Fall 2018 Immigration in Europe and US

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Instructions for Posting Research

Example:

This article corrects some misinformation about immigration to Italy. (Pick some of the important facts/claims out of the article and include in this description to save us time.)

I will recruit 3-5 "organizers from each class to help manage the arrangements of posts, but you can help them by thinking about the best place to put your post. We will have alot of material on the page and we need to organize it so that your reading and learning time is efficiently used. So here is some advice about how to promote good page organization:

Don't post random things. Think about what we need to know to understand the issues. Look at the page and see what people are posting and try to think of information, opinion pieces, and scholarly articles that will help us.
Pull important information out of the article or resource to include in your brief description. Keep that description to about 3-7 lines of text.
Don't just do Google searches. Use some of the databases through the Foley Library to access authoritative and scholarly work as well.
Think about what heading to put your finding under. You can create headings by using pairs of "=" signs.

What rules govern the handling of immigration into Italy? How do Italians view the support from the EU? What are the positions of major Italian political parties on immigration?

Report on major events and crises Italians have faced intercepting and receiving immigrants, especially by boat. What is the role of NGO's in these crises? How are contemporary Italian politic parties responding?
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s cabinet approved a set of laws that puts more restrictions on migration. It allows refugee applications to be suspended if the applicant is deemed "socially dangerous" and abolishes humanitarian protection, which protects asylum seekers who do not meet the qualifications to become a refugee. 25% of asylum seekers have humanitarian protection, which lasts for two years, so the removal of this protection may increase the number of immigrants who are in the country illegally. The new laws will also make it easier for the government to deport migrants.

What do economist and social scientist say about the impact of immigrants on the economy and social life in Italy / US? Are there differences of opinion and differences between impacts on Italy vs. US?

- This article address and debunks some myths about migrant workers and how migrant workers impact Italy's economy and pension system. It is a common myth that migrants steal jobs from Italians; instead the fields that migrants tend to work in and the fields that Italians tend to work in are drastically different. One of the reasons that migrants and Italians work in different fields has to do with the differing graduation rates of secondary education for migrants and Italians. In addition, since Italy is an aging country, immigrant workers provide a positive balance for INPS funds. Immigrant workers, just like in the United States, perform unqualified manual work. As of 2016 there are 5 million immigrants living in Italy and these immigrants add 130 billion euros to the Italian economy. So the argument that immigrants are taking Italians jobs and taking money from the government is false.

This article examines the history of immigrant cultural assimilation in America, how long it took and what conditions helped or hampered assimilation during the first waves of mass immigration to America. The author measures assimilation through the adaption of more American sounding names, as this is a way of showing an individuals effort to conform to the dominant society. Immigrants in this time, 1930's, entered the same job market as native born Americans, and therefore there was a larger pressure to assimilate to a culture they had more contact with. The study shows that it, on average, took three generations for an immigrant family to begin naming their children more American sounding names and marrying outside of their culture group. There is some variation to this time frame as more culturally dissimilar peoples, for example Finns and Russians, took longer to assimilate. The article ends by stating that immigrants to the US today enter into a different job market than that of Americans, therefore likely less forced contact with dominant culture, but that on average immigrant populations have ended up assimilating. There has always been anger and fear directed towards un-assimilated immigrants by the host population.