Those immigrants you're talking about are not poor by their countries standards. Very few come with low knowledge, I'm not sure where you get that idea from. Most immigrants are middle/upper-middle class professionals. The ones we hear about most often are migrant farm workers, but those are not representative of immigration patterns. Keep this in mind, except for Mexico where you can literally walk here, it takes substantial capital to migrate trans-nationally. Most of our migrants were white collar workers in the countries they came from.
Secondly, immigrant communities have informal systems to counter-act the lack of formal systems in the US. They do not "make it" independently. When a migrant mexican, russian, chinese, immigrates to the US they come to specific communities that are already established.
You should know this, since you came from Los Angeles.
Ethnic minorities have communities where wealthy benefactors can subsidize private business loans and provide housing. They assist one another in child care and learning English. Many come on education VISAs. These communities have capital and they can share it with newcomers. Black communities have none of this for the reasons I outlined earlier.
I've never said anything about "requiring that people become CEOs, presidents, state senators." I also never said that something is so institutional that nothing escapes from it. I would never say that nothing escapes from it and besides that I really encourage you to think of it more in terms of systems than entities. I get the sense you are thinking of it as like a building. Like a public institution or something...it's not.
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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman
Last edited by smooth; 12-01-2008 at 11:14 AM..
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