Over many years, immigrants have helped America's economy grow by the dominate race allowing Mexicans to mine, using African slaves to farm, allowing Asians to build railroads for faster transportation of goods, and doing all this solely on native land (Wise, 2012,p.126-127). Old white men established rules and regulations on how they could allocate their resources to other countries to invest in more profit in any way they can in order to create social order. Although they created these ideas, they used humans for their own success and to get ahead of everyone. The economy has been progressing, new inventions, and ideas have funded America's economy. However, There were times when America's economy had dropped to a sudden standstill and many …show more content…
Many people lost their jobs, houses and caused them a lot of grief during this time. Although some don’t understand the issues revolving around the America’s economy, having a well-known candidate like Donald Trump, has influenced others to believe that immigrants are the core problem to America’s economy slump. He’s persuading the people to believe that he can make “America great again” by "building a wall” to keep all the illegal immigrants out the United States. Because race has become a bigger issue now than ever in our society, Wise states that "even when a black person has a college degree, he or she is nearly twice as likely as one of us with a degree to be unemployed, while Latinos and Asian Americans with degrees are 40 percent more likely than we are to be out of work, with the same qualifications" (Wise, 2012, p.30). It's been common to stereotype minorities, especially blacks, and Latinos as uneducated and lacking the ability to search for a job or keep a job (Wise, 2012). However, that's not the case. We see this mostly happening in areas where it's predominantly minorities living there because many businesses and corporate businesses have their own idea of who they want to …show more content…
According to Matt Taibbi's book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (2014), he claims that our social justice system is part of reason why so many minorities are overrepresented in the prison system. He talks about how police target low economic neighborhoods in order for police to fulfill their quota (Taibbi, 2014). This also pumps money into the social justice system by handing out citations in which they will have to pay back (Taibbi, 2014). He does mention police brutality and its existence, but just recently our society has experienced and witnessed this first hand. Which has led to "Black Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter" movement people were witnessing police shootings and killings of black males for reasons that are considered to be ridiculous. Being Latino is also a struggle in the states as well. Wise brought up the law in Arizona which allows law enforcements to stop anyone they deem as undocumented. They have the right to ask for identification and they have to prove they are a citizen of this country (Wise, 2012). By Arizona allowing their law enforcement to work in this manner. It’s initially violating their rights to live peacefully and breaking civil liberties as a human in this
In “Why So Many Minority Millennials Can’t Get Ahead” The Atlantic author Mel Jones expresses that white families provide their children with financial assistance to get a head in life, or by inheritance, unlike the minority Hispanics and blacks who have to continually make sacrifices that set them back. To begin the article, Jones starts building her credibility with a personal fact. Then she provides credible sources, she cites convincing facts and statistics, and successfully uses pathos in applying her emotional appeals. On the other hand, when nearing the end of her paper, her biased opinions begin to weaken her credibility.
In Chapter 8 of Major Problems in American Immigration History, the topic of focus shifts from the United States proper to the expansion and creation of the so called American Empire of the late Nineteenth Century. Unlike other contemporary colonial powers, such as Britain and France, expansion beyond the coast to foreign lands was met with mixed responses. While some argued it to be a mere continuation of Manifest Destiny, others saw it as hypocritical of the democratic spirit which had come to the United States. Whatever their reasons, as United States foreign policy shifted in the direction of direct control and acquisition, it brought forth the issue of the native inhabitants of the lands which they owned and their place in American society. Despite its long history of creating states from acquired territory, the United States had no such plans for its colonies, effectively barring its native subjects from citizenship. Chapter 8’s discussion of Colonialism and Migration reveals that this new class of American, the native, was never to be the equal of its ruler, nor would they, in neither physical nor ideological terms, join in the union of states.
The work by Victor M. Rios entitled Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness depict ways in which policing and incarceration affect inequalities that exist in society. In this body of work I will draw on specific examples from the works of Victor M. Rios and Michelle Alexander to fulfill the tasks of this project. Over the course of the semester and by means of supplemental readings, a few key points are highlighted: how race and gender inequalities correlate to policing and incarceration, how laws marginalize specific groups, and lastly how policing and incarceration perpetuate the very inequalities that exist within American society.
Instead, this only increases criminalization, incarceration rates, policing, and only continues this cycle of hatred and bigotry fueled violence allotted by the state, because “the criminal punishment system itself is a significant source of racialized-gendered violence” (90). Criminal punishment and its legal system does not promote safety and non-violence but is rather “a site of enormous violence” and is the largest perpetrator of violence and hatred (90). This only allows more opportunities and resources for these exact system to strengthen and therefore continue to commit these hate acts of violence and disparity in increasing rates and severer forms, or as Spaid puts it, “provides even great opportunity for harmful systems to claim fairness and equality while continuing to kill us”
Many people claim that racism no longer exists; however, the minorities’ struggle with injustice is ubiquitous. Since there is a mass incarceration of African Americans, it is believed that African Americans are the cause of the severe increase of crimes. This belief has been sent out implicitly by the ruling class through the media. The media send out coded messages that are framed in abstract neutral language that play on white resentment that targets minorities. Disproportionate arrest is the result of racial disparities in the criminal justice system rather than disproportion in offenders. The disparities in the sentencing procedure are ascribed to racial discrimination. Because police officers are also biased, people of color are more likely to be investigated than whites. Police officers practice racial profiling to arrest African Americans under situations when they would not arrest white suspects, and they are more likely to stop African Americans and see them as suspicious (Alexander 150-176). In the “Anything Can Happen With Police Around”: Urban Youth Evaluate Strategies of Surveillance in Public Places,” Michelle Fine and her comrades were inspired to conduct a survey over one of the major social issues - how authority figures use a person’s racial identity as a key factor in determining how to enforce laws and how the surveillance is problematic in public space. Fine believes it is critical to draw attention to the reality in why African Americans are being arrested at a much higher rate. This article reflects the ongoing racial issue by focusing on the injustice in treatment by police officers and the youth of color who are victims. This article is successful in being persuasive about the ongoing racial iss...
First, immigrants come to the U.S. to work and bring valuable skills which help grow the economy despite the negative views surrounding their part in the U.S. economy. Since the 2008-2009 recession the view on immigration and its effects on the economy has been more negative than positive (Peri, 2012). A study done by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that about 50 percent of American adults believe that immigrants burden the country because they, “take jobs, housing, and healthcare”, while the other 50 percent believe that, “immigrants strengthen the country due to their hard work and talents” (Delener & Ventilato, 2008). Over the past decade, “over half of the increase in the U.S. labor force,… was the result of immigration-l...
The justice system is in place in America to protect its citizens, however in the case of blacks and some other minorities there are some practices that promote unfairness or wrongful doing towards these groups. Racial profiling is amongst these practices. In cases such as drug trafficking and other criminal acts, minorities have been picked out as the main culprits based off of skin color. In the article “Counterpoint: The Case Against Profiling” it recognizes racial profiling as a problem in America and states, “[In order to maintain national security] law-enforcement officers have detained members of minority groups in vehicles more than whites”…. “these officers assume that minorities commit more drug offenses, which is not the case” (Fauchon). In relationship to law enforcement there has also been many cases of police brutality leaving young blacks brutally injured, and even dead in recent years, cases such as Michael Brown, Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Freddy Gray just to name a few. Many of these young men were unarmed, and the police involved had no good justification for such excess force. They were seen as threats primarily because of their skin color. Despite the fact this nation is trying to attain security, inversely they are weakening bonds between many of its
To look closely at many of the mechanisms in American society is to observe the contradiction between constitutional equality and equality in practice. Several of these contradictions exist in the realm of racial equality. For example, Black s often get dealt an unfair hand in the criminal justice system. In The Real War on Crime, Steven Donziger explains,
As people immigrated to the United States, legally and illegally, particularly Hispanic workers, they began to look for jobs to provide for their families. They took jobs that Americans did not want: they accepted the low-paying, physically-demanding, and temporal agriculture jobs. Since many did not speak English and were uneducated, some even illiterate, they were easy targets for farm owners to exploit. Immigrant workers were often not paid, had low wages, and because of such conditions, some even died. In addition, they also lived and worked in appalling conditions, some workplaces did not even have suitab...
“They are willing to sell themselves in order to find a better life for themselves or
Most people today are mistaken about what occurs inside the factories and farms that produce the food we eat. They believe that slavery ended long ago after the emancipation proclamation, but that is unfortunately wrong. Slavery, abuse, and threats are in fact still present today within our own industries. Most think that with machines in our factories, tiresome labor is minimized and that work has become a stroll in the park. While true in some cases for native-born workers, this is rarely the case for immigrants. American owners today hire immigrants who are willing to receive lower paying wages than native-born workers (Jordan A13). We take for granted the cheap prices of products that undocumented immigrants make possible, while ironically accusing them of stealing our jobs. Immigrants are not here to steal our jobs, but instead are here to feed and support their family. They face several obstacles and are wiling to go through great measures to fulfill the American dream. The process of cheese making will allow us to observe the realities of immigration labor in America.
Living in the twenty first century Americans would like to believe that they are living in the land of the free, where anyone and everyone can live an ordinary life without worrying that they will be arrested on the spot for doing absolutely nothing. The sad truth, with the evidence to prove it, is that this American Dream is not all that it appears to be. It has been corrupted and continues to be everyday by the racism that is in the criminal justice system of America. Racism has perpetuated the corruption of the criminal justice system from aspect of the initial stop, the sentencing in court, all the way to the life of an inmate in the prison. There seems to be nothing stopping it as it continues to grow
Challenges Faced by Immigrants The changing environments throughout the ages have caused the movement of thousands of families out of their homelands. Whether forced to make such decisions or doing so by their own desires, all immigrants have had to survive the physical and psychological challenges encountered along the way. To speak about the experiences of all these different people using the same ideas and examples would be quite inaccurate. They all, however, had to live through similar situations and deal with similar problems.
“We are here because we were there.” These are not merely words that bleed ink onto a page. But, it is a collection of the voices of immigrants from across the world who took a chance on America. The United States is to be this land of supposed freedom, great opportunity, and undefined possibility which is seductive and alluring to eyes of those not in the U.S. The uniqueness of our world as it clashes with the various distinctive idiosyncratic humanities of others is a place with flaws and room to grow. Moreover, it too is a symbol of chao and hope to the immigrants whom not only came to explore promises of a better tomorrow but, to struggle a little less than yesterday.
Police brutality is one of the most serious human rights violations in the United States and it occurs everywhere. The reason why I chose this topic is because police brutality happens all the time in the United States and still remains unrecognized by many. Additionally, the public should be knowledgeable about this topic because of how serious this crime can be and the serious outcomes that police brutality can have on other police officers and the public. The job of police officers is to maintain public order, prevent, and detect crimes. They are involved in very dangerous and stressful occupations that can involve violent situations that must be stopped and controlled by any means. In many confrontations with people, police may find it necessary to use excessive force to take control of a certain situation. Sometimes this makes an officer fight with a suspect who resists being arrested. Not all cops in communities are great cops. At least once a year, the news covers a story about a person being beat by an officer. The article “Minority Threat and Police Brutality: Determinants of Civil Rights Criminal Complaints in U.S. Municipalities” by Malcolm D. Holmes from the University of Wyoming, uses the conflict theory to explain why officers go after minorities sometimes causing police brutality. It explains the police’s tension with African American and Latino males. Those minorities are the ones that retaliate more against police officers which causes the officer to use violent force to defend themselves.