How Immigrants Lift a Nation
Many of those who oppose immigration overlook an inconvenient truth: Immigrants often make the best citizens. In recent years, Mexican immigrants and their children have been rescuing small towns with declining populations across the United States, Alfredo Corchado reported in The Times. About half the 6,000 people in Kennett Square, near Philadelphia, are of Hispanic descent, and the town probably would have faded away without them.
Kennett Square claims to be the mushroom capital of the world, the center of a $2.7 billion mushroom industry in southeastern Pennsylvania that employs 10,000 workers.
But in the past decade, the number of Mexican immigrants in the United States has fallen by more than a million. Some were deported, but some left by choice.
“Mexicans are leaving, and that’s bad news for everyone,” said Chris Alonzo, president of Pietro Industries, one of the biggest mushroom companies. “All the negativity, the fearmongering, the anti-immigrant feeling is hurting our small town. We’re seeing labor shortages, and that threatens the vibrancy of our community.”
The new arrivals also helped revive the area’s cultural life.
“The Mexicans changed the community for the better,” Loretta Perna, a program coordinator at Kennett High School, told The Times, “bringing color, richness to an otherwise bland life.”
One hundred years ago, immigrants helped America and its allies win World War I.
In September of 1918, General John Pershing launched the final major Allied offensive against Germany in northern France, an assault that would bring an end to World War I two months later.
Without American help, the war would have ended with the Ger- mans in control of much of France, Belgium and Russia, Geoffrey Wawro wrote in The Times. In Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force, soldiers in some units were as likely to be foreign- born as American-born. The Germans tried to exploit the army’s multiethnic background, Mr. Wawro wrote, and derided the doughboys as “half-Americans.”
Though the American troops spoke 49 different languages, making training and command a challenge, the immigrants fought bravely. The Germans had assumed these soldiers would break into ethnic pieces on the battlefield. But the American forces held together, though they suffered some 122,000 casualties, including 29,000 dead.
“These half-Americans express without hesitation purely native sentiments,” a German dispatch concluded. “Their quality is remarkable. They brim with naïve confidence. ”
Many immigrants also show remarkable loyalty to the ideals of their adopted country. Yusuf Abdi, an immigrant who belongs to a small mosque in Flen, Sweden, told The Times that the country’s rightward shift does not worry him too much. “Sweden is a democratic country, and there are rules and laws,” he said.
Flen is a town of about 7,000 people, two hours southwest of Stockholm, and some locals are not happy about the direction the country is heading.
Anders Jansson, 64, who works at a Volvo plant in Flen, favors the Left party for its commitment to workers. He criticized “the normalization” of the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats. The atmosphere is bad, with a new selfishness, he said. “We are going from a society where we took care of each other to a society where all we care about is a new kitchen, a new car and vacations in Thailand.”
Erik Zsiga, a communications consultant for the Moderate Party, added: “The mood has become quite un-Swedish. What we credited ourselves for and also made fun of ourselves for was our obsession with consensus, trying to avoid conflict.”