American Civilization For Core and Business DegreesEnglish Department , ISEAH Kef

Prepared by Ms. Imen Hbibi

Course ObjectivesBy the end of this unit students will

Know the historical context that paved the way for the birth of the American nation.

Know the different waves of immigration the country has witnessed and how they have shaped the nation’s culture.

Understand the polemical debate around immigration and ethnic groups in the US.

Have an understanding of the different types of media. Understand the power of media in shaping attitudes and transmitting

propaganda.

Chapitre I: Invading the New World Section One: Settlement and ImmigrationSection Two: Encounters between Europeans and Native AmericansSection Three: Waves of Immigration Section Four: Attitudes to Immigrants: The Contemporary DebateMovie Projection (The New World) Topics of discussion: The European Settlement of America, Relationship between Indians and Europeans

Chapitre II: Minorities and Racism in American SocietySection One: Native AmericansSection Two: African AmericansSection Three: Racism and Positive Discrimination in American SocietyMovie Projection (Crash) Topics of discussion: minorities, racism, multicultural American society, representation of minority groups in film

Chapitre III: Media

Section One: Freedom of the MediaSection Two: Contemporary Print and Broadcasting Media Section Three: Attitudes to the MediaMovie Projection: (Wag the Dog) Topics of discussion: media manipulation, fabricating reality, power of the media

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American civilization courseSection1 settlement and immigration

Lesson 1: Early Settlements1/ First Arrivals

- Spanish: Columbus's first settlement in the New World 1493- French: Jacques Cartier 1534- English: The first months of Jamestown colony, 1607- English: The first year of the Plymouth Colony, 1620-21

Named for the Spanish queen who funded his expeditions to the New World, this was among the first European settlements - Viking contact predate's it - in the Americas. La Isabela was established on the northern coast of Hispanola in 1494 by Christopher Columbus and 1500 colonists. By 1498, it was abandoned. Settling in the Americas proved much harder than imagined. The rough weather, crop failures, and hurricanes on the coast drove the settlers away from La Isabela in just four years, moving instead to Santo Domingo.

In 1534, the Frenchman Jacques Cartier set sail with the hope of finding a sea passage to Asia. Cartier's expeditions along the St. Lawrence River laid the foundations for the French claims to North America, which were to last until 1763

English colonies

The English established their first permanent settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Their monarch had no desire to rule distant colonies, so instead the Crown legalized companies that undertook the colonization of America as private commercial enterprises. Virginia's early residents were so preoccupied with a vain search for gold and a sea passage to Asian markets that the colony floundered until tobacco provided a profitable export. Because of the scarcity of plantation labor, in 1619 the first African laborers were imported as indentured servants (free people who contracted for 5 to 7 years of servitude). Supported by tobacco profits, however, Virginia imported 1,500 free laborers a year by the 1680s and had a population of 75,000 white Americans and 10,000 Africans in hereditary slavery by 1700.

In the 1630s, Lord Baltimore established Maryland as a haven for Catholics, England's most persecuted minority. Maryland's leadership remained Catholic for some time, but its economy and population soon resembled Virginia's. In the 1660s, other English aristocrats financed Georgia and the Carolinas as commercial investments and experiments in social organization. Within a generation, these colonies too resembled Virginia, but their cash crops were rice and indigo. The southern settlers warred with the natives within a few years of their arrival and by the 1830s drove the Native Americans from today's South.

To escape religious oppression in England, the Pilgrims, a small group of radical separatists from the Church of England, founded the first of the northern colonies in 1620 at Plymouth, Massachusetts. The Puritans, who established the much

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larger Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630, wanted to purify the Church of England, not separate from it. Mostly well-educated middle-class people, in America they believed they could create a ‘city on a hill’ to show how English society could be reformed. To that end, over 20,000 emigrated in around ten years. By the latter 1600s, the bay colony had expanded to the coast of present day Maine, swallowed up Plymouth, and spawned the colony of Connecticut. Flourishing through agriculture and forestry, the New England colonies also became the shippers and merchants for all British America. Because of their intolerance towards dissenters, the Puritans’ New England became the most homogeneous region in the colonies. (TD Puritans and witch hunt

The founding of the middle colonies (New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania) was different. The earliest European communities here were Dutch and Swedish outposts of the fur trade that almost accidentally grew into colonies. New Netherlands, along the Hudson River and New York Bay, and New Sweden, along the Delaware River, recruited soldiers, farmers, craftsmen, clergymen and their families to meet the needs of the fur traders who bought pelts from the natives. New Sweden lasted only from 1638 to 1655, when the Dutch annexed it. New Netherlands itself fell to the English fleet in 1664. The Dutch maintained their culture in rural New York and New Jersey for over 200 years. They also set the precedent of toleration for many ethnic, racial and religious groups in New Amsterdam. Before it became New York, the city had white, red, brown and black inhabitants; institutions for Catholics, Jews and Protestants; and a diversity that resulted in eighteen different languages being spoken. Although the dominant culture in colonial New York and New Jersey became English by the end of the 1600s, the English authorities continued the tolerant traditions of the Dutch in the city. (picture of New York in 17th C)

Pennsylvania's founders were Quakers who flocked to the colony after Charles II granted the area to William Penn in 1681 as a religious refuge. As with the Pilgrims and Puritans, official English tolerance took the form of allowing persecuted minorities to emigrate. Penn's publicizing of cheap land and religious freedom brought some 12,000 people to the colony before 1690. His toleration attracted a population whose diversity was matched only by New York's.

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American Civ TD

Jamestown Colony

In 1606, King James I granted a charter to a new venture, the Virginia Company, to form a settlement in North America. At the time, Virginia was the English name for the entire eastern coast of North America north of Florida; they had named it for Elizabeth I, the “virgin queen.” The Virginia Company planned to search for gold and silver deposits in the New World, as well as a river route to the Pacific Ocean that would allow them to establish trade with the Orient.

Roughly 100 colonists left England in late December 1606 on three ships (the Susan Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery) and reached Chesapeake Bay late the next April. After forming a governing council—including Christopher Newport, commander of the sea voyage, and John Smith, a former mercenary who had been accused of insubordination aboard ship by several other company members—the group searched for a suitable settlement site. On May 14, 1607, they landed on a narrow peninsula–virtually an island–in the James River, where they would begin their lives in the New World.

SURVIVING THE FIRST YEARS

Known variously as James Forte, James Towne and James Cittie, the new settlement

initially consisted of a wooden fort built in a triangle around a storehouse for weapons

and other supplies, a church and a number of houses. By the summer of 1607,

Newport went back to England with two ships and 40 crewmembers to give a report

to the king and to gather more supplies and colonists. The settlers left behind suffered

greatly from hunger and illness, as well as the constant threat of attack by members of

local Algonquian tribes, most of which were organized into a kind of empire under

Chief Powhatan.

An understanding reached between Powhatan and John Smith led the settlers to

establish much-needed trade with Powhatan’s tribe by early 1608. Though skirmishes

still broke out between the two groups, the Native Americans traded corn for beads,

metal tools and other objects (including some weapons) from the English, who would

depend on this trade for sustenance in the colony’s early years. After Smith returned

to England in late 1609, the inhabitants of Jamestown suffered through a long, harsh

winter, during which more than 100 of them died. In the spring of 1610, just as the

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remaining colonists were set to abandon Jamestown, two ships arrived bearing at least

150 new settlers, a cache of supplies and the new English governor of the colony,

Lord De La Warr.

GROWTH OF THE COLONY

Though De La Warr soon took ill and went home, his successor Sir Thomas Gates and

Gates’ second-in command, Sir Thomas Dale, took firm charge of the colony and

issued a system of new laws that, among other things, strictly controlled the

interactions between settlers and Algonquians. They took a hard line with Powhatan

and launched raids against Algonquian villages, killing residents and burning houses

and crops. The English began to build other forts and settlements up and down the

James River, and by the fall of 1611 had managed to harvest a decent crop of corn

themselves. They had also learned other valuable techniques from the Algonquians,

including how to insulate their dwellings against the weather using tree bark, and

expanded Jamestown into a New Town to the east of the original fort.

A period of relative peace followed the marriage in April 1614 of the colonist and tobacco planter John Rolfe to Pocahontas, a daughter of Chief Powhatan who had been captured by the settlers and converted to Christianity. (According to John Smith, Pocahontas had rescued him from death in 1607, when she was just a young girl and he was her father’s captive.) Thanks largely to Rolfe’s introduction of a new type of tobacco grown from seeds from the West Indies, Jamestown’s economy began to thrive. In 1619, the colony established a General Assembly with members elected by Virginia’s male landowners; it would become a model for representative governments in later colonies. That same year, the first Africans (around 50 men, women and children) arrived in the English settlement; they had been on a Portuguese slave ship captured in the West Indies and brought to the Jamestown region. They worked as indentured servants at first (the race-based slavery system developed in North America in the 1680s) and were most likely put to work picking tobacco.

LATER YEARS

Pocahontas’ death during a trip to England in 1617 and the death of Powhatan in 1618

strained the already fragile peace between the English settlers and the Native

Americans. Under Powhatan’s successor, Opechankeno, the Algonquians became

more and more angry about the colonists’ insatiable need for land and the pace of

English settlement; meanwhile, diseases brought from the Old World decimated the

Native American population. In March 1622, the Powhatan made a major assault on

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English settlements in Virginia, killing some 350 to 400 residents (a full one-quarter

of the population). The attack hit the outposts of Jamestown the hardest, while the

town itself received advance warning and was able to mount a defense.

In an effort to take greater control of the situation, King James I dissolved the

Virginia Company and made Virginia into an official crown colony, with Jamestown

as its capital, in 1624. The New Town area of Jamestown continued to grow, and the

original fort seems to have disappeared after the 1620s. Though the Powhatan people

continued to mount a resistance (Opechankeno, by then in his 80s, led another great

rebellion in 1644), the colony continued to grow stronger, and his successor

Necotowance was forced to sign a peace treaty that ceded most of the Powhatans’

land and forced them to pay an annual tribute to the colonial governor. In 1698, the

central statehouse in Jamestown burned down, and Williamsburg replaced it as the

colonial capital the following year.

History.com / topics. Jamestown

Answer the following questions in separate paragraphs

1) Why was settling in the new world a difficult mission for the English?2) How would you describe the relationship between the Indians and the

English? Why do you think it was such?

TD

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Invading the New World

In the early 1600s, in rapid succession, the English began a colony (Jamestown) in Chesapeake Bay in 1607, the French built Quebec in 1608, and the Dutch began their interest in the region that became present-day New York. Within another generation, the Plymouth Company (1620), the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629), the Company of New France (1627), and the Dutch West India Company (1621) began to send thousands of colonists, including families, to North America. Successful colonization was not inevitable. Rather, interest in North America was a halting, yet global, contest among European powers to exploit these lands.

There is another very important point to keep in mind:  European colonization and settlement of North America (and other areas of the so-called "new world") was an invasion of territory controlled and settled for centuries by Native Americans. To be sure, Indian control and settlement of that land looked different to European, as compared to Indian, eyes. Nonetheless, Indian groups perceived the Europeans' arrival as an encroachment and they pursued any number of avenues to deal with that invasion. That the Indians were unsuccessful in the long run in resisting or in establishing a more favorable accommodation with the Europeans was as much the result of the impact on Indians of European diseases as superior force of arms. Moreover, to view the situation from Indian perspectives ("facing east from Indian country," in historian Daniel K. Richter's wonderful phrase) is essential in understanding the complex interaction of these very different peoples.

Finally, it is also important to keep in mind that yet a third group of people--in this case. Africans--played an active role in the European invasion (or colonization) of the western hemisphere. From the very beginning, Europeans' attempts to establish colonies in the western hemisphere foundered on the lack of laborers to do the hard work of colony-building. The Spanish, for example, enslaved the Indians in regions under their control. The English struck upon the idea of indentured servitude to solve the labor problem in Virginia. Virtually all the European powers eventually turned to African slavery to provide labor on their islands in the West Indies. Slavery was eventually transferred to other colonies in both South and North America.

Because of the interactions of these very diverse peoples, the process of European colonization of the western hemisphere was a complex one, indeed. Individual members of each group confronted situations that were most often not of their own making or choosing. These individuals responded with the means available to them. For most, these means were not sufficient to prevail. Yet these people were not simply victims; they were active agents trying to shape their own destinies. That many of them failed should not detract from their efforts.

Read the Text above and answer the following questions in the shape of a paragraph:

1) "They all came to the new world seeking a dream" There are different reasons that made colonists settle in the New World. Name at least two reasons.

2) There are two factors that were indispensable in the successful colonization of the New World. What are these factors and how did they help in the growth of the colonies.

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Pocahontas saves John Smith

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Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, the leader of an alliance of about 30 Algonquian-speaking groups and petty chiefdoms in Tidewater Virginia known as Tsenacommacah. Her mother’s identity is unknown.

Historians have estimated Pocahontas’ birth year as around 1595, based on the 1608 account of Captain John Smith in A True Relation of Virginia and Smith’s subsequent letters. Even Smith is inconsistent on the question of her age, however. Although English narratives would remember Pocahontas as a princess, her childhood was probably fairly typical for a girl in Tsenacommacah. Pocahontas was a favorite of her father's -- his "delight and darling,” according to the colonist Captain Ralph Hamor -- but she was not a princess in the sense of inheriting a political station.

Saving John Smith

Pocahontas was primarily linked to the English colonists through Captain John Smith, who arrived in Virginia with more than 100 other settlers in April 1607. The Englishmen had numerous encounters over the next several months with the Tsenacommacah Indians. While exploring on the Chickahominy River in December of that year, Smith was captured by a hunting party led by Powhatan's close relative Opechancanough, and brought to Powhatan's home at Werowocomoco.

Smith’s 1616 account describes the dramatic act of selflessness which would become legendary: "... at the minute of my execution", he wrote, "she [Pocahontas] hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine; and not only that, but so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to Jamestown." Smith further embellished this story in his Generall Historie, written years later.

Waves of Immigration

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I. The Founders

The people who established the colonies are considered founders rather than immigrants because they created the customs, laws and institutions to which later arrivals (the first immigrants) had to adjust.

II. The first wave of immigration 1680- 1776The founders had come for economic gain and religious freedom, but their descendants gave the first large wave of European newcomers a warm welcome only if they were willing to conform to Anglo-American culture and supply needed labor. The reception that immigrants received varied according to location and the individual's qualities, from the extremes of largely hostile New England, to the more tolerant, diverse middle colonies.

The largest group of immigrants (voluntary newcomers) were the Scots-Irish. Roughly a quarter of a million of them left Northern Ireland for the American colonies after 1680 because of economic discrimination by the English. Most paid their passage across the Atlantic by becoming indentured servants. When their term of service was finished, they usually took their ‘freedom dues’ (a small sum of money and tools) and settled on the frontier where land was cheapest. Immigration from Ireland included thousands of single, male, Irish Catholic indentured servants, who assimilated even more rapidly than the Scots-Irish, because of religious discrimination and the difficulty of finding Catholic wives. The Scots, perhaps because of their hatred of English attempts to suppress their culture at home, followed a conservative pattern, using compact settlement, religion, schooling and family networks to preserve their culture for generations in rural areas. English colonists severely limited their civil rights and sometimes attacked their churches or synagogues, but accepted marriage with them as long as they changed their religion. As a result, their communities nearly vanished

The period's 200,000 German immigrants aroused more opposition than the Scots-Irish. The largest non-English speaking group in the colonies, they believed their descendants had to learn German if their religion and culture were to survive in North America. For mutual support, they concentrated their settlements. Developing German-speaking towns, they kept to themselves and showed little interest in colonial politics. For some immigrants, the last straw was the Germans’ prosperity. Renowned for their hard work, caution, farming methods and concern for their property, they were too successful, according to their envious neighbors. Benjamin Franklin expressed what many feared when he said they might ‘Germanize us instead of us Anglicizing them’.

Other smaller groups in the first wave showed the contrasting ways in which immigrants could adjust to new and varied conditions. England sent some 50,000 convicts and perhaps 30,000 poor people as indentured servants to ease problems at home while supplying the labor-starved colonial economy, and these people formed an underclass that quickly Americanized.

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This first wave of immigration transformed the demography of the colonies. By 1776 English dominance had decreased from four-fifths to a bare majority (52 percent) of the population. African-American slaves composed 20 percent of this population and were a majority in large parts of the southern colonies. Most Native-American cultures had been forced inland to or beyond the Appalachians. Non-English peoples were a majority in the coastal towns, Pennsylvania, the south and parts of all the other colonies. The cultural, political and economic dominance of Anglo-Americans was clear, but the first wave had played a major role in bequeathing America a tradition of pioneers on the frontier, a new vision of itself as diverse, possessed of religious tolerance, and with a federal system of government that reserved most power to the new nation's quite dissimilar thirteen states.

The Second Wave: the 'old' immigrants 1820- 1890

Between 1776 and the late 1820s, immigration slowed to a trickle. The struggle for independence and the founding of the nation Americanized the colonies’ diverse peoples. The dominant Anglo-American culture and time weakened the old ethnic communities; most ethnic groups assimilated. A range of factors pushed Europeans from their homelands: religious persecution drove many German Jews to emigrate, and political unrest forced out some European intellectuals and political activists, but economic push factors were decisive for most of the so-called ‘old’ north-western immigrants.

Europe's population doubled between 1750 and 1850. In Ireland and parts of Germany rural people depended on the potato, which yielded more food per acre than grain. The rapid growth of cities encouraged farmers to switch to large-scale production based on farm machinery, the elimination of smallholdings and enclosure of common lands. With these changes, such a large population could not make a living in the countryside.

Following changes in the Atlantic labor market, people moved to where the jobs were. Steamships and trains made migration abroad safer, faster and cheaper, and ‘America letters’ from family and friends in the USA gave a remarkably accurate picture of changing economic conditions there. Of the 60 million people who left their homelands between 1820 and 1930, two-thirds settled in the USA. During the ‘old’ immigration, 15.5 million people made America their home. The factor that pulled most people to the USA was an apparently unlimited supply of land. Few seriously considered the claims of Native Americans.

Another pull factor was work. The USA needed both skilled and unskilled labor. American railroad companies as well as state and territorial governments sent immigration agents to Europe to recruit people with promises of cheap fertile farms or jobs with wages much higher than they could earn at home. News of boom times in the USA, land giveaways such as the Homestead Act of 1862 and the discovery of gold in California brought peaks in the rising immigration.

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The Third Wave: the "new" immigrants, 1890- 1930

Around 1890 immigration from north-western Europe declined sharply (but did not stop), while arrivals from southern and eastern Europe rose. By 1907, four out of five newcomers were ‘new’ immigrants. Between 1890 and 1914, the volume of immigration also soared, topping a million annually and equaling the 15.5 million of the old immigration in just twenty-four years. In numerical order, the largest ‘new’ groups were Italians, Jews, Poles and Hungarians, but many Mexicans, Russians, Czechs, Greeks, Portuguese, Syrians, Japanese, Filipinos and others also immigrated.

To most Americans, the change mostly involved the feeling that the typical immigrant had become much less like them. The religions, languages, manners and costumes of the Slavic peoples seemed exotic or incomprehensible. But this wave of people was in several ways similar to its predecessors. The basic economic push and pull factors had not changed. The new immigrants had the same dream of bettering their own and their children's future. Like the Puritans, eastern European Jews emigrated because of religious persecution, chiefly the bloody Russian pogroms.

By the late 1800s falling train and steam-ship ticket prices (often prepaid by relatives in America) made immigration affordable even for the very poor and the young. Cheap travel also permitted people to see immigration as a short-term strategy, and many new immigrants were sojourners, ‘birds of passage’, who stayed only long enough to save money to buy land or a small business in the old country. In general, the new immigrants were younger, more often unmarried, and more likely to travel as individuals rather than in family groups.

The opportunities in America had changed too. The closing of the frontier around 1890 signaled the end of the era of government land-giveaways. Less than a quarter of the newcomers found employment in agriculture. The Japanese in California are the best example of those who succeeded by buying unwanted land and making it productive. Four-fifths of immigrants went where the jobs were: to the industries in the big cities of the north-east and mid-west. America had an enormous need for factory workers, but, due to mechanization, most jobs were unskilled and poorly paid.

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Fourth Wave of Immigration

From 1965 to the present

The 1965 law ushered in the fourth major wave of immigration, which rose to

a peak in the late 1990s and produced the highest immigration totals in American

history. In addition to the many immigrants allowed by the hemispheric limits

(changed to a global total of 320,000 in 1980), the wave has included hundreds of

thousands of immediate relatives and refugees outside those limits. It has also

contained millions of illegal aliens, who cross borders without (or with false) papers

or arrive at airports on student or tourist visas and then overstay. Between 1960 and

2007 nearly 39 million people settled legally in America. The list of the ten largest

nationality groups among these is shown in (Table 1) for 1960 and 2007 below.

TABLE 3.1 The effects of the fourth wave on the ten largest immigrant groups, 1960 contrasted with 2007. (* = percent of the total foreign-born in the USA)1960 %* 2007 %Italians

Germans

Canadians

British

Poles

USSR

Mexicans

Irish

Austrians

Hungarians

13%

10%

9%

8%

7%

6%

3%

3%

3%

3%

Mexicans

Filipinos

Chinese

Indians

Vietnamese

Salvadoreans

Koreans

Cubans

Dominicans

Canadians

31%

4.4 %

4.3%

4.1%

3.0%

2.8%

2.7%

2.5%

2.3%

2.3%

The table shows only one Latino and no Asian immigrant groups but many

European nationalities in 1960. The prominence of Mexicans around half-way down

the list, however, foreshadowed future trends. At the peak of the fourth wave in the

1990s, some 11 million more newcomers arrived. The second list of groups, from

2007, well after the peak brought by the 1965 Act, reveals the law's unexpected

benefits for the Third World immigrants of the fourth wave. In 2007 no Europeans

groups were in the ten largest. Three quarters of the legally resident foreign-born

(over 38 million people) were Latino (51 percent) or Asian (25 percent). Remarkably,

another 42 percent of the immigrant population in 2007 consisted of people whose

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nations contributed fewer than the ten nationalities listed in the chart. In other words,

although this wave is predominantly Latino and Asian, it is also the most diverse

wave the USA has seen. Another striking feature of the table is the Mexicans’ rise in

prominence from a mere 6 percent in 1960 to a presence approaching a third of the

entire group in the present wave of immigrants.

Push and Pull factors:

Like the earlier waves of newcomers, the fourth includes a broad range of socio-economic groups. One result of saving visas for needed occupations is that a very noticeable minority are highly skilled workers, professionals (especially engineers, doctors and nurses) and entrepreneurs with capital. The large majority of both legal and illegal immigrants are unskilled workers. They have come because commercialization and industrialization disrupted their traditional economies.At the socio-economic bottom of this wave are often recently arrived groups of refugees from wars and other disasters. In the 1960s and early 1970s huge groups of people fled south-east Asia to the USA as a result of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. The poorest also include people who obtain visas because they are near-relatives of recent, more skilled immigrants or who take jobs Americans do not want. Among the latter are Latino women recruited by agencies as live-in domestic servants and nannies. Spreading the word about these jobs and moving into better-paid work once they have acquired more English, they bring their families and forge the links in ‘chain migration’.

The nationalities and skin colors of most people in this wave are different and more various, however, and they arrive in different ways and settle in different places. There are colonies of Hmong in Minneapolis, Vietnamese on the Mississippi Delta, east Indian hotel-owners across the Sunbelt, Middle- Eastern Muslims in Detroit and New Jersey and large concentrations of Latinos not only in the south-west and the nation's big cities, where their communities are large and long-established, but also across the rural districts and small towns of the south and mid-west. These large foreign-born settlements have given rise to contemporary forms of racism and nativism. Groping for ways to adjust to the changes in their country's population, some Americans are again resorting to broad stereotypes.

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Attitudes to Immigrants: The Contemporary Debate

In 1982, when the Gallup Organization asked Americans whether specific ethnic groups had been good or bad for the USA, on the whole, the longer the group had been in the country, the more favorable was the public response. Thus, by then large majorities thought Irish Catholics and Jews, who earlier suffered from widespread discrimination, had been good influences on the country. Racial attitudes, however, appeared to be decisive in creating long-term low opinions of non-white ethnic groups. Fewer than half of the Americans questioned in 1982 thought Japanese, Chinese and African Americans had favorably affected the country, and only one in five or fewer approved of having recent non-white groups, such as Puerto Ricans, Vietnamese and Haitians in the USA.Large numbers of Asian immigrants in the fourth wave arrive with more capital and a higher level of education than most Latinos. Those facts and popular attitudes towards some Asian cultures’ emphasis on respect for parents, education and hard work have led some media commentators to lump all Asian Americans together under the label of the ‘model minority’. This ignores the large majority of Asian immigrants who come with little money and education; the problems of Asian refugees who have experienced wartime traumas; and job discrimination and violence against Asian Americans.

For its own convenience, the federal government invented the word ‘Hispanics’ to put in a single category all the Central- and South American Spanish-speaking cultures arriving in the USA in the fourth wave. The word became identified with illegal immigrants in the popular mind because of the large number of immigrants unlawfully crossing the border with Mexico. It thus contributed to prejudice against hugely diverse Latino populations. About two-thirds of ‘illegals’ are Mexicans, but the ‘undocumented’ come from countries as diverse as China, Nigeria and Iran.

Illegal immigration causes heated debate over government policy to control entry to the USA. One segment of public opinion stresses that tolerating illegal immigration encourages a general disregard for the law, lowers wages for other workers, and undermines the 1965 law that gives all nationalities an equal chance for immigrant visas. Other Americans emphasize that illegal immigrants take jobs that US citizens do not want, are paid less than the legal minimum wage, work in substandard conditions and, while needing the benefits of social welfare programs, dare not reveal the facts of their situation for fear of being deported.

Legislations and Immigration Acts

The federal government responded to this ongoing debate in 1986 by passing the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). The law attempted to minimize illegal immigration while expressing acceptance and giving rights to people already inside the USA. It sets fines and penalties for employers who hire illegal aliens and also attempts to prevent employment discrimination through rules that outlaw firing or

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refusing to hire people because they look foreign. The law offered ‘amnesty’ (legal immigrant status) for illegals who had stayed in the USA for four years and for many temporarily resident farm workers. Almost 3 million people became legal immigrants through IRCA. Their improved situation was the one great success of the legislation.

In spite of rising reactions against immigration in the 1980s, national policy became more liberal through the Immigration Act of 1990. It raised the annual total of immigrant visas, the limit for individual nations and the number of asylum seekers who could remain in the USA. It also removed restrictions on the entry of many groups, including homosexuals, communists, people from nations adversely affected by the 1965 law, and additional family members, including the spouses and children of illegals given amnesty. During the economic boom of the 1990s, the shortage of unskilled labor made most Americans willing to overlook the problem of illegal immigration.The Growing Need for Immigration Reform Today

Sharp differences, nonetheless, continued to mark American public opinion about immigration after 2001. Most of the country's economic, political and cultural elites accepted high levels of legal and illegal immigration. The general public, on the other hand, increasingly linked immigration to concerns about job competition, national security, population growth, environmental problems and cultural differences. Majorities of those polled therefore favored more effectively restricting entrance to the country. A dramatic example of this chasm in attitudes about immigration occurred in 2004. Having implemented a variety of national security measures in response to the 9/11 attacks, including more high-tech surveillance and patrols of the border with Mexico, President Bush announced his support for a revised guest-worker amnesty plan, similar to the one proposed by Mexico three years earlier. The publicrejected the idea by large margins in a series of polls, and it quietly disappeared from the presidential agenda.Members of Congress, however, continued to respond to mounting public pressure in the seven states most affected and from some groups demanding immigration reform and restriction. From February through May, 2006 Latino groups mobilized hundreds of thousands of legal and illegal immigrants to march in major cities in protest against a bill passed by the House of Representatives that would make illegal entry a federal felony (serious crime) for both those who entered illegally and anyone who helped them. Leaders of the protest movement rallied perhaps half a million marchers against the bill in 102 cities in early April and, calling their next major action ‘a day without immigrants’, urged the undocumented and legal immigrants to demonstrate how dependent the economy was on them by boycotting their jobs on May 1. An estimated 450,000 immigrants filled the streets in dozens of cities.

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Illegal immigrants have 'earned the right to be U.S. citizens', says Homeland Security SecretaryIllegal immigrants must be able to become citizens in order to keep America safe, the man charged with protecting the country has declared.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that around 11 million people who are in the country illegally have 'earned the right to be citizens'.

Mr Johnson said: 'An earned path to citizenship for those currently present in this country is a matter of, in my view, homeland security to encourage people to come out from the shadows.

'It is also, frankly, in my judgment, a matter of who we are as Americans.

He used his speech to more than 270 mayors at the United States Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C. to call for 'comprehensive, common sense, immigration reform'.

Mr Johnson added: 'To offer the opportunity to those who want to be citizens, who’ve earned the right to be citizens, who are present in this country - many of whom came here as children - to have the opportunity that we all have to try to become American citizens.'

'Comprehensive immigration reform would also promote a more effective and efficient system for enforcing our immigration laws, and should include an earned path to citizenship for the approximately 11-and-a-half-million undocumented immigrants present in this country, something like 86% of whom have been here almost 10 years.'

Mr Johnson's intervention came as House Republican's prepared to reveal their plans for a shake-up of the immigration system.

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Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and other Republican leaders will also call for illegal immigrants to be given the oportunity to gain legal status - but stop short of calling for them to be able to become citizens.

They are expected to demand tougher border security during their annual retreat in Cambridge, Maryland later this week.

This apparent softening of the Republican stance would see the party attempting to reach a consensus with the Obama administration.

In June, last year, the Senate passed a measure reforming immigration which included a 13-year path to citizenship.

Mr Johnson, who took up the role of Department of Homeland Security chief in December, also reiterated the need for effective border policing, adding: 'Border security is inseparable from homeland security.'

'The five core missions of the Department of Homeland Security are guarding against terrorism, securing our borders, enforcing our nation’s immigration laws, safeguarding cyberspace and critical infrastructure in partnership with the private sector, and supporting emergency preparedness and response efforts at every level,' Johnson said.

'Common sense immigration reform is supported by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, businesses, and if the polls (are) to be believed, the majority of the American people,' Johnson said.

'And border security must and should be part of comprehensive immigration reform – protecting our borders, securing our ports, promoting the lawful flow of trade and travel through our ports to cities and other communities,' he said.

Johnson touted the alleged improvement in border security over the last four years and said comprehensive immigration reform also would increase that security.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2546580/Illegal-immigrants-earned-right-U-S-citizens-says-Homeland-Security-Secretary.html#ixzz2tZuiljZF Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

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Imen Hbibi

Civilisation Course

Module 1: DM

Part One: Explain two of the following terms in a paragraph (10 points)

Old Immigrants

Middle colonies

Melting pot

IRCA

Push and Pull Factors

Part Two: Write a short essay on one of the following topics (10 points)

1) Describe one of the four major waves of immigration to the United States, explain the factors that paved the way for it and discuss the kind of reception the newcomes received.

2) Explain why the encounters between Native Americans (Indians) and the Eurpean settlers were so disastrous?

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Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on ImmigrationCROSS HALL 8:01 P.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: My fellow Americans, tonight, I’d like to talk with you about immigration.

For more than 200 years, our tradition of welcoming immigrants from around the world has given us a tremendous advantage over other nations. It’s kept us youthful, dynamic, and entrepreneurial. It has shaped our character as a people with limitless possibilities — people not trapped by our past, but able to remake ourselves as we choose.

But today, our immigration system is broken — and everybody knows it.

Families who enter our country the right way and play by the rules watch others flout the rules. Business owners who offer their workers good wages and benefits see the competition exploit undocumented immigrants by paying them far less. All of us take offense to anyone who reaps the rewards of living in America without taking on the responsibilities of living in America. And undocumented immigrants who desperately want to embrace those responsibilities see little option but to remain in the shadows, or risk their families being torn apart.

It’s been this way for decades. And for decades, we haven’t done much about it.

When I took office, I committed to fixing this broken immigration system. And I began by doing what I could to secure our borders. Today, we have more agents and technology deployed to secure our southern border than at any time in our history. And over the past six years, illegal border crossings have been cut by more than half. Although this summer, there was a brief spike in unaccompanied children being apprehended at our border, the number of such children is now actually lower than it’s been in nearly two years. Overall, the number of people trying to cross our border illegally is at its lowest level since the 1970s. Those are the facts.

Meanwhile, I worked with Congress on a comprehensive fix, and last year, 68 Democrats, Republicans, and independents came together to pass a bipartisan bill in the Senate. It wasn’t perfect. It was a compromise. But it reflected common sense. It would have doubled the number of border patrol agents while giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship if they paid a fine, started paying their taxes, and went to the back of the line. And independent experts said that it would help grow our economy and shrink our deficits.

Had the House of Representatives allowed that kind of bill a simple yes-or-no vote, it would have passed with support from both parties, and today it would be the law. But for a year and a half now, Republican leaders in the House have refused to allow that simple vote.

Now, I continue to believe that the best way to solve this problem is by working together to pass that kind of common sense law. But until that happens, there are actions I have the legal authority to take as President — the same kinds of actions taken by Democratic and Republican presidents before me -– that will help make our immigration system more fair and more just.

Tonight, I am announcing those actions.

First, we’ll build on our progress at the border with additional resources for our law enforcement personnel so that they can stem the flow of illegal crossings, and speed the return of those who do cross over.

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Second, I’ll make it easier and faster for high-skilled immigrants, graduates, and entrepreneurs to stay and contribute to our economy, as so many business leaders have proposed.

Third, we’ll take steps to deal responsibly with the millions of undocumented immigrants who already live in our country.

I want to say more about this third issue, because it generates the most passion and controversy. Even as we are a nation of immigrants, we’re also a nation of laws. Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws, and I believe that they must be held accountable -– especially those who may be dangerous. That’s why, over the past six years, deportations of criminals are up 80 percent. And that’s why we’re going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security. Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids. We’ll prioritize, just like law enforcement does every day.

But even as we focus on deporting criminals, the fact is, millions of immigrants in every state, of every race and nationality still live here illegally. And let’s be honest -– tracking down, rounding up, and deporting millions of people isn’t realistic. Anyone who suggests otherwise isn’t being straight with you. It’s also not who we are as Americans. After all, most of these immigrants have been here a long time. They work hard, often in tough, low-paying jobs. They support their families. They worship at our churches. Many of their kids are American-born or spent most of their lives here, and their hopes, dreams, and patriotism are just like ours. As my predecessor, President Bush, once put it: “They are a part of American life.”

Now here’s the thing: We expect people who live in this country to play by the rules. We expect that those who cut the line will not be unfairly rewarded. So we’re going to offer the following deal: If you’ve been in America for more than five years; if you have children who are American citizens or legal residents; if you register, pass a criminal background check, and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes — you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily without fear of deportation. You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law. That’s what this deal is.

Now, let’s be clear about what it isn’t. This deal does not apply to anyone who has come to this country recently. It does not apply to anyone who might come to America illegally in the future. It does not grant citizenship, or the right to stay here permanently, or offer the same benefits that citizens receive -– only Congress can do that. All we’re saying is we’re not going to deport you.

I know some of the critics of this action call it amnesty. Well, it’s not. Amnesty is the immigration system we have today -– millions of people who live here without paying their taxes or playing by the rules while politicians use the issue to scare people and whip up votes at election time.

That’s the real amnesty — leaving this broken system the way it is. Mass amnesty would be unfair. Mass deportation would be both impossible and contrary to our character. What I’m describing is accountability — a common-sense, middle-ground approach: If you meet the criteria, you can come out of the shadows and get right with the law. If you’re a criminal, you’ll be deported. If you plan to enter the U.S. illegally, your chances of getting caught and sent back just went up.

The actions I’m taking are not only lawful, they’re the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican President and every single Democratic President for the past half century. And to those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill.

I want to work with both parties to pass a more permanent legislative solution. And the day I sign that bill into law, the actions I take will no longer be necessary. Meanwhile, don’t let a

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disagreement over a single issue be a dealbreaker on every issue. That’s not how our democracy works, and Congress certainly shouldn’t shut down our government again just because we disagree on this. Americans are tired of gridlock. What our country needs from us right now is a common purpose — a higher purpose.

Most Americans support the types of reforms I’ve talked about tonight. But I understand the disagreements held by many of you at home. Millions of us, myself included, go back generations in this country, with ancestors who put in the painstaking work to become citizens. So we don’t like the notion that anyone might get a free pass to American citizenship.

I know some worry immigration will change the very fabric of who we are, or take our jobs, or stick it to middle-class families at a time when they already feel like they’ve gotten the raw deal for over a decade. I hear these concerns. But that’s not what these steps would do. Our history and the facts show that immigrants are a net plus for our economy and our society. And I believe it’s important that all of us have this debate without impugning each other’s character.

Because for all the back and forth of Washington, we have to remember that this debate is about something bigger. It’s about who we are as a country, and who we want to be for future generations.

Are we a nation that tolerates the hypocrisy of a system where workers who pick our fruit and make our beds never have a chance to get right with the law? Or are we a nation that gives them a chance to make amends, take responsibility, and give their kids a better future?

Are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms? Or are we a nation that values families, and works together to keep them together?

Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs here, create businesses here, create industries right here in America?

That’s what this debate is all about. We need more than politics as usual when it comes to immigration. We need reasoned, thoughtful, compassionate debate that focuses on our hopes, not our fears. I know the politics of this issue are tough. But let me tell you why I have come to feel so strongly about it.

Over the past few years, I have seen the determination of immigrant fathers who worked two or three jobs without taking a dime from the government, and at risk any moment of losing it all, just to build a better life for their kids. I’ve seen the heartbreak and anxiety of children whose mothers might be taken away from them just because they didn’t have the right papers. I’ve seen the courage of students who, except for the circumstances of their birth, are as American as Malia or Sasha; students who bravely come out as undocumented in hopes they could make a difference in the country they love.

These people — our neighbors, our classmates, our friends — they did not come here in search of a free ride or an easy life. They came to work, and study, and serve in our military, and above all, contribute to America’s success.

Tomorrow, I’ll travel to Las Vegas and meet with some of these students, including a young woman named Astrid Silva. Astrid was brought to America when she was four years old. Her only possessions were a cross, her doll, and the frilly dress she had on. When she started school, she didn’t speak any English. She caught up to other kids by reading newspapers and watching PBS, and she became a good student. Her father worked in landscaping. Her mom cleaned other people’s homes. They wouldn’t let Astrid apply to a technology magnet school, not because they didn’t love her, but because they were afraid the paperwork would out her as an undocumented immigrant — so she applied behind their

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back and got in. Still, she mostly lived in the shadows — until her grandmother, who visited every year from Mexico, passed away, and she couldn’t travel to the funeral without risk of being found out and deported. It was around that time she decided to begin advocating for herself and others like her, and today, Astrid Silva is a college student working on her third degree.

Are we a nation that kicks out a striving, hopeful immigrant like Astrid, or are we a nation that finds a way to welcome her in? Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger — we were strangers once, too.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal -– that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.

That’s the country our parents and grandparents and generations before them built for us. That’s the tradition we must uphold. That’s the legacy we must leave for those who are yet to come.

Thank you. God bless you. And God bless this country we love.

END

8:16 P.M. EST

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