Chapters 13-14

            Chapter 13 deals with the change in immigration patterns and policy that occurring in the period following WWII. The first issue it covers is the people who were displaced after their homes had been destroyed in the war. It is disgusting that even after learning of the Holocaust so many American citizens were adamant that Jews not be allowed to immigrate. It is a shame that even after 7 million deaths Anti-Semitism was so prevalent in America. Despite this the American government felt the need to atone for its immigration policy during pre-war times and did let this sentiment guide their immigration policy. It is also interesting to note that the Red Scare was beginning to take shape in the fears about immigrants from certain areas. The rise of communist parties in almost every country was bothering Americans even in the late 1940s. The end of WWII lead to the creation of numerous Western European refugees who needed to find homes. The Communist scare had some other strange effects on immigration policy. Those who were doing the screening for who was allowed into the country increasingly neglected fascists. Many former Nazis and war criminals were allowed into the country because the screening process was more concerned with weeding out communists. Shouldn’t the country have been just as worried about potential Nazis making their way into the nation? It makes me wonder how much people knew about the Holocaust at the time and how the Nazis were viewed at the end of the war. I think that one of the reasons Germans were not targeted as much was that with the fall of the Third Reich Nazis did not pose the same kind of threat that communists did. However, I would think that fascism would still be viewed as a bigger threat to American society than communism. In fact I have never understood why communism is so universally reviled by American society. It just does not seem that communism poses as big of a threat to American life as some would have us believe. I also found the definition of what a refugee is interesting. According to an excerpt in the book refugees are defined by the United States government as, any person who is outside any country of his nationality or in the case of any person having no nationality, is outside of any country in which he last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country because of persecution, or a well-founded fear of persecution, on account of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” This definition is important because it grants asylum to refugee, something America had not done up to that point. Creating an asylum policy helped lead to Mariel Crisis in the 1980s. I have always been interested in the Mariel Crisis since it was a factor in leading to the cocaine epidemic that hit Miami in the 1980s. Numerous Latin American drug dealers were able to enter into Miami, this along with the rising popularity of cocaine lead to a crime wave that caused Miami to become the murder capital of the United States for a brief period in the 1980s. This is not to say that a majority of the people who came from Cuba during this time were criminals in fact most were not. However, there were certainly some criminals who were allowed to leave Cuba for the United States. In fact Fidel Castro, the dictator of Cuba, famously emptied many of Cuba’s prisons and sent the inmates to America. It is this fact that was used to help construct the basis for the 1980s crime movie “Scarface”.

            Concerning chapter 14 and Asian immigration I did not find too much interesting about this chapter. Most of the information seemed to be dry demographics about the various Asian groups that made their way to American Shores. The only thing that really struck me was the idea of the model minority. Asian’s are one of the view minorities in this country that posses a positive stereotype. Will stereotyping any group is never smart, I feel that their stereotype is what has helped lead to the massive growth in Asian immigration.