Looking back at our class on Thursday, I have to say that I found our discussion about the marginalized very interesting. I want to bring up Dayna’s comment about the illegal immigrants in the United States and how they keep the country stable by taking the job positions that Americans do not want.
When thinking about the marginalized, one usually thinks about them as part of a minority that is inferior and restrained from the rest of the majority. What people do not see, however, is that minorities can only be marginalized for so long until their population becomes bigger. As time change, both people and culture change. People become more accepting to new ideas and what once consider different is now considered normal.
An example where we can see this is with the different ethnic populations that has come to the United States and has developed over time. As time passed Asian, Black, and Hispanic people that were once considered “marginalized” slowly grew to become part of the “rest” (of the US population).
That being said, most people would marginalize illegal immigrants, and sometimes even go to the extent of considering them in the same population of Hispanics since most illegal immigrants are Mexican, when in reality illegal immigrants makes up a big part of our population. Since the United States has allowed the flow of illegal immigration for decades, the population gradually grew until to a point where the US is not able to remove them from the country. According to the Los Angeles Times, the United States currently has about eleven million illegal immigrants living in the country.1 An amount that would cause a negative impact to the nation if the country were to get rid of, but of course that is a whole new argument that would take a different blog to talk about.
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Notes:
- This guy in the library has been coughing for a whole hour and a half every 10 seconds, making it so hard for me to concentrate.
- The trip to New York yesterday was awesome, I wish we could've stayed there for the weekend. Hopefully I can go back during December to get the "New York Christmas Experience" that you can't get anywhere else.
- Katie gets mental breakdowns once it's past twelve and starts talking like if she were drunk..."I still can't understand which came first, the egg or the chicken".
1. Los Angeles Times: Illegal immigrant number plunge - http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/11/local/la-me-immig11-2010feb11
In our class, we also discussed the marginalized. Your reflection reminds me of one of the reasons most students in Texas learn Spanish as their secondary language: within a few year, the majority population in Texas will be Hispanics and Spanish will become the most used language in the state. Despite the large population in Texas, Hispanics are still considered a minority group. I just think its interesting the amount of cultural influence a community may have over a state without being considered in the majority...if that makes sense.
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