EVENT
A couple of weeks ago when my parents came in for a visit we went to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which literally every tourist’s guide to New York we own (Jess and I have probably three or four of them) assured us was all that. The tour (which focused on two textile working families from the late 1800s and the early 1900s) itself was certainly very interesting, although the hurried pace at which we moved from one room to the next compromised our ability to really soak in what we were doing.
After the tour, however, the museum encouraged us to participate in a “kitchen conversation.” The focus of this conversation was reconciling the obstacles faced by the immigrants featured in the museum with those faced by immigrants today. As my parents observed, the moderated questions didn’t really suggest an opening up and sharing of experiences, but more a stating of political views. On the other hand, there was nothing didactic about the setup of the conversation.
As it turned out, this whole approach caused problems. The whole group was pretty much split down the middle with my parents, Jessica, myself, and another couple taking one position, and five older visitors from the Bronx taking another position.
The “Coyne Group” position, allowing for shades of difference, emphasized the difficulty of immigration as opposed to a settled life with a citizen’s status both in the past and today.
The “Bronx Group” position stressed first the difference between the legal immigration of the tenement museum families as opposed to contentious illegal immigration today and second the general inprovements in standard-of-living in general.
As might be expected, with such an open-ended format in which we were directed to make generalized statements, the dialogue hit an impasse early on, with a following half-hour argument.
I don’t think that the conversation need have been didactic. As my father mentioned afterward, by sharing personal experiences instead of opinions right off the bat we could have found points of connection and communication regardless of differences in opinion. I would extend that to say that even if political opinion became engaged later on, the conversation would be less likely to hit an impasse since we would have a better grasp on each-other’s perspectives, and would be able to better qualify our own words in order to get our thoughts across.
In other words, communication is good. Political debate depends upon the sharing of ideas, and if you cannot communicate, there can be no sharing. More, if you cannot understand another point-of-view and address or reconcile it with or in your own, then your own ideas may not be as rigorously developed as you would hope.
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It shouldn’t surprise anybody that Genesee County, Michigan in the eighties and nineties was far more influenced by intranational migration than immigration. While the city of Flint has a Hispanic population of several thousand dominated by recently arrived Mexican Americans, and Flint and Grand Blanc Townships are the source of arrivals from India and the Middle-East, objectively these numbers are unremarkable even within Michigan.
While both Chicago and the University of Chicago have much larger international footprints, and while I had several friends with foreign (mainly Chinese and French) citizenship, their situations were stable and their nationality was rarely a legal or even social issue. In Canaryville I did hear a lot of talk about illegal immigrants from Ireland trying to legally reuinite with their families. And the issue of legal and illegal immegration was particularly tender in Humboldt Park, a large Puerto Rican neighborhood with an influx of both Mexican Americans and Caucasians in the last decade. I lived there for a year.
Finally, I should add, that while my family is a medley of Western European thisandthat, quite possibly with various skeletons in the closet, nobody has made the crossing more recently than a hundred years ago. There’s no discernable issue or drama there.
My personal experience with immigration issues of any kind doesn’t amount to much.
I probably should have made this a question of the day.
What are your experiences with immigration?
END OF POST.