It is the dream of every immigrant, to live a worry free life in a new country that can offer so much. A place where one can work for suitable wages, a place where one can raise their children free of the problems plaguing their previous country and a place where one can grow spiritually and socially. Assimilation can be drastic or very simple, from changing the type of food one eats to converting one's religious beliefs. The determining factors of whether to adapt or not are the morals and beliefs that the immigrant has been brought up on. If the immigrant was brought up on strong morals and beliefs towards their religion and nationality, chances are that the immigrant would rather be alienated and looked down upon rather than conforming to …show more content…
The main reason why they came to New York City was that during that time, Sri Lanka was having a civil war. So they decided to move somewhere with opportunities in employment and education for both them and their future children. When my parents first came to New York City, they saw many different types of people, life styles, languages and ways of acting. The language barrier however was not very difficult considering the fact that they learned English in school in Sri Lanka. The dream for their future life was very hard for them to fulfill in New York City. If somebody asked them any questions, sometimes they answered without making sense. My parents would be scared to go out to public places such as restaurants or parks because they were scared they wouldn’t adjust to the habitat. Sometimes if my mom or dad said something wrong, people would laugh at them. The start of my parents’ life in New York was very hard for them. They tried to find the Sri Lankan community here to gain connections and contacts. Unfortunately, not many Sri Lankans lived in New York. Then they moved from Manhattan to Staten Island, where my mom took classes at CSI to finish her schooling and get her degree in therapy. The education system in America was very different from the one in Sri Lanka. Most of the time my mother didn’t even know what people were talking about.
Meanwhile, multiculturalism in the United States has been part of their history, considering the fact that almost all its populations, including its founders are immigrants coming from different cultural backgrounds (Citrin, 2001). Due to globalization, there is no reason why other immigrants and new ethnic groups could have difficulty assimilating themselves into American life.
Native Americans have had a long history of resistance to the social and cultural assimilation into white culture. By employing various creative strategies, Native Americans have attempted to cope with the changes stemming from the European colonial movement into the Americas. There are fundamental differences in world views and cultural and social orders between Indians and Europeans, which contributed to conservatism in Native American cultures. In this paper, two aspects of such cultural and institutional differences of Native American societies will be examined: holistic Native American beliefs versus dualistic world views and harmony versus domination. These two aspects are important in terms of explaining changes (or lack thereof) in Native American societies because they suggest that the Native American world view is more cyclical and its components are interlinked, while Western societies have a clear demarcation between cultural elements, such as religion, kinship, and morality. However, there are certain limitations to the theoretical frameworks that explain conservatism in Indian cultures because these theories are oriented around the Western world view and were developed based on the Western terms; therefore, indigenous population was not taken into account when these theories were developed.
“To kill the Indian in the child,” was the prime objective of residential schools (“About the Commission”). With the establishment of residential schools in the 1880s, attending these educational facilities used to be an option (Miller, “Residential Schools”). However, it was not until the government’s time consuming attempts of annihilating the Aboriginal Canadians that, in 1920, residential schools became the new solution to the “Indian problem.” (PMC) From 1920 to 1996, around one hundred fifty thousand Aboriginal Canadians were forcibly removed from their homes to attend residential schools (CBC News). Aboriginal children were isolated from their parents and their communities to rid them of any cultural influence (Miller, “Residential Schools”). Parents who refrained from sending their children to these educational facilities faced the consequence of being arrested (Miller, “Residential Schools”). Upon the Aboriginal children’s arrival into the residential schools, they were stripped of their culture in the government’s attempt to assimilate these children into the predominately white religion, Christianity, and to transition them into the moderating society (Miller, “Residential Schools”). With the closing of residential schools in 1996, these educational facilities left Aboriginal Canadians with lasting negative intergenerational impacts (Miller, “Residential Schools”). The Aboriginals lost their identity, are affected economically, and suffer socially from their experiences.
Curtin’s “Coculturation: Toward a Critical Theoretical Framework for Cultural Adjustment” explores the many aspects of cultural adaptation. To enhance the conversation and construct a dialogue that counters that of the status quo, Melissa L. Curtin proposes a theory of Coculturation. Curtin (2010) seeks to “underscore the complex and ongoing processes of identification for all members of a community; to challenge any notion of a static, monolithic target culture; and to foreground that macrolevel sociopolitical and sociohistorical contexts, as well as microlevel social interactional processes, are important in understanding cultural adjustment” (p. 271). This work illuminates the conversation of acculturation and assimilation by combating the hegemonic discourse of traditional theoretical frameworks. According to Curtin, the rhetoric surrounding acculturation in the U.S. commonly “presumes an imagined national host community of a white, monolingual, English-speaking America to which immigrants should quickly assimilate.”
When it comes to immigration many things comes to a person mind. There are many things that an immigrant faces when he/she decides to migrate to another country. For instance, for an immigrant moving is not an easy thing to do they will have to leave everything behind and start over again in a whole different country than their own native country. At first is going to be hard because they do not know anyone, they do not speak the language. The parents will have to look for a house and also look for a job to support their family and learn how to survive in what seems like a different world. These are some of the problems that immigrants face when coming to the United States.
Immigrants are defined as people who permanently move to a forgiven country from their origin country. Immigrants can move for the purposes of seeking better living, better education, or in order to avoid any sort of issues in their origin country. Despite the reasoning behind the decision of the movement, an immigrant will be affected by the change of culture, way of life, social system and community. The process of the movement effects each individual differently depending on their, age, gender and their level of connection to their past culture. Having that said, the younger the age of the individual, the more venerable and easily they become to changing their way of life in order to feel a part of a community. Gender however is also related to the race of the person. To elaborate, females and black males are more open to the idea of changing any of their factors to adjust to their ‘new society’. An individual’s connection with their past culture, has a great impact on their personality and their standing and belief in their values, morals and culture. Therefore, the stronger and deeper the connection with their original culture and way of life, the more satisfied the individual becomes. Therefore, they don’t feel the urge to compete with another culture. Therefore, their current standing with their own culture has a strong impact on their future judgment on other culture. The weaker the connection the more prone they are to changing their current culture. Thus, an individual’s stability level towards their culture depends on other factors that are concerned with them. [Different age groups are faced with different situation that leads them to deal with different issues and therefore they are exposed to different kinds of expe...
Before you begin reading the main narrative of my essay, I want to let you in on some details about my life and myself. I was born in Manhattan, New York and when I was about twenty two days old, I boarded a plane with my parents on a journey across the United States to the city of San Francisco, then to the town of Grass Valley. This is where my grandmother and grandfather resided. They had been telling my parents that the city of Manhattan was no place to raise a child and that we should move to California and live with them. Before making this life changing decision of leaving most of their friends and loved ones in New York to come to California, my parents sent me off to live in India with my uncle. Keep in mind, I was about the age of two when this all happened. The opportunity of leaving me with my uncle gave my parents about a year to think things over and pull themselves together, in efforts to properly raise a child in a country that was so
In Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New Word, people are conditioned on how to exist in every aspect in their society from the day they are born until the day they die. They are told what to feel, what to believe, what to enjoy, how to spend their time, and what emotions are acceptable. This starts with recordings played in their infant sleep and transitions into the things they are taught as children. Of course, this is all fiction, but taken from a different perspective this can be relative to the American society today. There are processes in the raising of an American child and the public schools they attend that American children are put through that can be very closely compared to the conditioning that people experience in Brave New World; Just as people are formed to fit into society in the novel, so are we from an early age.
America is a country that has an unspoken immigration policy, and that is based entirely upon race. This policy has been in effect since we began racial classifications. In J.L. Hochschild’s paper titled “Racial Reorganization and the United States Census 1850-1930 Mulattoes, Half Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race. Studies in American Political Development.” The reorganization of races was rooted in who is and who isn’t white. What we honestly know is that being white carries a cache and that has never changed. It’s like having a backstage pass to the greatest rock concert ever performed. Everybody you tell wishes they were there too. Within that frame work a determination of whom would be included and who would be excluded would have to be made. Did Native Americans have the ability to assimilate, would Mexicans be included in the Jim Crow laws, and whether all Asians should be excluded from entering the country were questions white people would determine. (J. L. Hochschild 1) And, these questions would form the basis of each groups place on America’s racial totem pole. The focus of Professor Hochschild’s paper is that the Census Bureau is deeply implicated in the social construct of race, and precious little has changed in all that time.
Because of the concept of the word race, wars have been started and millions of people have been discriminated against. To me, it appears to be simply another evil in the world that we, as humans, must deal with and potentially overcome. Since the beginning of time, race has done nothing but give people a reason to argue, fight, and discriminate. It gives people reason to not associate with their fellow man. It causes a fear of the out-of-the-ordinary. Without education, race can be a barrier separating us.
The Allotment and Assimilation Era of the 1880’s to the 1930’s had a widespread and devastating impact on the Native American population in the United States. These two policies were attempts by the U.S. Federal Government to separate tribes, and indoctrinate the Native American youth to further assimilate the Native American population into the western body of culture. These policies were allotment, which broke apart the tribal land of the Native American people, and boarding schools, which attempted to teach the Native American youth about western culture and ways.
Immigration is a movement about settlement of people into another country to which they are not natives. As of the current time, the United States has made itself a new home for immigrants in search of a better life, religious freedom and opportunities. It embraces those who come to the USA often with nothing more than their work ethic in search of the promises and opportunities of the American Dream. Over the last decade, the Indian immigration population had been skyrocketing and approximately 3.6 million in the USA. Asian Indians are the second largest community in the USA after Chinese Americans. Asian Indians started to form their own communities and expanded their religions which make them distinguish among the others immigrants. Asian Indians immigrants come to the USA because they want a better life and better education, but not for the religious freedom. Asian Indians immigrated to the USA for business purposes in the 19th century; they were allowed to stay here as a result of changes in immigration laws. With increase in Indian immigrants, Hinduism and Sikhism were expanded in the USA even after an increase in discrimination after 9/11. Asian Indians have found immigration to the America desirable for a long time, but after 1965, new immigration laws made the process easier, resulting in a more diverse religious presence.
Multiculturalism vs Assimilation America is a place where many cultures and races co-exist, so there are many different opinions and beliefs. Of course there is bound to be tension and misunderstandings, which unfortunately escalates (in some cases) into violence that we hear about in the media. So what is the solution? Should we all assimilate to one standard or should we recognize our individual cultures and consider ourselves multicultural? The answer is not an easy one to define.
Several years ago, America was taught to be a 'melting pot,' a place where immigrants of different cultures or races form an integrated society, but now America is more of a 'salad bowl' where instead of forming an incorporated entity the people who make up the bowl are unwilling to unite as one. America started as an immigrant nation and has continued to be so. People all over the world come to America for several reasons. Most people come to America voluntarily, but very few come unwillingly. For whatever reasons they may have for coming they all have to face exposure to American society. When exposed to this 'new' society they choose whether to assimilate or not. Assimilation in any society is complex. Since assimilation is not simple, people will have negative experiences when assimilating into American society.
At some point in our lives we experience a culture as an outsider by moving from one culture to another.In the world today there are so many different cultures and not one of them is found to be the same.Instead they all have something that makes them unique, whether its language or even the clothes they wear and their behavior as well.The differences they have is what separates them from one another and who ever joins that particular culture must get accustomed to their way of life.In the society today we have many people immigrating to the United States to start a new and better life but what they soon begin to realize is that it’s a whole new world out there and in order to survive they have to get accustomed to the new way of life which is much different from their lives before.