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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   29544 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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short of a definition of 'cycle of poverty' broad enough to include "the KKK tries to burn down your parents or grandparent's house in your living memory"

...but not broad enough to also cover "communist revolutionaries force your parents or grandparents to leave your home and community (possibly killing any number of your relatives) so they fetched up, penniless, on a foreign country's shores without language proficiency or contacts, within living memory," or "your parents or grandparents have to sell all your family's possessions (and abandon those they couldn't sell) and emigrate to escape a genocidal regime before they get around to opening the death camps, within living memory"?

If the latter is meant to refer to European Jews, very few Jews in the US are descendants of people who emigrated to the US post-1933. And, if refugees from the former Yugoslavia are representative of those who successfully flee genocidal regimes, then those who escape are the more affluent ones. Those were certainlythe ones whose children I taught in the late 90s.

Finally, your examples are not very relevant. The entire concept of cycles of poverty assumes multigenerational poverty, not one-off catastrophes which plunge previously regular folk into penury.

Finally, as I have mentioned on here before, it is worth thinking about John Ogbu's writing on the difference between immigrant and non-immigrant minorities, in the US and elsewhere.

I was thinking of Cuban boat people, Latin American refugees from any number of crappy revolutions, and SE Asian post-Vietnam migrants for the first, actually. For the second, I was thinking, yes, of the Holocaust, but also of first-wave Armenian immigrants in the 1890s-1920s, Ibo migration to the US after the Biafra conflict, Rwandans fleeing the 1990s conflicts, etc. The communities are smaller, but they're there!

Well, here is what Wikipedia says about Cuban refugees:

After the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959, a Cuban exodus began as the new government allied itself with the Soviet Union and began to introduce communism. The first Cubans to come to America after the revolution were those affiliated with former dictator Fulgencio Batista, next were Cuba's professionals. Most Cuban Americans that arrived in the United States initially came from Cuba's educated upper and middle classes centered in Cuba's capital Havana. This middle class arose in the period after the Platt Amendment when Cuba became one of the most successful countries in Latin America. Between December 1960 and October 1962 more than 14,000 Cuban children arrived alone in the U.S. Their parents were afraid that their children were going to be sent to some Soviet bloc countries to be educated[citation needed] and they decided to send them to the States as soon as possible.[citation needed]

This program was called Operation Peter Pan (Operacion Pedro Pan). When the children arrived in Miami they were met by representatives of Catholic Charities and they were sent to live with relatives if they had any or were sent to foster homes, orphanages or boarding schools until their parents could leave Cuba. From 1965 to 1973, there was another wave of immigration known as the Freedom Flights. In order to provide aid to recently arrived Cuban immigrants, the United States Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966. The Cuban Refugee Program provided more than $1.3 billion of direct financial assistance. They also were eligible for public assistance, Medicare, free English courses, scholarships and low-interest college loans.[citation needed]

Some banks pioneered loans for exiles who did not have collateral or credit but received help in getting a business loan. These loans enabled many Cuban Americans to secure funds and start up their own businesses. With their Cuban-owned businesses and low cost of living, Miami, Florida and Union City, New Jersey (dubbed Havana on the Hudson)[18][19] were the preferred destinations for many immigrants and soon became the main centers for Cuban-American culture. According to author Lisandro Perez, Miami was not particularly attractive to Cubans prior to the 1960s.[20]

Vietnamese refugees were also provided financial and other assistance from the US govt

Those relatively few Jewish refugees who settled in the US after fleeing Germany (page 11 here puts the number of arrivals from 1933-1945 at 168,000) of course were assisted by the millions of Jewish people already living in the US. And note that on page 14 of the link above, only 12% of males in the sample were unskilled workers; 46% were skilled, 26% were semi-professional, and 9% were professional. These are not poor people without marketable skills.

Most importantly, how many of the groups came here and became sharecroppers, as African Americans did after slavery? The closest is probably the Hmong, many of whom settled in the Central Valley, and who are not doing so hot.

And, how many of those groups were effectively deprived of education, as were African Americans after slavery?

Again, comparisons with immigrant groups as a means of assessing the cycles of poverty is problematic because the entire argument is about the effect of multigenerational poverty.

here is what Wikipedia says about Cuban refugees

That's why I was specifying the boat people (definitely not middle class) who kept drifting on over on slapped-together rafts, or getting smuggled through latin america and up through the southern US border, like Yasiel Puig.

how many of the groups came here and became sharecroppers, as African Americans did after slavery?

If they were sharecroppers, they weren't all that different from most Southerners - two-thirds of sharecroppers in the South were White. Moreover, they didn't stay sharecroppers - millions moved north for industrial jobs in the Great Migration of the early 20th century (i.e., the big urban transition in U.S. history). While they were frequently met with opposition, quietly-prosperous black middle classes developed.

This actually mirrors the refugee and immigrant experience to the U.S. - show up in the cities, take a bunch of low-skill industrial and menial jobs (railway porters for blacks, taxi and uber drivers today), and slowly save and skill-up until you're basically level with most everyone else. Only, every time the black middle class started really developing, their neighborhoods got progressively wrecked worse-and-worse by radical "activism."

But, the Cuban boat people (isn't that term usually used to refer to Vietnamese refugees?) did not arrive "without . . . contacts" as you originally posited. That is why I assumed you were not referring to them.

If they were sharecroppers, they weren't all that different from most Southerners

How is that relevant to the discussion of blacks versus immigrants? And, if anything, that reinforces the cycles of poverty argument, given how the descendants of those white sharecroppers have done, and given that appears that social mobility in the South seems to be unusually low for whites.

And, note that, the Great Migration notwithstanding, in 1960 11 million of the 19 million African Americans in the US lived in the South.

quietly-prosperous black middle classes developed . . . every time the black middle class started really developing, their neighborhoods got progressively wrecked worse-and-worse by radical "activism."

This appears to be a claim that blacks have gone backward. But that is [clearly not the case}(https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/06/27/1-demographic-trends-and-economic-well-being/), and see here.

And, I am afraid you need to be more specific about your claim that "their neighborhoods got progressively wrecked worse-and-worse by radical "activism." Are you referring to the demise of black middle class neighborhoods like Central Ave in L.A. and Sugar Hill in Harlem, after housing discrimination disappeared, and black middle class families were not forced to live in certain neighborhoods

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