Smettem S. Welcome/assalaam-u-alaikaam: Improving Communications With Ethnic Minority Families
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In Los Angeles, demographers see "white flight" across the suburbs and into rural areas.
(By Todd Bigelow for The Washington Post)
Past William Booth
Washington Post Staff Author
Sunday, February 22, 1998; Page A1
At the beginning of this century, as steamers poured into American ports, their steerages filled with European immigrants, a Jew from England named Israel Zangwill penned a play whose story line has long been forgotten, but whose central theme has not. His production was entitled "The Melting Pot" and its bulletin still holds a tremendous power on the national imagination – the promise that all immigrants can be transformed into Americans, a new alloy forged in a crucible of commonwealth, freedom and civic responsibility.
In 1908, when the play opened in Washington, the United States was in the middle of arresting the largest influx of immigrants in its history – Irish and Germans, followed by Italians and East Europeans, Catholics and Jews – some 18 million new citizens between 1890 and 1920.
Today, the The states is experiencing its second great wave of immigration, a move of people that has profound implications for a society that by tradition pays homage to its immigrant roots at the same time information technology confronts complex and deeply ingrained ethnic and racial divisions.
The immigrants of today come not from Europe but overwhelmingly from the still developing world of Asia and Latin America. The are driving a demographic shift and so rapid that inside the lifetimes of today'southward teenagers, no 1 indigenous group – including whites of European descent – will contain a majority of the nation'due south population.
Simply every bit possible, they say, is that the nation will continue to fracture into many split, disconnected communities with no shared sense of commonality or purpose. Or perhaps information technology will evolve into something in between, a pluralistic gild that will hold on to some core ideas nearly citizenship and capitalism, simply with footling meaningful interaction amongst groups.
The demographic changes heighten other questions virtually political and economic ability. Will that power, at present held disproportionately past whites, be shared in the new America? What will happen when Hispanics overtake blacks as the nation'south single largest minority?
"I do non call up that most Americans really understand the celebrated changes happening before their very eyes," said Peter Salins, an clearing scholar who is provost of the State Universities of New York. "What are nosotros going to get? Who are nosotros? How do the newcomers fit in – and how do the natives handle information technology – this is the great unknown."
This is the start of a series of manufactures examining the furnishings of the new demographics on American life. Over the next few months, other reports volition focus on the impact on politics, jobs, and social institutions.
Fear of strangers, of course, is nothing new in American history. The last great immigration wave produced a biting backlash, epitomized by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the return, in the 1920s, of the Ku Klux Klan, which not merely targeted blacks, but Catholics, Jews and immigrants as well.
But despite this strife, many historians argue that there was a greater consensus in the past on what it meant to be an American, a yearning for a common language and civilisation, and a want – encouraged, if not coerced past members of the ascendant white Protestant culture – to digest. Today, they say, there is more emphasis on preserving one's indigenous identity, of finding ways to highlight and defend one's cultural roots.
Hard to Measure out
More often than not, the neighborhoods where Americans live, the politicians and propositions they vote for, the cultures they immerse themselves in, the friends and spouses they have, the churches and schools they attend, and the way they view themselves are defined by ethnicity. The question is whether, in the midst of such modify, there is also enough glue to hold Americans together.
Black customs activist Nathaniel J. Wilcox in Miami says, "Hispanics don't desire some of the power, they want all the power."
(By Todd Bigelow for The Washington Post)
It is a miracle sometimes difficult to measure, but not detect. Houses of worship remain, as the Rev. Martin Luther Male monarch Jr. described it three decades ago, among the about segregated institutions in America, non merely by race but likewise ethnicity. At high schoolhouse cafeterias, the second and 3rd generation children of immigrants clump together in cliques defined past where their parents or grandparents were born. There are television sitcoms, talk shows and movies that are considered black or white, Latino or Asian. At a place similar the police schoolhouse of the University of California at Los Angeles, which has nearly ane,000 students, there are carve up pupil associations for blacks, Latinos and Asians with their own constabulary review journals.
It about goes without saying that today's new arrivals are a source of vitality and free energy, especially in the big cities to which many are attracted. Multifariousness, almost everyone agrees, is good; choice is skilful; exposure to different cultures and ideas is expert.
But many scholars worry about the loss of community and shared sense of reality among Americans, what Todd Gitlin, a professor of culture and communications at New York University, calls "the twilight of common dreams." The concern is echoed past many on both the left and right, and of all ethnicities, but no ane seems to know exactly what to do well-nigh it.
Academics who examine the census information and probe for pregnant in the numbers already speak of a new "demographic balkanization," not but of residential segregation, forced or chosen simply besides a powerful preference to run into ourselves through a racial prism, wary of others, and, in many instances, hostile.
At a recent school board coming together in East Palo Alto, Calif., police had to break up a fight between Latinos and blacks, who were arguing over the merits and expense of bilingual instruction in a school district that has shifted over the last few years from majority African American to majority Hispanic. One parent told reporters that if the Hispanics wanted to larn Spanish they should stay in Mexico.
The demographic shifts are smudging the old lines demarcating two historical, often distinct societies, one blackness and i white. Reshaped by three decades of rapidly rising immigration, the national story is now far more complicated.
Whites currently account for 74 percent of the population, blacks 12 percent, Hispanics 10 percent and Asians 3 percent. Notwithstanding according to information and predictions generated by the U.S. Census Bureau and social scientists poring over the numbers, Hispanics will likely surpass blacks early on in the next century. And by the twelvemonth 2050, demographers predict, Hispanics will account for 25 pct of the population, blacks 14 pct, Asians 8 percent, with whites hovering somewhere effectually 53 percent.
As early as side by side year, whites no longer will be the majority in California; in Hawaii and New Mexico this is already the example. Before long afterwards, Nevada, Texas, Maryland and New Bailiwick of jersey are also predicted to get "majority minority" states, entities where no one ethnic group remains the majority.
Korean American activist Angela Oh says, "This persistence of segregation ... y'all would take to exist blind not to run across it."
(By Todd Bigelow
for The Washington Post)
The overwhelming majority of immigrants come from Asia and Latin America – Mexico, the Central American countries, the Philippines, Korea, and Southeast Asia.
What triggered this great transformation was a change to immigration law in 1965, when Congress made family reunification the primary criteria for admittance. That new policy, a response to charges that the police favored white Europeans, allowed immigrants already in the U.s.a. to bring over their relatives, who in turn could bring over more relatives. As a result, America has been absorbing every bit many as 1 million newcomers a year, to the point that now near 1 in every 10 residents is foreign born.
These numbers, relative to the overall population, were slightly college at the beginning of this century, only the electric current immigration wave is in many ways very different, and its context inexorably altered, from the concluding great wave.
This time around tensions are sharpened by the irresolute profile of those who are entering America'due south borders. Not merely are their racial and ethnic backgrounds more varied than in decades by, their place in a modern postindustrial economic system has besides been recast.
The newly arrived today tin can be roughly divided into two camps: those with college degrees and highly specialized skills, and those with almost no instruction or job grooming. Some 12 pct of immigrants have graduate degrees, compared to 8 percentage of native Americans. Merely more than one-third of the immigrants have no high school diploma, double the charge per unit for those born in the United States.
Before 1970, immigrants were actually doing better than natives overall, as measured by education, charge per unit of homeownership and average incomes. But those arriving later 1970, are younger, more likely to be underemployed and alive below the poverty level. As a group, they are doing worse than natives.
Almost 6 percent of new arrivals receive some form of welfare, double the rate for U.S.-born citizens. Among some newcomers – Cambodians and Salvadorans, for example – the numbers are even college.
With big numbers of immigrants arriving from Latin America, and segregating in barrios, at that place is also evidence of lingering language problems. Consider that in Miami, three-quarters of residents speak a language other than English language at home and 67 percent of those say they are not fluent in English. In New York City, 4 of every 10 residents speak a linguistic communication other than English at home, and of these, half said they practise not speak English language well.
Information technology is articulate that not all of America is experiencing the impact of clearing equally. Although fifty-fifty small midwestern cities have seen sharp changes in their racial and ethnic mix in the past two decades, nearly immigrants continue to cluster into a handful of large, more often than not coastal metropolitan areas: Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, Washington, D.C., and Houston. They are home to more than a quarter of the total U.S. population and more than lx percent of all foreign-built-in residents.
Simply as the immigrants get in, many American-born citizens pour out of these cities in search of new homes in more than homogeneous locales. New York and Los Angeles each lost more 1 million native-built-in residents between 1990 and 1995, even as their populations increased by roughly the aforementioned numbers with immigrants. To oversimplify, said University of Michigan demographer William Frey, "For every Mexican who comes to Los Angeles, a white native-built-in leaves."
Well-nigh of the people leaving the large cities are white and they tend to working course. This is an entirely new kind of "white flying," whereby whites are non just fleeing the city centers for the suburbs but also are leaving the region, and often the land.
"The Ozzies and Harriets of the 1990s are skipping the suburbs of the big cities and moving to more than homogeneous, by and large white smaller towns and smaller cities and rural areas," Frey said.
They're headed to Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Portland, Denver, Austin and Orlando, as well as smaller cities in Nevada, Idaho, Colorado and Washington. Frey and other demographers believe the domestic migrants – black and white – are being "pushed" out, at to the lowest degree in function, by competition with immigrants for jobs and neighborhoods, political clout and lifestyle.
Frey sees in this pattern "the emergence of separate Americas, one white and middle-anile, less urban and another intensely urban, immature, multicultural and multiethnic. One America will intendance deeply well-nigh English every bit the official language and near preserving Social Security. The other will intendance well-nigh things like retaining affirmative action and bilingual education."
This century'due south huge wave of immigrants is attracted to large metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, in a higher place.
(By Todd Bigelow for The Washington Postal service)
Fifty-fifty within gateway cities that give the outward appearance of being multicultural, there are sharp lines of indigenous segregation. When describing the ethnic diversity of a bellwether megacity such every bit Los Angeles, many residents speak soaringly of the corking mosaic of many peoples. But the social scientists who look at the hard census data see something more than complex.
James P. Allen, a cultural geographer at California State University-Northridge, suggests that while Los Angeles, equally seen from an aeroplane, is a tremendously mixed society, on the ground, racial homogeneity and segregation are common.
This is not a new phenomenon; in that location have always been immigrant neighborhoods. Ben Franklin, an early proponent of making English the "official language," worried about shut-knit High german communities. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-Due north.Y) described the lingering clannishness of Irish and other immigrant populations in New York in "Beyond the Melting Pot," a benchmark work from the 1960s that he wrote with Nathan Glazer.
But the persistance of indigenous enclaves and identification does not appear to be going away, and may not in a country that is now home to not a few singled-out ethnic groups, but to dozens. Hispanics in Los Angeles, to accept the dominant group in the nation's 2nd largest metropolis, are more segregated residentially in 1990 than they were 10 or 20 years agone, the census tracts evidence. Moreover, it is possible that what mixing of groups that does occur is only a temporary phenomenon every bit one indigenous group supplants another in the neighborhood.
If there is deep-seated indigenous segregation, it clearly extends to the American workplace. In many cities, researchers detect sustained "ethnic niches" in the labor market. Considering jobs are oftentimes a matter of whom 1 knows, the niches were enduring and remarkably resistant to outsiders.
In California, for example, Mexican immigrants are employed overwhelmingly equally gardeners and domestics, in apparel and furniture manufacturing, and as cooks and food preparers. Koreans open minor businesses. Filipinos become nurses and medical technicians. African Americans work in government jobs, an important niche that is increasingly beingness challenged past Hispanics who desire in.
UCLA's Roger Waldinger and others have pointed to the creation, in cities of high immigration, of "dual economies."
For the flush, which includes a disproportionate number of whites, the big labor pool provides them with a ready supply of gardeners, maids and nannies. For businesses in demand of inexpensive manpower, the same is true. Yet at that place are fewer "transitional" jobs – the bluish-neckband work that helped Italian and Irish immigrants motion up the economic ladder – to assistance newcomers or their children on their way to the jobs requiring avant-garde technical or professional skills that now dominate the upper tier of the economy.
A Rung at a Time
Traditionally, immigration scholars take seen the miracle of assimilation equally a relentless economic progression. The difficult-working new arrivals struggle along with a new language and at low-paying jobs in gild for their sons and daughters to climb the economic ladder, each generation advancing a rung. There are many cases where this is true.
More recently, there is evidence to suggest that economical movement is erratic and that some groups – particularly in high immigration cities – tin get "stuck."
Amidst African Americans, for instance, there emerges 2 singled-out patterns. The black middle class is doing demonstrably better – in income, home buying rates, didactics – than information technology was when the demographic transformation (and the civil rights motion) began three decades ago.
But for African Americans at the bottom, inquiry indicates that immigration, particularly of Latinos with limited education, has increased joblessness, and frustration.
In Miami, where Cuban immigrants dominate the political landscape, tensions are loftier between Hispanics and blacks, said Nathaniel J. Wilcox, a customs activist there. "The perception in the blackness community, the reality, is that Hispanics don't desire some of the power, they want all the power," Wilcox said. "At to the lowest degree when we were going through this with the whites during the Jim Crow era, at least they'd hire us. But Hispanics won't permit African Americans to even compete. They have this feeling that their customs is the only community that counts."
Yet many Hispanics too find themselves in an economical "mobility trap." While the new immigrants are willing to work in low-end jobs, their sons and daughters, growing up in the barrios but exposed to the relentless consumerism of popular culture, have greater expectations, simply are disadvantaged considering of their impoverished settings, particularly the overwhelmed inner-urban center schools most immigrant children attend.
"One doubts that a truck-driving hereafter will satisfy today's servants and assemblers. And this scenario gets a skilful deal more pessimistic if the region's economy fails to deliver or simply throws up more than bad jobs," writes Waldinger, a professor of folklore and director of center for regional policy studies at the Academy of California-Los Angeles.
Though there are calls to revive efforts to encourage "Americanization" of the newcomers, many researchers at present express doubt that the old absorption model works. For ane affair, in that location is less of a ascendant mainstream to enter. Instead, at that place are a dozen streams, despite the all-time efforts by the dominant white gild to lump groups together past ethnicity.
It is a particularly American phenomenon, many say, to label citizens by their ethnicity. When a person lived in El Salvador, for case, he or she saw themselves as a nationality. When they arrive in the U.s., they become Hispanic or Latino. So also with Asians. Koreans and Cambodians discover little in common, but when they arrive here they become "Asian," and are counted and courted, encouraged or discriminated against every bit such.
"My family unit has had trouble understanding that we are now Asians, and non Koreans, or people from Korea or Korean Americans, or only plain Americans," said Arthur Lee, who owns a dry cleaning store in Los Angeles. "Sometimes, we laugh about it. Oh, the Asian students are then smart! The Asians have no involvement in politics! Whatever. But we don't know what people are talking about. Who are the Asians?"
Many immigrant parents say that while they want their children to advance economically in their new state, they do not desire them to become "besides American." A common business concern amidst Haitians in South Florida is that their children will prefer the attitudes of the inner city's underclass. Vietnamese parents in New Orleans often try to proceed their children immersed in their ethnic enclave and try not to let them assimilate likewise fast.
Hyphenated Americans
Ane study of the children of immigrants, conducted six years ago among young Haitians, Cubans, Due west Indians, Mexican and Vietnamese in S Florida and Southern California, suggests the parents are not alone in their concerns.
Asked by researchers Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbauthow how they identified themselves, most chose categories of hyphenated Americans. Few choose "American" as their identity.
So in that location was this – asked if they believe the U.s. in the best country in the world, most of the youngsters answered: no.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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