Stirring the Melting Pot

Stirring the “Melting Pot”

“Melting pot” is still an accurate description of the United States because of the arrival (legally or illegal) of a wide variety of cultures that make the U.S. their permanent residence. There is a price for being the huge “melting pot” of the world. President Ronald Reagan stated on October 19, 1983, that “This country has lost control of its own borders, and no country can sustain that kind of position.” Several major cities have already have been turned into extensions of foreign countries, where English is not spoken and Americans are not welcomed. Although, I enjoy meeting people from different cultural backgrounds and celebrate those differences, it disturbs me when I see in the news that some immigrants are heavily involved in crime and welfare fraud, while some engage in terrorism and subversion.

The U.S. history of immigration policy has been very fickle and political. In 1854, when the Gold Rush led to the importation of Chinese immigrants, American workingmen saw the poorly paid Chinese laborers as a threat to their very existence. State legislatures reacted to the sudden influx of Chinese laborers by enacting laws aimed at excluding them. By 1875, the U.S. Congress passed a measure, popularly known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which significantly reduced Oriental immigration. In 375 years we have civilized and populated a virtually empty continent. Fifty million

Ken Lopez

SOCL 1020, Dr. E. Smith

Essay B

December 3, 2005

immigrants, from English Pilgrims to Vietnamese boat people, multiplied to produce a population of more than 226 million people by 1980. The U.S. has gone through prior periods in which immigration accompanied sea changes in economic and foreign policy, and other contexts. At the turn of the last century, the U.S. was undergoing the