http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration-and-emigration/index.html
The above link directs you to an article posted earlier in the week, run in The New York Times, this article revolves around immigration and emigration. This article explains both the fact of emigration; the act of immigrants leaving their home, and immigration; the act of entering America. This blog states that “From the time of the nation’s founding, immigration has been crucial to the United States’ growth and a periodic source of conflict. In recent decades, the country has experienced another great wave of immigration, the largest since the 1920s. However, for the first time, illegal immigrants outnumbered legal ones.” This article goes into talking about how the republicans and democrates as well as President Obama and Congress have been working hard to “fix a fundamentally broken immigration system” Obama is working towards defending his efforts to strengthen border security while promoting a path to citizenship for many of the 11 million people in the United States legally. Immigration has not been a topic that I was very well knowledged on until my Ethnic Studies course. I had never been aware that illegal immigration was such a problem, or that political leaders were working so hard to try to stabilize the laws, with the desire to help the immigrants come to America. Thru this article and my course, I learned that immigration is a push and pull factor. Push factors refer primarily to the motive for emigration from the country of orgin, these factors were explained as economic migration, usually labor migration, and wage rates. The pull factor, is the factors that the immigrants are looking and hoping for with their new nation, such as better education, jobs, more opportunites, and freedom.
This article caught my attention while searching thru The New York Times online newspaper, because it fits in directly with the heritage paper we are currently working on in class. The guideline for the assignment was to explore our ethnic roots, research where our families used to call home, why they chose America, and how their treatment was once they arrived on the soil of the land of the free. I never gave much thought as to where my ancestors came from. Exploring my heritage was never something that I did voluntarily, and not something that was ever a really prominent conversation in my household. After learning about immigrants and their motives for coming to America, I got very interested and excited when I was asked to learn about my own. This article fits in directly with the course material we were reviewing in class because it talks about the underlying fact that immigration has been such a crucial part of the United States growth. Not only growth, but immigration also brings with it periodic sources of conflict. The article explains illegal immigration and how President Obama is working to fix the “fundamentally broken” immigration problem. Besides the fact that immigration is still very common in America today and has gotten easier, the fact that we now have a black president working on immigration laws shows that America has come a long way. African Americans who came from Africa and other parts of the world came to America and were slaves and share croppers. Now, in 2010, an African American man is working to secure and fix what so many of his ancestors had a hard time doing.