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Immigrant Community and Their Neighborhood
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Immigrant Community and Their Neighborhood
The United States of America is a land of dreams; it is a land full of decent opportunities. Many people fly here, every year to achieve their goals, whether academic or professional. These people are known as immigrants. However, depending on where a person is from, their experience is likely to be varied by their education level and command of the English language.
The expectations of people that are not immigrants though are indeed a problem. It is not fair to expect immigrants to assimilate overnight. The people that complain that immigrants don't assimilate - in their majority - are looking at recent arrivals that may have gotten to this country as adults, not fluent in English; and pointing fingers and complaining that they don't want to assimilate. Nobody chooses to be different if it is going to make life harder. Assimilation will come, if the immigrant seeks solace in their community and original language while they grapple with the very hard task of being an immigrant - literally an alien to the local culture, no one can blame them.
Learning a foreign language is hard. Understanding a foreign culture is hard. Doing it while a person is dealing with the day to day of responsibilities, being an adult trying to build a life for you and your family is harder. It is hard for highly educated people. It is harder for people that may be uneducated (Hainmueller, & Hopkins, 2014). To persecute people for seeking solace in what is known and familiar to them is just heartless. The United States of America is an assimilation machine. If the first generation has trouble, the second generation will be American with a flavor and the third generation will be just American.
This was true to immigrants from Germany, Italy, Ireland, and all the other cultures that formed the USA of today. All of them looked for solace in their communities, their mother tongues, and preserved what they could of their original cultures. If people are doing their jobs, respecting the rule of law, contributing somehow to the society they will bring up their kids as Americans (with the aid of the education system). And they will appreciate the US a whole lot.The land of the United States welcomes its immigrants with mixed results. If a person is a Hispanic immigrant, arriving in the US to find something better for their family than what they had in Central or South America, not so good. If they are from the Indian Subcontinent, Europe or places like China or Japan, then they are golden. No "non-white" immigrant group has so quickly moved from "fresh immigrant" to the comfortable suburbs as Desis.
Part of this is that most Desi (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka) all have the benefit of not needing "Little Delhis" or "Little Daccas" to find a jumping-off point to integrate into the country. They all come here almost universally speaking English far better than Mexicans, Laotians and/or Chinese immigrants. Any immigrant group who doesn't command the language readily almost always uses a community to springboard into the nation.
Additionally, there's the curious case of how the distance from the Subcontinent filters immigrants down to those who really want it badly enough but can also afford it. That means affluent enough to buy a plane ticket, commands English and highly motivated (Borjas, 2014). This means that the Desi immigrant the USAmerican sees skews the perception of what being an Indian is (so, for many of us, we see IT, Engineer and Doctor). This is not to say that those aren't notable positions in India, but it's basically what any "native" US citizen thinks a Desi immigrant is. It's a lot better place to be than many other brown skinned people who are stereotyped into janitors or gardeners, but it's still a stereotype and indicative of a larger perception issue as a whole.
References
Borjas, G. J. (2014). Immigration economics. Harvard University Press.
Hainmueller, J., & Hopkins, D. J. (2014). Public attitudes toward immigration. Annual Review of Political Science, 17, 225-249.
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