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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| kmart Senior Member Australia Joined 6124 days ago 194 posts - 400 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 65 of 74 01 May 2010 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I wasn't advocating that people be allowed to break the laws of their adopted country. I don't feel that I would be undermining social cohesion if I moved to the USA to live, and failed to take an interest in ice hockey and Taco Bell, preferring instead to watch Aussie Rules football and cook pavlova... 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 66 of 74 01 May 2010 at 11:36pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This is a very trivialized view of cultural assimilation. Americans consume a wide variety of ethnic foods in numerous ethnic restaurants without knowing how to stop. Haven't heard of pavlova, but you wouldn't be kicked out of here for eating it. Ideally, you'd open a restaurant so the rest of us can have it too. Nobody is "interested" in Taco Bell, but some people do eat there - it's a legalized form of slow suicide. I ate at a Taco Bell once, got sick and never went back. I haven't been deported yet. Ice hockey is probably even bigger in Canada, but we are definitely big on baseball and American football. After 31 years in the country, I still don't know the rules of either. I was taken to my first baseball game a couple of years ago. I didn't really get what they were doing on the field, but the hot dogs were good. I mean, not being interested in sports does have its price - if you are of school age, you'll be unpopular, unloved, and your girlfriends will be weird, but it is a free country, so you'll be OK in the end, even if you like studying foreign languages as a hobby instead.
OK, this is a more serious part. The kind of law-breaking I was talking about isn't something ordinary, like a bank robbery and the like, but stems from very deep-seated cultural prejudices and differences. I picked honor killings as an example, so let's stick with it for the purposes of this discussion. There aren't all that many honor killings even in the countries where the practice originated, and I don't know that they are legal in all of those places either. Very few immigrants from those countries will ever commit this type of crime. This, however, is not the point. The point is that for something like to this to happen in the adopted country, one has to bring a huge amount of cultural baggage from one's original culture and refuse to give it up. By not giving up, such people remain incompatible at a rather fundamental level with the adopted society. You don't have to actually kill someone for that to be the case. Edited by frenkeld on 02 May 2010 at 4:52am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| kmart Senior Member Australia Joined 6124 days ago 194 posts - 400 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 67 of 74 02 May 2010 at 7:52am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's a fair comment, but leaving out actual illegal acts (which nobody expects that you can bring to another country with you as part of your "culture"), what sorts of cultural aspects would you consider would undermine social cohesion? Wearing a burkha? Animal sacrifice? Public nudity? There are probably some laws about the last 2 examples anyway, but I'm just trying to think of things, and I can't come up with any. BTW pavlova is an aussie/kiwi dessert consisting mostly of cream and sugar - it ought to do well in the USA if it were marketed right - maybe through Taco Bell! ;-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5345 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 68 of 74 04 May 2010 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
One can be certain it belongs to the same cultural sphere as Portugal, Spain or Italy.
I would be more optimistic about the latter than the former. In the United States social groups can survive for generations on welfare, no matter what condition they might keep their lives and communities in. In Latin America on the other hand, though people generally believe it to be the government's duty to provide for all their needs, they know from experience this is seldom the case, and hence a greater emphasis is placed on personal, individual advancement.
Because if no bond exists between people sharing a geography, on what basis can a nation be built? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 69 of 74 05 May 2010 at 12:38am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
What about places like Bolivia, with a higher percentage of Native American population?
When I look at the Indians and the Chinese, which are two very successful groups in the US right now, it is also the case that the countries they come from are also doing well. In fact, in the past they were already doing well in the US while their home countries were still behind the curve in development. If your ideas are correct, they would really contradict history. The US tends to unlock people's potential, so I am by no means ready to "write off" our immigrants from Latin America. I think they have actually been improving economically in the US in recent years, although I don't have the statistics on hand to prove it. That said, they are behind some other immigrant groups and the natives in terms of education, which is not a good thing if it persists into the future. Edited by frenkeld on 05 May 2010 at 12:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 70 of 74 05 May 2010 at 12:57am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't want to get too far from language issues, but let me remark that racial, ethnic, religious, and language differences often lead to disunity or worse - history is too replete with examples to cite any here. It is recognized that the US has been an incredibly successful immigrant society because it has found a way to integrate many groups into a diverse and yet in many ways single culture, and do so without entirely squashing the individual traits of these groups either. I believe having a common language to aim for at the native fluency level (for the second generation) has always been an important part of this process. Edited by frenkeld on 05 May 2010 at 1:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| robsolete Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5385 days ago 191 posts - 428 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 71 of 74 05 May 2010 at 2:08am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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This gubernatorial candidate would be an idiot if he were actually serious.
The truth is that if he were to enact this, for the measly tens of thousands of dollars "saved" by not printing Farsi driver's tests, he would lose millions of dollars of Federal Department of Transportation funds for not complying with their accessibility regulations. So he's not serious--it's just a way to make some quick political capital off of the Arizona immigration controversy and, when he eventually doesn't go through with it, shake his fist at big bad Obama and the federal government to look like the underdog (because white Christian males with Finance degrees are the new underdog, don't you know?). As for the issue itself, I would posit that any American here whose ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower ought to hold their tongues. Did my Sicilian great-grandfather learn enough English to get by at the supermarket? Yes. Was he literate enough to pass a standardized exam? Certainly not. The problem here is that driving is far more of an economic necessity in the United States than in most European countries--having access to a vehicle is having access toa job unless you live in maybe five or six cities with real public transit. So what we're essentially demanding is that immigrants desperate to escape poverty somehow harness their sixth-grade educations on a zero budget and take a few months off from working to feed their families so they can become literate in English. All of this before they can operate a motor vehicle in the US, which essentially means before they can get a job. It's the ultimate catch-22--no chance at education without money, and no chance to make money until you're educated. Which means that it's really just a stealthy way of trying to make life impossible for new immigrants, which is all this is really about. It's a cruel, cheap way of exploiting a vulnerable population for cynical political gain, and nothing more. 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| goosefrabbas Triglot Pro Member United States Joined 6368 days ago 393 posts - 475 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German, Italian Personal Language Map | Message 72 of 74 05 May 2010 at 2:21am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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My great-grandfather also came from Sicily. :)
1 person has voted this message useful |
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