Advantages and Challenges
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Advantages and Challenges
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Advantages and Challenges
I live in southern California where the area and city I live in has always be extremely diverse culturally. From pre-school all the way to Jr. College I have had diverse classroom and schools as a whole. From my first job working at McDonalds, then moving on to construction working for the Drywall Union, then working in the mortgage industry, moving on to working for Yokohama Tire Corp. and their race team traveling all over the world, to where I am now, working for the city of Los Angeless Water Department I have always worked along side people outside my social identity and even culture. I was taught as a young child that respect was to be given to everyone and anyone until they proved undeserving. My family never showed any type of prejudice or racism while I was growing up, so I never knew any different, but to treat everyone the same, unless they deserved to be treated different by their own actions. To say I learned anything new that helped me to relate to people outside my social identity would be difficult to agree to. I feel I also am very aware of how other in the country and or world feel different than the way I do. I am very involved with world events, I am intrigued with psychology and am an avid “people watcher”. Not many things stand out to me that I may or may not have already known prior to this class. What I can say is, that I was surprised by some of the discussion post I read, about how little people in this country are aware of the prejudice and racism or discrimination that is out in the world. We live in a day in age where information travels so fast and to so many so easily, it truly is disheartening how uninformed many people are, or how little they care to read about what is going on in the world.
One of the things I did enjoy researching was my own cultural history, being Norwegian. Today we have so many arguments or disagreements about immigration; its almost impossible to find an answer that everyone will be happy with. When I was researching my own heritage to find out what kind of discrimination, prejudice or racism my family encountered for one of our weekly assignments, I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. Like many immigrants of the late 1800s and early 1900s, they came to the United States the way the Government required immigrants to. The followed the process of immigration, paid their dues and waited their turn. My family came here, hardly knowing the language, however made it from Ellis Island, NY to Lakota, North Dakota with in a single year and Owned over 200 acres of farmland by the end of their second year living in the United States. In order to write the assignment I was looking for some form of prejudice, discrimination or racism people from my familys homeland experienced as they immigrated. What I found was this “While Norwegian immigrants did not face strong anti-immigrant sentiment, they were the targets of some unfriendly remarks. Sometimes they were called “guests,” a label signifying that the Norwegians were not part of America and implied that they would eventually leave. However, when it became necessary to interact outside their communities to run their farms, Norwegians began to develop relations with the larger American society” (“The Advocates For Human Rights”, 2011) This is a far cry from what the majority of immigrants in those days, including the Native Americans who were already living here had to endure through out the history of our nation. It seems that like most new comers to, whether it be a country or a school or a job, it takes a while to be fully welcomed by everybody, and my family and the others from Norway who immigrated here had a far less difficult time assimilating to American society than many had and have since.
Its hard to say what the country will look like in 50 years when considering immigration and what has happened in the past and trying to project what will happen in the future. As the nation of immigrants that we are, the U.S. has a long history of contradiction regarding immigration. I feel its safe to say that basically every new wave of immigrants arriving here — Jewish, Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, and Irish, as a