General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLatinos Learn English Faster Than Previous Immigrants, Study Finds
All those Hispanic immigrants! Why don't they just learn English? Why, my ancestors etc., etc.
http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/06/19/2179521/latinos-learn-english-faster/
byeya
(2,842 posts)who spoke only Italian, Greek, Irish, Chinese, and Polish.
Public school was the great leveler for the kids but the older people ofen did not learn English. When I got to high school, some kids had family that spoke only Yiddish.
Jack Kerouac, as an example, spoke only French until he entered school.
DavidDvorkin
(19,479 posts)That was in England, not here. My grandparents emigrated to London in the 1890s. They lived in a Jewish area of the city and never learned English beyond a very few simple phrases.
As long as those ethnic neighborhoods existed in big cities, immigrants could function perfectly well by ignoring the fact that they were no longer living in their homelands.
byeya
(2,842 posts)described Baltimore as a city of neighborhoods, strictly along ethnic lines. He said you didn't have a mostly Irish neighborhood, you had a neighborhood of Irish and Irish/Americans.
By the time I came along, this was breaking up and there was considerable mixing although you could see where I lived was mostly Irish and parts of the NW were mostly Jewish and there were large African American neighborhoods in both the east and west. Little Italy was still almost all Italian/American.
You are correct: A person could be Greek(say) and it would be almost like Greece with the markets, resaurants, church, and social clubs.
darkangel218
(13,985 posts)And that's because they love this country. I have met so many latinos on Miami. They worked so hard and really apreaciated what this country has to offer. :'(
It's not easy to leave everything and move here for a better life.