Immigration is a sensitive and complex issue that itself is often influenced by other factors like war and environmental disasters. I often saw immigration as nothing but a good thing, as something that brings cultures together and cultural clash as something rare that is caused only by bigots and they all vote republican, but after the past few years since the events leading up to the 2016 election I have rethought how I view many of these people. It does not seem logical that all of them are simply horrible racists with no legitimate qualms against mass immigration of undocumented immigrants. I spoke to a man named Xavier Rin about his thoughts on mass immigration and how it has affected his home of Orlando, Florida and his birthplace in Pennsylvania.
At first I was simply asking Rin about how changes in the environment has affected his life and how he thinks the government should step into stop or slow environmental damages. He takes a view that the government should have a soft hand in such matters and should not be allowed to make sweeping legislation that would put people’s jobs at risk for the sake of the environment “I would side with the coal workers” he says. This is a good point in my mind, afterall if our ultimate goal of stopping climate change is to help people and save humans from extinction, then why not find a solution that couldn’t potentially put people out of work. As we went further into this line of questions he eventually brought up how his place of residence were affected when immigrants from Puerto Rico had fled their home do to environmental disasters and how this changed the face of Orlando.
As he said to me the smallest problems were the simple issues of communication where the immigrants to Pennsylvania had taken jobs at the local King of Prussia mall and none were all that fluent in English, so the simple trip to the butcher’s suddenly became a rather upsetting game of charades. You can see where the problem comes from and how it could get upsetting, but Rin had bigger issues. Because many dems had voted to lend support to the people of Puerto Rico the new residents had supported the democrats overwhelmingly and this was very much at opposition with Rin’s politics.
I have now begun to see how the issues of immigration are more than just creating a nice cultural melting pot and upon this discovery I can now see where someone could get the impression that immigrants were an erasure of their own culture. Even with his problems however Rin agreed that a limited number of refugees should be allowed in and put under U.S. protection, he simply questions the liberal definition of refugee.
Hollow_Archeology 