Re:US Construction worker productivity has dropped 40% in th...
by gruez on Monday January 23, 2023 @04:27PM
(#34495321)
> It's interesting to see how the language changed over time from "foreign born" to illegal immigrant depending on who was doing the immigrating:
1. you seem to be implying that during periods of "white" immigration, americans were fine but the public changed their tune when it became south american/asian. However, irish/italian immigrants also received pushback. Specifically, irish were hated because they were catholic, and itlians weren't considered white back then.
2. You can also flip this around to say that as a society, we've gotten more accurate with our wording. Rather than lumping all immigrants (legal and illegal) into one bucket, we take care to point out that we're only against the illegal type of immigration. That seems like a win to me.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=illegal+immigr...
Look at the amount of legal immigration:
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/ann...
There have been plenty of people who have been in this country without appropriate paperwork historically - they were never called illegals (see above). In fact even now people make differentiations between "visa overstayers" and people who snuck across the border, even though both are technically illegal aliens.
I think you don't have to go far to see the implications.