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I am totally confused by your selection of nationalities that are supposedly non-immigrant. What makes Poles or French or Spanish immigrants that does not make

by lahvak 4y ago

I am totally confused by your selection of nationalities that are supposedly non-immigrant. What makes Poles or French or Spanish immigrants that does not make Germans or Dutch ones, too?

rayiner 4y ago
Everyone is immigrants (except native Americans). But certain groups came here in large numbers, settled the country in large homogenous groups, and shaped the country from the ground-up. Our legal and political structure is entirely Anglo. The culture of large swaths of the country can be traced directly back to different subgroups from different parts of England: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/albions-seed-david-h-fischer/1100542382 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/albions-seed-david-h-fische.... Germans, Dutch, Norwegians, and Swedes settled the midwest, which was a key to the development of American society and government. They were a backbone of the Republican Party during the Civil War. Iowa, full of recent German immigrants at the time, contributed more soldiers per capita to the union than any other state. To this day, midwestern speech patterns are full of German or Norwegian influences. There's 50 million German Americans--more than half as many as in Germany. Italians and Irish had major impacts on the culture and politics of the nation's largest cities. They changed the course of the 20th century by supporting the Democratic Party by large margins from FDR until Reagan, which took the country in a very different direction from the original vision created by the British founders. There's more Irish people in America than in Ireland. Other European immigrant groups had localized impacts, but never shaped the country the way these other groups did.
- lahvak 4y ago
  Thank you for the explanation, I can see your point now. I still think it is overly simplified, ignoring fairly large Spanish influence in the south and southwest and French in the north (all you need to do is look at names of towns and geographical features) and other groups like Moravians in the Midwest and Jews in the east. Also, "German" in the 18th or 19th century is not necessarily the same as German today, for example, lot of Austrians were included, and at that time that would be a fairly geographically large and culturally diverse area. I was mostly objecting to your simplified division of people into those "correct" groups whose country this is and those who are foreigners that don't belong here (I know you did not use these words, but that's how your comments sounded to me). I come from a place that has a long history of sentiments like that, and as far as I can tell, there was never anything good coming out of them.

by lahvak 4y ago

I am totally confused by your selection of nationalities that are supposedly non-immigrant. What makes Poles or French or Spanish immigrants that does not make Germans or Dutch ones, too?

rayiner 4y ago

Everyone is immigrants (except native Americans). But certain groups came here in large numbers, settled the country in large homogenous groups, and shaped the country from the ground-up. Our legal and political structure is entirely Anglo. The culture of large swaths of the country can be traced directly back to different subgroups from different parts of England: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/albions-seed-david-h-fischer/1100542382 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/albions-seed-david-h-fische.... Germans, Dutch, Norwegians, and Swedes settled the midwest, which was a key to the development of American society and government. They were a backbone of the Republican Party during the Civil War. Iowa, full of recent German immigrants at the time, contributed more soldiers per capita to the union than any other state. To this day, midwestern speech patterns are full of German or Norwegian influences. There's 50 million German Americans--more than half as many as in Germany. Italians and Irish had major impacts on the culture and politics of the nation's largest cities. They changed the course of the 20th century by supporting the Democratic Party by large margins from FDR until Reagan, which took the country in a very different direction from the original vision created by the British founders. There's more Irish people in America than in Ireland. Other European immigrant groups had localized impacts, but never shaped the country the way these other groups did.

lahvak 4y ago
Thank you for the explanation, I can see your point now. I still think it is overly simplified, ignoring fairly large Spanish influence in the south and southwest and French in the north (all you need to do is look at names of towns and geographical features) and other groups like Moravians in the Midwest and Jews in the east. Also, "German" in the 18th or 19th century is not necessarily the same as German today, for example, lot of Austrians were included, and at that time that would be a fairly geographically large and culturally diverse area. I was mostly objecting to your simplified division of people into those "correct" groups whose country this is and those who are foreigners that don't belong here (I know you did not use these words, but that's how your comments sounded to me). I come from a place that has a long history of sentiments like that, and as far as I can tell, there was never anything good coming out of them.