legal identity. On the other hand, many legal immigrants who have come back in Mexico risk losing their green card if they stay outside the country too long. So they are happy to lend their number in exchange for a fee. This practice also generates cash in other ways. Illegal immigrant workers usually earn so little they are owed an income tax refund at the end of the year. The illegal immigrant usually pays the real owner by sharing the tax refund.

By now a secondary trade in identities has emerged, involving an undetermined but relevant number of people. It is seen as a normal thing to do, and even if there are risks involved in letting one’s identity be used by someone else, the appeal of the chance to make a little extra money gets over any fear.

In fiction, a long history of fixation on the social gap

On television, in the movies, and novels now people tend to dwell in a classless, homogenized American Never-Neverland, where the order of sex and looks has replaced the old hierarchy of jobs and money. But for a long time American culture was preoccupied by class. A preoccupation that has diminished somewhat but it hasn’t entirely disappeared.

Before World War II in every movie or novel, you were reminded that in American society there was an insuperable gap between the middle and the upper class. This explains the great American nightmare: the dread of waking up one day and finding yourself at the bottom. This fear gets expression in books of the second half of the ^XIX century, which were meant to shock their middle-class readers.

The poor are absent, however, in the American novel at the turn of the ^XIX century, in the work of writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton, who are almost exclusively concerned with the rich or the aspiring middle classes. Novels had a sort of documentary function.

After World War II, novels ceased to be this way, and the glamour of the upper class lowered, while the importance and number of the middle class rose. The old kind of class novel is still being written, but more often novels these days take place in neighborhoods that could be almost anyplace. There everyone fits in, but nobody feels really at home.

Novel reading is a middle-class pastime, which is another reason that novels have so often focused on the middle and upper classes. Mass entertainment is another matter: during the Depression, most movies were based on formulaic fantasies in which a member of the upper class fell in love with a working girl/boy, by whom he/she was saved from a stiff and emotionally vacant existence (e.g., “Pretty Woman”).

Although the formula persisted, television has turned its attention elsewhere and the new heroes are doctors, cops, and lawyers. The old curiosity about how other people live is in reality television. This kind of television is based on the old game-show formula: the fantasy that you can be plucked out of ordinary life and immediately vested with celebrity, which has become a sort of modern aspiration.