When I was in grade school in the sixties I learned that the United States was a 'melting pot'

[milestogo]

of different people from different countries. While the metaphor may be out of fashion today, the basic sentiment - that we are a nation of immigrants, is still valid.

This was a public school, and the message I heard at school was no different than what I heard at home. I was aware that full equality was not a reality for women and blacks (never heard a word about gays) but equality was something that the country as a whole had been moving toward since its founding.

What I don't understand is why there are millions of people today who reject immigrants as inherently dangerous, or feel that people of other races are inferior. Did they learn this at home? At school? At church? How does half the country have such a totally different idea of what the USA is about than the other half does?

[JI7]

1. was this before or after the civil rights laws were passed ?

you may have gone to a school which leaned more liberal but that was not reality.

what we are seeing now is the right wing racists losing power and they are reacting to it. in very ugly ways.

[milestogo]

2. The books were probably written before the laws changed.

[upaloopa]

3. Those people we melted were a white Europeans.

We did not welcome Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese .

[lucca18]

4. Me too.

I always heard that in school.

[doc03]

5. When I was a kid living in a steel town in eastern Ohio when you went down town

you would hear people talking Polish, Italian, German, etc. I find today that those nationalities that were discriminated
against the worst when they came to America are the ones that now are the worse to discriminate today. The people that
spoke their native language at home then now complain about Mexicans not learning English.

[RobinA]

13. Well It Was

always thus. People always kicking at the people the next step down on the ladder. See the movie Matewan for a great depiction of us. Guy trying to organize coal fields having big problems because it would require different waves of immigrants to work and play together. Everybody looking down on the Italian family who barely speak English, but Italian guy doesn't want to hang with the black guy below him.

[doc03]

17. I agree Matewan was the best movie I ever saw on labor struggles in the USA.

I think it should be required viewing in all our high school history classes. Big business has used
race and ethnicity to divide labor throughout history. My dad was like Archie Bunker, he wasn't any worse than others of that generation that is the way people were raised back in the early 1900's. People of his generation called everyone dagos, spicks, pollocks etc. That's how management kept control of labor and they still do.

[Egnever]

6. The learned it in their insular communities

That is why the big cities are pretty much all blue.

There are a whole lot of people still today that can live their whole lives in their small town and never see any diversity or encounter it only rarely and it is an oddity to them. Pretty easy to fear the other in small towns.

[onecaliberal]

7. Unless you're Native American we all immigrated from somewhere else.

[jberryhill]

9. Native Americans were simply early arrivals

There were no humans here until relatively recently compared to Africa, Asia or Europe.

[linuxman]

15. Nope. Them too.

[jberryhill]

8. I think some kids misunderstood the "melting pot" thing

They believe that people who immigrate to the US are then required to be "the same as everyone else" as if that had any kind of definition.

[milestogo]

10. I think that immigrants used to have that attitude in the early 20th century

All of my grandparents came over from Europe before 1920. They learned English as quickly as possible and left behind the "old country" ways. People didn't want to stand out or seem like a foreigner.

[davidn3600]

12. Yep

My great-grandmother came here from Italy. She wouldnt teach her kids ANY Italian. They just wanted them to learn English.

That's how it was. And that's how it is even today, really. If you immigrate here and have children, you are going to want them to learn English. You pretty much have to in order to get anywhere in America. If you immigrate here and dont know any English and don't learn it, you will NEVER move out of lower class. And that's true probably everywhere in the world. You have to be able to speak the language everyone else speaks to function and communicate effectively in that society. Asking an immigrant to learn the language of the country they are moving to is not racist or intolerant....it's necessary.

[hfojvt]

21. I do not believe that is true

There were many German language newspapers in the 19th century and churches where the services were in German. In one church in Wisconsin when they switched to English services (perhaps in the 1870s, I don't remember and probably cannot find the book with a half hour search) one of the old timers was not happy. He said (in German) "I suppose God himself is going to have to learn English."

That may depend on where they settled to. When the Swiss came in waves from the 1850s to 1870s to Wisconsin, they did not have a group of "new country" ways to settle in to, They were some of the earliest settlers of that county and had a large community of their fellow Swiss around them.

[davidn3600]

11. No...that's the way it always was

It was melting pot because today's "Americans" are a mixture of many different nationalities, cultures, and races. Over the past 100-150 years or so, these have somewhat melted together to some extent. Not many Americans are even fully their nationality anymore. Most Americans are part one nationality and part another. We've all assimilated and integrated. I actually have 4 nationalities in my blood. I have different ancestors that immigrated to America from at least 4 different lands.

But today's multiculturalism (salad bowl) is a relatively new phenomenon. Multiculturalism seems to be supporting LESS integration and LESS assimilation.

[kwassa]

16. You are wrong.

I don't know where you live, but, this following statement by you is incorrect.

But today's multiculturalism (salad bowl) is a relatively new phenomenon. Multiculturalism seems to be supporting LESS integration and LESS assimilation.

I live in the wildly diverse suburbs of DC. Different cultures and races are assimilating everywhere. Interracial and intercultural and interethnic relationships are very common.

Every group that enters, however, alters American culture to some degree, but culture is dynamic, not static. Our culture is being enriched by the newcomers.

[Javaman]

14. growing up in NYC

I knew nothing else.

anytime of the day, I would walk in NY and hear any number of dozens of languages. I loved it.

the smells, sights and tastes of people from all over the world all squished together in NYC.

This is why many many years later (no longer living in NYC) I am continually amazed as to why people get bent out of shape over immigrants.

this is who we are. we are all immigrants.

we are a bouquet of humanity.

[Zing Zing Zingbah]

18. I was taught the same thing when I was kid in school in the 80's

and I am shocked that we are where we are right now. I just can't understand it. This isn't the future I expected at all.

[dawg]

19. Some are just racists. They hate blacks and Latinos.

They learned this at home.

Others are just chicken-shit cowards. They are scared of the big bad Muslim boogey-men who are going to come over here and blow us all up. They learned this on Fox News.

[hfojvt]

20. the BS that we are a nation of immigrants

is just that.

BS that comes from history writers. Here's an example that I recently read.

"The United States had always been a land of immigrants. A Bureau of Census official in the early 1920's estimated that about one half of the American population was descended from people who had been in the United States at the time of the first census in 1790 and the other half came from those who had immigrated later." 72

from Between the wars: America, 1919-1941 David A Shannon 1965 Houghton Mifflin

First of all, note the reasoning.

Half of the population descended from those here before 1790, half from more recent immigrants. Excuse me but if I take 100 marbles and half of them are red and half are blue, by what logic do I say "we have always been a nation of blues?" What about the other half?

Second, note even how "immigrants" are counted. For example, my grandfather was born in 1889 in New York. Both of his parents were born in New York. 3 of his four grandparents though were immigrants, all of them before 1845. So having grandparents who were immigrants makes you an immigrant too? Even 75 years later? And it makes his daughter, born in 1913 also an immigrant? Because she was from his first wife rather than my grandmother, I am not sure of her ancestry, but all four of her grandparents were born in New York.

But because the historians luuuuurve immigrants and think the story is ALL about immigrants, they just lump a bunch of 3rd generation Americans in with the foreign born. How many generations does a family need to be in a country before they STOP being "immigrants"? Am I still an immigrant because 11 of my 16 great great grandparents were born in other countries? In 1920 only 13% of the population was foreign born. To me that means the other 87% - a HUGE majority, are NOT immigrants.

My question is about the future of my country. One Hispanic woman responded to Trump, and said, of immigrants - "We are the future of this country." And she may be right. In my eyes though, the children and grandchildren of the people who are already here should be the future of this country. To give the country away to outsiders, even though, yes, they are humans too, would be a disservice to our own descendants.

[X_Digger]

22. There has always been an undercurrent of xenophobia. But nostalgia is strong.

It was the chinese.. the catholics.. the germans.. the irish.. the japanese.. the italians.. the poles.. the okies.. the jews.. the carpetbaggers.. the blacks.. the hillbillies.. the hispanics.. the yankees.. the puerto ricans.. the french.. the gringos..

Every generation since our founding and damned near every area of the country has had some moral panic over some 'other'- whether it's nation, skin color, religion, or class.

Pick a date in the last 250 odd years, and you can find one group or another being 'other-ized'.

That's not to say that we are not a multi-cultural nation. We're very good at integrating people and customs- eventually.