Illegal and often even legal immigrants are all too often looked upon in the these days as parasites with dark skin, too many children and no desire to learn English, as people who will come and take away jobs from "real" Americans. Such stereotypes about immigrants have been responsible for anti-immigration passed recently, such as the passage in California of Proposition 187, which was based on the assumption that illegal immigrants are an overall drawn on the economy, not only taking away jobs from U.S. citizens gut drawing from the public coffers more in social services than they return in the form of taxes paid. However, this has been found not to be the case (Scheer, 2000, p. B5). However, even if immigrants did cost the country a substantial amount in terms of social services, which they do not, they would still make immeasurable contributions to our culture, giving a richness to our art, literature, music and national dialogue as well as strengthening our economy. Without immigrants we would be poorer as a nation in every way. This dissertation examines one particular arena in which immigrants have been instrumental in enriching American life, that of the nation's business and industry, concluding that immigration has played a significant role in the development of the American economy as it is structured today.
Immigrants have been coming from other continents to this country for centuries -- for millennia, if we include the immigration of the people who we now call Native Americans across the land bridge from Asia. Sometimes they have been welcomed, sometimes...
Under each of these circumstances, immigrants have managed to make significant economic contributions. To what extent immigrants have been able to contribute to the economy has depended not only on the specific skills and goals of the immigrants themselves but also on the overall cultural model dominant at the time of the role that immigrants should hold.
For much of American history, social leaders, scholars and elected officials as well as ordinary citizens have adhered to two alternating models of the path that immigrants should follow when they came to this country. At times, the weight of opinion has been on the side of the model of assimilation, a model that argued that all people who come to the United States should in fact "melt" together, with each one of us becoming like those of our neighbors who have come here before in terms of language, the way we dress, our religious beliefs and political practices and our business activities. This ideal of immigrants all becoming -- as quickly as possible -- like those Americans of longer residence is summed up in the idea of the Melting Pot. Assimilation is for the most part a by which a minority group (in this case, the newly arrived immigrants from one country or another) relatively quickly adopt patterns of the dominant culture -- although it should be pointed out that even as it absorbs minorities the majority paradigm is always at least in some way changed…
